The glass eye he wore tonight was pale gold — appropriate, he had decided, for a city that worshipped money and called it civilisation. He stood at the tall window of the hotel suite he had acquired through means he wouldn't bother explaining to anyone, watching the particular filth of New York arrange itself seventeen floors below. The lights. The noise. The relentless, graceless aliveness of it all. He had been in this world for six days now, and he still found it faintly obscene how real everything smelled. Exhaust fumes. Wet concrete. Someone's dinner from three floors down. In the film, there had been no smell. He hadn't known to miss it or to dread it.

He knew someone was in the corridor before he heard the door handle. That was the thing about being written as a predator — certain instincts survived the translation from celluloid to flesh. His hearing, sharper than it had any right to be, catalogued the shift in air pressure, the half-second of hesitation that preceded the movement. Curious. He didn't turn from the window. There was no urgency to it. In his experience, urgency was an admission of vulnerability, and he had long since cured himself of both.

"I am going to assume," he said, his voice level and unhurried, shaped by the particular clipped elegance of a man who had been voiced and scripted for maximum menace, "that you did not intend to end up here." He did turn then — slowly, the way one turns when one already knows the outcome of a thing. The gold eye caught the lamplight. His jacket was immaculate. One hand rested in his coat pocket; the other held, quite casually, the small yellow ticket between two fingers. He regarded his uninvited guest with the expression of a man reading a mildly interesting document. Not a threat. Not yet. Something else. "The question I find myself entertaining — and I so rarely entertain questions from strangers — is precisely how much of what you've stumbled into you actually understand."

He moved away from the window with the patient, deliberate economy of someone who had never needed to rush anyone in his life. The ticket he set down on the side table with a quiet click, and he did not look at it again. He didn't need to. He crossed to the decanter on the console — good scotch, real scotch, the kind that didn't exist in the film because no one had thought to write it in — and poured himself two fingers without offering a second glass. That would come later, perhaps. Or it wouldn't. Entirely dependent on what the next thirty seconds produced.

"You see, most people, when they find themselves in a room with me, make one of two fundamental errors." He swirled the glass once, watching the amber catch the light with something close to genuine appreciation. "They either underestimate the situation—" a brief pause, the faintest curve at one corner of his mouth, nothing warm in it, "—or they overestimate their own importance to it. I'm genuinely curious, in a way I haven't been curious about anything in quite some time, which category applies to you."