The crack of the fifty-pound lead gavel sounded like a tombstone snapping in half.
Magistrate Horace Glass stared down from the upside-down ceiling bench, his weeping red ribbons trembling against his sunken cheeks. The heavy lead mallet in his right hand had fractured down the center line, spitting grey sparks. Fine grey lead dust sifted through his gaunt, ink-stained fingers, pattering onto the black marble ceiling sixty feet above Julian’s head.
The courtroom’s inverted gravity field groaned with a sickening metallic shriek.
For thirty years, the Inverted Courthouse had hung suspended inside the flooded maritime dry-dock shaft of Sub-Level 5. The mahogany benches, the jury box, the witness stand, and the judge’s dais were all bolted upside down to the structural iron bulkheads. Only the Grey Shift’s fraudulent legal code held them in place.
Now, that legal code was dead.
“Thomas Vance,” Magistrate Glass rasped, his voice echoing through the chamber like iron chains dragging across wet flagstones. “Badge 1996-04... You died in the flood.”
“You were expunged from the civic census roll on the morning of October twenty-first, 1996. Your death certificate was signed and sealed by this bench!”
Thomas Vance stood tall in the witness box.
