The freezing black water didn’t stop seeping through the floorboards. It sloshed over the oxblood leather bases of the executive chairs, pooling around Elena Rostova’s nursing sneakers with the thick, greasy drag of old machine oil.
It smelled of rotten brine, damp 1996 microfiche, and a century of stagnant harbor silt. The temperature inside the octagonal boardroom plummeted until Elena’s breath billowed out in thick white clouds against the green glow of the IBM mainframe cabinets.
Charts don’t lie, administrators do, Elena thought, her fingers tightening around the cold silver bell of her Littmann Cardiology IV stethoscope. And Silas Thorne has been falsifying the primary chart of this entire building.
“Keep your boots planted,” Julian said, his voice cutting through the hiss of escaping steam. “Don’t step into the open rudder cutout.”
Across the black obsidian table, Chairman Silas Thorne floated inside his pressurized bronze-and-glass diving bell. The old man’s paper-thin lips curled into a smile that showed yellowed teeth, his mechanical pantograph arm twitching against the brass console.
“You audited my pen, clerk,” Thorne’s voice rasped through the hydrophone grille. “You found a surgical cannula inside a thirty-year-old fountain pen. Do you think that saves you, or that this Bureau was built by mere accountants?”
