The white silk evening coats appeared through the mist like shroud-cloth drifting over black water.
There were twelve of them, marching in tight, rigid military formation down the rain-slicked asphalt of Old Ferry Road. Their double-breasted coats were tailored from heavy Italian silk, bone-white, completely spotless despite the churning mud, diesel oil, and dead kelp in the street gutters. Over their faces, they wore full-coverage masks of beaten gold plate, molded into the smooth, featureless likeness of Roman auctioneers.
Around their waists hung heavy leather document cases stamped with the gold crest of the Uptown Spire commercial district. On their silk lapels, pinned with platinum needles, sat the embossed brass crests of the Municipal Foreclosure Commission.
Leading the phalanx was a towering, spectral figure whose edges blurred into cold grey vapor.
The shade of Notary General Vance Sterling.
The corrupt corporate architect who had engineered the municipal foreclosure crackdowns across the river wards was dead, yet his legal shadow persisted. In nineteen ninety-four, his firm had signed the liquidation decrees that stripped forty thousand families of their homes along the waterfront. When the Inverted Courthouse collapsed in the earlier municipal audit, Sterling had drowned in his own ink vault.
Now, at Zero-Hour, his administrative shade had returned to claim the final holdout.
