The brass catwalk trembled beneath two pairs of boots.
Julian walked half a step ahead, his right hand keeping the Contradiction Ledger balanced against his hip. Beside him walked the Customer Without a Face. The tall man in the rain-darkened yellow rubber slicker moved with the measured, unhurried stride of a municipal inspector who had walked every subterranean steam tunnel in New Marrow.
Sixty feet below their boots, the dark river water in the flooded dry-dock lapped against the iron hull plates with a slow, sucking sound.
Across the cavernous chamber, the forty invisible stenotype machines fell completely silent. The clatter of mechanical keys died away in an instant, replaced by the hollow hiss of steam vents and the distant, slow thump of the Sub-Level Six printing press: clack-THUMP-hiss.
In the jury box ten feet to their right, the Twelve Faceless Jurors did something they had not done in thirty years.
They leaned forward.
Twelve dark-robed torsos bent across the 1924 carved mahogany rail in eerie unison. The blank parchment ovals of their faces turned toward the catwalk, following the wet, slapping sound of rubber boots on brass grating.
“Look at them,” Mac’s gravelly whisper carried from the Prisoner’s Dock behind them. “The dead jury is waking up.”
