The door pounded shut, swallowed the world before Thomas's face.

Neither of them said anything until the elevator doors closed.

'What do you make of that?' Sam finally asked.

'I don't know. He was drunk, for one. But beyond that? Could be he's suffering some post-traumatic stress…' he trailed, struggling to make sense of what had just happened. 'One thing's for sure.'

'What's that?'

'Did you notice how he behaved around us? The utter absence of any eye contact. His body language. Almost cringing from our presence.'

'So?'

Thomas breathed deeply. 'So, we were monstrosities to him. Faceless monstrosities.'

'What are you saying?'

Thomas found himself looking at his hand, at the missing wedding band on his ring finger, thinking of all the neural machinery churning away underneath, making this experience possible. That was where Neil was striking. Not at the heart, but at the soul.

'That Theodoros Gyges lives in a world of boogeymen.'

Other than in the back seat of a taxi, Thomas so rarely drove through Manhattan that he found the trip downtown to Federal Plaza vaguely disconcerting. Manhattan had always (and there was no other word for it) flummoxed him. The scale was nothing short of geological, as though the streets and avenues were river beds sunk canyon-deep into some ancient Martian plain. But the feel… At once archeological, like a vast inscription with Central Park the indent of some God-King's seal, and yet statistical, like a great 3-D bar graph, charting the sum of human hopes against the GDP of nations—a Powerpoint presentation frozen in monumental stone.

New York, Neil had once told him, was braille for a blinded God—the one place where the bumps of human ingenuity towered high enough for divine fingers to read. When Thomas had asked what it spelled out, Neil had replied: 'Three words: "Fuck. You. Too."'

'So what do you think, professor?' Sam asked. 'If Gyges is Cassidy's first premise, what is it?'

'I'm not entirely sure,' Thomas said absently.

Nothing made sense. That was the heartbreaking truth. Nora fucking Neil. Neil murdering innocents. Sam pursuing him, career hound that she was. Europe freezing to death. Moscow gone—or a good chunk of it, anyway. Even a fool could see there was no plan, no hidden author.

Everything shouted indifference. Everything. And those who thought otherwise, who embraced their hardwired weakness for simplicity, certainty, and flattery, simply made it worse. Voting for hardline rhetoric. Killing in the name of x, y or z.

Why couldn't they just play the game and let the world die?

Neil's words… from the previous night.

'Well, we need to come up with something,' Sam said. 'Something to wow Shelley. We're not going to catch this guy without your help, professor.'

Is that what he wanted? To hunt Neil?

He's hurting people.

What did it matter?

'Did you hear me, professor? Professor Bible? Yoo-hoo…'