They came on the seventh morning, in the space of four minutes and seventeen seconds, which was either a coincidence or a calculated insult, depending on how you read bureaucratic timing.
Wei was sitting in Madam Zhao's back room with the full group present for the first time in two days. The air in the room was thick with competing metaphysical pressures.
Granduncle Bo was in the corner with his newspaper, deliberately ignoring the tension. Huang Qilin stood against the wall with his arms straight and his expression doing the thing it always did, which was look like carved stone that was considering a violent opinion about you. Cassiel sat at the table with her wings folded so tightly beneath her coat that the fabric pulled, ignoring a cup of tea. Rosa had her feet up on a second chair, wearing the look of someone who had replaced sleep with a kind of furious, caffeine-driven competence. Magistrate Shen Ziyu sat opposite her in plainclothes rather than her judicial robes, which was a statement about her current political status that no one had been rude enough to make explicit.
Madam Zhao was in the kitchen, cooking something that smelled heavily of garlic, ginger, and dried shrimp. She was therefore the only productive person present. The grounded, human smell of the cooking oil provided a necessary ballast against the ambient supernatural static in the room.
The first summons arrived as a scroll.
It did not appear with a flash of light. It simply fell out of the empty air onto the center of the table, smelling intensely of old incense, cinnabar, and the specific dry dust of deep archives. The Eastern Underworld's seal was a heavy, red-lacquered stamp in the shape of a stylized flame. The scroll itself was black paper with gold ink. It unrolled itself without asking anyone's permission, the paper making a stiff, dry sound.
Shen looked at it the way you look at your supervisor's signature on a disciplinary notice you already knew was coming. Wei looked at it the way you look at a speeding ticket you're preparing to contest in court.
Thirty-eight seconds later: white fire.
The Celestial Court's summons arrived as a column of cold white fire about eight inches tall that formed directly on the table, smelling sharply of ozone and sterile snow. It produced, from its center, a scroll of what appeared to be extremely fine vellum. Cassiel read the header from across the table, blinked once, and set her jaw with the careful neutrality of someone maintaining professional composure while internally screaming.
Two minutes and four seconds after that: water.
The Ferryman's Proxy delivered their summons in person—which was to say, a gray-cloaked shade appeared at the frosted glass window without knocking, tapped on the pane twice, and waited. When Rosa opened the window, a smell of river silt and deep, standing water rolled into the room. The shade handed her a heavy rectangle of wet, pressed river-clay with archaic characters stamped into it. Then it dissolved into mist.
"Polite," said Rosa, wiping a smear of clay from her thumb.
"The old courts have manners," said Granduncle Bo, turning a page of his newspaper without looking up.
Eleven seconds after the river-clay summons: a message in the old Greek mode. A laurel sprig appeared on the table, smelling of dry Mediterranean earth. It was slightly wilted, with a small folded note tied to it with linen thread. The note said, in clean, handwritten English print: We're watching. No signature. The implied signature of Hades' court was the laurel itself, which everyone present recognized because Cassiel had dealt with their administrative staff on three separate occasions and had a grudging professional respect for their organizational coherence.
Then: nothing, for forty-three seconds.
Then every screen in the room lit up simultaneously.
It wasn't just the light; it was accompanied by a high-frequency electronic whine, a sound like a server rack spinning up past safe tolerances. Rosa's phone on the table. Cassiel's administrative tablet, which she kept face-down, now glowing against the wood. A tablet Madam Zhao had in the kitchen for recipes. The old CRT television in the corner that had been unplugged for two years, its screen buzzing with static before snapping to clarity. Even the screen of a laptop that had been sitting closed in the corner, belonging to Madam Zhao's nephew who had left it there in 2019, shone through the crack in its chassis.
Every screen showed Wei's face.
It was not a photograph he recognized. It was a digital reconstruction—his face at a slight angle, clear and sharp, expression somewhere between exhausted and resolved, which was his expression most of the time. But the eyes were slightly wrong, too perfectly symmetrical, sitting right in the uncanny valley. Below the face, in stark white sans-serif text: CLAIM ME.
He stared at it. The digital whine pressed against his eardrums.
It was not from him. He had not put his face on any screen. He had not authorized a campaign.
"That," said Granduncle Bo, setting down the newspaper very deliberately, "is not from any of the courts."
"No," said Cassiel. She was very still in a way that meant she was running rapid celestial analysis. "The signal profile is new-god energy. Algorithmic pantheon architecture. The propagation pattern is consistent with—"
"The Ninth Pantheon," said Rosa.
The room was quiet, except for the sizzling of garlic from the kitchen.
The screens still showed his face, a perfectly optimized digital idol.
"They made me an advertisement," Wei said, his voice flat.
"They made you a message," said Granduncle Bo. "Addressed to you. They're not advertising to the courts. They're advertising to you."
"To tell me what?"
"That they are an option. That you could be what they say on the tin." Granduncle Bo picked up the newspaper again, his spectral hands shaking slightly. "The future is recruiting."
The screens went dark almost simultaneously. Not powered off—the image simply withdrew, pulling back into the network with a certain amount of algorithmic style. The whine faded.
Wei looked at the table. Four summonses in various physical formats: a black scroll of gold ink, a white vellum scroll smelling of ozone, a pressed river-clay tablet weeping silt, a slightly wilted laurel sprig. Plus the digital memory of his own face looking back at him from every dead screen in the room.
There was no summons from the Blood Consulate. They were in enough political difficulty with Shen's formal filing that appearing in this company would have been worse than absence.
There was no summons from Hell. Hector Voss did not do summonses. He did invitations, which were a different thing entirely, and he was apparently content to wait.
Granduncle Bo folded the newspaper in half. "This is a lot of paper," he said, attempting a joke that didn't land.
Huang Qilin looked at the summonses. His expression conveyed a range of precise and well-organized violence, none of which he shared aloud. "Say the word," he said, his voice a low rumble, "and I will burn them all."
"You cannot burn a celestial summons," said Cassiel, with the reflexive accuracy of someone who spent her life correcting procedural errors. "The fire is structural, not physical."
"I know," said Huang Qilin. He was quiet for a moment. "I was being optimistic."
Wei stepped up to the table. He picked up the black scroll first. Read the archaic characters translating in his mind. Set it down. Read the vellum. Set it down. Looked at the river-clay. Put it back.
"Give me the night," he said. "I need to think."
"You have seven hours," said Shen, quietly, checking the administrative clock in her head. "After that—"
"I know." He turned away from the table. "Seven hours is enough. I only need one idea."
He went out to the courtyard and sat on the low brick wall, the summonses left behind in the kitchen. The November air was sharp. He tried to think about the courts—their procedural leverage points, the gaps in their authority, the thing Shen had said about contested-death reviews making compulsory summons contestable. He tried to think strategically, the way he'd been thinking for six days, arranging logistics and categories in his mind like a warehouse manifest.
His mind went to the harbour instead.
The sound of the bell the night he died. Not the first ring—the echo after. The way the sound had traveled out across the black water and come back wrong, changed by distance and cold and the way sound behaves differently when there is nothing left to absorb it. He hadn't understood, that night, what was happening to him. He'd understood only the freezing shock, the water filling his lungs, the sheer mechanical failure of his body.
The Preservation Authority had engineered that. Someone had wanted him in that water. Someone had wanted him to die in a jurisdictional gap where no court could reach him cleanly, where everyone would argue about who owned the mess. Someone had filed his death like a form to be processed.
He looked down at the cracked bronze bell strapped to his wrist.
He thought about the echo on the water. The way a signal bounces back.
He thought: carrier wave.
He thought: What if I don't answer the summonses. What if I use their own open channels to send something back.
He looked up at the night sky over Toronto, the orange glow of the city lights reflecting off the low clouds.
He had it.