Simon warns Alex that Thomas Warren is listening and watching all of them from the shadows.
The trail begins with Simon Rees. He will not hand Alex the Horn of Tiamat, which somehow makes the phone photograph feel worse: proof close enough to stare at, not close enough to trust. Alex pushes him on the Vatican and on whether he is really claiming bilocation. Simon gives her that unnerving goodbye, then disappears behind the last number she has for him. Back in Seattle, Alex and Nick go over the parchment photos and try to put hard edges around a story that keeps slipping loose. The document appears to be Sumerian. The script is cuneiform, just as Simon said, so the case cannot stay safely in folklore. It needs someone who can read the thing, or at least say what kind of thing it is. Dr. Jane Martindale, a retired professor of archaeology and art history at McGill University, agrees to examine the photograph. She is interested, but careful. She asks where Alex found it. Alex can only say it came from a friend who gave her almost nothing else, which leaves the provenance looking pretty empty. The object may be a song, or something close to one, but the excerpt cuts off before anyone can relax into certainty. Then the episode moves to a different room. Children have gathered, apparently for an anniversary, and the easy answer is family resemblance. They are descendants of John Noise, after all. That should explain enough. It does not. Taken together, the children are said to look like Sebastian Torres. The detail lands quietly, which makes it worse. The episode does not tie Simon's artifact, Martindale's read, and the children into one neat theory. It leaves them side by side, waiting to become a problem.
