The logical option was to go to the cops, but my experiences with the NYPD when I was a teenager made me never want to set foot in another police station. I knew they’d laugh at me if I went in armed only with that email. I needed more, and I had to dredge it up myself.

That meant starting with Osiris’s Vault. Under Caro’s words was some boilerplate legalese about privacy and opting out of future messages, which felt like a bad joke. But I kept scrolling and found the company’s address in the Bronx. I walked to the nearest subway stop, passing businesses offering headstone engraving and other funeral services. They certainly hadn’t vanished in the pandemic. I got on the R train and headed back into Manhattan, switching at Union Square for the 4 express train north.

The subway spat me out at Yankee Stadium. I’d heard that games would start up again, but the neighborhood was so desolate I wondered if a nuclear blast had gone unreported. The first couple of blocks east of the train were boarded up, some with restaurant signs forlornly hanging above. After I passed Walton Street, there were signs of life: people young and old in Joyce Kilmer Park, ringed around the fountain, and others congregating on the steps of the majestic Bronx courthouse. But after that it got eerily quiet again. Even the sidewalk was a mess, with broken concrete slabs and ringed with tall weeds. I turned left at Sheridan Avenue, which had fewer abandoned storefronts but more bail bondsman offices. It felt like a tumbleweed might blow by at any moment.

“This looks like a place where you’d find messages from dead people,” I murmured aloud.

The front door was shut tight, of course. This was the kind of place where you’d lock down a bag of chips. Next to the door was a rusty buzzer with company names and suite numbers. It looked like it’d been updated around the time I’d been born, when some eager beaver got a label maker. Osiris’s Vault wasn’t on the list, but something called Joy Spa was. I pressed some buzzers until a garbled human voice came through the intercom.

She let me in.

Inside, the hallway was blindingly bright with yellow walls. The result was pathologically cheerful, like someone thought they could drag sunshine indoors against its will. I spotted Osiris’s digs from down the hall, thanks to a blown-up image of their dead god—his skin a brighter green than his digital twin’s—attached to the door. There was a keypad lock, and on impulse I tapped in 9-5-7, the code my employer used on an identical lock—the numbers formed a little triangle. At a soft click, I pushed the door open.