I get the feeling that’s your real name, Siobhan. You’ve broken one of the first rules. How do you pronounce it?

Siobhan could feel the blood rising to her face. It’s not a game, Quizmaster.

But that’s exactly what it is. How do you pronounce your name?

Shi-vawn.

There was a longer pause, and she was about to re-send the message when his response came.

To answer your question, Hellbank is one level of the game.

Flipside was playing a game?

Yes. Stricture is the next level.

What sort of game? Could she have got into trouble?

Later.

Siobhan stared at the word. What do you mean?

We’ll talk later.

I need your cooperation.

Then learn patience. I could shut down right now and you’d never find me, do you accept that?

Yes. Siobhan was about ready to punch the screen.

Later.

Later, she typed.

And that was it. No further messages. He’d gone off-line, or was still there but wouldn’t respond. And all she could do was wait. Or was it? She logged on to the Internet and tried all the search engines she could find, asking them for sites related to Quizmaster and PaganOmerta. She came up with dozens of Quizmasters, but got the feeling none of them was hers. PaganOmerta was a blank, though separating the words gave her hundreds of sites, almost all of them trying to sell her a new-age religion. When she tried PaganOmerta. com there was nothing there. It was an address rather than a site. She made more coffee. The rest of the shift was drifting in. A couple of people said hello, but she wasn’t listening. She’d had another idea. She sat back down at her desk with the phone book and a copy of Yellow Pages, drew her notebook towards her and picked up a pen.

She tried computer retailers first, until finally someone directed her towards a comic shop on South Bridge. To Siobhan, comics meant things like the Beano and Dandy, though she’d once had a boyfriend whose obsession with 2000AD was at least partly responsible for their break-up. But this shop was a revelation. There were thousands of titles, along with sci-fi books, T-shirts and other merchandise. At the counter, a teenage assistant was arguing the merits of John Constantine with two schoolboys. She’d no way of knowing whether Constantine was a comic character or a writer or artist. Eventually the boys noticed her standing right behind them. They stopped being excited, turned back into awkward, gangling twelve-year-olds. Maybe they weren’t used to women listening in. She didn’t suppose they were used to women at all.

‘I heard you talking,’ she said. ‘Thought maybe you could help me with something.’ None of the three said anything. The teenage assistant was rubbing at a patch of acne on his cheek. ‘You ever play games on the Internet?’