Around the black bronze pillar, eleven voices cried out at once as Nara Soth’s dropping Crown wave struck the sub-floor ring.
On Bed One, sixteen-year-old Halin’s back arched off the straw mattress despite his grounded heels. His teeth was clenched so hard his jaw Popped as his right hand death-gripped the iron rail. On Bed Three, Senn pressed both forearms across his scarred ribs to hold his chest down. Along the far curve, Kori, Dren, Sela, Borin, Neth, and Yul gasped for air as the silver ferrules between their ribs sang with a high, metal shriek.
Yet even as Mina lunged to Halin’s bedside and Chief Examiner Vaska Ren dropped to one knee beside Bed Three to press a late Jade palm over the stone floor between the mattresses, Seyun heard something happen four inches beneath the flat stone slabs that changed every rule in the room.
Nara Soth’s cracking Crown deep ring roared down the central shaft of the black bronze pillar. Then, it didn’t meet an intact, balanced twelve-socket pipe hub box.
It hit the eight-sided sub-floor box right where Daro Kesh’s Deeper Bronze blade had just snapped and jammed the external brass return latch of Socket Two fifty degrees crooked.
