“Well, good luck, or break a leg, or whatever.” I stand up and she walks towards me and we hug. “And say ‘hi’ to you-know-who if you see her.”

“Unlikely.” She hugs me again, then lets go. “Be good while I’m gone, okay? And stroke the cat for me.”

Then she leaves.

• • •

“DUDES, THIS IS NOT WHAT I SIGNED UP FOR! WHERE’S MY tuxedo? Where is my license to kill? Where are the hot Bond Babes? This sucks!”

Evan juggles his furry dice while he complains before an audience of one: Alex. Evan used to be able to keep three or four in the air for a couple of minutes before he dropped them. Now he’s casually keeping eight at a time airborne without even tracking them with his eyes. There’s a fat ring-bound training manual on the chipped utilitarian desk, and every ten seconds or so his left hand zips sideways to flip a page as he speed-reads, swinging back in time to catch a falling die.

Alex hunches in on himself, hugging his stomach. “She warned us,” he points out. “I wish this hunger would go away. I’m starving.” He’s mildly feverish: the pangs and the hot chills running through him won’t let up no matter how much he eats. A stack of wrappers from all-day breakfast sandwiches litter the floor under his desk.

“It’s not fucking James Bond; who knew? I bet Oscar and Mhari aren’t being handled like this.”

“What, shoved off into an office with a bunch of health and safety manuals to memorize?” Alex considers for a moment: “I very much suspect that they are. This isn’t an accident, Evan. They’re—”

“They’re trying to bore us to death.” Evan gives up on his juggling, guides the stack of dice down to a safe landing in an eight-cube tower.

A couple of weeks ago it had been an impressive trick; now it strikes Alex as a distraction. He fingers the small, sealed locket they’ve given him to hang around his neck. The thing itches pretty much all the time now. “They don’t work the same way as an investment bank. Boredom is part of the process, at least at first: they’re trying to see if we act up. Didn’t you read section two?”

“What, the induction training process? They’re going to give us a sodding aptitude test to see if we have a predisposition towards formal logic? Then send us on a ten-week residential circle jerk that’s going to teach us the basics we need to embark on the study of applied computational demonology? Stuff like binary arithmetic, basic set theory, and predicate calculus?” Evan doesn’t try to keep the offended pride out of his voice. “Before assigning us trainee roles?”