Chapter 15: The Feast — Seraphine Voss Escalates

The announcement comes at what Hamlet has learned to identify as mid-morning — a subjective calculation based on the arena's artificial light reaching its most aggressive angle, designed, he suspects, to simulate the productive hours of a working day, to suggest that time is passing efficiently and toward something.

The sky opens.

Not literally. A panel in the amphitheater's vaulted ceiling — which Hamlet had taken for architectural detail, decorative stonework in the Roman manner — retracts with a sound like a held breath releasing, and from the aperture descends a screen, enormous, filling the southern quadrant of the visible sky above the stage floor forty meters below them. It unfolds with mechanical grace. It has clearly done this before.