Regina slid the hard drive out from under the body of its former possessor as Neetu reholstered her pistol for the second time in an hour. Or a minute, depending on how you measured it. “Exactly how many gods are in here?”

“A few,” I replied, staring down at the fallen deity intersecting my feet in a tangle of brightly-coloured limbs. Someone was in for a shock when they came up to investigate. Other than that, the balcony and the pile of goo that had once been Scarfy, we’d managed to keep the fallout relatively contained.

I didn’t expect it would last.

Regina gingerly stepped away. She slung off her overstuffed backpack and handed the drive to Neetu as she fiddled with the zip. “But not Vishnu. If he’s really gone, where would the fields have taken him?”

I posed the question to Gia, half a world away and then some. The bright lights of the temple cast eerie shadows over her features, bringing her closer to the stereotype of the creature she’d become, if only for a short time.

“Redirected somewhere, I’d think,” the expert replied. “But if Siphon know what they’re doing, they’d prevent it from being traced. If I had access to an infected device, I could find out more.”

“No time,” I told her. “We got Vishnu. You’re up.”

The analyst paled. “I’ll inform Mayari.” She broke into a trot towards the altar at the back of the temple, only to squeak as I pulled her back by the collar.

“You’re going back the way you came,” I said, giving her a light push towards the open door. “With the spear. Mayari can take the long way round.”

“Again? Isn’t that a risk?”

“Or you can find out what happens when a god accompanies you back to your body. Your choice.”

“Why? What happens?”

I laid a hand on her shoulder and smiled winningly. “Whatever it is, it will probably contribute to science.”

“And what about the spear? I don’t suppose it’s too much to hope it will magically appear in my hand like it did for you.”

“You have aspect magic, you nitwit,” I reminded her. “As long as it comes in some form, that’s all you need. You probably could bring Mayari with you, although don’t say I didn’t warn you about side-effects.”

“No, I’m, ah, definitely warned.”

Soul drive swaddled in her jacket, the ex-waitress sidled back into the room next door, hanging just out of view of the exit. Amped up from the place of power, I didn’t feel the need to stay as close as I normally would. I followed anyway.

Any caution turned out to be unjustified. It wasn’t only Regina out on the ledge; all around us, people were stepping outside. And not to gawp at property damage. Curfew or no, a few had made their way onto the streets in the moments since the freeze. Searching for a better angle from which to view the city’s enormous, impossible interloper. White motes the size of cars drifted within its surface, serene and gentle, and sent light shifting across the breadth of the city. Daylight diminished the effect, but it was still noticeable. Here and there, a little too bright, and moving.

“The fields are still active,” Regina stated. Her eyes didn’t stray from the tower. “If I let my guard down, they’ll eat us alive. I’m new at this. I don’t know how long I’ve got it in me. And as for that –”

“Don’t go near it.”

“– if it takes down the barrier, the effect will spread.”

One room over, Neetu had hoisted Vishnu’s husk up by its armpits and was slowly hauling it towards the bedroom. So much for not meddling with the crime scene.

“If it doesn’t, your part in this is done,” I remarked. “If Tez really did get the details on Siphon’s system, you should be able to take care of it between the three of you.”

Regina snapped her gaze away from the skyline. “Not you?”

“Busy undermining authority. I can give you attention in emergencies. Besides,” I added, witnessing more residents abandon curfew, “Tez isn’t going anywhere.” If nothing else, I suspected Primary Tez might lose the remnants of whatever tether had been keeping his increasingly fraying sanity together. Seer interference had lost him an incarnation, and that had been up against one adversary. Amulet Tez staying behind the Great Themis Wall made for convenient insulation.

And if I was honest, Tez had been worrying me. For all his skill as a seer, he was no Apollo. With luck, his victory over Vishnu would have removed some of the pressure.

Mayari and Gia were exiting the temple as Neetu walked in through the door backwards with her load, which she heaved onto Scarfy’s double bed. Its sheets occupied the space between saccharine and cheerful I associated with what manufacturers thought their market would enjoy and rarely matched anything short of public funding misallocated into waving colour psychology at social issues. With the addition of Vishnu, it resembled an apoplectic seizure.

Neetu folded his arms – a little awkwardly – so that the palms of each pair rested face-down over his chest. “You heard this guy,” she said, straightening. “If there’s a timed signal being sent out to collaborators, we’ve got less than an hour to shut down this operation before they start unleashing backup.”

I expended the effort to squeeze out another visitation, appearing in front of her with mild disorientation. Neetu jumped.

“We can’t have that,” I said to both women. “Siphon wreaking havoc might bring Yahweh here, where we can’t get the spear to him. How long do we actually have?”

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Regina looked at the amulet. “Enough, apparently. I guess we don’t need to worry about travel time.”

“I’m proud of you both,” I grinned. “It’ll be like your first Viking raid, except without the idealism and suicidal tendencies.”

A small notification ‘dinged’ on Colstee’s computer in Philadelphia.

“Please don’t be proud of me,” said Neetu. She looked at the figure on the bed. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

“But you’re still here,” I pointed out.

“God knows why.”

“God can make a reasonable guess,” I agreed. “I’ll share it once you’re done ravaging and pillaging.”

It was good timing, because a shower of water had cascaded onto Vince’s pontoon, passing through me and showering the occultist in rogue spray. At its centre, Lucy wiped the droplets out of his eyes, still garbed in a suit and tie for reasons I could only assume involved sea creatures conducting job interviews.

“That can’t be comfortable,” I commented. “Anyway,” I added to Vince, “you can tell Lucy we’re good on the Vishnu front. I also found you a perfect date.”

“You can tell me yourself,” said Lucy. He didn’t look at me, but pulled his tie up out of his jacket, carefully undid the knot and folded it back into a saturated pocket.

I started. “And just when I think you’ve run out of surprises.”

“I could say the same. This seems to be a repeated conversation of late.”

“Question,” I evaded. “If you can see me in visitation, can I assume Yahweh will be the same? I feel like this should have been mentioned earlier.”

Two more notifications announced themselves to Colstee in quick succession. The mogul glanced at Durga with some wariness, who cheerily waved her captive on towards the monitor.

“Actually, I’m having Vince relay everything in real time,” the devil responded. “He’s quite good at it.”

“Naturally,” Vince put in, sounding mildly wounded. “I have devoted my life to making contact with my lord.”

“We need to get you that date,” I said, and held the thought.

Mayari and Gia had reached the edge of the task manager temple’s platform and jumped off. Or rather, Mayari had jumped. Gia had been dragged along, plummeting with her arms wrapped around her chest like a straitjacket, eyes closed and enough fear radiating off of her I was worried it might start showing up on company computers. I shifted into bird form and swooped off to keep up. Around us, the world of tubes and server stacks flickered for a second, but didn’t change.

“I’ve dealt with the environmental hazards,” said Lucy, extending a hand towards Vince. “It won’t last long. They really didn’t want anyone stumbling on this place. But it’ll do the job. So, Loki. Why are you turning up everywhere?”

“Other than being amazing,” I answered, as barnacle-encrusted walls replaced the open blue skies, “I’m not sure. Place of power with uncertain conditions. May as well use it while it lasts.”

“Hmm.”

My cave triggers weren’t firing as much as usual, mitigated by the fact I was also outdoors. It wasn’t claustrophobia so much as the brown, dark, and lack of change. That in the wrong circumstance, one step too far, it could be this forever, trapped and forgotten with no way out.

But this wasn’t so much a cave as a chamber. It was about the size of Tru’s living room, with a higher ceiling in the shape of a dome. Half the floor comprised a worn platform sitting above the rest, which sunk into water. From the sharp line of barnacles cutting off halfway up the dome, it had clearly been a recent adjustment. A complex array of letters scrawled onto the wet floor in Lucy’s handwriting confirmed this assessment.

It wasn’t the only change. Teardrops of blue fire danced around the enclosure, hovering in midair at equal distance from each other and the receded waterline.

Vince dropped Lucy’s hand to rub his arms. He shifted his weight. “Feels –” he paused, searching for the right word, “– heavy. Inevitable. Like death.”

“Depth,” Lucy corrected him. “That’s the pressure. Though one usually leads to the other. In this case, we have worse.”

Where the moon edict had taken the form of a large tablet, Janus’ prison wound around the walls. It started at the top of the dome in rows half the width of my palm and descended in narrow concentric circles, lines etched between them. It did get hard to read after the barnacle line.

Chipping them off at the far end of the platform stood Janus, mask still in place, his hands feeling out the surface to chisel away at the damage. Much of the chamber had already been done, and, it had to be said, wasn’t much clearer.

In the task manager, Mayari had stopped at a particular rack of winking servers. It looked exactly like the others. I could and should have left a marker on the right one. Even Mayari gazed uncertainly around at the glittering vista, lingering before speaking.

Behind the aspect it was still data, and tedious stuff at that. We were the first people to have seen it like this; nostalgia was a trick of the mind. The only reason it resembled anything physical at all was thanks to Gia.

Still, it was pretty, and we were about to kill it all over again, along with the sole known path to Yggdrasil.

“I know,” I responded to the sentiment lingering unspoken in the chasm, transforming back. “We’ll find a way back. But priorities. You’re a millennial, Gia; you should know all about industricide.”

Colstee, Durga and Tru were all clustered around Colstee’s monitor now, notifications continuing to pour in. The businesswoman entered a few keyboard strokes, and, with a subtle hum, black-out screens descended over the office windows. A small box lowered from the ceiling opposite, projecting bright rays onto the big screen. Colstee lowered her head back behind the computer.

Gia tucked her hands under her armpits and shivered in the ambient room temperature, still a little shaky after her high-speed plummet through the system. “What you said earlier, about me being a new god. Or close.”

“Don’t let it get to your head,” said Mayari, firmly. “That’s how you contribute to the problem. Thinking you know better than everyone else around you, no matter how skilled you are. And especially sometimes because of it.”

I coughed into the cup of my palm.

“Unless your name’s Loki,” the goddess amended, with a roll of her eye. “And see how irritating it is already.” She glanced upwards, towards more groups of distant server racks. “Are you sure we’re in the right place?”

The demon lord followed her gaze. “I’m sure. And I think –”

Far above us, an empty patch of air flickered and resolved into a cheap wooden door facing down towards the servers. A green and white exit sign was affixed to its surface with tiny screws.

“Two out of ten for style,” I offered, barely resisting the temptation to manifest a pair of glasses to push up my nose.

“But I just –” Gia protested. She waved her arms in the direction of the door. “I just –”

Mayari winked at me. She pushed the Spear of Destiny into Gia’s outstretched hands. “I’ll catch up.”

“All’s well with Cave-Brain?”

“I expect Tepeyollotl will have other things on his mind.”

I shot her a quizzical expression.

“Providence is in Singapore,” she elaborated, as if that explained everything. “Bashing its way through a hostile compulsion field.”

“That was the plan.”

“Yes, and look at how that affects the active travel stations.”

“I don’t think Tepe will be going out of his way to fix them, if that’s what you’re saying.”

“Maybe, if going offline was all he had to worry about.”

I had a bad feeling about where this was going. I didn’t have to wait for long. On Colstee’s cinema, live feeds had begun pouring in from sources of surveillance footage, a new window for each chiming notification. Worldwide, pouring in from the globe.

The subject matter they depicted wasn’t technically new, but it may as well have been. For one thing, you weren’t supposed to be able to see the portals. Not without a cleared access card. For another, I was fairly sure the Facilities department’s day-to-day operating tedium didn’t cover swirling, house-sized vortices dragging in all surrounding matter.

“I’m an engineer,” Mayari reminded me back in the task system. “Just because I don’t meet the official servicing qualifications doesn’t mean I don’t take an interest.”

“Well,” I articulated, after a moment’s observation. “I think it’s safe to say they’ve noticed.”