"We could... write to her pretending to be a foreign doctor, I guess? Although this would work better if we weren't in fact in Malta right now."

"I was going to ask about maybe meeting her next time I saw Inaaya, since I have this fake identity as a cultist already."

"Should you not... be attempting to keep people under the impression that you're dead now."

"I guess we don't know who knows what."

"It would be so convenient if she had some horrifying manifesto written up somewhere. ...Hmm. That might actually work but only if she doesn't know your face by now from yesterday's, um."

"Lukas knows me by a different fake name than Inaaya and Louise and associated do, and I never saw Donovan and Lukas didn't take photos."

"You were knocked out, right? That's not evidence anything happened, but."

"....fair. I still think it's a better shot than anything else that's been suggested."

"I guess it might work, then. But we should have people spotting the building this time, if you're going to go meeting people alone. And should probably rent a car. In case we need to tail people."

"What else do we know... Hey, can we talk about this New Moon business? Which by some miracle either didn't happen on the actual new moon last night or didn't cause anything, but we still don't know when it's happening or what exactly it is or what it means for Portia and it feels like it's probably important."

"I don't feel like we have enough information about that to say. All we have to go on is an eight-year-old's prophetic dream."

"One of the books we stole in LA has this whole thing about the New Moon Rift which is the most direct way to get to the Maw which is connected to the Mouth, but also it's a poetry book and it's not especially coherent."

"Well, that's at least evidence that it wasn't an ordinary dream."

(she is not going to complain that this is a STUPID NAMING SYSTEM given that she's pretty sure that "maw" is another word for "mouth". whatever.)

"Tereza called it the stomach. She said it was digesting the woman she saw."

Anita's not wrong honestly but they didn't come up with the name scheme and if it were up to them they probably would not have chosen this one.

"Speaking of things connected to the Mouth -- this is conjecture and I don't actually know how rituals usually work and plausibly we already know it, but it's been bothering me -- you know how ten years ago everyone we've talked to about it has said they disrupted the ritual? As in, it was still ongoing when Henslowe and Winston got there?"

"Go on."

"They successfully summoned the Mouth. Why was it still ongoing after a successful summoning?"

"I thought the other group broke in before the Mouth was summoned, and then the ritual kept going long enough to summon it?"

"No, it stopped once the men with guns burst in."

"Well, maybe you'd done enough that the Mouth was able to punch through the last bit on its own? Or maybe they were going to kill you and then someone else died instead, and that did the trick?"

Possibly that was a kind of callous thing to say, whoops.

Yeah it kind of was.

"Anyway, plausibly we already know this since Tereza talked about the Maw like it was a thing that definitely existed on Earth and can digest people, and also plausibly it's nothing at all and rituals always go for hours after summoning things, but I didn't want to leave it unsaid and then have it turn out to matter."

"I am, as far as I can tell, invulnerable. Kind of a weird thing to do to a human sacrifice."

“Demonic summoning rituals usually end as soon as the demon is summoned. If it continued, they must have wanted to do something else with the demon.”

"Like what?"

“Binding it—using it as a tool to summon a larger demon—harnessing its power for witchcraft—other things as well, just, as examples—“

"I don't like the juxtaposition of the word binding with Lev being an invulnerable conduit for -- some purpose.

...Mmm. Separate tack. Do we know that the Mouths and the Liar are exactly the same entity? Because I don't think we actually know that."