The mechanical clatter of forty hidden stenotype machines echoed from the darkness of the ceiling.
Julian looked up through the iron bars of the Prisoner’s Dock. Above them, hanging upside down over the flooded dry-dock shaft, Chief Magistrate Horace Glass pulled a long roll of cream-colored legal parchment from the carriage of his bench recorder. The paper was stamped with a weeping crimson seal: Form PB-06.
“The clerk’s companions may approach the gate,” Glass announced, his voice reverberating like an organ pipe clogged with gravel.
Mac shifted his weight on the iron grate, his prosthetic ticket-punch clicking once. “What kind of junk mail is the judge peddling now, kid?”
“A settlement offer,” Julian said, his retail deadpan dead steady. “When a store manager realizes he can’t win an argument at the register, he tries to split the customers. It’s the oldest trick in the retail playbook.”
Glass raised a single pale, ink-stained hand. “Under Rule 06-B, Clerk #044 is the sole signatory on every unauthorized counter-audit entered into evidence. The yellow grease pencil belongs to him.”
“The ledger belongs to him. You five are merely collateral casualties of his reckless administrative insubordination.”
“Get to the point, Glass,” Elena called out, her hand resting on the silver bell of her stethoscope. “We don’t have all night to listen to your judicial preamble.”
