Morning light slanted through the cabin’s front windows, catching steam from coffee mugs and the drift of dust in the air. The big room was its usual kind of chaos — chairs half-pushed back from last night, a guitar leaning against the wall where Gabriel had left it. Wolves lounged everywhere, tails hanging off chairs, claws ticking faintly when someone shifted on the wood floor.
The stew pot on the stove muttered quietly. Holt hovered near it like a satellite, ladling “just one more taste” every few minutes.
Mark sat at the heavy table with a sheaf of papers and a rolled-up map, scratching notes in his cramped, precise handwriting. Gabriel leaned over his shoulder, pointing with a claw. Kade was perched on the bench by the door, cleaning his knife with small, economical movements. Rime occupied his usual spot near the window, looking outward, watching the treeline even while he picked at a chipped spot in the sill.
Thane padded out of the hallway, claws soft against the boards for someone his size. Brown-gray fur still ruffled from sleep, medallion resting against his chest, he rubbed at one eye with the back of his hand and tried not to think about how much coffee he wanted.
The room didn’t fall completely silent this time, not like the morning he’d told them he loved them, but conversation dipped instinctively. Attention shifted toward him; space opened at the table without anyone needing to say it.
“Morning,” he rumbled.
A chorus of replies. “Morning, Alpha.” “Hey.” “You look like the stew smells.” Holt again.
Thane squeezed Holt’s shoulder in passing and went for the coffee. The mug handle felt good in his hand — solid, familiar — and the first swallow loosened something in his chest.
“Mark,” he said. “That map from the school. You still have it?”
Mark tapped the table. “Right here.” He flattened it out and weighted the corners with whatever was closest — a spoon, a radio battery, a wrench.
Thane stepped closer, peering down. It was one of the large, laminated teaching maps they’d salvaged from the schoolhouse storage closet, the ones big enough to cover half a chalkboard. This one showed the Kootenai River and the surrounding valley. Bold blue water, contour lines, and little printed labels.
His eyes went to the thing that had snagged his attention the first time he’d seen it: a drawn rectangle straddling the river downstream of Libby. Tiny icons next to it, a legend in the corner: Libby Dam – Hydroelectric Generating Station.
That word again. Hydroelectric.
Gabriel followed his gaze and snorted. “Staring at the big concrete wall again?”
Thane didn’t answer right away. He sipped his coffee, thinking. Outside, the wind moved through the trees, faint and steady.
“We built all our planning around solar,” he said finally. “Generators. Little hydro rigs. We’ve been acting like that thing doesn’t exist.”
Mark’s brow furrowed. “We assumed it was dead after the Fall. Grid goes down, plants trip offline… nobody left to restart them.”
“Yeah.” Thane nodded slowly. “But it’s close.”
He tapped the map. Claw tip clicked on the lamination just below the little black symbol.
“We were sorting old papers at the school,” he said. “I saw a binder about the dam in the principal’s office. Tours, safety talks, ‘how power works.’ It said this plant fed power across most of Montana. Lines to eastern Washington. Half the region.”
Gabriel tilted his head. “You thinking what I think you’re thinking, or is this just another one of those ‘what if we built a radio station’ ideas?”
“We did build a radio station,” Thane pointed out mildly.
Gabriel’s grin was all teeth.
Thane looked around the room. “If that station tripped and never came back… if it just shut itself down and nobody touched it…”
Mark’s eyes sharpened. “You think it’s a simple trip?”
“Maybe,” Thane said. “Or maybe it’s scrap metal. But if there’s even a chance…”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. The room shifted around the thought.
“Say we could get it running,” Gabriel said slowly. “You’re talking about more than lights in Libby.”
“I am,” Thane said. “I’m talking about lights in every town tied to those lines. Spokane. All the little places between. Hospitals, radios, heaters, water treatment. Real power. Not just us getting by on batteries and prayer.”
Holt blinked, spoon halfway to his mouth. “Whole… valley light?” he said. “All towns? Like… before?”
“Bigger than the valley,” Mark said. “We’re talking full grid segments.”
Kade’s yellow eyes were thoughtful. “What’s the catch?”
Thane smiled, just a little. “We don’t know a damn thing about high-voltage systems.”
Gabriel snorted. “Minor detail.”
“We know enough to be dangerous,” Mark admitted. “But they must’ve had documentation. Manuals. Procedures. Black-start plans.”
“Black what?” Holt asked.
“Black start,” Mark said. “Bringing a power plant back online when there’s no grid to sync to. Standing up your own power first. Station service, controls, then the turbines. Then you reconnect the big lines one at a time.”
Gabriel’s eyes brightened with the familiar spark he got when something was difficult and technical and maybe impossible. “Okay,” he said. “Now I want to see it.”
Thane drained his mug. “So do I.”
He rolled the map up, tucking it under his arm. “Finish breakfast,” he said. “Then we go see Hank.”
Town Hall smelled like paper, coffee, and old carpet — the same mix it always had, with a faint overlay of wet fur from the days wolves came in out of the rain to argue policy.
Hank stood behind the front counter, bent over a logbook. His uniform jacket hung on a peg behind him; he wore a flannel shirt rolled up at the sleeves, forearms scarred and solid. The pistol on his hip looked almost out of place in the morning quiet.
He glanced up when the door opened and five wolves padded in — Thane, Gabriel, Mark, Kade, Varro — claws clicking softly on the linoleum.
“Morning,” Hank said. “What’d I do this time?”
“You’re about to loan us something,” Thane said.
“Uh-oh.” Hank closed the logbook, squinting. “That sentence never ends with ‘and everything was uneventful.’”
Thane unrolled the map on the counter. “When we were cleaning the school, I found some old info on the dam,” he said. “Hydropower plant downriver. You remember what happened to it after the Fall?”
Hank scratched his beard. “Heard secondhand it tripped offline a few months in. Lights started flickering all over the state, frequency swings on the grid. Then one day — nothing. Folks figured either a fault cooked the guts or the people running it… stopped coming to work.” He didn’t say why out loud. He didn’t have to.
“Anyone ever go check?” Thane asked.
“Not that I know of.” Hank shrugged. “Most folks were busy trying not to starve. And high-voltage yards are the kind of places you don’t poke at without knowing your business.”
Mark nodded. “Reasonable.”
“We want to poke at it anyway,” Thane said.
Hank stared at him for a beat, then at the map, then back at him.
“You’re serious.”
Thane nodded once.
Mark folded his arms. “If it’s gone, it’s gone. But if it’s just a turbine trip… There are procedures. If we can get the station service back, we can see the logs. The logic. Maybe the plant shut itself down to save itself when the rest of the grid started falling apart.”
“So you’re thinking…” Hank gestured vaguely. “Flip it back on and suddenly every refrigerator from here to Spokane hums to life?”
“Not all at once,” Thane said. “We’d bring the units up no-load. Verify. Then we start closing breakers to the lines piece by piece. Let the grid drink slow instead of all at once.”
Hank’s mouth curled. “You been reading manuals I don’t know about?”
“Gonna be,” Thane said. “If you let us past the front gate.”
Hank leaned back, lips pressing into a line. He looked at each of them in turn — Mark’s calm focus, Gabriel’s eager grin, Varro’s controlled stillness, Kade’s quiet alertness — then back to Thane’s ice-blue eyes.
“I’m not fond of wolves playing with a few hundred megawatts like it’s a toaster,” he said. “But I’m also not fond of half the region sitting in the dark because nobody tried.”
He reached under the counter, feeling around. When his hand came back up, it held an old keyring: thick brass keys, plastic tags with faded labels. He thumbed through them until he found one with a yellow tag: LIBBY DAM – MAIN GATE / CONTROL ROOM.
He set it down on the map with a soft clink.
“You go look,” he said. “You touch nothing until you’re damn sure you know what it does. You see a sign that says ‘DANGER’—”
“We assume it means ‘you first, Thane,’” Gabriel said.
Hank gave him a flat look. “You assume it means exactly what it says. And you report back. If there’s any chance we can get that beast running, we treat it like the heart of the valley it is.”
Varro, who’d been silent so far, inclined his head. “If we succeed,” he said quietly, “you’ll need people to guard it. Wolves or humans. A power like that will draw the wrong kind of eyes.”
Hank nodded once. “You bring me good news, I’ll start the rotation.”
Thane picked up the keys, the metal warm from Hank’s hand.
“We’ll be careful,” he said.
Hank sighed. “You lot and ‘careful’ don’t belong in the same sentence.” Then he smiled, just a little. “Go on. Go see if you can turn the lights back on for the world.”
The road to the dam wound along the river, cut into green slopes and rock. The truck rattled over cracks and frost heaves, tires humming. Thane drove, claws wrapped loosely around the wheel, eyes flicking between the road and the glint of water through the trees. Gabriel rode shotgun with the dam manuals stacked in his lap, pages bristling with Mark’s hastily added paper scraps as bookmarks.
Mark sat behind them with a notebook, pen tucked behind one ear. Varro and Kade shared the back bench, both watching the terrain in that way they had — predator’s eyes cataloging approach routes, cover, sightlines.
“You know,” Gabriel said, flipping pages, “if you’d told me in the old world I’d be riding to a hydroelectric plant with a pack of werewolves to do a black start, I would have asked what you were smoking.”
“Old world did not have us,” Kade said mildly.
“Good point.”
The dam came into view around a bend: massive concrete across the river, a long gray arc holding back the blue weight of the reservoir. The switchyard stretched downstream — lattice towers, steel frames with insulators, squat breakers lined in rows. Power lines radiated away like the spokes of some giant wheel, disappearing over ridges and into the distance.
“Damn,” Gabriel breathed. “Pun not intended.”
Thane snorted.
The main gate was shut, but the fence was intact. No obvious scavenging. No burned-out trucks, no bullet-scarred walls. Just quiet and the distant rush of water spilling through some unseen outlet.
He killed the engine. The sudden silence fell heavy.
They climbed out of the truck. Claws hit the packed gravel with soft scrapes. The air smelled like cold water, damp rock, and dust that had been left alone too long.
Thane walked to the gate, keyring in hand. The big padlock on the chain was stiff but functional. The key slid in with a reluctant click, turned with a groan, and the shackle popped free.
“Feels wrong how easy that was,” Kade murmured.
“World’s full of doors that used to have people behind them,” Varro said. “Now it’s just doors.”
They pushed through.
Inside, the access road descended toward the powerhouse: a long, low building built into the base of the dam, windows facing the tailrace where water boiled white from the turbines’ discharge tunnels.
Near the entrance, a glass-fronted bulletin case still held faded posters: “SAFETY STARTS WITH YOU,” “HYDRO 101: HOW LIBBY POWERS YOUR WORLD,” a laminated evacuation map.
Gabriel paused, looking at it. The little cartoon turbine smiled cheerfully from the poster, water rushing through it like nothing bad ever happened.
“Hi, buddy,” Gabriel said. “We’re here to resurrect you.”
Inside, the lobby was dim but not completely dark. Enough daylight leaked through high windows to paint pale stripes across the tile. Chairs lined the walls; a reception desk sat empty, a coffee mug fossilized on its surface by a thick ring of dust.
Thane’s claws left faint traces in the dust on the floor as they moved deeper.
The control room door had a keycard reader and a physical lock. The key from Hank’s ring turned that one, too.
The control room smelled stale, like closed electronics and old carpet. Rows of control panels wrapped around a central operator console, studded with switches, analog gauges, and small darkened displays. Two big mimic boards covered the far wall: one showing turbine and generator schematics, another the switchyard and transmission lines.
Everything was off. Dead.
Mark moved first, drawn like a moth to the panels. “There should be station service feeds,” he murmured. “Backup diesels. Something.”
He crouched by a cabinet, reading the stenciled labels. “Here — STATION SERVICE A/B. House power. That’s our first step. No lights, no brain.”
Thane watched him work, one big hand resting on the back of Mark’s chair as the smaller wolf leafed through a ring-bound manual he’d grabbed off a nearby shelf: LIBBY PROJECT – PLANT OPERATIONS – STARTUP/SHUTDOWN PROCEDURES.
Mark flipped to a tab marked “Black Start – Loss of Grid.”
His pen scratched quickly as he jotted a simplified checklist on a blank notepad.
Gabriel leaned over his shoulder, squinting. “Translation for the rest of us?”
Mark’s tail flicked once. “Okay,” he said. “Good news: they wrote this for humans who don’t want to die. Steps are clear. Station service gets fed either from the grid or from onsite generators. Since there is no grid anymore, we’d be using the diesel backup to boot the brains, bring up controls, cooling, lighting, the works.”
“Where are the diesels?” Thane asked.
“Basement level, according to this.” Mark pointed at a diagram. “Two engines, redundant. I’m betting they shut down automatically when the plant tripped and nobody restarted them.”
“Fuel?” Kade asked.
“There was a refuel schedule,” Varro said quietly, reading over another sheet. “If this was only a few months post-Fall… tanks should still have something. Unless someone siphoned it.”
“Only one way to find out,” Thane said.
The diesel room echoed with their footsteps — bare concrete, steel, and the looming bulk of the engines themselves: two big V-style blocks painted industrial green, exhaust stacks reaching up toward a maze of pipes and vents. The smell of old fuel, oil, and dust hung thick in the still air.
Mark found the control cabinet and opened it, eyes scanning indicator lights that were all dark.
“Battery chargers dead,” he murmured. “But the starter banks… might still have enough.”
He pulled a multimeter from his bag — an artifact he treated like a holy relic — and touched the leads to a terminal strip.
“Eleven point eight volts,” he said. “Low, but maybe enough to get one of these beasts to cough.”
Gabriel padded around the back of the nearest engine, reading the hand-painted labels. “This one’s GEN-D1. That make it the lucky winner?”
“I like D1,” Holt would have said, if he were there. “Sounds like stew.”
Thane half-smiled at the thought.
“Prime fuel first,” Mark said. “Cycle the pre-lube. Then we hit start and pray to whatever gods care about electrons.”
They followed the printed procedure step by step. Valves checked. Oil levels verified. Fuel line valves cracked open; the faint scent of diesel grew stronger.
“Here we go,” Mark said. He flipped a switch labeled PRELUBE. One of the pumps whined, protesting, then spun up. A needle on a nearby gauge twitched upward: oil pressure climbing.
“Give it a minute,” Varro said. “Machines that sleep this long wake up angry.”
Mark waited, watching the gauge steady. He clicked the pre-lube off.
“Okay,” he said softly. “Start.”
He pressed the black START button.
At first, nothing. Then a slow, grating whirr as the starter engaged. The diesel coughed, turned, coughed again.
“Come on,” Gabriel murmured. “Come on, big guy.”
The sound deepened into a heavier chug, one cylinder catching, then another. A thick puff of gray-blue smoke belched from the stack. The engine sputtered, faltered — then roared to life, settling into a steady, throaty rumble that vibrated through the concrete.
“Ha!” Gabriel whooped.
Mark’s ears went flat in sheer relief. “We have station service,” he said. “Let’s go light up the brain.”
Back in the control room, the change was immediate.
When they flipped the station service breakers, lights flickered, then steadied. Fluorescents buzzed overhead. Control panels blinked to life: green and amber indicator lamps, small digital displays booting with old-fashioned blocky text. The mimic boards lit up like constellations finding their stars again.
Fans kicked on. Somewhere deep in the building, pumps started, water moving through cooling systems that had been dry for years.
Thane stood in the doorway for a moment and just listened. Not to the noise, but to the feeling of it — the plant waking up around them, like some big animal taking its first breath after a long winter.
“Okay,” Mark said, sliding into the operator’s chair. “Now we see what happened.”
He pulled up an event log on one of the dusty monitors, fingers moving over physical buttons and a clunky trackball. Lines of text scrolled by; he paged backward.
“There,” he said. “Event sequence. Grid frequency sagging, then spiking. Under-voltage alarms. Overcurrent on the transmission lines. Looks like some other plants dropped out and this one tried to carry the load… until it couldn’t. Then…”
He pointed at a line.
“TURBINE TRIP – UNIT 3 – OVERSPEED PROTECTION.”
More entries followed in quick succession. One by one: Unit 4 trip. Unit 2. 1. 5. The gap between them seconds at most.
“The plant shut itself down to save itself,” Mark said. “Turbines spun up too fast with the load dropping unpredictably. Overspeed protection did its job. Better a trip than a thrown runner and a flooded powerhouse.”
“So the guts are still good,” Thane said.
“Looks like it,” Mark said. “No catastrophic alarms. No generator damage flags, no fire trips. Just… no one here to reset it and bring it back.”
Varro folded his arms across his chest, amber eyes on the mimic board. “So we do what they would have done,” he said. “Carefully.”
Gabriel looked at Thane. “You realize we’re about to restart a multi-hundred-megawatt hydro station with nothing but troubleshooting skills and stubbornness.”
Thane’s mouth twitched. “Seems on brand.”
“Copy that, Alpha.”
Mark took a breath. “Order of operations,” he said. “We keep the station isolated from the outside world until we know the units are healthy. That means every transmission line breaker in the switchyard open. We black-start each turbine, bring the generator up, sync it to the station bus, put a token load on it — house loads only — and watch it. Once all five are happy, we start feeding the world one line at a time.”
Thane nodded. “Let’s walk it.”
They split up.
Thane, Kade, and Varro headed for the switchyard, hard hats forgotten but unnecessary — claws and fur made a different kind of armor. Mark and Gabriel stayed in the control room to drive the sequence.
Outside, the switchyard stretched like a steel forest, the ground covered in crushed rock that crunched under their clawed feet. Breakers sat in ranks, each one labeled in fading paint: GEN 1, GEN 2, LINE A – WEST MT, LINE B – EAST MT, LINE C – SPOKANE, and so on.
“Ten lines,” Varro counted. “Ten regions.”
Kade rested his hand on one of the steel structures, feeling the cold. “Dead,” he said. “For now.”
Thane used the radio clipped to his belt — an old VHF set tied into the plant’s local repeaters, surprisingly again functional.
“Control, this is yard,” he said. “Visual confirms all line breakers open. Generator breakers as marked: all open.”
“Copy, yard,” Mark’s voice crackled back. “We’re ready for Unit 1 startup when you are.”
They regrouped in the control room.
Gabriel stood at the Unit 1 panel, claws hovering near the controls. The mimic board showed a stylized diagram: FOREBAY → PENSTOCK → TURBINE → GENERATOR → BREAKER → BUS.
Water, steel, copper. Flow to spin, spin to electrons.
“Checking penstock intake,” Mark muttered, scanning another screen. “Gate status closed. No alarms on the scroll case. Runner speed zero. Tailrace level stable.”
He looked up at Thane. “You want to do the honors?”
Thane eyed the chunky, labeled switches: PENSTOCK INLET GATE – OPEN/CLOSE, UNIT START, SPEED GOVERNOR, FIELD EXCITER.
“I’m good with letting the guy who read the manual drive,” he said.
Gabriel snorted. “See, he can be reasonable.”
Mark set his shoulders, then reached for the PENSTOCK INLET GATE control. “Opening intake,” he said, voice steady.
He flipped the switch.
On the mimic board, the tiny gate symbol shifted from red to amber, then to green. A pressure gauge climbed slowly. Far below their feet, deep in the concrete, a massive gate at the penstock mouth lifted, allowing water from the reservoir — the forebay — to flow into the long steel tunnel leading to the turbine.
“Penstock pressure coming up,” Mark narrated. “Runner still locked. No leaks indicated.”
He tapped in the next sequence. “Releasing mechanical brake… runner free. Governor set to minimum. Starting unit.”
He pressed UNIT START.
There was a moment where the only sound was the diesel’s distant thrum and the gentle hiss of air from the vents. Then a deep vibration hummed through the floor, a resonance in Thane’s bones.
A low, rising whine echoed from below as water began to spin the turbine, slow at first, then faster. Needles climbed on the gauges: RUNNER SPEED, GENERATOR RPM, VOLTAGE, FREQUENCY.
Mark watched them like a hawk. “Bringing it up to synchronous speed,” he said. “Sixty hertz target. Governor engaged. Excitation… on.”
He flipped the FIELD EXCITER switch. The generator symbol on the mimic board glowed brighter as the machine built a magnetic field, converting its mechanical spin into electrical potential.
“Unit 1 at rated speed,” Mark said. “Voltage nominal. Frequency stable. No trip alarms.”
Gabriel’s tail flicked. “Feels like standing next to a sleeping dragon that just opened one eye.”
“Let’s keep it friendly,” Thane said.
“Closing Unit 1 breaker to station bus,” Mark said. “House load only.”
He took a breath, then flipped the breaker control.
In the mimic board diagram, a little animated contact snapped shut between the generator and the bus. The station’s local load meters ticked upward, drawing power from the first turbine for lights, pumps, controls — everything that had been leaning on the diesel generator.
“Diesel load dropping,” Mark observed. “Unit 1 carrying station service. No frequency droop. She’s happy.”
One by one they repeated the sequence for Units 2 through 5.
Open intake. Bring up penstock pressure. Start turbine, watch the runner come up to speed. Engage the generator, excite the field, sync to the bus, close the breaker. Each time, Thane stood just back from the panels, watching his pack work, listening to the plant’s heartbeat grow stronger.
By the time Unit 5 joined the bus, the room hummed with energy — literally and figuratively.
“All five units online,” Mark said, almost reverent. “We’re making real power again, gentlemen.”
“How much?” Kade asked.
Mark pointed at the total generation readout. The number rolled up past hundred, two hundred, more. “Enough,” he said. “More than we can use here by a factor I don’t want to think about.”
“The world’s thirsty,” Thane said. “Let’s get it a drink.”
Back in the switchyard, the sky felt bigger somehow. Maybe it was just that Thane knew the lines above him were waiting instead of dead.
He and Kade stood by the first transmission breaker: LINE A – WESTERN MONTANA.
Varro watched the perimeter, eyes tracking the ridgelines, but his ears were angled toward them.
“Control, yard,” Thane said into the radio. “We’re at Line A. Confirm plant ready to energize first line.”
“Yard, control,” Mark replied. “We’re holding generation steady. Ten percent headroom. When you close that breaker, we’ll see a load step. If it stays within tolerance, we ride it. If not, we trip the line back out.”
“Copy,” Thane said.
He set his claws lightly on the manual operating lever of the breaker’s local control — a big, steel-housed mechanism with a simple up/down handle and a placard proclaiming DANGER – HIGH VOLTAGE – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
“Somehow I don’t feel authorized,” Gabriel’s voice said softly in his ear from the radio.
“You read the manual,” Thane muttered. “You’re as authorized as it gets now.”
He wrapped his hand around the lever and pulled it down.
The breaker closed with a deep, bass thump that echoed through the yard. Overhead, the line’s insulators gave a faint, almost inaudible crackle as power surged into the empty wires, racing out across miles of steel and copper.
“Control, yard,” Thane said. “Line A closed.”
There was a brief pause.
“Yard, control,” Mark answered. “We just picked up… oh, that’s pretty. Big load step, but frequency holding. Voltage stable. Unit governors responded perfectly. Western Montana just came back from the dead.”
Kade exhaled softly. “One.”
They moved down the row.
LINE B – EASTERN MONTANA. Another clunk, another surge, another confirmation from Mark that the system held.
LINE C – SPOKANE / E WA MAIN.
“This is the one,” Gabriel said over the radio. “Think the folks in Spokane are ready for traffic lights again?”
Thane smiled, picturing the distant city — the markets, the fuel depots, the people who’d welcomed Marta and his wolves with wary curiosity and then open arms.
“They earned it,” he said.
He closed Line C. The breaker thunked; the line took power.
“Control, this is—” Mark stopped, then laughed, the sound crackling through the radio. “That’s a spike, all right. Spokane just inhaled about twenty megawatts, but we’re still rock-solid. She’s not even sweating.”
They kept going. Ten lines total, ten regions of the old grid. A few drew almost nothing — stretches where towns had fallen entirely silent, maybe with only a handful of survivors and some darkened substations.
Others pulled greedy and fast, lights and heaters and long-dead electronics waking up all at once. Each time, the plant’s governors adjusted, turbines opening their wicket gates a little more, letting more water push through to meet the demand. The readouts in the control room danced, then steadied.
Finally, they stood by the last breaker. The placard read: LINE J – REGIONAL TIE / AUX.
“Last one,” Kade said.
“Control, yard,” Thane said. “We’re at Line J. You comfortable?”
“Yard, control,” Mark answered. “We’re within sixty percent of capacity, all units sharing nicely. Bring it on. If she complains, we drop it.”
Thane nodded to himself and closed the breaker.
This time the load step was smaller — some isolated stretch of grid finding its feet again. The plant didn’t even flinch.
“Yard, control,” Mark said. “We are officially supplying power to all ten transmission corridors. Gentlemen… we just turned the lights back on for half the damn region.”
For a moment, no one spoke.
The wind touched Thane’s fur. The river roared beyond the dam. The steel structures hummed with invisible force.
Varro broke the silence. “We should secure the plant,” he said quietly. “This place is now worth more than any stack of guns or fuel in the valley. Raiders will figure it out eventually.”
“Agreed,” Kade said. “We talk to Hank tonight. Humans to guard, wolves to patrol, regular visits. If this heart stops again, the world feels it.”
Thane nodded. “Monthly checks,” he said. “At least. We keep an eye on the logs, watch for faults, keep the diesel maintained in case we ever have to do this dance again.”
He looked up at the lines stretching away into the distance, imagining small towns miles away — a child flipping a light switch out of habit for the first time in years and jolting when the bulb actually glowed.
“Let’s go home,” he said.
They knew something was different as soon as they came around the bend before Libby.
It wasn’t just the town’s outline against the hills; it was the soft glow already visible even in daylight. Traffic signals at the main intersection blinked yellow, then cycled to red. Streetlights along Main Street stood ready, their heads faintly buzzing. The windows of shops and houses gleamed with more than daylight — the steady, unmistakable shimmer of powered glass and working bulbs.
As their truck rolled into town, the square came into view.
The fountain pump in the center — dry for months — splashed with clear water, arcs rising and falling. The AT&T Definity cabinet in City Hall hummed audibly, line lights glowing steady green. KLMR’s studio over the old storefront had its “ON AIR” sign lit again, a red square crowning the window.
People were already pouring into the street, pointing, shouting to each other.
“They did something,” someone yelled. “The power’s back!”
A little girl flipped a light switch on the corner building’s porch, giggling when it obeyed. A man in a shop tested his cash register; the display blinked awake. Somewhere a fridge compressor kicked on with a comforting, normal little rattle that made Thane’s throat tighten unexpectedly.
By the time they pulled up to the square, there was a crowd.
Hank stood at the front, hands on his hips, staring, as the wolves climbed out of the truck. Marta was beside him, hair pulled back, eyes bright with wary hope.
“What did you idiots do?” Hank demanded, but his voice shook just enough to give him away.
Thane shut the truck door and stepped forward, dust on his fur, medallion resting against his chest. The whole pack fanned around him — Mark with his worn notebook, Gabriel with grease on his forearms, Kade and Varro standing like quiet flanking shadows.
“We went for a drive,” Thane said.
“Thane,” Marta said, taking a step closer, searching his face. “Is this— Is this…”
He nodded. “Libby Dam,” he said. “She was sleeping. Not dead. Turbine trip when the old grid tore itself apart. We black-started her, brought all five units online, then fed the lines back in one at a time. Western Montana, eastern, Spokane, the whole web this side of the mountains. If there’s a town still standing on those lines, it has power again now.”
A murmur rippled through the crowd. Someone’s hand went to their mouth. Someone else laughed, half-hysterical.
“You did that?” Hank said. “With manuals and good intentions?”
“Also a diesel generator that really didn’t want to wake up,” Gabriel said. “We had a conversation about it.”
Mark’s tail flicked. “We followed the procedures,” he said. “The engineers who built that place did good work. We just… honored it.”
Marta swallowed hard. “This changes everything,” she said. “Hospitals in Missoula, clinics, water plants… Spokane’s entire grid—”
“Careful,” Varro said gently. “Some of those places still have to bring their own systems up. Breakers closed, yes. But machines still need hands.”
“Then we send hands,” Marta said, eyes already taking on that familiar sharp focus. “We send word. We send instructions. We… gods. We can actually plan for a world with real power again.”
Hank shook his head slowly, a disbelieving smile creeping across his face. “You realize you just painted the biggest target in the region on that dam.”
“We know,” Thane said. “We’ll need people there. Human crews watching the switchyard, learning the plant. Wolves on regular patrol. Kade, Varro and I already talked — we’ll run a check every month at minimum. Walk through the logs, make sure all five units stay healthy.”
“We can train operators,” Mark said. “Teach them how to read the boards, how to handle trips. This can’t rely on just us.”
Marta nodded. “I’ll start a list,” she said. “Engineers, techs, anyone who worked maintenance before the Fall. We’ll put out a call over KLMR and the phone lines.”
The square buzzed louder now. People were hugging, laughing, crying. A boy ran up to Holt — who had emerged from somewhere with Rime at his side — clutching a small electric toy car.
“It moves again!” the boy crowed, as the car’s tiny wheels whirred on the cobblestones. “Look! It goes!”
Holt watched it, then looked up at Thane, eyes wide.
“World… louder,” he said. “In good way.”
“Yeah,” Thane said quietly. “In good way.”
A chant started somewhere — not organized, not planned. Just voices calling the same word: “Pack! Pack! Pack!”
Thane winced.
“Oh no,” Gabriel said, grinning. “You did this to yourself, Alpha.”
Marta raised both hands for quiet and somehow got it.
“Listen up!” she called.
The noise subsided, leaving wind and fountain and the distant hum of newly alive transformers.
She turned toward Thane. “You brought the valley’s heart back online,” she said. “You and your wolves. We’ll argue about technical credits later, but today?”
She took a breath.
“Today, Libby owes you our thanks,” she said simply.
Silence for a moment. Then applause, rough and real — hands clapping, some people howling without thinking, wolves answering with their own voices.
Thane’s ears folded back; he shifted his weight, uncomfortable under the attention, but he let it happen. The pack stood with him — Mark’s hand brushing his arm, Gabriel bumping his shoulder, Kade and Varro flanking him like quiet pillars. Rime and Holt howled once, sharp and proud, then went shy.
When the noise finally tapered off, Hank stepped closer.
“You’re all insane,” he said. “But if insanity turns the lights back on, I’ll take it.”
Thane huffed a soft laugh. “We’re going to need a dam watch rotation,” he said. “Soon as possible.”
“You’ll have it,” Hank said. “I’ll pull a couple of my best and start training. We treat that place like a holy site.”
“Not holy,” Varro said. “Just important. Holy things get fought over for the wrong reasons. This just needs to run.”
“That,” Gabriel said, “might be the most Varro thing you’ve ever said.”
Varro’s mouth quirked. “I will take that as compliment.”
Marta looked at Thane. “Do you know what people are going to think,” she said, “when their lights come back on today? In Spokane. In the little towns. In cabins along these lines? They’re going to think the world decided to forgive them.”
Thane glanced up at the lines again, stretching away into blue sky.
“Then we should tell them the truth,” he said. “That the world’s still broken. But we’re fixing it. Little by little.”
Gabriel’s tail swished. “You want to say that on KLMR tonight, or save it for our next inspirational episode?”
Thane sighed. “Both, probably.”
Hank clapped him on the shoulder. “Go home, Alpha,” he said. “Eat something. Sleep. Let the rest of us feel useful for a few hours.”
Thane nodded. He looked over his pack: Mark already mentally drafting training manuals, Gabriel humming some half-formed tune that would no doubt turn into a song about dam dragons, Kade and Varro quietly debriefing in low voices about guard rotations and sightlines.
Rime and Holt stood by the fountain, watching the water, their reflections wobbly and bright.
“Good work,” he said softly.
They all looked up. The words were simple, but from him, they hit like a weight.
Gabriel grinned. “You too, boss. Not bad for a guy who says he’s not a high-voltage electrician.”
Thane snorted. “I read the title page. That’s my contribution.”
“You also pulled a breaker lever,” Mark pointed out. “Don’t sell yourself short.”
The pack laughed.
As evening crept in, the streetlights in Libby flicked on in unison for the first time since the Fall. Warm pools of light bloomed along the sidewalks, chasing back shadows.
From the cabin porch later that night, Thane watched them glow through the trees — the schoolhouse, City Hall, the radio tower’s little obstruction lamp blinking slow and steady against the dark.
Beside him, Gabriel strummed a gentle pattern on his guitar, soft enough not to disturb the night too much. Inside, the rest of the pack shifted and murmured and dozed.
“You did a big thing today,” Gabriel said quietly.
“We did,” Thane corrected.
Gabriel nodded. “We did.”
Down in the valley, unseen but very real, turbines turned in their concrete caverns, water roaring through penstocks, generators humming as they pushed electrons along steel veins across mountains and plains.
Libby glowed. Spokane glowed. Countless little dots on the map glowed.
For the first time since the world fell, the night didn’t feel quite so heavy.
Thane leaned on the railing, claws tapping faintly, eyes on the lights.
“Let there be light,” Gabriel said, half-teasing.
Thane huffed. “And there was,” he said.
The pack, the town, the valley — all of it breathed under the returning glow. And somewhere far downstream, the dam they’d woken kept turning river into power, a steady heartbeat for a world learning, slowly, how to live again.