The felt wrapped around Julian Vance’s boots compressed against the pine floorboards with a muffled sigh.
Twenty-one point four decibels.
They were moving north along the eastern brick wall, slipping through the shadows cast by the massive masonry pilasters. Between each pillar lay twenty feet of open hallway, flanking the ends of Rows Nineteen, Eighteen, Seventeen, and Sixteen.
To Julian’s left, eighty student desks stretched across the darkness in rigid perspective.
Under the green-tinted glow of the banker’s lamps, eighty pairs of hands moved in mechanical synchrony. Steel fountain pens scratched through paper, dipping into open ceramic inkwells every thirty seconds.
Nobody looked up. Nobody coughed.
The silence in the room was dense and suffocating, punctuated only by the steady sixty-cycle hum of the electrical wiring.
Elena stayed three feet behind Julian, her right hand holding the neck of the liquid nitrogen canister to prevent the brass fittings from chiming against her belt. Lin Mei crept between them, her chin tucked into the collar of her grey academy cardigan, her spectacles catching the sickly emerald glare of the row lamps.
