Julian Vance stood right in the center of the brass Prisoner’s Dock.
The thirty-foot court docket hanging from the ceiling was still humming with red electrical static.
The heat from the acid-etched words seemed to burn through the air: 850 COUNTS OF UNLICENSED COUNTER-AUDITING.
Behind the massive thirty-foot judicial bench, Chief Magistrate Horace Glass picked up a polished black fountain pen.
It was an antique Esterbrook pen, fitted with a fourteen-karat gold nib that gleamed with wet, cherry-red fountain ink.
The ink didn’t drip downward.
Because of the inverted gravity, it pooled at the tip of the nib in a tiny, perfect sphere, trembling with chemical malice.
Glass dipped the nib into a heavy crystal inkwell.
