Clara Vance watched the orange Nixie digits on the Gatesway console flicker and tick:
02:13:55 AM.
Four point eight seconds remained until the Audit Minute.
In the far corner of Studio B, the six-foot-tall Gates Cartritape Seven-Second Broadcast Delay Cabinet stood wide open, its smoked-glass door latched against the concrete wall. Inside the gray steel frame, an endless loop of quarter-inch magnetic tape whirred with a high-pitched, metallic hiss. One hundred and five inches of brown ferric oxide traveled across seven aluminum tension rollers at fifteen inches per second.
Up in Level 4, four hundred feet above her head on the storm-lashed mast, Director Evelyn Cross had just slammed her palm onto the master transmit button.
Cross thought her Master Harvest Reel was radiating straight out to the antenna mast.
She was wrong.
Because Julian Vance and their father, Mr. Zero, had clamped the high-voltage waveguide transfer switch outside on the catwalk at zero-two-thirteen-fifty-three, Cross’s harvest signal didn’t reach the sky.
