I left the building via the ground floor foyer, which was currently taking over a swanky apartment building in Hungary, and ducked back to my new penthouse in search of Tru. He wasn’t there, despite the late hour. In a repeat of my experiment from the kitchen, I used my new rune-finding ability to track him down and found him a couple of blocks away, on the move. I shifted into the form of a mosquito and transported myself to his location, where I found him strolling down the footpath of a city block, wearing a tailored leather jacket and looking grim. On his hands he wore thick leather gloves, which served to hide any traces of purple rune-light that might be attempting to escape.

“Hey, housemate,” I greeted him, transforming back directly in his path. “I have a favour to ask.”

“Argh!” he yelled, stumbling over his own feet in his hurry to stop. “Why would you do that? And why do you look like someone’s mom?”

“Because it’s funny,” I pointed out, moving out of his way a little. “And I am a mom. But about that favour. I need you to track something down for me.”

“Do I get a choice? I have an appointment to go to.”

“Oh? And what kind of appointment are you going to at this time of night?”

“None of your business,” he said curtly.

I shrugged. “We can walk and talk. The sooner you do me this favour, the sooner I’ll be out of your hair.” I passed him the phone with Lucy’s message up on screen. “Take a look at this.”

“It’s an IP address. So what?”

“I want to verify if it originates from this physical address, or if it’s being redirected from somewhere else.”

“How the hell would I know?”

“Come on, this is good practice for you,” I said. “No one gets free internet. You should be able to trace it back to its financial origin.” I didn’t know this at all, nor indeed anything about tracing IPs, but I’d had just enough conversations with Lakshmi to sound like I knew what I was talking about, and the placebo effect was a powerful thing. It was better to build up Tru’s expectations than shut them down.

He looked at me as if I was crazy, but then his eyes lost focus the same way Apollo’s did during an interrogation, a surefire sign his attention was elsewhere.

“Try starting with a transaction on the address and work from there,” I recommended, steering him away from walking into a streetlight.

“I’m getting hundreds of them,” he said. “Going all over the place. This doesn’t seem right.”

“Could be a fake, then,” I surmised. “What if you go backwards to the origin point?”

“I’m trying,” he said, annoyed. “You’re asking me to do something I don’t understand and you’re not giving me any time to figure it out.”

That was a good point. I was acting like I was still in a rush, used to my one-hour time limit before the Compliance headaches started kicking in. Now that I had my powers again, I could just override the effects. As long as I didn’t stay away from my desk too much, I could start spending more time out of the office.

“You must have some way of distinguishing between transactions,” I pressed. “Do any stand out to you if I give you the name ‘Eris’?”

His eyebrows rose. “Yes. One. Christ, you’ve turned my brain into a fucking search engine.”

“Sounds like an improvement,” I said. “Let’s have it, then.”

The resulting address turned out to be in Peru. Well, that ruled out the theory it was Yun-Qi. I left Tru to enjoy his mystery appointment and kicked off down to Lima as per the financial trail, where I found myself standing in front of a ramshackle two-storey building, lights off, a few wilting plants forced into the few spare centimetres between the structure’s façade and the road. It looked residential. By Lima’s standards, the suburb was lower-middle class – run-down and shabby, but a far cry better than the poverty-stricken shanty towns that had a permanent presence in parts of the city. Whoever lived here was getting by.

I shifted into a mosquito again and crawled in under the front door, emerging into a combined kitchen and living space. My insect’s senses gave me the immediate impression the house was empty, a lifeless odour pervading the area. If anything, the faint pang of death. Unexpected. I took to the air, flying upwards and sharpening my vision for a better look, and didn’t find anything to contradict my initial impression. The room was neatly laid out, everything in what looked like its proper place. Neat and untouched – a fine layer of dust coated everything in the room. Nothing else to see here otherwise.

I made my way upstairs, where the smell of death grew stronger. It didn’t take long to find the source – a woman’s corpse, a week or so old, seated at a small desk in the single bedroom. It didn’t look like it had been a violent death at first glance. Her torso leaned forward, her head resting against a dark computer monitor.

I made a quick sweep of the house for anything that could have been a surveillance device, and transformed into a human form again once I was confident the coast was clear. Just to be certain, I made myself look like Quil from Security. His department had more of an excuse to be here, and he could stand to be taken down a peg or two after yesterday. Not that I thought it would come to that.

Gently, I pulled the corpse’s head and shoulders back from the computer, leaning it against the back of the chair. It was stiff and difficult to maneuver, and if I wasn't impersonating someone else I would have manifested some extra arms and muscles to help with the job. Part of what made it difficult was that there were some cables in the way – cables which, I realised after trying to disentangle them, weren’t just tangled up with the body but actually connected to it. What I’d taken for a set of headphones was in fact a more complicated device resembling a chunky black tiara, with multiple cables extending from the computer to the headset, where they split and burrowed into the skull in a symmetrical line from left to right. Further cables were attached to each arm at the inner elbow joint.

It was a little creepy, not least because this technology resembled nothing I’d seen before outside of science fiction. It was the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a futuristic lab or perhaps a hospital working on advanced assistive technologies, not attached to someone’s personal desktop computer. It somehow managed to pull off the impressive feat of looking both shady as hell and uncannily advanced.

One by one, I worked the cables out of the body until it was free, and carried it over to the bed. I was then able to turn my attention to the computer. It was still on, in sleep mode. And, as I soon found out, password-protected. And not with a biometric trigger. Curses. I really wanted to know what was on that machine.

I didn’t want to leave the computer behind where other people might find it, but if I unplugged it and took it with me, everything would reset and I’d lose the opportunity to find out what the woman had been doing right before she was turned into a soulless husk.

There was nothing for it but to leave it for now. At least I could tidy up the cables and bundle them under the desk where they were less conspicuous. I spent a few minutes searching the house in hopes of finding some identifying information, and located a wallet and passport inside a handbag under the bed, along with a phone that had run out of battery. One Canciana Prieto, originally from Brazil, and from the dates stamped in her passport, it didn’t seem she had been in Peru long. I made note of the contents of her cupboard and pantry – the clothes she’d liked to wear and the foods she’d liked to eat. She didn’t seem to have owned any physical books. When I was done, I picked up the handbag in one arm and Canciana’s body in the other, transported myself to the sky above one of Indonesia’s active volcanoes and dropped her in.

I made a quick detour via the penthouse to drop off the handbag and made my way back via the foyer to Floor L, Providence, as if nothing had happened.

Lofn was gone by the time I returned to my desk, and Lucy was waiting with an expectant expression. “Find anything?”

“Some,” I said, folding myself onto my swivel chair. “Whatever it is we’re onto, it’s definitely weird.”

As I regaled him with the tale of what had happened, his expression grew thoughtful. When I was finished, it was a few moments before he spoke.

“So what I’m hearing is that we need a way to unlock that computer,” he said. “Assuming someone else doesn’t wander off with it in the meantime.”

“Can you do it?”

He shook his head. “But I know several people who should be able to do the job.”

“Are they discreet, though?”

He made an evasive gesture. “Depends how much you’re willing to pay for the privilege. Or how persuasive your arguments are.”

Oh. He must have been thinking of hiring on mortal suppliers. Very different to the idea running through my head: tracking down one of the more sympathetic gods of death to locate Canciana’s soul and ask her. The problem with that plan was that I wasn’t sure any of the ones who still had their powers could be trusted, and there would probably be some awkward questions we’d have to deal with. Lucy’s method was slower, but safer.

“That’s fine,” I grinned, feeling proud of myself for thinking ahead with the bank account. “I have money.”

“Ha,” he said, sounding amused. “That you do. How is Tru doing?”

I got it a second too late and resisted the urge to groan. “Still angry,” I told him. “He’s hiring an exorcist.”

Lucy drew in a sharp breath and made a slight choking noise. “He what?”

“Bear with me,” I said, raising my hands, “I think we should let him do it. It’s going to give him the mother of all wake-up calls. Words alone aren’t going to do it.”

Lucy wheeled his chair around to my side of the pod and lowered his voice. “Do you know how long it takes me to collate enough power to make one demon lord? I wasn’t planning on bringing them into the world just to have them destroyed hours later.”

“Is one run-of-the-mill exorcism really enough to destroy a lord, though?” I asked. “Genuine question. Because it’s my understanding he should be able to withstand something like that. Don’t take this the wrong way, but if he can’t… that would make him a bit crap.”

“We're in uncharted waters here,” Lucy responded. “I haven’t used mortal humans for something like this before. I don’t know how this new type of demon will react to anything. They might have different strengths and weaknesses. It’s too early to tell.” He cocked his head. “But on the other hand, we’re not talking ordinary mortals, either. Not just anyone can become a demon lord. They have to have the right aptitude. Something they can do that few others can.”

“Like translating task descriptions into rap verse,” I said, catching on.

He nodded. “Exactly. The fact your guy could influence Helpdesk infrastructure was no small feat.”

Indeed. And it made me thoughtful. Couched in those terms, it didn’t seem wholly out of line to wonder if something similar could have happened with Eris’ computer. Or Lofn’s, for that matter. Had they been 'influenced'? Was that what Canciana had been trying to accomplish with her invasive setup? I wasn’t even sure what the implications of that would be.

“So that was the trigger for the transference, I take it,” I deduced, keeping those other thoughts to myself for now. “The rest being pure dumb luck.”

“Not quite. I can’t speak for others, but my subordinates need to be suited to their roles. In the case of Greed, it would be some form of strong desire for more. His is obviously money, which makes sense.”

“Hmm,” I mused. After what Tru had told me in the desert, I had my doubts. Desire for more dead demons, though, that I could see.

“And lastly, they need to be considered capable. As the carrier, you recognised Tru’s capacity. That’s how you were able to seal the transference.”

“Might I suggest amending that to conscious recognition next time,” I proposed.

“Nope. Too late.”

“Gah,” I said. “So this could happen again.”

He grinned. “I’ve been seeding you with demon-awakening power for the last fifty years while you were none the wiser. There are four more in you where that came from.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about being used as an incubation service,” I said, giving him the side-eye.

“Well, you have a great track record,” he explained. “All your children turned out fantastic.”

“The ones who survived,” I muttered darkly. “But compliment noted.”

I saw Lucy pick up on the change in my mood. “It may also be related to the fact I have direct access to you seven hours a day,” he admitted, in an attempt to salvage it. “All that power has to be stored somewhere.”

“So, four more demon lords. Aren’t there supposed to be seven in total?”

“If you’d had the decency to wait another twenty years, there would be.”

I ignored the jibe. I wasn’t about to start feeling guilty over things that were someone else’s fault. “Don’t get overprotective on me. He has to learn,” I insisted, returning to the issue at hand. “The way we’re currently headed, we’ll be looking at a scenario where your precious lord pledges his services to your dad. And he definitely won’t survive that one.”

One thing the public got right about Yahweh was that he wasn’t a fan of demons. Even the ones who didn’t belong to his religion and had nothing against him in particular. There were striking cultural differences depending on which pantheon’s demons you were looking at, even sometimes between different tribes within the same pantheon, so I could only assume it came down to a point of prejudice. The problem with demons was that, albeit resilient, they could be killed much more easily than a god. As a new demon, and a non-physically oriented one at that, Tru had no real means of defense.

“Not to mention being humiliating,” said Lucy. “I should have just explained everything to him off the bat.”

Yes, because that would have gone down well, I thought. Don’t trust demons? Here, let me present Lucifer, Ruler of Demons and Father of Lies! “Eh,” I said. “Let’s work on countering the indoctrination first. After you give me the contacts for those suppliers. Did you find anything on my computer?”

His expression cleared a little. “I did. The same thing Eris had. My computer’s clear, and so is Lofn’s.”

“I’m surprised she let you on it to check.”

“She didn’t. I waited until she left. But yours is the problem here. The question is, do we wipe the program or leave it be?”

Good question. It was looking like Canciana was our mysterious Hacker, and not only was she gone, she hadn’t been monitoring anything for some time. But it didn’t explain where Yun-Qi came into any of this, nor the shell ticket Lofn had received. Perhaps the person or people who sent it weren’t aware Canciana was dead, or perhaps she hadn’t been working alone.

“Let’s leave it for now,” I said. “As you mentioned earlier, we don’t want to tip our hand. I don’t think this is over.” I’d just have to be careful with what I did on my machine until I knew more.

“Well,” said Lucy, rising to his feet. “In that case, this seems like a good time to interrupt a certain summoning ritual, don’t you think?”

According to my phone it was just before eleven, which meant we probably had enough time to do what we needed to do with His Popeliness before my supposed meeting with Shitface. And if we ran over, that would be his problem.