One of Legba’s underlings had arrived at the tower by the time I came back, gazing out over the strata of terracotta rooftops. Uzume: goddess of all manner of pleasurable things that had no business being in a corporate marketing department. Hers had been a recent promotion after Legba had taken his position. I had no idea how he’d gotten Yahweh to approve it, unless he’d spun it as some kind of poetic punishment or ‘character-building’ growth opportunity. It might even have been true.

Certainly the goddess of mirth wasn’t smiling. She clutched wildly at the edge of the tower alcove, fingertips pressing into the plasterwork in an attempt to bore grooves into it, and swayed with a bad case of vertigo. She had her head lifted slightly skywards, eyes wide and sightless with pupils and irises vanishing into the same milky white I’d seen on Lucy. Her loose, rolled-up sleeves billowed in the wind barrelling through the back of the tower. A headliner of the popular Shinto pantheon, she’d naturally been hit hard by the system shutdown.

I fluffed my owl’s wings in anticipation. That was one-third of the performance team down, at least temporarily, and I hadn’t even had to draw attention to myself. Still, better to finish the job. I liked Uzume, but this was too good an opportunity to miss.

She went down easily, utterly failing to sense my approach. Hastened by the wind, I sheared through the tower’s cupola to rake six sharp claws up the back of her neck. By the time she reacted, I was well out of arms’ reach and the poison coating my talons was doing its job. She whirled, searching for a target, but her eyes were blind, her balance off, and her brain crowded with cognitive overload.

About thirty seconds in, she slumped to the base of the cupola, convulsed briefly, and ceased to move.

I landed on her shoe and somewhat skittishly set about warping her onto a rooftop halfway across the world, with a few more poisoned scratches for good measure. It would keep her down for a few days without too much damage, not counting a severe case of FOMO after this all cleared up one way or another.

No one came, not even the angels camped out below. Perhaps they’d left when the shutdown had hit.

And of course, there were others, the spectators. Casting my eye over the city, I could see where the tone of the night had markedly shifted. No fewer than sixteen scattered rifts, throbbing wounds ripped from the skin of the universe, thrummed silent screeches within eyeshot where gods had travelled from work. Far worse than the distortions at the Xiānfēng facility, which had been due to natural decay or skilful, if shattered, artifice. I could sense more further out.

Wisely, the crowds had backed away from the rifts, packing people towards the main thoroughfare more densely than before. But few were leaving. Once the fissures had stabilised, mob dynamics had taken over and convinced whole crowds the whirling breaches were safe from a distance. Given the timing, people would wonder if they were part of the show. Maybe they expected heaven on the other side, a stream of angels pouring through with blessings and poorly-defined euphoria. Even now, when everyone should have been running, the propaganda campaign was doing its job.

If the quakes I’d expected from the versal blade had hit nearby, it didn’t show. The Earth had a lot of surface area to cover; chances had always been low. Fewer people were on their phones, too – I imagined the lines were clogged with activity shutting down connections. That, or they were just saving the battery.

Uzume had been a freebie. Gwydion and Bragi wouldn’t go down so easily. Neither had the worshippers to suffer real hindrance from the shutdown. I had an edge on Bragi in that I knew exactly how his powers specialised and how to exploit them, but they were dangerous enough I couldn’t afford to give him the chance. Gwydion was a creative versatile manipulator I could almost believe had been taking lessons from Odin, if the latter hadn’t been so unwilling to share his expertise. I had the former firmly in the ‘people to avoid’ bucket thanks to the obsessive mean streak he fertilised among his garden of red flags. Odin was a pragmatist. Gwydion was a bully.

In any case, neither showrunner had arrived, and I didn’t plan to wait around. Retreating, I chased the trail of red and blue lights marking Grace’s cavalcade across the city. The denser crowds had slowed it down, but the destination was clear: the Piazza dell’Esquilino. A stage had been erected on the roof of the central basilica, already aglow with a white radiance that had nothing to do with floodlights. It was no St. Peter’s Square, but could still fit a good few tens of thousands if it really tried.

Right now, it was pulling out all the stops. Word had evidently spread, and the space was full to bursting. Every building had its doors open, faces crammed at windows. As many people packed the rooftops as at street level, with more hanging off the sides of precarious ladders jostled by those underneath. Scalpers, ever the opportunists in a crisis, ushered people through doors while counting out money, leaving those inside to fight over window space. Others were installing scaffolding over heads, inciting arguments nearby. Everyone wanted a piece of the miracle to be.

Legba had already arrived, scowling on the roof of the cathedral as his eyes flitted between invisible phantoms. He’d been hit by the shutdown, but seemed to be mostly coping, because of course this couldn’t be easy. Bragi stood with him, fighting for his attention and looking increasingly flustered about it. The tip of his tongue poked out of his mouth between words as one finger traced patterns over the scene below in eager, hurried movements. Lines, stabs and trajectories; less like writing and more to do with taking measurements, apportioning, and division. The vista his map; the city his war table, in a quite literal interpretation of strategic audience segmentation.

At the same time as Grace’s popemobile caused traffic jams at the piazza entrance, I dropped out of the sky to settle on someone’s rooftop antenna where bystanders were unable to bother me. I was feeling better about my abilities. It felt like they were coming back faster the closer I got to the stage. Almost exponentially so. I was still baffled by what could be causing it. None of the individual situational aspects were elements I hadn’t encountered in some form before, unless the trigger was some specific combination of conditions I’d somehow avoided up till now. Or that I could remember.

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Reinstating my visitation to the marine grotto, I was pleased to find myself mostly intact, with only a vague fuzzing around the edges. Lucy was up, though with uncharacteristic bags under his eyes and the same distracted countenance I’d seen moments ago on Legba. It was good enough.

He paced the edge of the circular chamber, intent on its markings in Akkadian cuneiform. The carvings already glowed with a soft golden light, shifting in and out of prominence as Janus stood somewhat anticlimactically in their centre, chin lifted towards the ceiling. The last of the barnacles had been chiselled away, the tool lying discarded at the foot of the wall. Symbols detached from the wall as Lucy passed them, words lifted from a page to be given both form and wings. In this case, the form happened to be blue light overlaying the gold, and the wings a slow anti-clockwise rotation, each row moving at a slightly different speed so that the overall effect resembled a cross-section of some complicated interlocking mechanism. When the devil reached the part of the floor underwater, he kept going without a pause, walking over the liquid surface as easily as any floorboards.

I sighed, folded my arms, and leaned back against the now featureless dome. “And there it is,” I murmured, shooting a glance at the demon lord leaning beside me. “Funny how some traits run in families. And then there’s the Greek pantheon, whose only consistent theme is a talent for applied obnoxiousness.”

Vince took a while to respond, watching Lucy complete his circuit. “What went wrong?”

“Nothing we couldn’t handle.”

“My dear boy. You look like my grandkids do when they talk about housing affordability.”

I gave him the side-eye. This had come a long way since the days of ‘O’ great skin-fiend’. “Did you figure out your powers yet? You might need them soon.”

“Answer my question first, and you can have one in return. Fourth rule of dealing with demonic trickery.”

“Vince,” I said, “you are a demon. Don’t make me go through this again.”

“Exactly,” he replied, a pleased expression tugging at his eyebrows. “Therefore I must abide by the rules. Plus it made you smile.”

The floating lettering began to shift as Lucy returned to the centre of the chamber, meeting Janus in the middle. He positioned himself back to back with Janus and mirrored his stance. Neither spoke a word as the two simultaneous rituals merged before our eyes into one seamless conglomeration of blinking gold and blue. Letters flipped like tablets in their tens, then hundreds, emerging changed on the other side. It may as well have been written in Wingdings for all I understood of it, but any idiot could tell the number of moving pieces far exceeded the complexity the average mind could process.

I checked back in Rome, where Grace had just gotten past the traffic jam. Not much time left.

With great effort, I squeezed another hazy visitation back to Gia. She and Mayari were still alone and waiting. Mayari held the spear, outfit badly blackened and singed, as she guarded the pinned analyst in the broken facility. Painful-looking blisters covered her arms and part of her face, sending shivers running up my own limbs in solidarity. Yahweh was still nowhere to be seen.

“I’m concerned about where the repurposed edict is coming down,” I answered Vince, pitching the half-truth in position for a useful response. “Yahweh hasn’t shown himself yet, which could be a good or a bad thing, and I’d rather we didn’t end up with five neutered demons because the whole world was caught in its grasp. I can’t narrow the location for Lucy until we know for sure where he’s going to show.”

The ritual in progress didn’t slow down as Lucy spoke. “Where we most want him, of course. Tezcatlipoca already confirmed it.”

“And where is he now?” I asked. “After your incident in Bolivia, I could use a reassuring update.”

“I don’t know. Somewhere useful, one hopes. But Dad is disoriented. When he arrives at the cave, Mayari will have a split second to act.”

“To strike.”

“To relocate. To the moon, her place of power. I’ll need you to tell me the moment she does, so we can release the edict then. We won’t have more than a moment.”

It would be close. Legba’s performance probably wouldn’t start the exact minute Grace climbed the stage, but I couldn’t assume we’d have additional leeway. And there was the matter of Gia, barely hanging on as it was. I needed her as my eyes on Mayari, unless I abandoned Rome and went in person – and that was as much of a risk in its own way. Once the rock slab stopped blocking the demon’s blood loss, there went my easy contact.

I switched focus to my physical body and carefully picked my moment, moving when Legba’s attention was otherwise occupied. In a flutter of wings, subtle as I could make it, I dipped closer to the stage, as close as I could get without crossing to the centre of the piazza. More power returned. Part of me wondered if it wasn’t a clever trap, after all, designed to mimic the effects of a place of power as a genius sort of lure. I could imagine Legba arranging it, and frankly it annoyed me he might have thought of it before I had. I’d file that one away for later.

Down below, Bragi had finally stopped talking. Legba snapped a couple of words in his direction and the god disappeared, heedless of who might be watching. To the tower, if I was lucky. I chose to stay put. At this point, I was better off focusing on the senior leader and dealing with the underlings afterwards.

Or, the sudden thought occurred, perhaps it had nothing to do with me in particular. Some places of power affected many gods. Perhaps they’d all had the boost for the sake of the announcement and I was wandering into a nest of steroid-pumped hornets.

But I needed the energy.

Gia’s eyes were closed. I shifted form next to her, reaching inwards for the remnants of the apple of Yggdrasil. It materialised in my pocket, as fresh as when picked, despite the fact it was covered in Ponytail’s bite marks. Visitation status by proxy had kept it from being otherwise dirtied by the environment; a convenient little perk. I squeezed it in my hand until juice poured from my fist, and held it above Gia’s mouth, prying her jaws open like an owner giving their dog medicine.

Gia groaned. I used the opportunity to funnel more of the juice in.

“Swallow.”

She didn’t, but the contact seemed to be enough. It saved me having to reach through the rock to the wound directly, which risked bringing back the kinds of memories best left buried under their own ancient geology. Her fingertips twitched, then spasmed. A moment later, her eyes flew open, and she tore at the rock violently enough I actually stepped back. Pools of blood welled up in the gaps.

Mayari wheeled, distracted, but I couldn’t do anything about it. Her eyes moved, and the rock shifted in response.

“No,” Gia growled. Her body seizured as she gripped the wall and pulled away. Red threads followed her, which I took for blood until they thickened into skin and muscle, limbs regenerating from the amputations down. She stumbled sideways in a heap, propping herself up on the good arm while gaping at the other in mid-reconfiguration. It took only seconds before it was as good as new.

If it wasn’t for the impending uncertain future of international capitalism, and the fact Tru technically still hadn’t given me his banking passwords, I would be tempted to invest heavily in the apple market once we came out the other side of the day’s shenanigans. Not that I needed the money at this point. Leverage was the more valuable resource by far.

“Okay,” I said to Gia, as she stared at her unblemished fingers, “now you need to pass on a message. And I recommend a change of clothes.”