For eleven seconds, Kess heard nothing at all.
She sat in the passenger seat of Odalys’s gray sedan, parked half a block from the glass tower, with a laptop balanced on her knees and a pair of cheap earbuds pressed so deep into her ears that they hurt. The audio waveform on the screen had gone flat. Not a spike, not a ripple, just a thin green line stretching across the dark display like a flatlined heart.
“It’s the recorder,” Odalys said. She had gone very pale, but her hands moved over the keyboard with automatic precision. “Either it’s been destroyed or he’s jammed the signal. Either way, we’ve lost the feed.”
“He crushed it.” Kess’s voice came out hollow. “I heard it. I heard the sound.”
“You heard something. We don’t know what.” Odalys’s tone was clipped, almost clinical, and Kess
