Written for readers who have finished Book 1.
The Lampstand is set in present-day Seoul, a city that verifies everything: every card, every login, every entry to worship logged and counted. The country learned the habit in "the bad year", when a sickness spread through a sect and contact-tracing taught a grateful nation to want to know who had gathered where. It worked, people lived, and nobody saw anything sinister in a little green tick. When a calm new order begins to settle the world, Seoul is ready for it before anyone has asked.