“Over and over. I stopped paying attention.” But Zula could tell by the gestures he was making, the movements of his eyes, that he was paying attention now. He was using his spectacles to visualize the latest burn-rate stats. She let him have a moment to take it in. The memory pang had made her nose run. She pulled a tissue from her bag.

“Yup,” C-plus concluded, “six weeks ago they both burst through the ceiling. Became much more resource hungry. They’ve been growing ever since. They moved out of the Garden, down to the Spawn Point, and then west. And—”

“What!? What!?” Zula demanded. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I think I have,” Corvallis said. “Maeve’s with them. She can fly.”

They invited the Metatron to rejoin them, now uncertain as to how much it—and its remote operators—knew. Could it track their elevated respiration and heart rate? Had it overheard them through the wall? When C-plus had checked the stats on the runaway processes, and cross-correlated them with Maeve’s, had he left a bread crumb trail in the network that El’s minions were now following?

Had the entire point of the Metatron’s visit been to elicit just such behaviors?

“Why are you here? What do you want?” Zula asked it, before Corvallis could make things more complicated than they already were.

“As a representative of El’s interests,” said the Metatron, “I am here to make our position clearly known.”

“And what is that position?” C-plus asked. “We would appreciate it if you just stated it outright.”

“That the recent activities of the REAP are—”

“Excuse me, the what?”

“Renascent Egdod-Associated Process.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

“That those activities, though conducted on a very small scale, have had very large consequences. That they were overtly hostile and invasive, with potentially ruinous consequences. That they were, in a word, of a warlike nature.”

“War? Did you really just use the word ‘war’ in a sentence? Are you sure your programming is okay?” Zula demanded.

“My programming is fine and my choice of wording is carefully considered and is sanctioned by a higher power.”

“A higher power. What a choice of words!” Zula scoffed.

“Are you El Shepherd?” Corvallis asked.

Zula got a prickly feeling of the numinous. Talking to the dead wasn’t done. The dead didn’t want to talk to us. They didn’t care.

Or so they’d always assumed. The dead were amnesiacs; they drank of the waters of Lethe when they crossed over and, beneath the dark poplars, forgot their former lives. That was what bereaved people like Zula told themselves to soften the hurt they felt when dead people like Sophia didn’t phone home. But there was always this suspicion that it might not be that clear-cut.

Corvallis was insistent: “Am I in fact talking to El at this moment?”