The copper headphone coils against Clara Vance’s ears grew hot enough to singe hair.
The heat was not physical fire. It was radio-frequency electromagnetic induction, pouring through the braided copper cable plugged into the auxiliary jack of Station 6. The silver static tasted like zinc fillings and battery acid on the back of Clara’s tongue.
Her molars throbbed with a shrill, metallic vibration that turned every breath into an electric shock.
Station 6 was the communications desk of Store #04. Bolted to the end of the front counter, it housed the vintage Bogen PA amplifier, the Motorola two-way radio base station, and Clara’s prize possession: a restored nineteen-seventy-two Western Electric Model 555 PBX cord switchboard. The switchboard featured fifty-two quarter-inch brass jacks, ten nylon-braided patch cords with heavy brass plugs, and rows of magnetic drop-indicators that fluttered like mechanical eyelids.
She had spent three months restoring those copper connections after waking from her coma. She knew every soldered joint, every carbon resistor, and every ground strap.
Now, every single brass jack on the switchboard was glowing with a pale, ghostly violet luminescence.
Clara tried to pull the padded leather ear-cups away from her skull.
Her fingers refused to obey. The motor nerves in her forearms were locked in rigid, involuntary tetanus, her knuckles frozen in mid-air two inches from her ears.
