Chapter 18: What Marcus Cannot Understand About a Man Who Does Not Want to Win

The arena's artificial night arrives the way it always does — not gradually, not with the slow surrender of natural dusk, but all at once, a technician's decision rendered in darkness. One moment the amphitheater's broken columns hold the last of the engineered afternoon light; the next, they don't. Hamlet has learned to stop being startled by it. He has not learned to trust it.

He is still standing on the central stage when the lights cut.

He does not move. The cameras will adjust — he has watched them adjust, the small mechanical whirr of aperture widening, the infrared shift that turns darkness into a greenish, watchable nothing — and there is no point in rushing toward what is already coming. He stands where Marcus left him and lets his eyes find what the dark has left available: the pale geometry of broken stone, the dimmer-switch stars that Seraphine Voss has programmed for ambience and that he can tell are wrong by their arrangement, constellations that belong to nobody's actual sky.