The blue light hit Elena’s retinas like an unshielded defibrillator discharge.
She didn’t flinch. When you spent six years working trauma triage in St. Jude’s emergency ward, sudden flashes of light and screaming alarms were just background noise. You kept your hands steady on the patient.
Elena drove the twenty-pound lead payroll ingot into the brass slot on Chair 06.
CLANG-CHUNCK!
Internal bronze tumblers sheared into place with the heavy mechanical bite of an industrial guillotine. A sharp kick of static surged through her forearms, numbing her fingers, but Elena held her grip until the lead ingot locked flush with the polished armrest.
The sixty-pin ribbon cable wrapped around her chest violently slacked. Its copper braids hissed, discharging thousands of tiny blue sparks into the brine before the motorized reel snatched it backward into the floor drain.
Around the obsidian table, five other impacts shook the flooded room in rapid sequence.
To her right, at Seat 07, Thomas Vance slammed Chief Inspector Halvorsen’s Form 1099-SHIFT into the terminal slot. With his left hand, the silent inspector jammed the muzzle of the 650-nanometer barcode scanner into the optical port.
