The drafting calipers felt cold against Lin Mei’s ink-stained thumb.
She leaned over the wooden sorting table, the heavy black binder pinned flat under her elbows. Her breath formed faint white plumes in the chilly alcove air, drifting across the yellowed parchment.
Two feet away, the white eyeball shutter of Trunk Jack #14 sat closed behind its small glass bezel at the bottom right corner of the switchboard.
Even behind the closed shutter, the circular aluminum disc seemed to stare into the dim alcove like a dead fish’s eye. Inside the quarter-inch brass socket below it, the leaf-spring contacts quivered with a faint sixty-cycle electrical vibration.
“Don’t stare at the jack, Lin Mei,” Julian said from the threshold of the alcove.
“Focus on the page,” Julian added calmly.
“I’m not looking at it,” Lin Mei lied.
She pushed her wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose with a chalk-dusted knuckle.
