Stepdad and His Friends Bred Me During the Birthday Blackout novel · Chapter 8 of 48

Chapter 8: My Own Name

I didn't touch it.

I took twenty-two photos instead, the way I'd taken them of the meter.

The box. The antenna. The tap on the main feed. The sticker. The serial number, close enough to read.

Then I sat on an upside-down bucket in front of the open cabinet and called Rand.

He came down the basement stairs nine minutes later in his navy suit, carrying two coffees and a paper bag.

"Breck sent breakfast burritos," he said. "He says eat both or he'll know."

"He can't know."

"He'll know." He handed me one. "What am I looking at?"

I put my headlamp on the gray box.

"That's a remote kill relay. It's wired in front of the main. Somebody with a phone can shut off every light in this building from a beach in Mexico."

Rand bent close to it, not touching.

"Who'd want to shut off the lights in a bank?"

"Somebody who wanted to do something in the dark," I said. "Again."

He straightened up slowly.

"The vote's on the twenty-second," he said. "In the dining room, upstairs from here."

"I know."

"Can you take it out?"

"I can. Then they know we found it." I peeled the foil on my burrito. "Right now they think nobody's opened this cabinet since Truman."

"So it stays."

"It stays. And I rewire everything around it."

Rand looked at me for a long moment over the tops of his glasses.

"Counselor," he said. "That's devious."

"I learned from a professional."

"Your mother?"

"You."

He laughed, a real one, the first I'd ever gotten out of him that wasn't dry.

Then he looked at the sticker again, and the laugh went out of his face.

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