Dr. Victor Corvo’s No. 10 scalpel was forged to separate cartilage and dura mater, not parry four-foot iron boat-hooks.
Dr. Victor Corvo gripped the knurled stainless-steel handle of his favorite number ten blade in his right fist, his white hair plastered to his forehead with grease and river damp. His heavy rubber-soled boots hit the iron grating of the lower processing deck with a solid, echoing thud.
In thirty-four years as Chief Medical Examiner for District Nine, Corvo had signed eighteen thousand death certificates. He had examined victims of harbor drownings, boiler explosions, switchboard fires, and the quiet, lonely deaths of old night watchmen who had simply frozen in their chairs when the steam pipes went dead.
But in all those decades, there had always been an unwritten boundary: the dead belonged to the coroner until the inquest was signed. You didn’t process a human body like raw scrap iron before the family was notified.
Then the 1996 Census Covenant had passed, and the Notary Syndicate had turned death into an industrial supply chain.
Behind him, Julian Vance hit the deck in a clean runner’s slide, his work boots kicking up a spray of pulverized lime dust. The kid didn’t flinch. In retail, Corvo had observed, graveyard clerks developed a peculiar brand of cold, practical courage.
