Chapter 22: The Stage

"Close the laptop," the man in the charcoal jacket said pleasantly.

"No."

"I'm not asking you to leave. Mr. Stanfield would only like you to sit quietly until the end."

His hand rested on the armrest between us, very near my wrist.

The pearl necklace woman on my other side leaned away from him.

"Oz," I said, into the little mic at my collar. "Now."

Every light in the hall went out.

Four thousand people gasped as one.

In the dark I heard the charcoal man's chair creak and his hand close on empty air.

Then a single white spotlight snapped on at the left side of the stage.

It showed a man in a stagehand's black jacket, with a cast on his wrist and a shaved head and a scar.

The audience made a sound I will never forget.

On the big screen, the smiling headshot was gone.

In its place, live, forty feet wide, was Jonas Wray's real face.

"My name is Jonas Wray," he said.

His voice filled the hall, steady and low.

"I'm not dead. That letter was not written by me."

"The man who just read it asked a woman to build it from my old emails. It says I'm sorry. I am."

"But he wrote it so I could never speak."

Palmer's face did not change.

He lifted a hand with a small, smiling gesture to the booth, and his microphone gave a long, dull, silent nothing.

He tapped it and tapped it again.

Oz, in the back of the hall, ate a potato chip.

I couldn't see him.

I knew.

Jonas walked to the center of the stage in the white circle.

"On October eleventh, 2022, I wrote a program called the Tuesday," he said.

"I wrote it for Mr. Stanfield, on his word that it was only a test."

A sound went through the front row.

"I did not know it until I woke in a stranger's apartment twelve days ago, and I do not remember writing it," he said.

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