This time, Jean identifies Mieli's employer as a Sobornost Founder, Joséphine Pellegrini, and gets her to reveal how he got captured, thereby picking up the clues to make plans for his next heist.

Now Cassar Gomelez, her father, hopes to get her to curry favor with a gogol merchant, Abu Nuwas, so that he has enough votes in the Council for the upcoming decision to renegotiate the Cry of Wrath Accords with the Sobornost.

Soon, Tawaddud is embroiled in an investigation with a Sobornost envoy into the murder that triggered the need for her father to forge a new alliance in the first place, and forced to confront old secrets that will change Sirr forever.

In the acknowledgments, Rajaniemi cites the influence of "Andy Clark, Douglas Hofstadter, Maurice Leblanc, Jan Potocki and [...] The Arabian Nights."

In the novel, the idea that the mind is a self-loop may have been influenced by the theories of the Professor of Philosophy, Andy Clark, and the book I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter.

For example, Amy Goldschlager, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, suggested that "[a] bit more explication of the physics involved (“surfing the deficit angle”?)