Pinned to the collar was Arthur Mercer Senior’s unpolished bronze surveyor’s transit pin, its miniature brass vernier catching the flickering emergency lights.
I took the jacket.
I slipped my arms into the wool sleeves, buttoning the silver eagles across my chest with fingers that were cold, steady, and immovable.
I returned Uncle David’s salute with textbook, eighty-year mechanical symmetry:
“At ease, Uncle David.”
Julian Vance’s face did not merely lose its color; his capillaries collapsed inward, leaving his skin the exact, mottled shade of sour skim milk.
His Patek Philippe watch slipped an inch down his wrist as his arm went limp:
*k-k-k.*
His jaw worked in dry, spastic, uncoordinated clicks:
“Clara…?”
Julian whispered.
His voice had no volume.
It was the dry, whistling rasp of an ancient water pump sucking air in an empty cistern:
