The woman appeared on Spadina at noon.
Wei noticed her because the dead noticed things the living missed: the way she moved with too much precision, the way her footsteps made slightly less sound than they should for someone her apparent size, the way she looked at him from across the street with an expression that was professional assessment and not the slight unfocus of a living person's gaze sliding past something not quite material.
She crossed the street and stood two meters from him and said: "I'm an investigator."
She said it the way bureaucrats said things—not as identification but as category placement.
He looked at her. The face was old iron, the kind of face that had spent too long dealing with cases that ended badly and had stopped filtering the accumulated experience out of its expression. She was wearing civilian clothes that were clearly an afterthought, a costume over a function. Her hands were folded in front of her and very still.
"Which system?" he said.
A small adjustment of her expression. "Eastern Underworld. Specifically, I supervise processing of souls in the Toronto catchment area." She reached into her jacket and produced a small object—not a business card, something more physical, a pressed-jade tablet with characters that meant official inquiry, third investigative grade. "My name is Shen Ziyu. I would like to speak with you about an irregularity in your death record."
Wei thought about running. He thought about it the way he always thought about it—quick calculation, what he'd gain versus what he'd lose—and concluded that she had crossed a street to show him a credential rather than a containment order, which was at least worth the conversation.
"Show me," he said.
She produced a file. Paper—actual paper, the kind the Underworld used, which was not regular paper but something denser and more certain, printed in ink that Wei could see with his ghost-vision as both text and something underneath the text: the record-structure itself, the chain of authority. She showed him the top sheet.
He read it. He read it again.
Death Date (Original): Age 74. Natural Causes. Cardiac event, uncomplicated. Peaceful.
And below it, the alteration record:
Death Date (Modified): Age 29. Cause: External Impact + Drowning (water-crossing jurisdictional trigger). Authorization: Pending birth. Filed via: Pre-Audit Channel 7-B. Registrar: Feng Qiao.
He read the number. Twenty-nine. His age. Then seventy-four.
Forty-five years.
He stood on Spadina with the spring noise of the city around him—the streetcar grinding down its tracks, someone arguing at a food cart, the constant ambient din of a city that had never paused for anything and was not pausing for this—and absorbed the specific weight of what the numbers said.
"Someone cut forty-five years off my life," he said. He said it carefully, like putting down something heavy.
"Yes." Her voice was level. Not unkind—not performing kindness either, which he appreciated. "Someone intervened in your fate three weeks before your death. They filed the alteration through old administrative channels that bypassed modern audit systems. The authorization code on the order is seventeen months old—which means this was planned at least seventeen months before your death."
"Who filed it?"
"I have a parchment imprint of the original order," she said. "I can show you the mechanics. A death alteration requires four elements to pass the system: a registrar's stamp, a beneficiary code, a payment, and an authorization signature. All four are present in your record."
She pointed to the corresponding sections on the page. "The registrar stamp is Feng Qiao's. I know him. I have worked with him for eighty years. He is not malicious, but he is corruptible. The beneficiary code is the Blood Consulate Research Division. The payment cleared three weeks before your death. And the payment source is listed as—" She paused.
"Pending birth," Wei said. He'd seen it on the page.
"Yes. Which means the entity that paid for this does not technically exist yet. Or existed in a form not registered with any current supernatural authority." She folded the file. She looked at him—a direct, unadorned look, the look of someone who had decided to be honest because the alternative was more expensive. "The authorization signature is the part I cannot read. It's not from my court. It's not from the Celestial Court. It's not from any court I recognize by seal. That is what concerns me most. Not the murder itself, but the unrecognized seal."
She paused to let that sink in. "I cannot tell you who paid for it. That information is sealed. But someone murdered you at twenty-nine to create a supernatural jurisdiction error. The specific type of death—water crossing, no religious affiliation on record, maternal folk ritual residue—was chosen to produce the maximum classification conflict."
Wei was quiet for a moment.
He was not going to have a dramatic scene on Spadina Avenue. He was constitutionally unable to have a dramatic scene. Instead, his mind processed the information sideways, dropping facts into categories. One: someone had decided he was worth killing three weeks in advance. Two: they had used official supernatural bureaucratic channels to do it, which meant they understood the system better than the system understood itself. Three: they had paid the Blood Consulate for something, which meant the Consulate was implicated in his death, even if Varro hadn't personally ordered it. Four: the method. Water, cold, 2:47 AM, in a location with three overlapping jurisdiction territories.
His death hadn't been an accident that caused a jurisdictional conflict. His death was designed to strand him. The jurisdiction conflict wasn't a side effect. It was the point.
"Why strand me here?" Wei asked, his voice steady. "If they wanted me dead, why not just kill me and send me somewhere? Why the conflict?"
Shen considered this carefully, watching the streetcar rattle past. "Because a filed death can be contested. A soul that disappears cleanly into a court without record cannot be reached. Whoever did this wanted you findable. They wanted you confused, caught in the buffer, but alive enough—present enough—to be reached."
"Leverage," Wei said.
"Or bait," Shen replied.
"You're telling me this because?"
"Because I don't like my records being used as weapons," she said. "And because the registrar who filed this alteration has also rejected my query about it, which means there is a corruption inside the system I am responsible for maintaining, and I intend to find it." She paused. The iron in her face did not soften but something in it changed—the specific shift of a person who is saying the real thing now instead of the official thing. "I also intend to eventually process you correctly. That is my function. I will not pretend otherwise."
"So you're going to help me find who killed me and then process my soul."
"Yes."
"That's a hell of a disclosure."
"I find that disclosure produces better outcomes than the alternative." She looked at him steadily. "The alternative being that you find out later and trust nothing I've said."
Wei thought about this. He thought about Varro and his card. He thought about Cassiel and her irregular judgment note. He thought about Voss and his future consideration. Everyone in this city was being honest with him in partial, strategic ways, except for his granduncle who was honest with him in the complete and brutal way of someone who had nothing to lose and had loved him since before he could remember.
And now here was a magistrate of the Eastern Underworld, standing on Spadina in civilian clothes, telling him she was going to find who killed him and then put him in the system that had been used to kill him.
He said: "What do you need from me?"
She produced a small notebook. Not supernatural—it was a regular Moleskine, the kind you bought at Indigo, and for some reason this was the detail that made her most real to him.
"Everything you know," she said. "Starting from the beginning."
He started from the beginning.