Lin Mei did not turn around.
Every nerve in her nineteen-year-old spine screamed at her to glance over her shoulder toward the back of the bus. The human body was built on reflexive symmetry: when an alarm chimed behind you in a dark room, your neck rotated. It was an instinct older than language or mathematics.
She clamped her back teeth together and kept her eyes locked on the scratched aluminum bulkhead behind Driver Mac Cole’s seat.
Down on the chrome rail of Clara Vance’s mobile ICU isolette, Clerk 03’s warning still pulsed in sharp emerald block letters across the Casio HR-100TM’s vacuum-fluorescent display:
[ALERT: FARE-BOX HEADCOUNT = 0004. MIRROR HEADCOUNT IN ROW 12 = 0008. DO NOT TURN AROUND.]
Four living crew members logged through the front step-well (Mac Cole, Julian Vance, Elena Rostova, Lin Mei, with Clara Vance classified as sealed medical cargo in the wheelchair lock-bay).
Eight bodies reflected at the rear of the cabin.
That left an un-ticketed delta of four sitting in the dark of Row 12.
