Chapter 13: Teel Doesn't Make It Out

The power went out between one sentence and the next.

Teel had just said the name. He had said it quietly, the way people say things they've been holding in their mouths for too long — not dramatically, not with the weight of revelation, but with the flat exhausted release of something finally set down. The name had landed in the air between the three of us, and then the lights in the Float went out, and in the sudden dark I heard Drift move instinctively to his left, and I heard the sound of Teel's chair.

Not the sound of a man standing up. The sound of a man whose body has decided, without his consultation, to stop.