The soundproof glass of the Dean’s Grading Annex hummed with a dead, muffled vibration.
On the other side of the heavy wire-reinforced pane, four hundred students sat in twenty rigid rows, their pens moving across blue exam booklets like metronomes. The green banker’s lamps cast sharp cones of emerald light over four hundred bowed heads. At the front of the hall, Matron Bell stood beside the raised mahogany podium, her seven-foot silhouette draped in ankle-length wool.
Julian Vance lowered the acoustic ear-tubes from his ears and rested the brass Dictaphone horn against his thigh.
Clara’s voice still echoed in the hollow space behind his ribs. Her words were sharp, stubborn, and steady.
She had jammed the silver Parker pen he had given her for her nineteenth birthday straight into the type-basket of the 1998 Underwood Master Typewriter. She had done it six months ago, right before her shuttle vanished on the bridge.
She had done it to buy him time.
“Four minutes and forty seconds,” Elena Rostova said, checking the second hand of her pocket watch. “At 03:15 AM, the Route 04 night freight bus leaves the North Gate loading dock.
The waybill we took from Hollis says the master ribbon-spool is already down there.”
