Behind the stone low roof wall of the watching gallery, Seyun looked where Mina was pointing. Down in the chalk circle at the center of the vault, sixteen-year-old Halin was trying with all his might to obey Assistant Examiner Reth Mal’s instructions. Keeping his head bowed, his eyes shut. His narrow shoulders slumped forward so his inward channels would accept the seventh latch.
Yet to Mina’s trained eyes—and to Seyun’s own training sense once she directed his gaze—the boy’s body was shouting a fully different testimony from the whispered words Reth Mal had just checked off on his ivory docket.
“Look at his left main neck blood vessel just below the angle of his jaw, and look at the between-rib spaces between his fifth and sixth ribs,” Mina whispered rapidly. She kept her face turned toward Hall Mistress Soran and Seyun so the deaf Hall Mistress could read every word on her lips. “His mouth said I consent. He’s trying to hold his shoulders limp because he thinks fighting the wire will kill Senn. But his sympathetic nervous system and his deep vessel walls are in total panic. His pulse is hammering at over a hundred and forty beats a minute against a squeezed tight heart-artery arch. His chest muscle is spasming on every third beat.”
