Act I — Part 1: “You’ll Steal What I Tell You”
The salon is colder than it looks. A garden mural pretends at California… lemon trees, a chalk-blue sky… but the air tastes of antiseptic and brine. At the room’s center rises the column: glass, steel rings, a slow peristaltic pulse of bubbles. Inside, suspended like a thought you can’t unthink, floats Magnus Caulfield.
His hands are the first thing Vera clocks… split like a bird’s foot, two thick, opposing digits where five should be, keratin scrolled into plates that flash when the column light swings. He lifts one in greeting. The gesture is almost courtly.
Orrin Hex enters from a side door, eyes too bright, smile ironed flat. “Magnus Caulfield will outline scope.”
Vera keeps her distance, close enough to see the microturbines in the base of the column, far enough that a hidden gun can’t triangulate an easy shot. The floor has that faint magnetic pull, she files it away. A room designed so the man in the tank owns your stance.
“Or should I say Lobster?” she says.
Magnus doesn’t blink. The gel shifts around his ribs as he resettles. His voice comes through ceiling speakers warm and exact, like an audiobook version of himself. “You may say it. You won’t write it.”
Orrin ticks his gaze toward Vera’s boots, as if checking for mud on a white rug. “We appreciate formality.”
“I appreciate air,” she says, lifting her chin at the column. “You’ve cornered the market.”
A short beat. The bubble pulse slows, then quickens… either a joke lands, or a valve does its work.
“Please sit,” Magnus says.
There are two chairs and a floating table holding a carafe of water that is surely not poisoned, too obvious, but also surely tracked. Vera doesn’t sit. Orrin does, ringing the glass with one manicured fingernail.
Magnus: “You came because the price was persuasive.”
Vera: “I came because your courier said, ‘urgent, discreet, high hazard, high integrity.’ Integrity is a joke, but I respect hazard.”
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A bit of the first act is in the ALT!
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