A shower of rusted sheet-metal screws rained down onto the corrugated steel roof of Walk-In Beverage Cooler #3.
Inside the narrow, dimly lit stockroom of Starlight Mart #04, the air smelled of damp cardboard, sour mop water, and the sharp, hot ozone of thirty computer cooling fans spinning at nine thousand revolutions per minute. The bare concrete floor was trembling under a steady eighteen-point-nine-hertz vibration that made the wire display racks rattle like dry teeth against the cinder-block walls.
Eighteen-year-old Sammy Chen stood in the center of the concrete stockroom aisle, his knuckles white around the rubber grip of a two-foot steel tire iron. His oversized blue Starlight relief clerk smock hung down past his knees, the white cotton collar buttoned tight against the icy draft blowing down through the ceiling seams. Over his left breast pocket, his plastic apprentice tag -- CLERK-IN-TRAINING: SAMMY CHEN -- clattered softly against his ribs.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
Three concussive impacts struck the flat tar-and-gravel roof directly overhead. Each blow carried the unmistakable, ponderous weight of heavy cast iron -- matching the deliberate, hydraulic tread of Notary Roof-Bailiffs.
From inside the cold room, seventy-year-old Dr. Beatrice Hahn looked through the reinforced wire-glass inspection window. The retired Chief Archivist wore a faded green wool cardigan buttoned over her Starlight smock, her silver hair coiled into a severe bun held together with two sharpened wooden pencils.
