The copper pipe didn’t just vibrate. It sang.
Lin Mei knelt on the damp basalt floor, her Pickett slide rule clamped between her teeth while she wiped her fogged spectacles on her sleeve. She didn’t like the sound coming out of the three-inch Heliax waveguide.
It wasn’t the clean, mechanical hum of an industrial generator. It had a wet, raspy throat behind it.
“Julian,” Lin Mei said, shoving the spectacles back up her nose with a chalk-dusted thumb. “Don’t take another step. Don’t even shift your heel.”
Julian Vance froze. His right boot stayed poised half an inch above the glistening rock. He held the grips of Clara’s wheelchair with both hands, his knuckles pale under the yellow glare of the tunnel’s wire-caged incandescent bulbs.
“I hear it,” Julian said. His voice was flat and steady, the voice of a clerk dealing with an expired coupon at two in the morning. “It’s using my voice.”
From the corrugated copper flanges twenty feet ahead, a hollow murmur leaked into the damp tunnel air.
Keep walking, Julian, the pipe whispered. It sounded exactly like Julian--down to the dry cadence and the faint rasp he got after breathing cold salt air.
