“The Diwata is not a serial killer,” I say sharply.

“That his name?” Producer Three asks. “Diwata?”

“It means god in Tagalog,” Leo says stiffly.

“Not that easy to remember. Let’s call it the Dreamer. Better recall, fits in nicely with the rest of the narrative we’re pitching.”

“Getting back to the victims.” The head writer taps on his keyboard and a projector flickers to life, displaying information on the wall behind him.

“Here we go. First two deaths, few details. Then the third victim, Oliviero Cortes. Those initial two deaths were recorded in his journal, and scholars have verified them. Cortes’s life is a good chunk of known history, until his disappearance.”

“I take it everyone here is aware of Oliviero Cortes?” Armani asks, looking meaningfully at me.

I set my jaw. “Oliviero Cortes was one of the many Spaniards who tried to colonize my country, sir. I am well aware of who he is.”

“One of the crew members of Magellan’s expedition, right?” Producer Two asks. “The one who tried to make off with the locals’ gold. Allegedly hid it on the island. Now, treasure—that’s what interests me most.”

“We’ve printed out copies of Cortes’s journal to pass around,” the head writer says. “Other records mentioned that the chieftain Cilapulapu—better known as Lapulapu, a hero in this country—had this journal in his possession.”

“The same chieftain who killed Magellan? How’d he get his hands on the journal?”

“Historians believe that Lapulapu killed Cortes for attempting to steal his people’s gold. We think it’s because Cortes had stumbled onto Lapulapu’s supposed connection with this god. This Mactan chieftain was one of the most powerful rulers of the region surrounding Kisapmata, though very little has been recorded of him after Magellan’s death. We’ll spend a couple of episodes unpacking all of that before we move on to the cultists.”

“What’s this?” Producer One asks. “What cultists?”

An exasperated exhale from one of the other monitors. “Mark, weren’t you paying attention during the last meeting?”

“Buried treasure was all I needed to sell me on this production.”

“There was a cult,” Leo Gries tells him. “They believed that by helping the god find the deaths he wanted, they would, in turn, gain powers beyond their imagination. So they sacrificed a woman inside the cave. A pregnant woman. We found her grave—not on the island, but she is buried in the town graveyard.”

“Holy shit,” Hawaiian Shirt mutters, shocked. “You mean the altar inside the Godseye was where they’d killed her? Damn.”

The head writer clicks on his keyboard. The image behind him shifts to reveal a white woman, haggard-looking but defiant, staring back at us. She seems oddly familiar. Watson, Lindsay, is scribbled on the placard she holds before her.

“The cult leader,” the writer says. “Lindsay Watson. Museum curator from Florida charged with embezzling funds. Turns out even Lindsay Watson was an alias as well. She didn’t have any family we could find, nothing to suggest what her past life was. There are thousands of people with the same name across the US. She’d gotten her hands on someone else’s social security and forged documents to make herself a new identity. By the time anyone realized that the real Lindsay Watson had been dead for twenty years, she’d already bailed herself out, fled the United States, and resurfaced at a museum in Cebu using forged references. It was the same museum with the Cortes journal. Colleagues said she was fascinated by Cortes’s life. Seems like she was the one who found the journal in their archives and recognized its importance.”