The problem with anticipating something was that it made you stupid.
Nolan had known this about himself for years; had built systems specifically to counteract it, to keep the forward-moving part of his brain from eating the careful part alive. Usually it worked. Usually he was good at compartmentalising, at filing the thing that was happening later into a separate drawer and closing it and working cleanly in the present tense.
Usually he was not thinking about being called good boy for his reluctant cooperating while trying to recalibrate a live circuit.
The spark that jumped from the connection point to his ring finger was his own fault entirely. He pulled his hand back, shook it out, looked at the ceiling with the expression of a man having a very serious word with himself.
"Right," he said. "Right. Focusing now."
He focused for approximately seven minutes before he cross-wired the secondary feed and had to spend twenty minutes undoing it.
The tea break was not optional after that. He made it on the hotplate, the spark from his palm to the element automatic and practiced, muscle memory so deep it didn't require thought, and stood in the middle of the plant holding the mug in both hands and doing the thing he never normally had to do, which was deliberately slow his own nervous system down. Breathe. Clock the exits. Feel the floor under his feet. The familiar hum of the plant coming up through the concrete. The smell of metal and something faintly burnt and the particular quality of the air down here that he'd stopped noticing years ago and noticed constantly now because Dom was going to be breathing it soon.
The mug was warm. He held it until his hands stopped feeling like they belonged to someone running a different program.
Get it together, he told himself. You have work to do and you are going to do it and then he's going to walk through that door and you are going to be a functional human person who has not made three rookie errors in forty minutes.
He finished the tea. Set the mug down. Pulled his goggles down from where they'd been pushed up on his forehead and went back to work.
The plant was running hot tonight. Not dangerously — not yet — but the equipment had been working at capacity since the crisis earlier that week and the ambient temperature in the upper section had climbed to the point where working with a shirt on was a losing proposition. He'd shed it an hour ago, folded it over the railing at the base of the ladder, and promptly stopped thinking about it because there was nobody here and he had work to do.
The Lichtenberg scars caught the light when he moved. The branching patterns across his shoulders and down his arms, old and new both, fern-like and precise in the way that only things made by electricity were precise. He didn't think about them. He never thought about them while he was working. They were just part of the landscape of being him.
The thing in the upper rigging needed doing immediately. He'd been watching it for two days, a junction point thirty feet up where the secondary distribution line was running hotter than it should, the housing showing the very specific color he associated with this is about to become my emergency, and tonight it had crossed a threshold he couldn't in good conscience ignore.
Which was how he ended up thirty feet off the ground on a platform that had never been designed for a person, the original infrastructure built for maintenance access by machinery that no longer existed there, a narrow shelf of old metal grating accessible only by a ladder that complained the entire way up and delivered him onto a surface approximately the width of his shoulders. Below him, the plant. Above him, the ceiling of the old facility, close enough to feel the heat radiating off it; worse up here, significantly worse, the air thick and warm and smelling of overworked metal. Sweat at his temples, at the back of his neck, tracking down between his shoulder blades. The goggles fogging slightly at the edges and doing nothing to help with the heat.
Beside him, the junction housing, already warm to the touch through the gloves.
He worked by torchlight, clamped between his teeth, the beam steady, his hands doing what they knew how to do. The height was not the problem. He'd never had an issue with heights. The problem was the grating flexing slightly under his weight in a way that was probably fine and was definitely something he was tracking in the background at all times, and the problem was that down below, the main door was visible from where he was, and he kept not-looking at it.
He was most of the way through the repair when the housing decided it had opinions.
The arc came without warning, old failing metal throwing a spark sideways, external current hitting him from the wrong direction entirely, and his body's response to it was involuntary and immediate. Not painful, exactly. More like being grabbed suddenly. His grip slipped. His weight shifted wrong on the grating and the grating flexed and for one very specific second the situation had the feeling of something that was about to become significantly worse before it got better.
He caught himself. Both hands finding purchase, the repair half-finished, the torch still somehow between his teeth. He stayed very still for a moment, breathing through his nose, letting the involuntary charge that had spiked in response to the arc settle back down to something manageable. His shoulders were shaking slightly. Residual. Fine.
Fine, he told himself. You're fine. Don't drop anything.
The particular drag of it, the way it scraped slightly on the threshold, he'd done that drag himself ten thousand times, knew the sound the way he knew his own heartbeat, and then footsteps.
He could not look down. He was holding two contacts together that needed to stay held until the housing cooled enough to seal around them, both hands occupied, torch between his teeth, perched on a surface he trusted approximately sixty percent and had no choice but to trust entirely. Sweat running down his collarbone. The goggles fogged at the edges. Still shaking slightly in the shoulders from the arc.
He took the torch out of his mouth.
"Fair warning," he said, to the room, to whoever had just come through his door, pitched loud enough to carry down through the plant's hum. "If you’re not Dom, you've got about ten seconds to reconsider your evening plans." A pause. He did not look down. He could not look down. His hands stayed exactly where they were. "I'm not in a position to come down there at the moment and I genuinely cannot guarantee your safety if you're still in this building when I am. So."
"If you are Dom —" and something shifted in his voice, the warning quality of it falling away into something warmer, slightly helpless, aimed directly at the door below "— watch your step on the left side of the floor. There's a patch that gets slippery when it's warm." A beat. "And I'm — " the grating flexed and he adjusted his weight, jaw tight, torch still in hand "— I'm a bit busy up here. Just give me a sec. Don't be alarmed. Everything's fine."
A pause that suggested everything was, in fact, fine.
He held the contacts together and waited to hear which one it was.