He found the Tim Hortons the way he found most places now—by following the warmth.
The living world gave off heat in all its concentrated activities, and a 24-hour Tim Hortons on Spadina at 3 AM was one of those places that was always occupied by someone who needed to be warm and wasn't quite sure yet how to get there permanently. Cab drivers. A pair of nursing home care workers on their break. One man asleep at a corner table with a coffee going cold beside him. The particular fluorescence of a place designed to be functional at any hour and beautiful at none, which Wei found, in his ghost state, oddly comfortable. No performance. Just continuation.
He'd found that he could almost taste things, in ghost-state, if he concentrated. Not taste them properly. More like the ghost of the flavor, the way you can smell a meal someone else cooked in a room you enter after they've gone. He liked coffee ghost. It was one of the remaining sensory pleasures available to him and he was going to take all of them.
He was sitting at a table by the window, not visible enough for the cashier to notice but visible enough to hold spatial presence, when a man came in.
The man was Black, mid-fifties, wearing a charcoal suit that was at least one level of formality above anything that had ever entered this Tim Hortons voluntarily. His lapel had seven small items on it: a pin in the shape of a key, something that might have been a coin, something that changed when Wei looked directly at it and was a different thing when he looked from the side. The man carried himself the way people carry themselves when they've been doing a job for a very long time and have made peace with the fact that the job is, ultimately, what they are.
He ordered a double-double and a Boston cream and brought them to Wei's table and sat down across from him.
Wei looked at him. The seven items on the lapel had rearranged again. He stopped looking at them.
"Hector Voss," the man said. "Just easier. Most names like mine create a vocabulary issue." He said it warmly, the warmth of someone who has found a way to say the difficult thing that makes it go down easier, not because the difficult thing is different but because the delivery has been perfected.
"Malphas," Wei said.
The man—Voss—smiled. Not a lot. "You've been doing research."
"I've had four days and very little else to do."
"Fair." Voss took a sip of the double-double. The Boston cream sat on a napkin between them, offered and not pushed. "I want to be clear about something before we get into what I'm here about. I'm not here to claim you. I have no jurisdiction over unclaimed souls and even if I did, you've made your position on claims abundantly clear. I represent certain infernal interests that have found you interesting, not in the sense of wanting to acquire you, but in the sense of—" He paused, searching for the right framing. "—wanting to get ahead of the conversation."
"What conversation?"
"The one where someone tells you the truth about what happened to you and what it means." He folded his hands on the table. They were very still hands, the hands of someone for whom patience was not a virtue but a professional competency. "I know who ordered your death. I know the shape of the conspiracy that arranged it. I know what the Ninth Pantheon is and why you're significant to it. This information has material value. I'm willing to share it."
"For what."
"A future consideration. Scope undefined—deliberately. I'm not here to trap you tonight." He met Wei's gaze. "I know that sounds like the beginning of a trap. But consider: if I wanted to trap you, I wouldn't be telling you the scope is undefined. I'd give you a very small, very reasonable-sounding scope and let the terms do the work. What I'm offering is honest: I want a future consideration, I can't tell you what it will be, and you can refuse it when it arrives."
Wei looked at him. He tried the lie-sense—the same thing he'd used with Varro, the same thing he'd used with Cassiel. It came back: not lying. Not complete. The parts left out are the load-bearing ones.
"You're leaving out everything that matters," Wei said.
"I'm leaving out the details of the consideration, yes. Which is the part that matters. But the information I'm offering in exchange is also real, and it is also the part that matters on your side." Voss tilted his head. "We're each holding the significant thing."
"How do I know the information is accurate?"
"You don't, tonight. But I'll tell you one thing now, as a demonstration. Free. No consideration attached." He leaned forward slightly. "Your death was filed through the Eastern Underworld's records system. The authorization code on the alteration order is seventeen months old. Seventeen months ago, something that does not officially exist yet paid a clerk named Feng Qiao to move the date of your death from age seventy-four to age twenty-nine, using the mechanism of a jurisdiction error at your death site—the harbour—to create a soul that would be both technically deceased, legally unclaimed, and in a position to either become the first hinge of the Ninth Pantheon or be used as a research subject to prevent it."
Silence.
The cab driver at the counter ordered another coffee. The care workers laughed at something on one of their phones. The man in the corner stirred, adjusted his head against the wall, went back to sleep.
"The Ninth Pantheon," Wei said.
"A new divine order arising from mass belief dynamics that existing pantheons cannot regulate. Algorithmic, distributed, attention-based. Not worshipping anyone specific—worshipping attention itself. The old gods are terrified of it. Some of them are trying to stop it. Some are trying to control its first hinge."
"And I'm the first hinge."
"You were supposed to be the first hinge at seventy-four. Thirty years of unremarkable living, gradual development of ancestral authority through the bell lineage, a quiet minor godling career in Toronto's underserved ghost community. Nobody wanted you weaponized. You were supposed to be harmless." Voss's voice carried no mockery. "Someone moved the timeline. Whether to stop you or to use you is what I don't know yet."
Wei sat with all of this. He picked up the Boston cream by instinct and then remembered and put it down.
"No deal," he said.
Voss nodded. "Fair enough." He reached into his jacket and produced a business card and set it next to the Boston cream. Hector Voss. Strategic Advisory. No obligation consultations. "I'll check back in."
He stood, straightened his cuffs, picked up his own coffee. He looked at the Boston cream. He looked at Wei.
"That's yours," he said. "For the ghost of the taste." He said it without condescension—just information.
He walked out.
Wei looked at the Boston cream. He looked at the business card. He looked at the door.
INFERNAL CONTACT REGISTERED. PARTY: MALPHAS / HECTOR VOSS. AGREEMENT: NONE. CONSIDERATION: NONE. NEGOTIATION WINDOW: OPEN. NOTE: NO RECORD GENERATED. YOUR CHOICE.
The text faded.
Wei looked at the Boston cream for a long time.
That, he thought, was the most honest conversation I've had in years. Including the years when he was alive.
He was not sure what to do with that.
He left the Boston cream on the table. He picked up the business card and put it in his pocket, where his Airport ID badge still lived, the last evidence his body had produced that he'd existed in a specific place with a specific purpose.
He sat in the Tim Hortons until 4 AM and let the ghost of coffee be enough.