Clara Vance pressed the heavy brass headset against her temples and listened to the city die.
The sound coming through her 89.9 FM crystal tuner wasn’t normal atmospheric static. It was the deep, shuddering drone of five thousand vacuum lines drawing air at once.
Inside the massive cavern of Sub-Level 2, the roar was ear-splitting, a hollow metallic howling that vibrated through the soles of her sneakers and rattled the fillings in her back teeth. It sounded like a freight train trapped inside an iron boiler.
“Julian, look at the casing walls!” Clara shouted, pointing her telescopic antenna toward the nearest column of brass.
The laminated paper raft rose steadily on the central updraft, drifting within six feet of the spiraling cyclone of metal. The Lamson pneumatic tubes weren’t solid brass all the way through. Every ten feet, the pipes were spliced with six-foot sections of clear, reinforced polycarbonate inspection sleeves, held in place by heavy hexagonal copper collars.
Inside those clear tubes, things were moving.
Not brass carrier capsules. Not message canisters.
Shadows.
