The Emissary

Chapter One

A Soldier, Weary

When the knock sounded at the door of his duty cell, to Amon Tomasson it was nothing so much as the echo of his own thoughts come to greet him in the physical world. The blows were insistent and staccato, vanishing into the hermetic room almost as if they’d drowned. Drowned, Amon thought, maybe drowning. This was how his mind felt: unmoored, adrift, sinking almost into itself, the feeling unnerving yet familiar.

A corner of his mouth twitched; a fleeting smile, so slight that to an observer it would have registered as a barely noticeable tick of the nerves.

It would have to come now, he thought. Just when I have found a moment to rest.

No one would ever accuse Amon of being a great wit, nor express surprise upon learning that the irony of his musings eluded him. Amon was a serious man and proud of the fact, not least because it also made him capable of tremendous focus, of attaining great calm and poise. It was only such focused composure that prevented him now from tearing open the duty cell door and crushing in his soldier’s grip the hand whose knuckles seemed to be rapping not so much on his chamber’s door, but on the bare and frayed nerves of his wearied mind.

Amon sat on a slender-backed metal chair behind a boxy aluminium table, its oft-polished surface reflecting a waxen distillation of the cell’s too-bright lighting. His eyes were closed, hands folded in front of him, his compact, muscular body upright. Anyone seeing him in that moment would have been forgiven for thinking he was deep in prayer, but this was merely the most efficient position in which Amon was able to sink into something approaching meditation while remaining, crucially, awake.

As he did whenever he was agitated, Amon absently fingered the triangular shard of thick, opaque glass that lay lightly on his breastbone. It hung at the end of a braided loop of rubberised plastic, gossamer but strong: the braid had been woven by one of his wives, though which one he could not in the moment recall. He wore it visibly, as he was meant to do. The muted charcoal of his cottonate duty tunic, of simple cut and closely fitting, shone through the shard as if through a prism, the tunic’s leaden colour amplified to something only marginally less dull.

This talisman, for this is what Amon called it, was not a large thing, perhaps the size and shape of a tablespoon’s bowl. Yet it felt thick and unaccountably heavy. The shard hung point downward so that it appeared to be the tooth of a strange and very large prehistoric beast. The wide base and one side of the talisman were worn smooth; the third side was hewn to a deadly edge, requiring Amon’s periodic polishing to maintain it as such, a ritual whose cost could readily be seen in the gashes and slices that marked each of his fingers. The talisman’s stinging sharpness contained a memory: let the edge soften, and the memory would likewise lose its power, or so Amon believed. The talisman was his one adornment. It was also a keeper of secrets.

Sitting quietly, eyes closed, absently exploring the contours of his talisman: thus did Amon begin many a duty cycle, steeling his mind to face the long, often interminably dull hours ahead. Today, Amon’s need for this brief solitude was more urgent: today, Amon had an almost chemical need for this tiny morsel of space in life. But the summons was wired almost instinctively to the twin essentials of his life, duty and obedience. It was not for him to delay a call to service. And yet such was his need for reinvigoration that he remained immobile even as the knock at the door faded into the tiny room, as if Amon were pinned into his chair by an invisible force beyond his control.

A moment more, he pleaded silently. Just a moment more.

It was early, the sun just beginning to stretch its light over the rumpled crest of the Lost River mountains, which rippled upward out of the desolate vastness of the great desert that stretched for hundreds of miles around. He could not actually see the sun, but he nonetheless felt it unfurling a hundred or so metres above him as if it were beating on the walls of his duty cell. After the light would come the heat, an incinerating wave that would blanket the high desert like invisible lava, consuming what little moisture had managed to settle in the preceding darkness. Even in the coolest hours of night, the outside temperature refused to descend below eighty degrees. It could easily reach 150F on a particularly scorching day, and there were many of those. As it was, it was now winter: with luck, the air would not rise beyond 100 or so.

Amon thought of these things, of the morning sun and its superheating qualities; of the fertile valley now turned to scrub desert, the mountains whose forests had migrated ever higher until they survived only as a ragged crown atop only the tallest peaks, the riverbeds whose water had long ago been siphoned, diverted or had simply evaporated into the hungry air. He pictured his place in the landscape, knowing that his day, as most, would be spent there, outside the cool cocoon of the Warrens. By the time he reached the surface, the sun would be a blazing flower, spreading its blistering heat across the mountains, the desert; the heart of the Prophet’s land.

Amon was First Watchman of the Council Guard, newly promoted and quickly, too: at the age of twenty-one, a rising star in the dazzling firmament of the Prophet’s legions. As First Watchman, he was at the forefront of defending the interests of the Church. Amon knew that vigilance, not bleary-eyed stupor, was the minimum requirement at all times.

The discipline of soldierly existence suited Amon like a second skin; in a rare moment of creative insight, he had once considered that being a Guardsman fit him as cleanly and snugly as the Guardsman’s tunic itself. He received orders and carried them out, satisfied to live a life that by its nature crowded out introspection. He lived to serve the People and the Prophet! But if that was so, why did the knock at his cell door not drum him immediately from his chair? Why did he remain seated in defiance of those who would draw him from his cubicle of calm? The questions drifted from his mind shortly after they’d been born, for the truth was that he was too exhausted to hold them there.

The duty cell possessed an enervating bleakness, skeletal in both décor and design, as if it had once been something more voluptuous but had been flayed of flesh. Devoid of color, the walls and ceiling were made of pre-moulded plastic of the most brilliant white, scrubbed clean; the springy plasticized floor was a noncommittal slate grey. There were no pictures or keepsake objects of any kind to be found, consistent with the dictates of the Prophet. Adornment and imagery of any kind (especially imagery of the Prophet, blessed be He Who Guides) were ruses of the devil, put in the path of man to distract, to lure him away from the Prophet’s service, away from devotion and into idleness and narcissism.

Even so, Amon found himself wishing for even the smallest splash of color in the naked room, something to draw the tiredness out of him. He’d slept barely four hours last night, even fewer the night before. His eyelids sagged, and the crystalline glow from the cell’s light bars pierced his head like a thousand tiny knives. He sat as if pinned behind his desk, helpless to respond, helpless to serve.

It was 0500 hours. His shift had another sixteen hours to go.

Amon was all too aware of the source of his anxiety, and hence his exhaustion. Tamar had given birth to their third child only weeks before; another boy, Amon’s sixth boy among his thirteen children, which only confirmed to his friends and family that the Prophet had singled out Amon for special blessing. Tam was Amon’s newest wife, a second cousin he’d known since childhood when they’d exhausted days chasing each other in the Warrens’ phosphorescent glow, both dimly aware they were part of the restless pack of a new generation, killing time until they could rebuild a life on the surface.

With her generous curves and dimpled smile Tamar was attractive enough: he knew that several of his other cousins had had crushes on her from adolescence. But to Amon, Tamar was too much a fixture of his youth—another adolescent playmate—for him to ever have considered her as other than a friend. But as with so many things among the People, wiving was a duty, not a choice. When the Council decreed that Amon was ready for his fourth partner – and with Tam, at sixteen, fast approaching the thin ranks of spinsterhood amongst the People (a path that led only to the lowest, most menial tasks among the People) – the decision became final of its own accord.

Tam proved a dutiful and capable wife, and their childhood familiarity gave their relationship a ready-made ease. And so it pained him doubly that his new son, Tam’s first child, was seriously ill. For the past few days, the boy had cried almost without cease, his howling interrupted only by a paralysing cough that sounded like nothing so much as the rasping cackle of an old man. The Healers had tried their magic—salves, unguents, vigorous praying—but they invariably departed shaking their heads, all the while muttering that the Prophet would determine the course.

Mercifully, Tam had become very close with Rachel, Amon’s second wife—and, he secretly admitted, his favorite. Rachel, mother to four of Amon’s children, had found time to help Tam with the sick boy, who would not be named until his first birthday, as the Church dictated. Tam and Rachel had kept vigil with the boy through the long nights, huddling in a far corner of the communal home that Amon’s family shared with his brother, Jacob, (Amon was the oldest of three boys and two girls) his two wives and their three children. The home’s labyrinthine quality—a coiling maze of narrow corridors spilling into a dozen cramped rooms—allowed Tam and Rachel to keep the howling child far from Amon’s bed.

Rest had eluded him, though, and he knew full well that it was neither the boy’s crying nor coughing that kept him awake. It was Amon’s conscience. He had become obsessed with the idea that this, his thirteenth child (always a number to be wary of) was somehow paying the price for all of his blessings of late. Or, rather, that the boy would pay the price for Amon’s lack of gratitude for those blessings.

Another knock at the door, this one more insistent, followed by a muted command: Brother Tomasson, the Council summons you. Immediately. It was a soldier’s voice, clear and firm, flat with obedience; Amon imagined that his own voice must sound this way to others. He opened his eyes, and as he did so the room tilted sickeningly, as if it were being poured sideways by invisible hands. His head spun; the duty cell was no longer reassuringly cuboid but something more sinister, trapezoidal, elongated, as if threatening to stretch to nothingness and collapse him with it.

He blinked his eyes open and shut, the movement deliberately mechanical. The cell resolved again into the dreary, square box that it was. This was better. He must not break. A summons to the Council was not an occasion to evince anything other than strength and confidence. This was true now more than ever.

Amon was riding a crest of good fortune. Two weeks earlier, just before his twenty-first birthday, and on the eve of his new son’s birth, Amon had been given public sacrament at the Inner Temple, in a ceremony witnessed by a thousand of the People. In the ceremony, he was promoted from Citizen to Hero for his deeds at the Siege of Coeur d’Alene, the most significant of the Church’s many recent battles of expansion. The People, and the Council, had officially taken note of him.

The battle had been a bitter, brutal affair. The last, hardened pocket of ex-NPRC fighters did not give up the city easily, choosing to make a murderous last stand from deep within a mountain of rubble that had once been the city’s market district. Amon had been selected to lead a probing assault to test their defences: he finished by destroying the last clutch of hardened opponents. No one was more surprised at this than Amon himself, who began the day believing he would die, but in maximum service to the Church and the People. This was comforting to him, even calming. Were he to die a Hero, Amon’s wives and children would be redistributed to Brothers of distinction: the Church cared for those who gave their best. No other insurance policy existed in Amon’s world.

As he recalled the assault, Amon caught a glimpse of himself in the hazy reflection of the duty cell’s table. The Church allowed no mirrors, which only encouraged vanity, and so the image Amon saw was distorted but familiar: a large head with quiet grey eyes; a dark fuzz of close-cropped hair, shorn according to his rank, sat atop a high forehead. He was of average height, but his quiet confidence gave the impression of a taller man; someone who naturally instilled calm even in difficult circumstances. Amon would not have been surprised to know that those who caught sight of him in civilian clothes often mistook him for a priest.

His mouth was small but full-lipped, its expression permanently solemn. Amon knew that his wives whispered that he rarely smiled, let alone laughed, but Amon didn’t feel he was cold or humorless. More often than not, he was simply overwhelmed: by work, by his duties as a husband and father, and above all, by his quiet yet persistent existential crisis about where it was all leading him, and why.

He knew this was sinful, this…doubt. The People lived as the Church dictated; they mated as decreed, and served in whatever capacities the People required. Every one of the People lived according to a single principle: the advancement of the Church, and the pursuit of its survival and expansion. There was no room for questioning, let alone doubt. Doubt was the enemy of duty; doubt was the enemy of the People.

Doubt certainly had no place at the Siege of Coeur d’Alene. The Inner Temple ceremony had described, among other feats, Amon’s final charge down the length of a cratered city block. He had run breathlessly, completely alone, his ammunition spent, his comrades now well behind him, many of them wounded. It was surely the Prophet’s will, intoned the Elder who had recited Amon’s heroic deeds at the Temple ceremony, that despite withering fire from the enemy, no bullet had so much as grazed him.

Amon’s recollection was less romantic. He had fought his way to a clumsy revetment of ancient household appliances, scrambling behind a decaying metal mountain of up-ended washing machines and rusting dishwashing devices, relics from another era of human existence. Amon calmly sat inside the cave-like remains of a door-less refrigerator as machine guns barked heavy rounds that crunched into the dead technology around him. It seemed that gunfire was coming from every compass point…perhaps even, he thought in the cold light of hindsight, from his own, terrified troops. He did not feel their fear. Having already resigned himself to the Prophet’s care, his head was clear and his body loose and ready.

Sensing a break in the fire, Amon clambered up the improvised hill of domestic junk and raced across a plateau of rubble and machinery before leaping into a shallow crater on the other side, stunning the two enemy soldiers manning the heavy machine gun that had menaced him. The blood was in his eyes then. Amon swung his empty rifle in a frenzied arc with so much force that he partially decapitated one soldier, the impact spraying a cloud of blood through the air. The other enemy soldier tried to pivot the machine gun toward Amon, but he wasn’t fast enough: throwing down his rifle, Amon grabbed the man’s jaw and tore off the bottom of his face, then shoved his serrated battle knife through the soldier’s now-exposed soft palate and into his brain.

As he was about to grab the heavy gun and bolt out of the crater, Amon saw a third soldier partially hidden inside the blackened carcass of an upturned motorcar at the crater’s far end. The soldier was so filthy with dirt and blood that he seemed almost to be part of the decaying vehicle, whose innards had been pilfered long ago, leaving it a naked shell of pockmarked iron. Amon lunged toward the soldier, then stopped short when he saw the fully loaded pistol in the soldier’s shaking hand, its maw pointed squarely at Amon.

The soldier was tall and, once, probably handsome. Now, though, he barely qualified as an animal, a gaunt and shaking beast, starving and exhausted, his greasy, cordite-blackened uniform too baggy for his lanky frame. His eyes were locked onto Amon as if by electricity; his face was twisted by a perverse, mad grin, as if someone had just told him a joke, the humor of which had inexplicably lingered.

Amon waited for a beat for the gun to bark out his death but as seconds passed, Amon came to realise that he was in no danger. The man was in shock. He walked towards the soldier slowly but resolutely; he recalled feeling discomfited by the man’s unflinching gaze and maniacal grin. But only for a moment: taking the pistol with the ease of a parent taking a child’s toy, he turned it on the man and emptied the clip into his wracked body.

A second later, Amon had felt a hammer blow at his back…or, as the Teller had proclaimed at the Temple ceremony, Brother Tomasson was felled as if by the hand of a devil, so great was the force of evil that struck him. Yet still did the Prophet’s grace protect him. He later learned that he’d been hit by shrapnel and had momentarily blacked out. All he remembered was falling and then, seemingly instantly, getting up, pressing on, like an automaton, unthinking, fuelled only by feral fury. Amon could recall no details of what happened after that, only the muddy, deafening sound of men desperately trying to kill each other in order to stay alive.

After the siege, Amon had been named to the delegation that had negotiated a truce with Coeur d’Alene’s leaders—a shaky confederation of local Shoshone, Flathead and Blackfoot tribes—who were both grateful for, and terrified by, the Church’s defeat of their ex-NPRC overlords. The truce gave the Church license to defend the small but resilient city-state…and of course, license to begin the slow and delicate process of converting its assets and people to Church control.

Being named to a delegation was a rare privilege. Amon knew that those among earlier delegations—at the Siege of Santa Fe, and in the vast undulating wasteland outside greater San Diego—had, in short order, ascended to Quorum Apprenticeship, a lower order of soldier-priests groomed for positions in one of the Quorums that comprised the General Authorities. This was a reward that usually arose only from cronyism or bare-fisted calculation; it was a path that could lead to greatness. And that was the problem.

The Church bade everyone to serve according to capacity, as determined by the Prophet through His instrument on Earth, the Church. Choice, desire, free will…such ideas were enemies of the People, sinful impediments to the day He would return and lead the People to glory. But Amon did desire. He desired to live an unexceptional life; the extraordinary life was to be avoided, even dreaded. This he knew from experience.

When he was five years old, Amon’s parents had disappeared into the violent, chaotic land cleansed by the Prophet. All his life he had been told of their greatness, their sacrifice; from boyhood to manhood he had been assured that, surely, he too would one day achieve an exceptional deed or action that would make them proud…and, though it was never said directly, make his life worthy of their loss.

His parents had been a rarity among the People: they chose only each other, a choice tolerable only because of their extreme piousness and service. Amon was their only child, another rarity, though not one of their choosing. Their disappearance left him hollowed out, alone, this despite the constant care of a tightly woven web of cousins, aunts, uncles, and others. He was everyone’s child, and no one’s. Thus did he want nothing more than to have wives and watch his children grow old enough to have their own children: the Church was eager to swell the ranks of the righteous. He would fight when commanded, mate when required, and pray when necessary. He needed nothing more.

Yet given the events of recent weeks, it seemed that what he desired was counter to the wishes of the Prophet. He knew he lacked gratitude, lacked grace. How many soldiers might envy his ascendance? How many more experienced Brothers—some as old as thirty—deserved accolades and praise more than him? Amon knew he was strong and capable. But ambition, even when practically handed to him, felt foreign, almost distasteful: it was sufficient for him simply to serve. Political advancement, more wives, more capacious rooms in the Warrens, a reprieve from front-line hardship…Amon wanted none of it.

But to want nothing was still wanting nonetheless – in the Prophet’s all-seeing eyes, this surely counted as a sinful portion of desire. Amon knew that the Prophet could see inside men’s hearts, through whatever walls of deceit Amon, a mere mortal, might conjure. Thus did he worry that his new son’s illness was divine retribution for this secret rebellion, this mute rejection of the accolades and promotions that were now, seemingly, raining upon him. He had even wondered whether a devil was at work on his son—toying with his tender soul, flaying his delicate insides with taloned rakes fashioned from his father’s secret wilfulness.

A third, more urgent rap resounded in the duty cell; the soldier outside was clearly growing impatient. Amon ran a hand through his cropped black hair, then opened the door and nodded to the waiting soldier, whose shining pate marking him out as an adjutant to the Authorities. The adjutant turned on his heel without a word, and Amon followed him silently through snaking corridors spanning barely an arms-width and then into wider avenues where strong-muscled Brothers pulled trolleys of goods—heavy pallets of canned rations, sheets of metal and plastic, gleaming rifles and boxes of bullets from the busy armory—to countless destinations.

Amon marvelled again at the scale and ingenuity of the Warrens: nearly one hundred miles of chambers, residences, stores, temples and prayer cells, all burrowed deep into the belly of the mountain. There were unknown zones, red-taped perimeters, and countless corridors guarded at their entrances whose maws disappeared into darkness: it was said that no one knew their full extent. It was said, too, that there were cavernous warehouses containing marvels that would reveal themselves only when the Prophet embraced the People again, and led them by the light of His grandeur out of the mountain for good.

The Warrens were once natural caves that had been home to the ancient people of the continent, many centuries before Amon’s ancestors settled the land. Caves were ultimately tunnelled into mines, first in hope of precious metals and, later, for more practical riches; gypsum, salt, mercury. But the Warrens could not have been imagined either by the natives or even by the industrialised miners who followed. They were more than a city beneath the earth. They were a nation.

Before they took to the Warrens, the People were part and parcel of the United States of America, a nation-state much like others that had been annihilated when the Prophet’s great scourge, the War, swept across the planet. The Church founders had seen what was to come: how could they not, since it was foretold in Scripture? The Founders attained positions of power in the American nation-state and over the course of many decades deftly manipulated its twin engines – money and politics – to build the Warrens. No doubt some of those involved had secretly questioned the project, the staggering expense of it, the madness of its conceit, the impossibility of its purpose. But the Warren’s architects were men of vision: true servants of the Prophet who surely had His words, His confidence at their back.

The adjutant’s marching pace led them into the Nave, an arched cavern more than five storeys high and half a mile long that linked a spider’s web of tunnels to other, smaller caverns, all of them awash with phosphorescent lighting that dimly lit the gunmetal colored walls and melted into acres of rubberized flooring. If the Warrens resembled nothing so much as the world’s most elaborate bomb shelter, to Amon this was nothing short of beauty; a vast, humming cathedral that purified air, pumped water, powered lighting. But the Warrens were even more than this to Amon, far more than a mere wonder of engineering. They were the only home he had ever known.

Walking through the bustling tunnelways, Amon’s steps grew firmer, his stride more confident, and he felt his woozy fatigue slip away from him: in its place, he rediscovered purpose and pride. Touring the Warrens always had this tonical effect on Amon, seeing and feeling the purpose of the People, what they had endured, what they were building; the soldiers, like him, drilling in ranks; the priests, chattering in fast-moving clusters; children clustered in teaching pods, learning whilst still in swaddling the ways of the Prophet.

Although the War had shaped Amon’s life almost completely, his was the first truly post-War generation. The isolation of the Warrens was all he had ever known, and if the War was something more than a myth to him, it was also something less than a visceral presence. It had begun and ended when his own parents were children; they, like him, were raised largely inside the Warrens, anxiously awaiting word from the scouting parties who took the temperature of the battered and chaotic land outside, trying to divine the moment when the People could emerge and rebuild the world outside in the Prophet’s image, as He wished it.

The War—no one had been clever enough to call it anything else—raged across the planet for three years. It spared no nation, no continent, no society. Like the rest of the People, Amon knew little about what had actually happened – who had fought whom, why, where, in what fashion. But he knew the basics. The Prophet sent the War. The War was the inevitable consequence of humankind’s depravity, and a measure of its distance from Him. The People had survived in order to prepare the world for the Prophet’s return and for the triumph, at last, of His Kingdom. This was Scripture. Amon did not need to know more.

Amon again realized that he bore an awesome legacy into this new world, in which the Prophet would return to lead the People to a dominion embracing the entire planet with its light and truth. A chant of female voices from a behind a closed door snapped him out of his reverie: a group of wives, certainly, being led through the morning Kata of Remembrance, when those who had fallen for the Prophet were recalled and commended to His mercy. Amon thought shamefully of his resistance, the arrogance of protesting his fate, of denying the People his skill and vitality, even his life. Who am I? he muttered under his breath…meaning, who was he to think of himself before his duty?

The adjutant’s pace never slackened, and Amon fairly trotted after him as they snaked their way through the bustle of the public mezzanine and through another maze of narrow corridors, Amon all the while training his gaze on the spongy flooring, one step, then another, a quick-time march that lasted nearly an hour and eventually arrived an unmarked door in a part of the Warrens he had never before visited. Amon was led into a waiting room that was murky and humid, almost like a grotto.

The adjutant departed without a word after handing him to another pair of adjutants, distinguishable from his escort only by uniforms so black they seemed to actually consume the dim lighting around them. The consuming blackness of the uniforms was broken only by an embossed triangle at the left breast, roughly where the wearer’s heart would be. The triangle was a deep, bright red; in the low light of the grottoed cell, the triangle seemed almost to float in the air.

Only a few moments, Brother, said the taller of the two, with a slight smile, clearly seeing Amon’s gaze linger upon his uniform’s crimson marking. Just some final precautions.

I understand, Amon said. The adjutants left the room, closing a heavy door behind them: had Amon not known better, he might have mistaken this room for a confinement chamber. For at least ten minutes Amon’s only company was the thudding of his own heart. He felt the cool press of the talisman, now tucked beneath his Guardsman’s tunic, and fought his hand’s urge to find comfort there. Yet he remained perfectly still, terror and excitement interweaving in his mind.

Until a few minutes earlier, the red triangles he saw were the stuff of mere rumour: the men wearing them were, too, something only slightly more real than myth. Yet there could be no mistake. These were the Personal Guards of the Council of Twelve – rarely seen, heard from only in proclamation, and yet bearing the burden of guiding the Church and the People from darkness and into light. It was said that the Twelve could even speak directly with the spirit of the Prophet, who guided their hands to prepare for His return. Of all the strange, head-whirling events in Amon’s life of recent weeks, nothing was nearly so unexpected as this.

Despite serving with the Council Guard – so named for its elite qualities, not special access – Amon had never actually met any of those he was sworn to protect. They never appeared in public, not even before the lower Quora whose members ran the day-to-day business of the Warrens and the People. The Twelve were never named, and in conversation they were referred to simply as ‘Elders’ or ‘Elder Brothers’. Amon’s older cousin Micah had served in the Council Guard for several years before ascending to the ranks of the First Quorum, a lawmaking body of several hundred Brothers responsible for translating the decrees of the Twelve into laws, dictates, assignments, missions. In all his years of service, Micah had only glimpsed a member of the Twelve once.

Yet here he was. For an irrational moment, Amon wondered if he was to be invited into the ranks of the Inner Guard. But this was impossible: those who bore the red triangle were chosen from youth, were effectively ‘married’ to the Twelve and therefore had neither wives nor children. His speculation darkened: it was said that the Twelve, like the Prophet, could read the hearts of men. Perhaps Amon’s doubts had been revealed to them. Perhaps he was to be sent into quarantine, cast off from the People and sent alone into the deepest emptiness beyond, a punishment that had only one, desperate end.

The two Personal Guards returned, and with a nod beckoned him to follow them towards his fate. He was escorted into a high-domed chamber, vast and cavernous, and directed to sit in the single, hard metal chair illuminated with a faint penumbra of light whose source was indeterminate: it was as if the chair itself was glowing. He sat down with a crisp