All Taken Care Of

Forty thousand pounds a week. Phones surrendered on arrival. Seven days of silent meditation in a glass-walled retreat cantilevered over the Atlantic. The Glasshouse is where the powerful come to be unpowered. The brief from Vantage’s client is straightforward: assess the retreat’s suitability as an executive venue. The team’s cover is, as always, a corporate retreat consultancy.

Dr. Suki Langford greets them at the door. Silver hair cut to geometric precision. White linen that exists in its own microclimate. The smile is calibrated to a tolerance of approximately one millimetre. Nadia Calloway reads the surface, then the structure underneath. The surface is serenity. The structure is something else entirely. Watchful. Measuring.

The team is shown to the east wing. The wing with the most glass. The wing where every movement is visible from the meditation hall, the kitchen, and Dr. Langford’s private office. The wing where you can see everything and be seen doing it. Nadia files this.

Then a guest dies during a silent meditation session. Everyone in the room had their eyes closed. Everyone heard nothing. Everyone knows nothing. And no one can leave. The causeway only opens at low tide. The tide is in.