Twelve stainless-steel turnstile bars blurred into a shrieking wall of chrome eighteen inches from Julian Vance’s chest.
Spinning at eight hundred revolutions per minute, Chief Inspector Halvorsen’s lower rotor whipped a gale of hot bearing grease, scorched ozone, and copper blood down the six-foot width of Corridor B. Every time a polished steel arm sheared through the air, the draft snapped the hem of Julian’s dark clerk vest against his ribs.
“Hold the cadence in place!” Elena Rostova shouted over the mechanical scream. Her eyes stayed locked on the sweep hand of her St. Jude’s watch as her wax-insulated boots struck the sixth Blue Anchor carbon sheet in steady quarter-note time. “Left, right, left, right!”
“One hundred and twenty beats per minute! Nobody steps off the carbon!”
Julian kept his knees pumping cleanly on the indigo sheet. Thump-thump-thump.
An industrial food processor blocking the fire exit at one-thirty in the morning, Julian thought, watching the whirling chrome blades throw white friction sparks off the welded brass seam of the stairwell door. Honestly, still less hostile than the health department inspector who used to visit Store #04 on Fridays.
Directly behind Julian, Thomas Vance (Customer #00) shifted his broad, silent frame half a pace to the left. He angled the heavy rubber folds of his 1996 yellow slicker between Clara’s face and the flying flecks of molten brass.
