Chapter 2: The Reaping of a Ghost

The door opens without announcement.

No knock, no warning light, no courtesy of the kind one offers a prisoner who is also, however marginally, a person. The wall simply parts — a seam Hamlet had examined twice and dismissed as decorative — and a woman enters carrying a flat-screened instrument and the professional composure of someone who has never once wondered whether her work was worth doing.

She is followed by two others in grey uniforms, heavier than his own, whose function is apparently to stand at measured intervals and exist as spatial fact. Not guards, precisely. The architecture of threat without its content.