Julian Vance stepped past the bronze scissor-doors and planted his right boot on the lobby floor.
Except it wasn’t a floor. It was an acoustic tile ceiling.
He stood on square panels of perforated white mineral fiber framed by thin aluminum T-bars. Rows of recessed fluorescent light troffers stretched beneath their boots like lit pedestrian crosswalks. The twin forty-watt tubes buzzed inside their housings at a flat sixty hertz.
Julian didn’t look down at the light fixtures. He looked up.
Thirty feet above their heads hung the actual floor of a 1920s municipal bank. Heavy oak desks, brass wastebaskets, and green glass banker’s lamps clung upside-down to slabs of veined grey marble.
Beyond the inverted desks, a massive skylight frame held back the flooded dry dock. A subterranean ocean pressed down against a thick membrane of clear industrial laminate.
Millions of gallons of freezing black seawater bulged overhead, held in check only by rusted 1924 naval rivets and high-tensile steel straps. Pale, blind harbor minnows darted through the dark brine, their white bellies brushing against the clear plastic above the crew’s skulls.
“Don’t look at the water,” Elena Rostova said. Her voice was brisk and clinical, cutting cleanly through the ballast hum.
