Looking down through the open floor grating at the fifty-foot staging collar felt like standing on the edge of an icy bridge suspended over an upside-down city.
Julian spread his feet fourteen inches apart, his heavy rubber soles gripping the welded steel rivets of the elevator’s diamond-plate deck.
Fifty feet above his head lay the surface world: New Marrow, the rain-soaked asphalt of Old Ferry Road, and the glowing green-and-gold neon sign of Store #04. And fifty feet below the floor grating hung the -100 ft gravitational null-plane, where the Inverted Courthouse’s reverse gravity pushed upward against the upper shaft like a vertical wind tunnel.
Beside him, Mac crouched low by the 900-lb stainless-steel frame of Mobile Register Annex #04-B, his prosthetic left knuckles gripping the cart’s push-handle. “The air draft coming up through the floor grate is pulling backward on my boots, Kid. And the bulkhead scale says we’re seven hundred and forty pounds over the hoist limit with this stainless-steel cart.”
“Don’t look down through the floor mesh into the inverted lights, Mac,” Elena said, bracing her back against the scissor-gate. She held her Littmann stethoscope tight against her ribs with one hand and checked Clara’s balance with the other.
