In pitch darkness, Julian Vance did not blink.
Every crooked store manager running a short-count audit tried the same trick. When the district inspector walked down the aisle with an inventory clipboard, the manager scrambled the stock crates between storage bays. If the auditor lost track of which carton held the counterfeit stock, the audit stalled, the clock ran out, and the discrepancy vanished into shrinkage.
Captain Laminate was running the same retail scam on a forty-foot turntable.
The floor beneath Julian’s boots groaned as massive steel ball-bearings ground along brass races. The speed climbed instantly, throwing off a whining vibration that rose through his shins to his jaw. Forty revolutions per minute.
The wind off the rotating tanks whipped past his face, heavy with hot saline mist and the sour tang of ozone. The sloshing water inside the seven tubs sounded like a tide rip crashing against a seawall.
“Don’t move your feet,” Julian said into the blackness. His voice was level, pitched just below the mechanical shriek of the drive gears. “Corvo, where’s your line?”
“Directly on the manifold,” Dr. Corvo’s voice answered from two paces to the left.
Corvo wasn’t trying to look through the dark. He had dropped to one knee the second the breakers blew. Julian heard the faint metallic click of the doctor’s Littmann cardiology stethoscope as the dual-frequency chestpiece pressed against the raw brass of the central water-return column.
