“It’s a time reversal device,” Enki explained, not bothering to argue. “Set to take someone exactly one week into the past,” he added, upon seeing our reactions. “I’m not insane. A week gives us more than enough response time for most problems, and I built in a timer to make sure the same person can’t continually jump back and abuse it. They’d have to wait out the week again before it would reactivate. I track who uses it and how often, and check every few days.”
“You gave Odin access to time reversal.” I resisted the urge to bash my head on the wall again. “You are insane.”
“How many times has it been used so far?” Lucy asked warily.
“This was the first. A use would trigger an official inquiry. We’d find out everything. We always do. Besides, until now prophecy has been enough. Of course, inquiries presume there’s a leadership to conduct them.”
“So we’re talking to the you from one week in the future?” I questioned.
“Bingo. It’s not enough to rewire the universe, but it’s enough to make temporary personal changes. And take care of Lucifer’s attempts to kill me.” He stared at the devil meaningfully.
“You get a stay for the moment,” Lucy acknowledged.
“So tell me about Baldr,” Enki said, changing the subject.
“He’s a mind controller,” I said. “Not that anyone will believe me. He’s also a sadist. Jack the Ripper, except everyone thinks he’s Ghandi.” I paused. “Repeat what I just said.”
“Mind controller, sadist, Jack the Ripper and Ghandi.”
“Good enough.” I felt my legs jittering, and shifted away the adrenalin before it had a chance to make me look incompetent in front of the most powerful god alive. At least for now.
I didn’t think it was Baldr’s fault, necessarily. Like all of us, he’d had his powers since birth. In Baldr’s world, consequences only happened to other people. The reaction was the same whether he sang a song or pulled the wings off a fly. Social barriers didn’t exist. It hadn’t taken him long to realise he could do things no one else could, and delighted in it. Like we all did, where our abilities made us different. In a world of only praise where adoration meant nothing, differentiation became everything.
“And how widespread?”
“Everyone. Except me, and now you. And probably Yahweh.”
“Right. You do know that’s a stretch to believe even without mind control. There’d be evidence, a trail. Lasting damage.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Lucy put in.
“Oh, you have experience with spotting mind controllers, do you?” I groaned and rubbed at my eyes. “If I pitted Baldr against Yahweh in an election, who would you choose?”
“Well, Baldr, obviously,” said Enki. “Except for you, I haven’t heard a bad word against him. But Yahweh would win by a mile. He has the popular support. No offense, but your pantheon is one of history’s irrelevant footnotes. Even if you told the world, your full powers behind you, it would take a lot of work to make people come around.”
“Wrong,” I declared. “We’re not dealing with logic here, or marketing – for once – or force of habit. Evidence is a lot harder to pin down when the world agrees it doesn’t exist. But if you’re looking for evidence, why is it no one resurrected Baldy?”
“Isn’t that what I should be asking you?”
I didn’t answer, and Enki sighed.
“It’s come up,” he said. “More than a few times. From Odin, for obvious reasons. But also the others. Myself, too. We all have people we want pardoned. But Yahweh strikes it down. Can’t play favourites, so it goes, or the same argument can be used for all pre-merger prisoners. But we all know the real reason is jealousy. It’s a pattern.”
Annoyance outshone the stab of spiteful vindication I felt at the confirmation. For all his blinkered vision, the tyrant had played the situation smarter than I had. He hadn’t tried to convince people who couldn’t listen, hadn’t wasted time approaching the problem from every conceivable angle in the hopes of finding the single, special exception key to its dissolution. He’d talked the talk, justified another seeming atrocity with another flimsy excuse, and avoided singling one target out in particular. Who could hold him accountable? I supposed to Yahweh, Baldr was one of many threats to his power, to be dealt with the same as any other. I’d even done the killing for him.
I went to fold my arms over my chest and ended up cradling my new stump instead. “And it never struck you as odd how everyone loved him so much? People who’d never met him? With no achievements to his name? Did you even know anything about him other than that he was ‘good’ and ‘kind’?”
A strange expression crossed over Enki’s face. “No,” he said. “I never thought about it that way. It was just… obvious. And of course, it wasn’t everyone. There was always you.”
I let my face show what I thought of that comment.
“Alright, Cassandra,” he said, holding his palms in the shape of a peace offering. “It’s obvious in hindsight. The good news is, you said the right thing to get me where I am today. The bad news is, it’s temporary. The edicts I wrote exist in the future; I couldn’t bring the physical copies with me. This is only the body of my past self. Once you have multiples of yourself running around, things get messy.”
There was something about the way he said it. “How do you –”
“Let’s keep this on topic,” Enki said, a little too hastily. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
No arguments there. “If you don’t have the edicts,” I said, a sinking feeling settling into my stomach, “then how are you holding it off?”
“I can sustain them a while once written. Being at the site of another edict helps; I create my own places of power. One of the perks of being the best.” His voice didn’t sound cheerful as he said it. “But it’s not long. Even if we moved to a different site, it would only buy us a few more minutes. I’m going to start reverting soon, and if it’s as bad as you say, I might not realise.”
“How long do we have?” I asked.
“Best guess? An hour or two. One hour is the safer bet.”
Lucy had been quiet throughout the exchange, his head tilted towards the ground in thought. He raised it now. “You spent a week of preparation and activated a catastrophic universal failsafe just for an hour’s grace?”
“Mind control is as serious as it gets,” Enki responded. “If I’d gone back any earlier, Providence would have wanted a review. There would have been questions. An investigation. And your plan would have fallen apart. If that’s not proof I’m on your side, I’m not sure there’s any convincing you. After Loki put the fear of Ba-Pef in me, I knew I had a narrow window. Besides,” he added, glancing at Lucy, “I needed all the prep I could get.”
Not to mention Tez. It was tempting to think Enki should have aimed for earlier to prevent Baldr being raised at all. But he’d made the right call. Trying to avoid the snare to make for the source of the problem would have led him straight into the path of a seer. Protection or no protection, he was no match against prophecy.
“How are you doing?” I asked the devil cautiously. “Still with us?”
“Is there a diplomatic answer to that?” Raising his hands, he stared at the back of his knuckles as if they contained some kind of hidden answer. “Logic and my gut both say your perceptions are skewed. But –” he hesitated, “as you said, some details don’t add up. Or rather, they add up perfectly, but examining each piece of the equation alone, I’m not sure how.”
My eyes burned. “Lucy.”
He shook his head, the clarity returning to his features. “I’m fine. You should be worried about yourself.”
Oh, I was. I turned back to the last remaining member of Providence’s executive suite. “I may have a way to make it permanent. If it doesn’t pan out, Lucy will have to wipe your memory. Because if Baldr gets hold of you –”
“You know,” Lucy reminded me, patting the lump in his jacket, “I did have a solution for that. No one’s developing amnesia today. Not after the job Janus did on me. I’ll be recovering for centuries.”
“Right. This is fine. It’s not like everything’s on the verge of locking into a fixed hellscape of a future or anything.” I paced halfway across the room, stopped at the water’s edge, and paced back. Why couldn’t anything be easy?
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The irony of my own words hit me, and I almost laughed. Maybe there was something to this fate business. If anything could bring back destiny, the rise of a truly unstoppable divinity seemed as likely to do it as any. At that point, what did anything anyone else do matter?
And Janus, the part controlled by Facility J, was a seer too. That part hadn’t been Baldr-immune. Had this been his plan from the start?
“What can you do in an hour?” I asked, trying not to think about the futility of the task ahead. “I need you to start thinking while I get you assistance.”
“Information,” he said, as I was about to leave. “Not edicts. The first thing Providence did was make me butcher my own strength. They made sure I wouldn’t have enough unsupervised time to do anything serious, while still being usable. And they were right. Any other way, they wouldn’t have had the best of both worlds. But I can start with the location of the failsafe. It can be used again, just not by me.”
I placed the back of my heel back down on the ground. “I’m listening.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Lucy warned me, switching into high alert. “A week’s reset would undo everything we’ve accomplished.”
“Yes, but think how much faster it would be the second time round,” I remarked, with not a small amount of wistfulness.
We could fix all our mistakes. Approach Apollo from the start, free Yun-Qi from his geas. Weaponise both Siphon and Xiānfēng against Providence before the crackdown. Avoid the Vatican attack, the Singapore lockdown, and Marketing’s announcement. Avoid triggering Parvati and the sequence of events leading to releasing Janus. Save the old Tez. Pit Durga against Legba before he could see her coming. Myself against Hera. Stop the seers from looking into places they shouldn’t. I knew so much more than I had one week ago. We’d do it better. And if we got it wrong, we’d wait a week and try again until we didn’t. Anything was preferable to the alternative.
“Only for Odin to pluck it straight out of your brain? Have you forgotten so soon? What about the usage record? I’d have to wipe you again, and myself, and then we’re back at square one and worse.”
“There is no worse,” I said simply, and nodded at Enki. “And I’d find a way. Hit me.”
A set of coordinates entered my mind, clear as day. I wasn’t entirely surprised to recognise them. Last I’d seen them, they’d taken the form of a conspicuous red dot in Apollo’s office. Not whatever was at the top of Providence, then. Curious. Perhaps he’d been trying to tell me something.
“This is a mistake,” Lucy repeated. He shook his head. “Don’t do it. For all we know, it’s his final ploy to undo the rebellion and mark your culpability. That’s if it even is what he says it is. You could be walking straight into a snare built for this express situation.”
“You’ll need access,” said Enki, ignoring him. He reached for the lanyard around his neck, narrowly unscathed by the godkiller bullet. The shard of laminated plastic was heavily smeared with blood.
“Already have it,” I replied, but accepted the access card. I looped it around my wrist and cleaned the smears off before absorbing it into the general mix.
Enki’s eyebrows rose mildly up his forehead. “Odin was right to fear you.”
“Hah.” Once upon a time I might have gloated about it, but any mirth in the current situation seemed to have aged into retirement. Part of me worried Lucy was right, that Enki’s story was all just a clever lie in another of Providence’s security schemes, Baldr’s influence remaining immutable as ever, and the establishment one vital step ahead. I didn’t know with complete certainty. “Is there anything else –”
I broke off as another flash of colour materialised into existence in the sodden chamber. It resolved into a familiar face paired with an ill-fitting tracksuit and restless leg syndrome.
“Yo,” said Pakhet, slipping into an alert poise on the balls of her feet. She grinned. “Found you.”
Providence! Shoot! I fired at Lucy, who frowned but retrieved the pistol, aimed and fired in one sharp motion.
Too late; the huntress was already gone. Another hole joined the others in the wall.
Crap. If Pakhet was here, it meant Baldr was already gathering allies. He wasn’t wasting any time. I held onto the memory of seeing Pakhet in the crowd at Rome; she hadn’t been in the office. Chances were good he hadn’t yet managed to break in. That was something. That had to be something.
But we couldn’t stay here.
With me, I said, and reached out through the place to power to transport the four of us through to a star-studded landscape, along with the base of the chamber. Waves of sand rolled over me and through my hair as I resolved into Odin’s likeness, retrieving his access card from the folds of my robes. I stamped eleven paces north and five paces east, swiped the card over the access point and kicked at the air beside it.
A chasm yawned open in the fabric of the universe.
“Everyone in,” I urged them. “Before she has a chance to find us again.”
I’d been afraid Tez might already be there, waiting, but his burnout seemed to be continuing to take its toll. Knowing Baldr, he’d keep pushing and pushing the seer, allowing him no respite. Expediency over effectiveness. Exhausted, Tez would be slow. Make mistakes. It might buy us only seconds, but every bit helped.
Lucy glanced at me, motioned Vince inside, and stepped through afterwards.
“A demotion facility?” Enki wiped the sand out of his eyes. “There’s only one exit. We’d be backing ourselves into a corner.”
I didn’t have time to argue. I took control of the environment around the entrance, folded it around him and shoved him physically inside, following through afterwards to slam the door shut behind us. Only then did I stop to take a breath.
“Trackers don’t fare so well across dimensional boundaries,” I explained, leaning back against the door as sand dripped from my clothes to the floor. “I have a certain amount of experience with this.”
“But the edict’s gone,” the CHRO pointed out. “No place of power means my grace period just got shorter.”
“I’m trying,” I protested. “Lucy’s right about Odin; time reversal’s still a last resort. I was hoping to get you, but you can still bring back Yahweh.”
“In less than an hour? No. I can’t.”
“You don’t have a premade edict lying around in the back end of the universe for Mr Omniscient? Seems unlike him.”
“It’s almost as if others could do it faster. Like Legba. Except you killed him.”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“Then –”
“I’ll give you one guess.”
“I still can’t believe this conversation is happening,” said Lucy. He sighed. “Entertaining this hypothetical scenario, there’s a better way. One most of the business isn’t aware of. And that’s to use Siphon.”
“Wouldn’t work.” I waved a hand in dismissal. “The damage is already done.”
“But you could lure someone in, trap them in a hard drive.”
“Where a tracker could find it again. With everyone looking for it, I can’t hide the thing for long, and no one with the ability will want to. Unless you’re willing to host it in the abyss?”
Lucy remained silent.
“Didn’t think so.”
“There are worse choices for leadership than Baldr, Loki.”
Staring up at Facility J’s latticework, I tried very hard not to lose my temper, and possibly my mind. “How do we get back into Providence?” I asked the CHRO. The foyer was presumably still disrupting Singapore, and last I’d seen, the travel station rifts had only been expanding.
Another set of coordinates entered my head. “Facilities is maintaining an emergency override on its floor,” said Enki. “But it’s well-secured by experienced technicians. The office is on high alert. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’re restricting all movement. Even if you impersonated myself or Odin, you’d have to pass a number of checks.”
“Tell me how to pass them.”
Enki hesitated. “That’s a big ask. Those processes are in place for a reason.”
I stiffened, feeling not only my muscles tense, but the vicinity around them. Particles of sand swirled parallel to the ground in subtle eddies, and I caught Lucy’s eyes shifting to follow them. The outer rim of the pocket dimension flexed ever so slightly, full of complex undercurrents where various enclosures nested and intersected, and with a start I realised I could control them too.
But that was abstract.
For a shifter, it was very abstract.
I pushed it aside to deal with the immediate issue. “That’s the mind control coming back,” I alerted the god of magic.
“No, it’s good practice. It’s too early.”
“That’s what it’s making you think. I’ve seen it enough times to know. I need to go now. I’ll be back in a moment. Stay put until then, and I’ll fix this. Don’t let Lucy talk you out of it.”
Pulling open the door was as easy as flexing a muscle, and I was halfway out of the opening before I registered the faces on the other side.
“Hi,” said Pakhet. She waved. “I brought backup.”
I stared into Durga’s dark eyes, retreated and slammed the door closed, resealing it.
Three sombre faces regarded me.
“Backed into a corner,” Enki stated unnecessarily.
They were using seers. Tez, Janus, or both. Already. I should have been flattered to be that much of a personal priority, or relieved they weren’t turning them on Providence instead. All I felt was afraid.
“Okay,” I muttered shakily. “Not the end of the world. I can still do this, it will just take longer.” I reached out for the demonic runes, locating raidho’s faint glimmer behind what felt like several layers of glass maze.
“We don’t have longer,” Enki said. “Not if I’m already backsliding. I think we all know what needs to be done here.”
Lucy pursed his lips together. “And thus we’re back to where we should have been, only now we’ve wasted fifteen minutes and drawn the attention of Security during a critical window.”
I could feel something prying at the facility door from the outside, seeking a way in. I shored up the entrance, making the slab wider and thicker with the hinges a metre to the right, all while trying to work my way through to Gia. The prying sensation stopped.
Lucy pulled out the godkiller and flicked off the safety.
“Just give me a few minutes,” I implored, even as an ear-splitting boom rattled the bounds of the pocket dimension and sent a cloud of resting sand puffing into a gritty haze.
“We don’t have a few minutes,” said Enki. “However bad a mind controller on their own can be, you need to understand what’s at stake. I can give them unstoppable power without the preventative social controls we had under Yahweh. True untouchability. The risk is too high.”
‘Mind controller’. Not ‘Baldr’. ‘Them’, not ‘him’.
“That’s the mind control talking,” I snapped again, resisting the urge to push through the maze faster. Steady and careful; speeding up would lead to mistakes and falling further behind. Raidho rewarded me by glimmering a little brighter. “He wants you dead. You’re not the only one who can bestow powers. But you can do anything. You’re our best weapon against him.”
“Vince,” Lucy called out, raising the gun, “cover me.”
Another boom wracked the facility, and the entire door slab shifted an inch inwards. I reformed it again, undoing the damage and sliding it to the other end of the wall. Raidho was still too far away.
Vince stepped in front of me, fingers laced and eyes trained on mine. “Of course, my lord.”
Hermes’ tax evasion; I had too many things needing attention. I made it a little closer to raidho as Enki moved to stand in front of the gun. But I wasn’t going to make it.
“Lucy,” I said, hearing the sound of defeat echoing in my voice, “burn it all down. Then run. Run and keep running, no matter what they tell you.”
The two other gods regarded each other for a moment before the devil gave Enki a nod.
“Promise you’ll remember what I told you,” said the god of magic.
“I will,” Lucy replied.
And he shot Enki in the head.