Elena Brightforge could hear the grid.
Not literally. She had stopped believing in that kind of romance at twenty-two, her second year as a line engineer, when a transformer she'd been told was "singing" had exploded forty metres from her and taken two fingers off the man beside her. But after thirty-one years, she could look at the great curved wall of Luminalis Central Dispatch, eleven storeys beneath the Brightforge Tower, and read the Empire's power the way a conductor reads a score.
Tens of thousands of substations. Millions of kilometres of line. The steady, breathing load of nearly three billion people turning on their lights, their kettles, their hospital monitors and their training halls. Every pulse of it passed through a room she had designed herself, down to the chairs.
She did not think of it as power. She thought of it as a promise. Luminalis promised that when you reached for the switch, the light would come.
