Our materialisation upstairs went completely unnoticed by the room’s two occupants. The presumable forensic analysts sat huddled around Canciana’s computer monitor on foldable plastic stools, intent on the contents of the screen. Vince, on the other hand, reacted as though he wasn’t sure if he’d just been fed through a woodchipper, checking his hands and feet for abnormalities. This despite the fact I was fairly sure he’d been through it at least once before at the Vatican.

“Good job,” I announced, stepping forward to crouch between the pair. Sure enough, the login screen was nowhere to be seen, replaced with a smorgasbord of tabs and applications. “Now we just need to understand what we’re looking at.”

They both jumped. Gia, at the controls, couldn’t have been more than forty but had a pronounced twist to her back reminding me of Hel’s uncooperative half. Her partner, a younger man with a short ponytail and ill-fitting suit, fidgeted with his hands in various positions before ending up with them tucked stiffly into his pockets.

“I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure,” said the latter. One hand re-emerged from the pocket and extended towards me. I didn’t take it.

“Silvio, Gianna,” said Vince, “these are representatives of the client.” He trailed off, looking between us with an expectant expression.

I was expecting Durga to jump in, but she hung back under the steady golden glow of the single lamp, gaze distant as though her attention was elsewhere. I still hadn’t seen her smile since the showdown in Bolivia.

“Jon,” I introduced myself as Ponytail finally gave up on the handshake. “And my colleague Jane. We thought we’d drop by and check in on your progress. Very important job you’re working on, here.”

Gia cackled, a loud peal easily exceeding the recommended decibel level for human ears. “I’ll bet. Way Vincenzo here described it, you’d think we were working for a bunch of Satanists.”

I shot an entertained glance in Vince’s direction, whereby the occultist straightened his tie with a small cough. “We all have our own beliefs, my dear, as long as they aren’t hurting anybody.”

“Oh?” I queried him. “Your fortnightly Sunday requests beg to differ.”

“…who doesn’t deserve it,” he finished smoothly.

Gia looked blank for a second, then sized up Durga where the latter stood under the lamp. Light cascaded over the goddess, forming a fuzzy, unmagical halo around her figure even as it threw the rest of us into partial shadow. An atmospheric lie. It looked warm. Cosy. But the room remained cool, its imagined warmth fading into hard surfaces and weathered angles the further you gazed from the lamp. On the desk, the black headset had been pulled out, retrieved from its hasty hiding spot and still connected to the rest of the rig.

“Well,” said the analyst. “Your timing was impeccable, but I’m glad you’re here. Not every day we get flown halfway round the world for a job like this. And the incentives. Mind telling us what we’re getting paid the big bucks for? Beelzebub here was clamped up tighter than Scrooge’s purse.”

“Poking holes in wallets is a skill of mine,” I agreed. “But in this case we’re hiring you to find out. I see you’ve found the death tiara; we’re interested in the what and how.”

I watched Ponytail’s eyes slide from me to the headset. He reached out a hand for it, then paused, hand hovering over the black plastic. “So you’re police? Government?” His lips twitched, betraying a secret third option on the tip of his tongue. When I made no move to stop him, he went ahead and picked up the device. “As far as headsets go, it’s like nothing I’ve heard of. Vince was likening it to VR, but this doesn’t cover the eyes. And those protrusions –”

“Exactly what they look like,” I remarked. “You can thank me for cleaning the blood off.”

Ponytail fumbled with the device, saving it from clattering to the floor at the last minute. “And, uh, who –” He broke off halfway, the words dying on his lips.

Gia came to his rescue. “There’s a non-disclosure agreement in our contract,” she pointed out. “We’re good.”

Durga stepped forward wearing a vaguely alarmed expression. “You signed a contract? With, er, us?”

“Look, this is a new one, but I guarantee we’ve seen more shit than you’d expect. Grandma doesn’t pay us to unlock her family photos. Sometimes it’s recovering traces of fraud. Sometimes the job is to expose kiddy-fiddlers. My point is, we’re used to dealing with humanity’s rejects, and if someone –” she waved a hand at the headset, “was doing something inadvisable, it wouldn’t be the first time. The more information you can give us to create context, the easier it will be to build a picture of what we’re looking at. And it stays with us.”

“Still,” said Ponytail. “This is messed up.”

I peered past them towards the evidence of the final actions of Xiānfēng’s leader. It didn’t look like much. The app on screen might have been developed twenty-five years ago in as many tiled windows of inscrutability; half spreadsheet, half code and clearly designed by a sadist. If I’d been hoping for a handy explainer to pop up, I was out of luck.

“There,” Ponytail observed. He pointed at one of the spreadsheeted tiles. A column of tiny error icons followed it down the page. “Inputs. If I’m not mistaken, these correspond to the hardware used. They’re all registering disconnected at the moment, which makes sense. But there’s got to be more to this than just an activity indicator. If we can find out what else this data links back to, we can start to unravel what this thing does. But it’s going to take work. Hours at least.”

Gia peered around his outstretched arm. “It’s convoluted, I’ll say that. At first glance I’d say a team worked on this. Multiple people patching in different programs to handle different functions. Here.” She pointed towards two different tiles. “The formatting’s completely different between them. And that’s your first warning sign. Means we’re looking at something organised.”

Ponytail coughed and seemed to look everywhere but at Durga and I. “Not that organised, er, activity is bad.”

“I’ll tell the Don you said that,” I replied, keeping a straight face while Durga groaned in the background. “Maybe he’ll have some more jobs for you.”

“Let’s worry about that later. He’s very busy,” Durga interrupted, though I noted she didn’t contradict me. “And all appointments need to go through Vincenzo as the official intermediary.”

Vince beamed, albeit with a slightly confused slant to it. That he was familiar with stretching the truth wasn’t in question, though I had him pegged as the ‘careful, let’s get our story straight’ type.

Gia, at least, either wasn’t buying it or didn’t care. “This is great, guys, but we need more.”

“You’re right about the team,” I told them. “As for the purpose… For argument’s sake, what would come to mind if I told you this was a gate into the framework controlling the universe?”

The analysts shared a dubious glance between themselves. “Provided there was any way to take that seriously, the wording alone would suggest our universe exists as a virtual simulation,” Ponytail answered. “But that’s one heck of an assumption to make, and we have no supporting evidence.”

Durga gave him a thoughtful glance. “Some people believe that, you know. That all this is a carefully calibrated experiment by a higher power.”

“Who’s to say it doesn’t go the other way?” Gia proposed. “Sil went big, but I heard the opposite.” She tapped the computer monitor with a light finger and wiped it on her jeans when it came back dusty. “Context. You aren’t going to run the universe on this level of processing power. Someone else’s primitive universe, though, maybe. This baby could lead into a simple enough simulation, no problem. People have been trying to do it for decades.”

Ponytail snorted. “With what AI? High-budget games still struggle with pathing issues, Gia.”

“Well, no one said it had to be good.”

“This doesn’t need to house the universe,” Ponytail stressed. “It just needs to act as a conduit. An interface connecting to the simulation’s network.” He frowned in my direction. “But that doesn’t answer why any of this is relevant. Don’t tell me someone’s built a legitimate AI, because I won’t believe you.”

“Well, a framework controlling the universe wouldn’t necessarily have to have an intelligence behind it.” Gia’s attention wavered between the monitor and the rest of us as she rolled the mouse over several of the visible tiles. “Automated processes would do it. We have them in the real world, after all. Different names, but the same deal. Things like gravity. Magnetism. Set and forget. Don’t forget we have the virtual equivalents of those already; they just boil down to code and numbers.”

“Or divine powers,” I suggested, with a sidelong glance at Durga.

“Hah,” said Gia. “That’s a question you’ll have to save for God. Heading a little out of our wheelhouse, there. My point is, it isn’t the environment we should be asking about first, but the gate into it.”

Ponytail frowned. “You really think someone tried to interface themselves into a virtual world?”

“You sweet, summer blossom, Sil. People’s capacity for stupidity knows no bounds. But I’m more worried they tried to do it to someone else. That would mean the psycho was still out there.” Her face had grown more concerned as she skimmed through the various pieces of content. “Whatever this is, it’s complex. But if someone’s tried to build a failed inroad to a virtual universe, we’ll find it.”

“In the unlikely event,” Ponytail uttered, grimacing.

‘Failed’ was the part I was finding myself increasingly unsure about, especially given what I understood about Siphon. They had a way of moving souls around, I’d known that; but hadn’t made the connection to the out-of-the-way Peruvian dwelling and its missing occupant. If the computer wasn’t part of the whole shebang I’d eat my hat, though whether it was just a facilitator or the destination itself remained to be seen.

End goal aside, the questions remained: how had a mortal institution accomplished it? And why? As soon as I had Odin’s access sorted out, I was going to order an audit of every computer in the business to search for copies of the software Lucy had found earlier in the week. The investigation into Apollo’s system activities would be the perfect cover.

We’d see what it turned up.

Gia shrugged in exaggerated nonchalance, but her eyes shone. “We’ll make a copy of the system state and move this to a more useful environment. Just leave it with us. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out.”

I could already feel Durga petitioning me for attention, urging me to wrap things up.

“Perfect,” I said. “Just don’t lose it, or the consequences are on you. Vince? Stick with them. Lucy will cover expenses.”

“I'm honoured.”

“Thank you,” Durga stressed, before I could open my mouth. Gold glittered off the dupatta in the light, scattering as she shifted slightly. “'Jon?’ You and I have a lot to discuss.”