Now playing: "The Storm." The barometric needle touched forty-two. Stand back.
The barometric needle touched forty-two at eleven minutes past nine.
On the tray, she set the loupe.
She finished the radial nerve map on both hands: the right showed the precision she’d specified, the left showed a slight delay in the ulnar response she’d noted and intended to correct in calibration.
She established the anastomoses for individual finger movement.
She checked the needle; forty-two and holding.
The storm would arrive before midnight.
The most recent cup of coffee on the shelf beside the documentation wall had grown a skin.
It was the third coffee since she began working after Marc Tessier set the galvanic case on the central table twenty-nine hours ago and buttoned his coat and told her to finish it and left through the stone passage for the last time.
She had not slept.
She crossed to the generator beneath the central table; three months she had spent building it from a salvaged university transformer and sixteen hand-wound copper coils, the specifications classified three years ago and memorized before the classification took effect.
She had started the warm-up sequence at six that morning. The first coil engaged at a subsonic register felt in the molars before the ears registered it. The second and third added intervals she had calibrated to the resonance of the Oratory’s stone walls, measured in her first month down here, before the central table existed, before she understood what the room would need to hold.
The generator had been producing a continuous vibration by ten o’clock, which traveled up through the floor and settled behind her ribs.
The tube array along the eastern wall had responded.
The galvanic-reactive fluid detected the generator’s frequency and replied to it, much like an instrument answers a tuning fork not meant for it.
The Oratory was waking up.
