The mountain air was thin enough that Len Vey could hear the dry crackle of static electricity running through the wool nap of his coat sleeves. He stood two paces back from the dark rock low roof wall, his boots braced on the lead seam between the granite slabs, his breathing drawn slow and deep through his nostrils to keep the cold air from searing his lung tubes.
Long Breath held his pulse at sixty beats a minute, despite the cold, despite the throbbing ache in his braced radius, and despite the huge, impending strike of the global midnight clock.
He closed his eyes for three seconds, clearing the glare of Chancellor Morn’s searchlights from his eyes, then opened them into the dark.
In the surrounding gloom, projected against the cold mountain mist six inches before his face, the gray box-shaped shape of his office status slate appeared.
It didn’t arrive with fanfare, golden fanfares, or celebratory chimes. It possessed no decorative borders, no heraldic filigree, and no promises of transcendent glory. It was an austere, office audit docket, its forty-character width machined with the exact, unforgiving care of a town tax check in an occupied territory.
Len studied the characters, his jaw tightening until his back teeth ground together.
