The felt wrapped around Julian’s work boots kept each step under nineteen decibels.
Behind him, Elena Rostova moved with the silent, balanced weight of an emergency triage nurse who had spent seven years walking ICU wards at three in the morning. Lin Mei crept half a pace back, holding her brass inspection mirror tight against her ribs.
Above their heads, the cavernous ceiling of the Midnight Study Hall hummed with the dry, insect-like scratching of four hundred steel pens.
Rows of heavy oak desks stretched into the darkness on either side of the center aisle. Each student sat frozen beneath the green glow of a banker’s lamp.
Strips of white surgical tape held their eyelids wide open, keeping their bloodshot eyes pinned to their blue examination covers. Black typewriter ink dripped from their cracked fingernails onto the wood pulp.
High overhead, suspended from steel roof trusses, hung the decibel meter. Its polished brass housing gleamed under the emerald lamps, and its black indicator needle hovered at twenty-three point five decibels.
That left six point five decibels of margin.
If anyone coughed, dropped a pen, or dragged an iron chair foot across the floorboards, the room would hit thirty decibels. The twenty-foot bronze pendulum blade hanging above Row 10 would slip its release dog and slice through the aisle.
