Lin Mei didn’t wait for Julian to open the letter.
Her fingers were already moving. She pulled the ten-power Hastings loupe from her collar, unclipped her mechanical pencil, and stepped right past the brass threshold into the booth.
“Hold the letter for two minutes, Julian,” Lin Mei said. Her voice was rapid and sharp, the tone she used when an equation was three steps from solving itself. “The letter is personal testimony. We need the legal baseline first. The contract beneath the porcelain plate--that’s the root directory. If we don’t know the root, we won’t understand what he was fighting.”
Julian paused. He held the yellow legal sheet in his left hand, his thumb resting over his father’s pencil marks. He looked at Lin Mei, then down at the thick cream-colored bond packet resting in the velvet recess.
“Go ahead,” Julian said. “Map the root.”
Lin Mei clicked the side switch on her micro-penlight.
The beam was pure white halogen, five thousand Kelvin. It cut clean across the dark red archival cotton tape binding the cream-colored parchment.
Dr. Victor Corvo stepped in beside her, leaning his tall, gaunt frame over the zinc rim. He set his Pyrex espresso beaker on the shelf and adjusted his Carl Zeiss jeweler’s loupes with a faint brass rattle.
