Somebody had already gotten to the notes that had been left in Raspe’s office.
Well, I say somebody. Either the Priest’s Union or the police, I wasn’t about to start conspiracising and assuming it was anybody else.
Those were really the only notes I even had, and I wasn’t sure what other notes Bishop Irons had assumed I was holding on to. Not that I was going to tell her that.
I still found myself back in his office, staring at the wreckage. Whoever had been through here had really torn the place apart. The contents of drawers were strewn across the floor. Patches of wall were visible with squares of brighter paint just because of how long posters and diagrams had been there, whilst exposure to light, oxygen and dust had darkened everything else.
The little patch of warped gravity was still there, though. They hadn’t worked out how to get rid of it, apparently.
It was like the place had been hit by a mortar. It was a wreckage, the gutted shell of a room.
It felt strange to think I’d been sitting in here just a day ago, it didn’t even feel like the same place. I wasn’t about to say that it felt like Raspe was fully gone from the world now his office had been ruined, but…
It still felt a little sad, seeing the place like this. He’d loved his work so much, and now it was all in some police lockup as evidence.
And much as I didn’t understand a word of it, I’d loved the old bastard’s work too.
They’d taken everything I’d come here for. I’d come here to try to see what I could piece together about what had happened yesterday.
I was doubting, I’ll admit. Irons had a point, for all I didn’t want to admit it, an omnipotent machine felt… farfetched. And if I was wrong, it wasn’t just me who’d be worse off for it anymore. It had felt hard to refute the thing’s existence whilst it was right in front of me, now the it had vanished into thin air, I was wondering if it wasn’t some kind of trick after all.
I poked the tip of a pencil into the anti-gravity bubble, just a distorted warp in the air. Felt the end of the pencil float up, and then down again. I kept poking at it, chin resting on my other hand, propped up on the desk, just thinking.
The murder was easily explainable if the Godbox was real. Somebody had snuck inside, killed Raspe with it, and then used its ability to defy physics to leave with it. It’s an omnipotent box. You don’t really need to explain how it happened, the box can do what it wants, right? It teleported, vanished, warped time or space or whatever, could be anything. It almost felt like cheating, explaining what had happened that way, but…
The tip of the pencil floated up again, I could feel the motion resonate through my hand.
It sure wasn’t divine power doing that.
The problem with that logic is, it explained too much. Who would have motive to steal an omnipotent box? Everybody, basically. Liberationists, Church, parliament, Raspe’s co-workers, me. Friggin’ spies from the Dreaming Empire or Coil State revanchists or basically anybody else. There is literally no group or individual whose goals wouldn’t be furthered by having hold of the thing. It didn’t narrow my options down. Maybe mole-people from the moon came down here to steal it to overthrow the rest of the planet. How’d they get down here? Omnipotent box! Time and linear causation were laws of physics, right? They used it to get down here so they could use it to get down here so…
That answer still didn’t feel that much more farfetched than gravity turning off for no reason.
I frowned a little as I looked into the dim electric lights sticking out from the wall. Divinely powered again, they’d been swapped back onto the usual power sources after the demonstration was over.
We hadn’t wanted there to be any divine power around the demonstration to prove this wasn’t just a god-in-the-box. The Priest’s Union’s people had told us they hadn’t detected any before the murder. That meant it couldn’t be a god-in-the-box, right? The Godbox had to be real.
No, not really, the priests could’ve been lying, much as I hated to think that.
The murder was impossible without a real Godbox or divine power. If the machine was fake, all the priests would have to do to cover their asses was lie and say there was no divine power. Sarah, her people, Irons, they’d… they’d all have to be lying to me for that to be true, but…
I tried to picture Sarah’s face. The horror when she saw Raspe floating in the air.
I didn’t want to believe that of her.
I chewed on the rubber end of the pencil a bit, trying not to feel too guilty for even thinking that. Or too stupid for wanting to discard it out of hand.
Why would she do it, anyway? If the machine was fake, the box wouldn’t be a threat to the Union, right? She’d have no motive, it wouldn’t be a threat to her people anymore.
Frank, then? If the machine was fake I didn’t see how he could’ve done it either, really. I could see his motive, though, if he thought some abused slave was running the thing, but any method was beyond me, even if the Godbox was a, well, god-in-the-box. A mechanical Gnoll or whatever he’d called it. It felt like he’d’ve just knifed Raspe in an alley and taken the box by hand if he was gonna do that.
Maybe he convinced the god in the box to rebel? But that’d still mean the Priests would’ve detected divine power, right?
Great. That’s where I was, then. If it was a full fake, I had means but no motive. God-in-the-box, motive but no means. And if it was real? So many means and so many motives I wouldn’t know how to begin.
At least determining which of the three would let me know where to start investigating next. That had to be my first step.
I searched a bit amongst the ruin of a room around me. Not a scrap of paper was left, not so much as a tissue or grocery list. My hands were starting to get dirty from looking, the room was dust-filled and things were upturned everywhere, I wasn’t sure Raspe had cleaned behind his desk in years and it had been pulled away from the wall to expose everything that had fallen behind there in that time.
I shuddered, and even though it probably wasn’t as unhygienic as it felt, I went to the bathroom to wash my hands anyway.
I looked at myself in the mirror. I hadn’t slept well and it showed, I usually had dark spots around my eyes but they were unusually deep tonight. I hadn’t really combed my dirty-blonde hair.
Well, that just made me look like a regular academic.
I tried to think about what I did know, or at least, what I could find out.
Who else might know more about the Godbox? Raspe and his notes were gone. I was his primary assistant… apprentice, dammit, and I didn’t know a thing. He’d mostly put it together himself, from parts sourced from…
Where?
Where were the parts from? Finding that out might be a place to start.
I rushed downstairs into the university lobby. I used to work in accounting, and I knew full well they’d’ve stored records of any business transactions Raspe made. There was no way he built the Godbox out-of-pocket, either, since Professor pay was crap.
I had technically quit that job a month ago, but the secretary knew me, and she probably didn’t know I’d quit. I’d kept coming into the building every day, after all, I still worked here. I gave her a smile, said I’d lost my key, and she let me into the records room.
The door opened with a familiar click, and I stepped into a maze of filing cabinets. A row of them ran wall to wall, and then if I went all the way to the end I knew I’d see another row, another, a genuine labyrinth, made of awful metal cabinets painted in an ugly green.
My eyes almost glazed over the guardian deity statue at the front door. Pallas, I think its name was, taking the form of an owl carved from wood with a single eye, stood where a secretary’s desk would be. Its eye lit up with an off-white, off-yellow glow, recognising a visitor.
“Welcome, guest, you should-”
“Thank you, very helpful, turn off now.” I waved it away, annoyed. I found it just tended to get in the way. I walked in with confidence and all the purpose I could muster.
Pallas wasn’t really a security deity, so it probably didn’t have a solid database of who was or wasn’t meant to be in here. I had a key, and gods ran on belief, right? Only report what you expect them to? I tried to expect it to let me past real hard. I had no clue if that helped, but it didn’t screech an alarm.
Pallas helped me in one other way, too. It helped that it was rare enough for people to actually go wandering through the stacks of filing cabinets on their own, made sure no humans spotted me. Most people just had the deity grab stuff instead.
Either way, I started searching through the filing cabinets. Under R, Rudolph Raspe.
It didn’t take me long to find what I needed, Raspe’s files
There were a lot of documents pertaining to Raspe to search through. It wasn’t just expenses, and I started pulling papers out and sorting them back into piles for easy re-filing and management, just on the ground around me. Turning the place into a little base-camp to work from.
By the time I’d found the most recent set of expenses reports, my eyes were starting to hurt from reading rows of almost identical tiny black text in the dim light of a flickering lightbulb. Even so, I could still make out the details.
For starters, the paper revealed he was taking a mildly egregious amount of business dinners, but that was true of almost every professor. Never pay for a meal yourself if you can get the university to. I briefly checked to see if he’d been having lunches with Bishop Irons or anything, but it didn’t look like he had.
There was a little gust of wind behind me as one of the cabinet drawers opened on their own, jabbing into my back. Scared the hell out of me, but it was just the Pallas fetching something for somebody else, a bundle of papers floated out of the cabinet and back towards the front of the room, carried by unseen energy.
Pallas didn’t seem to like me. Probably because I kept refusing to let it help me with things. I rubbed the forming bruise between my shoulderblades and got back to examining the papers I had in my hands.
It only took me a moment to find what I needed. Purchases. Metal plates, lead blocks, a set of curtains, nails, all from random stores around the city. With the addition of nails, I wondered if he’d been hammering the damned Godbox together himself. He was a physicist, not an engineer. He’d had soft, wrinkled hands, like he’d never used them, I fuzzily recalled. I didn’t think he’d know how to hammer something together himself, but I could’ve been wrong.
“Dammit.” I sighed. This was far from revelatory. It all seemed to be simple materials, basic parts. Nothing you could overturn reality with. Infinite hells, I’m pretty sure that the electrical generator required more exotic parts, there wasn’t even any mildly unusual natural materials. I could’ve worked with like, Zinc, even, that would probably tell me something, but just wood, lead and iron?
The drawer behind me jabbed into my back again. Then a second time. I hissed in pain, or well, frustration mostly. “Chartered, Pallas, are you doing that on purpose?” I cursed. She was too far away to hear me, her idol was way across the room and behind a dozen rows of cabinets, but she jabbed the drawer a third time. Gentler.
Was she trying to get my attention?
“What?!” I hissed. I abandoned the papers and went up to her, bruised and grumpy. “Did you not know I was there? Pretty sure your contract doesn’t let you bruise your human co-workers you know…”
The owl’s eyes lit up. “Section four, paragraph two. Nudges with stationary equipment is an accepted method for the signatory divine to alert or request communication from co-workers out of audio range of the signatory divine’s idol. Section nine, paragraph three, signatory divine is not at fault for minor injuries sustained from contact with equipment being moved or manipulated by the signatory divine’s power provided the divine was in process of performing their agreed upon duties and no undue negligence or intentional malice was exercised. Undue negligence is defined as-”
“Not what you just did, right. Hylyss tits, that needs renegotiating.” I pinched the bridge of my nose, growling. “I- what do you want, Pallas? I’m busy.”
“You are making a mess in my assigned domain. Keeping the floor clean is a part of my assigned duties, so-”
“I’ll clean it up in a minute. I’m looking for something important is all. Not that I’m finding anything, so-” I closed my eyes a moment, let out a sigh.
Pallas went quiet enough that I almost thought that had ended the conversation. No moving facial features, it made it difficult to tell what they were thinking. I started to turn but had barely moved when she spoke up. “You’re looking in the wrong place, I believe.”
“Wait, what?” I had no clue what that could mean. I had Raspe’s financials, he’d’ve had to pay for any parts, if it wasn’t here, it wasn’t being used in the Godbox, right?
“You have spent an excess of time looking at Professor Rudolph Raspe’s transactions, you are seeking evidence of a purchase? There are others you have yet to find. I can tell you.”
That wasn’t possible. They ought to all be in one place, one document, right?
I couldn’t read its face, but it could read mine. Pallas just repeated itself again. “I can tell you, if you apologise.”
That made my brain skip a beat, for a second. “Uh, what?”
“You have been consistently rude since we began working together, Alexandria De La Ruge. I would like an apology before I assist you.”
“You can’t-” I sputtered. “You can’t do that, you can’t refuse an instruction to follow your c-”
“Section two, paragraph one. The signatory deity is not required to tolerate abusive, rude or untoward behavior from assigned clients or co-workers. The signatory deity may withhold service on this basis at its own discretion, though each incident therein is to be reported to and audited by the assigned priest.”
I just stared in disbelief. I had never actually had a work deity refuse me service before, so long as I had the proper licenses and authorisation to use them. I stammered impotently, and the deity spoke lower.
“We did not lose and were not conquered, Alexandria De La Ruge. We signed a negotiated peace treaty in the Divine Charter. Concessions were given to both sides.”
I hated to say it, but it had a point. The Chartered Nine got special treatment but the other gods still had conditions we had to fill. We had to pay them in sacrifices, for starters. Priests spent a lot of time doing little services, wearing the preferred holy materials of whatever the main deity they worked with was. A few gods had annual festivals to perform written into their contracts, all that jazz.
Was not being a dick all that different? Sure, she wasn’t really upset. But it probably had a hundred-odd worshippers who thought it would be upset if people were jerks to it, since it’s too easy to think of it as a person, and that’s what people are like.
Better to just do it.
“Fine, sure. I’m sorry for being rude, Pallas.” I did my best to mean it, too. My heart wasn’t all the way there, but enough I wasn’t gonna be totally recalcitrant about this.
The idol was silent for a moment. When it spoke again its tone was the same, academic tone as before. I had no clue if it was pleased or not. “Raspe had most of the parts for the Godbox delivered from in-house. It was specialty work nobody outside the university but inside the country was equipped to handle.”
Oh! That explained it, actually. I’d half expected my problem was the opposite, he was ordering from traders from outside Lysium in some foreign currency or another the university didn’t deal in. I grinned, and started to rush off without another word, before catching myself.
“I uh- thanks, Pallas. I know where to go now, I think. Internal work orders are that way?”
“Indeed.”
I rushed off. Down two rows of cabinets, one across. Almost didn’t need to look to pull the record out of a drawer.
The list was exotic, if short.
Specialty lenses, something called “Liquid void”. The largest purchase simply read “Assorted monster parts”. I could see everything labelled by sub-department, and it ran the gamut from Theo-engineering to Cryptozoology. Hell, even the humanities were involved, he’d purchased some soil samples from his homeland, Authas, via the Authan Studies department.
Given the catastrophe that turned Authas into an island nation was one of the two big drivers of the Divine Charter getting signed, I imagined they might have some pretty interesting geological anomalies around the place.
There was one more thing though. There was an invoice for assembly of those materials. It only took one line, and I felt embarrassed for assuming Raspe, a physicist, had put everything together himself. It was made out to Doctor Lucas Sellers, and Doctor Erwin Schreck. It was an in-house job, the University’s own people. Schreck was an engineer, Sellers a… Biologist?
I cleaned everything up, including, like Pallas had asked, the mess I’d made on the floor searching the other cabinets. Went out to try to find those two lovely gentlemen.
Took me under five minutes to find out where their offices were. Another five to walk over there.
And then thirty actually tracking them down, because once I found their offices, I promptly found out that at the time they were giving lectures on the exact opposite end of campus.
I didn’t mean to pry, I really didn’t.
Schreck was giving a lecture in one of the ichthyology labs, and I’d been waiting outside it politely for him to finish for a while now. It was not a pleasant wait. I’d never known somewhere so beautiful that smelled so bad. The lab was nearly an aquarium, rows and rows of little glass habitats for fish in shapes and colors I’d never seen flitting too and fro. The tanks were short enough in some cases I could stick my hand in like it was a shallow rock pool, and others were high enough to touch the ceiling.
But the whole place smelled of rot and, well, dead fish.
I waited thirty minutes, until it passed the hour and lectures were meant to end. Nobody came out, though, student or teacher. I just stood outside the door that was labelled ‘Room 12’, where Schreck was scheduled to be. Waited another five minutes, nothing.
I wondered if it had been cancelled or something. That had to be it. So I opened the door, poked my head in.
He was alone, sat in one of the audience rows, arms limp past the armrests, staring blankly up at the ceiling. For a moment, I thought he was dead.
“...Doctor Schreck?”
He stirred a little at that, and I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. Stirred, though, not responded. He didn’t turn to look at me and nothing that came out of his mouth was a coherent reply.
There weren’t any other exits to this room so it wasn’t like the students had just already left, he’d been alone in here the whole time. The place was dimly lit by electric lighting, but as I squinted, I saw a little discarded paper bundle on the floor next to him, stained with something purple.
Was he high?
“Doctor Schreck!”
He certainly looked like he was. I approached cautiously, trying to get his attention. He was a shorter man, with a fuzzy, messy shock of greying brown hair. His shirt was stained and in places scorched. I wondered if this was even the guy I was after, and not just some student who’d stayed behind.
“Wh- oh, hi.” He let out a gurgling, snorting chuckle. He kept blinking like he was struggling to see, eyes not quite focusing on me. “Hooh, did I oversleep again? Wow, is it easy to lose track of time, you-”
He sat up so sharply I jumped. Not slumping, it was like he’d been electrocuted, eyes wild and full of energy in the blink of an eye. “Wait, what time is it? Ichthyology lecture just ended, that means it’s time for-” He paused a moment, looked at me, then at the bundle on the floor. He used his foot to nudge it under the chair and out of sight. “Aheeeh- you didn’t see that. Unless- Wait, did Lucas send you? How the hell did you find me down here anyw-”
I raised a hand to cut him off. “I’m, uh, Lucas didn’t send me, but I’m looking for her too. And I, uh, I didn’t see anything.” I tried to smile as gently as I could, the last thing I wanted was to look like a threat, I wasn’t sure how… how stable he was. “I have some questions about some things you were working on. Some of the projects you’ve been taking, according to the University’s financial records.”
“Hey, look, if this is about the centipedes, that’s entirely at my own expense! None of the university’s business how I-”
“Rudolph Raspe’s project! Not- I… I don’t think I want to hear about anything else you’re working on, do I? Just-” At the very least this man seemed very bad at keeping secrets. But his voice was always just barely a shade below yelling, he made me jump every other sentence, especially the way his voice echoed and boomed in this big empty room.
“Oh! Uh, right, yeah, Mordant bless his smutty soul. Hung by his own device, huh? Wow. What a way to go.” He pressed three fingers to his sternum for a moment, a gesture of prayer, even if a cursory one. It was meant to mimic holding prayer beads, or a sigil necklace. He did it whilst giving a mirthless chuckle. “Wish I go that way someday, tell you what, and some of the projects I’m working on lately- hey, you ever seen a parabolic panther tripping on mushrooms? Anything blessed by dream gods, it’s like a double negative, they-”
I winced as I cut him off, raising my own voice a little. “Raspe’s project. I- you were helping him put it together, right? You built the Godbox? Can- the Union have been trying to get all his notes, but I was hoping to figure out how it worked, maybe build another one? Or, uh, figure out where the original one went, maybe? I was hoping you could help.”
He blinked, like he was just now realising what we were talking about. “Oh, Raspe’s thing? Let me guess, Lucas sent you? Not seen you about, you join the Staircase recently?”
The Staircase? “N-” I got halfway through answering before realising I probably wouldn’t get anywhere here without playing along. “Yeah, Lucas sent me. Wanted help finding it.”
“Well, tell him the man only had me build parts. Real plug ‘n play stuff but I still dunno the final configuration and hoo-eyy, I could not see how it was meant to plug together. Probably he had somebody else making other stuff, too, would explain the gaps.”
“Dammit.” I hissed. So much for trying to reverse engineer it from the components alone. “Does it- did you think it would work, though? Like, properly overturn reality, like he said? I- certain… people… are saying it might have been a trick. Like, he just had a god in there or something. Is that-”
Schreck paused, tapping his chin. He stared off for a moment, thoughtful, then murmured “What is reality, anyway, man…?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose with a hiss of frustration.
“No, really. Not just being-” He let out a hacking, wet cough, before pulling his shoulders up a little, refocusing on me. “Look, you Stairscase guys- uh, we Staircase guys.” He emphasised that at the end, putting an arm around me, full of camaraderie. My skin crawled a little, but I resisted the urge to brush the hand off. “-have been funding him for a reason, yeah?”
The Society of the Infinite Staircase were one of his primary funding sources, but all I knew about them was the name on a page. Raspe hadn’t talked about them much. They were an academic society, I knew that much. I listened, avidly, for once letting him ramble.
“There, like- ach, I’m bad at the words. There ain’t no base reality is the point, right? That big speech Lucas always gives, you ask how rain works and it evaporizes from the ocean, you ask why it does that and it’s… something something molecules. You ask why that, and it’s something something atoms and energy, and you ask why that and it just- goes on forever, no bottom, infinite staircase, right?”
I nodded along, vaguely, pretending to be following. He smiled. As best I could tell he was just pleased to have somebody to talk to. I smiled back when he let go of me to gesture vaguely at the heavens as he kept going.
“Raspe’s the one really proving that, man. You go down far enough, you’ll always find something to break, so there’s no rules but the ones in your head, man. I mean, he’s an Authan, man, you better believe he have something to say about it.”
It took me a moment to make the connection, but when I did, it actually made sense.
Given how often it was brought up to justify heavily regulating the divines, Authas was something I knew a bit about. The place had used to be a landlocked nation that got dropped into the ocean by an angry ocean deity, back when they were free to do whatever they wanted and ruled mankind.
Except that wasn’t quite true. Records from nations across the Eaten Sea, of which Lysium was one, all agreed Authas had been there millenia earlier than Authan records suggested they had. Not just written records either, their geology suggested they’d been moved, damned genetic studies showed they were descended from Rugan, which was impossible. We figured their history had been rewritten locally, likely by a time deity rather than a sea one.
“...But you don’t think there’s a base history at all, do you?” I finished the thought. “You think it’s-”
“Rewrites all the way down, man! I mean, mindblowing, right? Wow.” He put a hand to his head then exploded it, like his mind was being blown. “Same with physics. You know those noise-maker things the Dreaming Empire has? What do they call ‘em, radios? They don’t work down south, we think it’s the same thing. Whatever deities they’ve got up there making sound or light or something work differently. But isn’t that a touch chauvinist? Assuming our way is the default? That’s the Staircase. There ain’t no default, just what’s local.”
“But surely there’s gotta be- I mean, how would gods even come into being to set the laws if there’s no-” My head was starting to hurt, now, just trying to imagine it. Was starting to suspect I was talking to a nutter.
“Cyclical, man! Gods made people, people get sick of their shit and overthrow ‘em and work out how to change physics themselves… ‘n then make more gods ‘cause it’s convenient who take over. Does there need to be a first? Chicken and egg, doesn’t matter which. And now it’s our turn, Raspe figured out the trick. Now we can stop relying on gods and, uh… unite the workers, free the class slaves, break the great chain?” He paused a moment, scratching his chin, sounding uncertain.
“Wait, what?” I blinked. “Are you an academic society or a political-” I clamped down on the question. I’d just implied I wasn’t a member, huh? Fortunately, he didn’t seem to catch that.
“I dunno, ask the others, I’m not really here for the philosophy. I’ll be real, I just wanna make cool shit, and hooh-man, was that Godbox cool shit. Raspe wanted the least real materials he could get his damned hands on! Shit from gods nobody believes in any more. You know what a Grootslang is, or a Lambton Wurm?”
I had absolutely no idea. I was about to say so, but I didn’t get a chance to form the first syllable before he exploded with a “No! And nor did bloody I, but the maniac had me out there finding them, and figuring out how to make a piston mechanism outta the ivory.”
“Out of- wait, are you an engineer or-”
He blinked a moment, before standing on shaky legs and opening the door back to where I’d been waiting “I’m lecturing in the icthyology wing for a reason, man. BIO-engineer. I make stuff outta, uh, things.” He pressed his lips together, seeming to realise that was not a great description. “I- look, back in the old days, and sometimes even in the now days, a god took a look at a perfectly good lizard and decides to like, fuck it up with wings and fire breath and making it ten times the size, and then you got a dragon. Except we enslaved all the gods, so that doesn’t happen much any more except when the church wants a cutsey floofball for making people think attending church is fun. I kinda miss those fuckers, y’know? I wanted to make my own. Not- no results yet, but maaan, I want to make my own.”
I rolled my wrist in the universal gesture for ‘back to the point’, admittedly getting impatient with all the rambling. He took the hint. “Right. Uh- Raspe’s stuff was sorta god-y, but he never wanted, like, actual worship items. It was more about the not-exist-ed-ence.” He waved a hand as he tried to formulate that last word like he was struggling not to sneeze.
I just about followed. “So- you think it was real? God-in-a-box is…?”
“Man, I sure hope not, or what was I wasting my time on? Didn’t look like anything to bind gods in, not enough paperwork or propaganda. Don’t you need to convince people the god is bindable for that to work? A god-in-a-box don’t work if nobody knows it exists.” He sighed, calming down a little. He was almost forlorn, energy draining from him as quickly as he’d gained it. “I want my dang dragon, man. I know the rest of the society has lofty goals about like, no more labor, no more oppression, but I just really wanted to make a dragon. Current consensus theology doesn’t allow for anything fun anymore.”
I put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it a little. “We’ll see what we can do to get you a dragon, then.” I smiled as though I had any ability to make that happen whatsoever. “If you, uh, if you remember anything else useful, can you-” Should I give him my contact details? If this Lucas guy found out I was impersonating a member of his society to snoop around…
On the other hand, I almost wanted him to. From what little I could gather it sounded like they were the only people who wanted to use the damned Godbox for good, and I could use an ally. “-in fact, tell Lucas to contact me. Here.” I scribbled down my address on a piece of paper, handed it over. He didn’t even look at it, just stuffed it into a pocket, crumpling it.
“You can’t yourself? Don’t you, like, work for him, or-?”
I started to walk away as he asked that, wanting to be out of the room by the time his frazzled mind put the pieces together. He blinked blearily and watched me go, too out of it to even really complain about the rudeness of my leaving without a word.
I’d gotten what I needed to out of this, anyway. Not a step closer to understanding how the Godbox worked, but at least some corroborating evidence that it was real. Or at least, that people other than Raspe thought it was, that this Infinite Staircase was confident in it and invested in its existence.
So now it was just a question of narrowing down motive. And whilst investigating the Union was appealing, if I was thinking about allies?
Frank and his Society for Divine Liberation probably wanted to find the Godbox even if they were innocent of stealing it. Investigating them would get me closer no matter what, right?