Chapter 47
At seven in the morning, the familiar scents of hot solder, machine oil, and the persistent, faint ozone tang that Ralph’s ceiling fans could never entirely dispel permeated the shop. D’Antonio Tech Solutions occupied the ground floor of a building that had been a print shop, then a nail salon, then nothing for two years before he gutted it and made it his. The shelves ran floor to ceiling on three walls, packed with signal dampeners in various stages of assembly, kinetic feedback harnesses coiled like sleeping snakes, comms rigs with their guts exposed and waiting for him to close them up. A whiteboard took up most of the fourth wall, covered edge to edge in circuit diagrams, half-erased field notes, and a running tally of failure rates he updated every time something blew up in the field, literally or otherwise.
