WHILE THERE IS LIGHT

The alert came in at four-twenty-two in the morning.

An incident on the line supplying part of the historic center. Not a complete blackout, but something more unsettling: irregular voltage drops, spontaneous resets, lamps losing intensity without ever fully going out.

Brais had been with the municipal electrical maintenance service for twelve years and knew these kinds of calls well. Most of the time it was dampness, old wiring, poorly sealed boxes. Minor issues resolved without much thought and closed with a standard report.

That night, however, the map caught his attention.

The incidents weren’t scattered. They followed one another across the map, forming an irregular line—a layout that didn’t match the modern distribution of the grid. It didn’t follow criteria of efficiency or recent expansions. It seemed like something older, drawn when the city was still imagined in a different way.

“This makes no sense at all,” he muttered, grabbing his flashlight.

He started with the box closest to the Salón García.

As he removed the cover, he felt the sensation before identifying the cause. It wasn’t the usual hum of a live installation, but a low, constant pressure—a pulse that appeared in no technical manual. The cables were warm, but not overloaded. The readings were correct.

Too correct.

He made a mental note of the anomaly and moved on.

The next box showed the same pattern. And the next one too. Old installations, some officially decommissioned, were still active, well-maintained, integrated into a circuit that no longer appeared on current diagrams.

It didn’t look like a hack job.

It looked like maintenance.

He moved forward following the layout, opening registers one by one, until he approached the harbor area. There, the last cover was coated in a layer of fresh, damp salt, as if it had just been pulled from the water.

As he pushed it aside, the pulse intensified.

The streetlights dimmed at the same time and recovered instantly, in perfect synchrony. None tripped. None went out completely.

Brais stood motionless.

Not out of fear. But out of calculation.

The radio crackled.

“We’re getting more reports,” the dispatcher’s voice said. “But nothing’s crashing. Everything is still up. It’s strange.”

“I see it,” he replied.

He didn’t cut the power.

In the report, he noted that the incident had been resolved through minor adjustments. He didn’t detail which ones. No one asked him to. It was filed away as an anomaly without consequences.

Before leaving, he rested his hand on the now-closed cover.

It was warm. Not with a dangerous heat, but steady and sustained, like that of a body at rest.

Since that night, every year, Brais voluntarily requests the shift during the festival. He checks that line with more care than any other. He replaces parts before they fail. He cleans contacts that still function perfectly.

He never proposes modernizing it.

He knows there are systems that should not be optimized. And that a second of darkness can be longer than the clock shows.