Cobalt

An electrician in Las Vegas — the city that never sleeps because it lost the light switch. She wired marquees, crawled through drop ceilings above packed rooms, repaired miles of neon by headlamp. The street trained her in parallel: count a room before entering, know the two exits — three, in her case, because she read the blueprints.

A House hired her to relight a club after a curtain. She relit it, glanced at the books, then asked what it felt like, a trade where you win. They showed her. She stowed the headlamp in her toolbox, just in case, and stayed.

She opens doors without touching them. Fifteen minutes bent over a gray junction box, and the building across the street blinks, hiccups, goes dark exactly where it should. Her squad walks into the dark she made, walks out before the light. The girls call it the live current: with her on the team, everybody suddenly feels competent, even the rookies.

The sidewalk is another story. Blue coveralls, a job-site walk, and heads turning everywhere she goes — she’s enormously attractive, which annoys her, because it makes noise. Don’t count on her to fill a conversation: she answers in monosyllables, estimate attached. Talk, she says, is badly insulated cable: it heats up, and sooner or later it burns somebody.

Ambitious the old way: she wants a marquee with her name on it, and she wants to wire it herself, down to the last bulb socket. In the meantime she runs her crews like a site foreman — helmets, schedules, nobody climbs without a harness — and spends her days off scouting the back courtyards of Houses that treat their people badly. She notes the meters, the conduits, the exits. Professional conscience, she says. Appetite, say the others. Both are true.