The wooden stool groaned beneath Len Vey as his spine arched against the sudden violence exploding behind his ribs.
His uninjured right hand clawed into the edge of the cedar table, the grain biting into his fingertips as he fought to draw breath. His chest muscle was locked in a rigid burst, seized by a deep, systemic pressure that felt as though red-hot tongs had clamped around the base of his chest bone and twisted with clockwork force.
Beneath the coarse wool of his courier tunic, the warning band raged.
A blazing bright radiance blazed through the weave of his gray shirt. It cast sharp amber sharp-angled patterns across the cedar planks and the stone rafters above. The cold violet shaking that had thrummed in his chest for four days had vanished, replaced by the crushing heat of a qualitative threshold demanding its settlement:
With the starting of the band came a sudden distortion of his senses.
The perk was Signal Recognition. The registry was forcibly establishing the sound neural pathways through living tissue. High in his skull, a crystal-clear shaking began to sway at impossible frequencies. It wasn’t sound entering his ears from the room. It was the bones of his head resonating with every load-bearing shaking in the tram basin.
