The cast-iron freight elevator dropped like a stone down the dark gullet of the Citadel.
Mac stood with his good right hand wrapped around the brass control handle, his knuckles white as he held the brake off. The heavy steel-mesh cage groaned against its vertical guide rails, shuddering every three seconds as the elevator plummeted through the eighty-eight floors of empty, darkened corporate suites.
Inside the cage, Mobile Register Annex #04-B was lashed to the reinforced corner uprights with heavy nylon cargo straps.
Elena knelt on the ribbed rubber floor, holding Clara’s head in her lap. Clara was awake, her dark eyes clear and alert beneath the Starlight Mart wool coat, though her skin was still cold to the touch. Dr. Corvo stood over them, his fingers resting on the brass handle of the lamination seal, while Lin Mei held the 1998 Underwood typewriter clamped tightly under her arm.
“Eighty floors,” Lin Mei said, watching the bronze floor-indicator arrows spin backward through the mesh. “Fifty floors... thirty floors...”
Beneath the floor of the descending cage, the bedrock was shaking.
It was not the random shudder of an earthquake. It was a rhythmic, mechanical hammer striking an anvil in the deep mantle of the city.
