The moment the alarm strobe flared on the ceiling, the ground beneath Coach #404 ceased to feel like solid earth.
“Julian, wait!” Harlan Reed shouted from the window of Seat 1A, his face pressed against the glass. “You can’t just climb up there! That dispatch tower is Corbus Vane’s private fortress, guarded by pneumatic deadlocks and automated penalty relays!”
“Three years ago, an independent auditor from District 2 tried to force the door,” Reed warned. “The security grid fried his nervous system from thirty paces away!”
“The auditor from District 2 didn’t have Clara in the wire,” Julian replied without slowing down.
He grabbed the portable dispatch handset from the dashboard cradle. The thick, coiled rubber cord stretched out behind him like an umbilical line, connected to the bus’s main communication trunk.
“Lin! Bring the contradiction ledger, the inspection lamp, and the master key!” Julian barked.
“Right behind you!” Lin Mei shouted, adjusting her glasses and clutching the heavy cloth-bound binder to her chest.
Mac Cole stood in the bus’s open doorway, his twelve-hole master route-punch resting across his chest like a badge of office. “Go, Julian! I’ll hold the step-well! If anything crawls out of those inspection pits while you’re on the catwalk, my punch will take its head off!”
