Current flowed through the wires, and transformers hummed. The workers who had been holding wrenches and pliers moments ago now looked up at the lights that had come on overhead.
"The auxiliary systems are stable," Dick said, brushing the dirt from his hands as he addressed the engineers sitting beside the instrument console. "Give the turbines another twenty minutes to warm up, and we should be able to connect to the grid. At least a third of Gotham will have lights then."
No one answered him.
Something was off about the atmosphere in the control room. The workers and engineers sat scattered around in twos and threes, their eyes darting between Dick and one another, as though exchanging messages that needed no words.
Dick stopped walking.
He glanced at the East End power grid map spread across the console. Several places had been circled in pencil and labeled: the stadium, the hospital, the Police Department's temporary headquarters, and a few streets he had never heard of. Another sheet lay beside it, covered in a few crooked lines of handwriting. It looked like a to-do list, but not a single entry had been checked off.
"What's wrong?" Dick asked.
No one spoke. Their leader was an engineer in his fifties, with a scar on his face from crawling out of the earthquake rubble. He sat at the console with his back to Dick, clutching an extinguished cigarette and squinting at the slowly rising readings on the screen.
Dick went around the console and stood in front of him.
"I asked, what's wrong?"
The old engineer looked up at him, then lowered his head to the screen again.
"Nothing, Mr. Robin. There'll be power," he said, sounding a little guilty. "But... you know, electricity doesn't jump straight from the power station into