The rain did not fall anymore.
Millions of heavy drops hung motionless in the red air above Old Ferry Road. They looked like glass beads strung on invisible nylon lines, suspended between the low clouds and the flooded asphalt. When a truck exhaust rolled past three blocks away, the vapor did not move the droplets.
The entire city had locked into a dead mechanical pause.
Inside Starlight Mart #04, the only sound was the sixty-hertz hum of the fluorescent tubes and the faint drip of water from the condensation pipe beneath the milk cooler.
Julian Vance stood behind the counter of Register 1.
His bandaged left wrist rested on the wooden till rail. Beside his right hand sat the Composite Master Bureau Seal, its naval-brass shanks still warm from the fusion of the seven departmental dies.
Across Old Ferry Road, the spectral spectators of the Global Audit Parade had pressed their backs against the brick walls of the warehouses. The dead tax clerks, the transit bailiffs, and the municipal appraisers stood perfectly still, their grey faces turned downward in dread.
They had cleared a twenty-foot path right down the center of the flooded street.
