GODSFALL

Priya Gets Involved

Priya Sharma had a talent for ending up in places she wasn't supposed to be.

She had never considered this a flaw. It was more of a navigational condition, a chronic inability to recognise where the line fell between what she had been asked to do and what clearly, obviously, needed to happen before the asked thing could actually occur. Three separate managers had told her over her career that she went beyond her remit. She had smiled and nodded each time and kept going, because the remit was always, without exception, smaller than the problem. That wasn't stubbornness. It was just arithmetic.

Lena had gone to shower and change. Forty-five minutes, roughly. Priya had a laptop, the hotel WiFi was good, and she had an incomplete picture that was making her slightly restless in the way incomplete pictures always had.

She started with public records; Corporate registrations, court filings, property records across Evergreen and the three surrounding counties. Ethan Cross was almost entirely clean, which was itself the problem, because real people collected mess like parking fines, old addresses that never got scrubbed, former employers, professional registrations from six jobs back. Ethan Cross had almost none of that. It like he had just appeared, fully formed, four years ago, with the tidiness of someone assembled rather than grown.

The first anomaly sat in a company registry. A directorship listing for something called Crestfield Holdings, under an Ethan Cross with a matching date of birth, in a filing from seven years ago. Either the name was older than it should be, or it had been borrowed from an earlier version.

She pulled that thread.

The thread pulled back.

The corporate tree branched in several different directions at once, each branch dimmer than the last, shell companies and holding structures and offshore vehicles of the kind that appeared regularly in the filing histories of entities that preferred their actual activities to remain undescribed. She was not a specialist, but she was quick with a laptop and a reasonable ability to follow a paper trail, which was different from expertise but had always been enough.

She hit a firewall at eleven fourteen AM.

Not a polite one. This firewall did not simply refuse access and wait. It refused, and then, before she could back out, a text field appeared. No prompt. No instruction. Just a blank.

She stared at it.

She typed, because she was constitutionally incapable of ignoring an open question: Who are you and what are you looking for?

She meant it as a joke. Roughly.

The field cleared. New text appeared.

‘We know who you are, Priya Sharma. The question is why you're here.’

She pushed back from the laptop. Then pulled forward again.

She typed: ‘I'm trying to understand who Ethan Cross actually is. For personal reasons that are also professional reasons. For my employer.’

A pause. Then: ‘We're aware of your employer's situation. This network is not a threat to her.’

Priya read this. Then typed: ‘That's exactly what a threat would say.’

A long pause. Long enough that she was already composing her next search query in her head.

Then: ‘You're not wrong. But you're also inside a section of our infrastructure that should have taken you four hours to reach. You did it in forty minutes. That's either luck or better instincts than you know you have.’

She looked at the screen. Then typed: ‘I prefer to think of it as structured chaos.’

The next pause was short.

‘My name is Zeph. I'm going to give you some information. In exchange, you tell me what Ms. Sterling knows and what she's planning to do.’

‘Zeph,’ Priya said aloud to no one in particular. ‘Right.’

She typed: ‘That seems reasonable. She's currently showering and probably crying a little, though she'd never say so. She found out an hour ago that her company's entire financial foundation was quietly built for her by the man who just left divorce papers on her wedding pillow. She's having a day.’

She watched the cursor blink.

Then her laptop speakers made a sound she had never heard them make. A single chime. And a voice came through, male, extremely dry, controlled in the way of someone who had chosen control deliberately and a long time ago: "Hello, little mouse."

Priya screamed. Not loudly. A short, sharp sound she immediately converted into a cough in case it carried to the bathroom.

"Don't do that," she said to the screen.

"You hacked into a War God Temple server," the voice said. "I think I get to decide how I say hello."

"War God Temple," she repeated.

"Yes."

"Is that a metaphorical name or..."

"Largely metaphorical. Partially literal." A brief pause. "Your employer's husband runs it. In case the connection needed stating."

Priya looked at the bathroom door. The shower was still running.

"Okay," she said, quietly. "Start from the beginning."