“I did,” said Belinda. “You’ll have noticed that cell phones don’t work in this building? That’s the influence of the dungeon. I went to the end of the drive to make the call, and Agent Fallon directed me to proceed to the drop point.”

“Drop point?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“There’s a spot not far from here,” Belinda explained, “a small building made up to look like an abandoned electricity supply regulation station. It’s boarded up and surrounded by a high fence, but we have a key. Inside, we’ve set up a small drop station—a miniature portal which connects us with EDI headquarters. Through the portal, we can send and receive small items to and from our base in New York City. Nothing large, you understand, they can’t send weapons or vehicles or anything like that, but they can send paperwork. Agent Fallon was pleased that you had succeeded in merging with the dungeon, but she warned us that there was a job we needed to do, immediately. She sent us the paperwork through the portal. Here…”

From her bag, Belinda pulled out a thick brown manilla folder, packed with papers. She walked over to a little table near the stairs and laid the folder open on the table. We all crowded round her to look as Belinda began shuffling through the papers.

“You set up a portal to receive this stuff?” I asked incredulously. “Haven’t you people ever heard of email? Fax, even? Trust me, it’s easier!”

I was only part joking, but Belinda shook her head, looking serious. “It’s too insecure. Hacker collectives and conscious systems enchanters are constantly on the lookout for any EDI traffic on the networks. We start sending this kind of stuff over an email connection, there’s a good chance it’ll end up on the open internet immediately. No, hard copy is safest. That’s why we set up portals for communication. They can’t be hacked.”

I nodded, impressed. I had heard stories about groups of geeks and obsessive security hackers who used their cultivation abilities and enchanted hardware to basically live inside the internet. These guys were supposed to be a genuine threat to nearly every organization that relied on encryption for secure communication. I had never paid much attention to this kind of thing, thinking it was just a crazy story. Now, hearing the sincerity in Belinda’s voice, I realized that there must have been more to it than I’d thought.

Belinda flipped the folder open and began to leaf through the pages. There were mugshots of evil-looking dudes, pictures of crazy-looking weapons, and pages of text with red ‘confidential’ and ‘your eyes only’ stamps across the top. These often had words, lines, or even whole paragraphs redacted under bars of black ink.