Four hertz was not a sound you heard with your eardrums. It was a rhythmic, nauseating jolt in the roots of your molar teeth.
The sweep-second hand of the Seth Thomas master wall clock clicked into vertical alignment against twelve. In that exact fraction of a second, the four-foot fluorescent tubes recessed into the ceiling dropped straight from buzzing white to a bruised, electric violet.
Frost broke across Bay 1 in a single, whispering wave. It did not creep from the corners. It exploded outward from the floor drains, feathering over the white porcelain tiles, climbing the chrome legs of the autopsy tables, and glazing the zinc gutters with crystalline ice.
The dial thermometer bolted beside the intake board dropped like a severed plumb bob. It swept past thirty-four degrees, plunged through zero, and froze at minus two point one four degrees Fahrenheit.
Julian Vance braced his shoulder against Table #1 to keep his footing on the slick tile. In his right ear, the high whine of forty-two hundred hertz met the low rumble of forty-one ninety-six coming through the concrete floor. The two acoustic frequencies collided inside his skull, beating against his temporal lobe like an out-of-balance washing machine on spin cycle.
