Live long enough, and chances were you’d accumulate names. It often didn’t take long. Identities and circumstances evolved, like Loki to Sørine and Fenrisúlfr to Yun-Qi. Nor did it apply only to people. On the inanimate side, claims, ownership and stories achieved the same effect.

One building, two different tales, and the nuance mattered. Etemenanki had been a gift to the gods. Altruism on the record, appeasement in practice. Never mind the total waste of decades spent delivering a product its recipient could have built in the blink of an eye; some gods thought it ‘character building’, while never having done the same. For their efforts, the builders had been rewarded with the ear of the divine. It could have been a viable complaints channel, had it been used correctly. But those on the less fortunate end of lopsided relationships had a bad habit of burying the facts behind what the other wanted to hear.

Babel had flipped the story, the tower an insult. The folly of man, or some such drivel, for daring to think it could equal God. While not wrong from even the most tortured capability metric, the ‘insult’ part was so much of a stretch it beggared belief, as if the hundreds of builders spending their lives making the thing hadn’t sacrificed heavily to do so.

For that sacrifice, humanity had paid – if you believed Yahweh’s version of events. The tantrum had been real. Officially, he’d been responsible for much of the world’s communication problems in the name of teaching mortals a lesson. Irony aside in the notion removing understanding was somehow supposed to invoke it, I doubted it was true. Languages weren’t just a mortal problem, or I wouldn’t be bashing my head against them now.

Effectively, I still didn’t have answers. Separate enclosure aside, Inanna and Baal were held in a jail like Providence’s countless others. Whatever point of difference made these two special lay buried under incomprehensibility and deadlines. If my latest phone hadn’t been obliterated by Pope Grace, I could have asked Lucy.

But I’d deviated enough already. I settled for poking the barrier one more time in case it had developed any new vulnerabilities. While intriguing, I had to deal with the bigger problem. If this place was still here by the time I was done, I’d be back. I stared into Inanna’s eyes behind the barrier, aware of the rapidly encroaching elephant in the tower. I shifted back into her father, only to mime slicing my throat open. “Enki’s dead. Sorry.”

I’d been expecting blankness, confusion or anger if she put the wrong – or right – dots together. Instead, Inanna leant forward with a curious expression. The goddess motioned at the hand holding the imaginary knife and spoke a short question in a slow voice, not that it made any difference. I made out Yahweh’s name among the words.

“Who did it?” I bit back a chuckle. In another timeline, it could have been me. But despite my best efforts, I hadn’t managed to kill anyone I’d set out to, even Odin. “Enki himself,” I said, aware any answer I gave would lead to some kind of misunderstanding. I didn’t dare lay the blame on Baldr. “It’s complicated.”

Inanna didn’t repeat the question, instead turning and walking back towards the bull in the centre of the glade.

Baal hadn’t woken throughout the exchange, or hadn’t appeared to. I could see why potentially thousands of years of confinement would lead to a default position of not caring, especially after taunting from the executive suite. Unless the sleep was part of the treatment. I shifted back into my chosen form as the winged goddess stooped beside him, laying a single hand on his hide.

The brown bull’s eyes fluttered open and met mine; large, gentle eyes at odds with his fearsome reputation. Back in the fuzzy times, Baal had been a weather god and conqueror of other ancients I wasn’t sure had ever truly existed. Until now, I hadn’t been sure about him, either. That far back, enough gods swore blind wildly incompatible versions of events that you couldn’t trust anything had really happened. Not unless it was currently in front of you hitting you in the face. And sometimes not even then. You couldn’t make the logic work, so the easiest approach was not to care.

But something had happened.

Baal’s head turned from me to Inanna, who continued to kneel beside him. It looked a lot to me like they were conversing – but that would mean they hadn’t been depowered. That didn’t happen by intent. Not with Providence. With Janus and Lucy, this then made four people the tyrant had failed to suppress. Possibly more. There were other upper storeys, after all.

And the executive suite had known; it had to have. These two weren’t making it a secret, and I was hardly a trustworthy figure. Was this why they were kept separate?

So, then. Another prison, more secret than the others, right above our noses. Senior management hadn’t been told. Security hadn’t known, and their job was to handle demotions, even if they predated Providence’s formation. If it hadn’t been for Janus disrupting the pattern, I would have surmised internal PR. Former enemies and managers witnessing Yahweh’s decrees failing? Couldn’t have that, even at a high level. Especially at a senior level.

Maybe it was a legacy policy. Enki, Inanna and Baal were venerable even for gods, contemporaries of Yahweh and Lucy. Then why didn’t they escape? Was the containment that powerful? Providence had lasted as long as it had through entire teams shoring it up whenever the latest angry deity decided to run on a rampage; everything else was a short-term solution at best.

I shifted antsily on my feet; Baldr was out there and I wasn’t finding any answers here. I couldn’t afford to wait. “I have to go,” I left them with, and departed, making my way back to the lift.

If not for the place of power, I might have missed it; the sheer volume of the expanse made finding anything a hassle even for a giant. But I did, and materialised back down to the sight of Gia leaning with her back against one half of the door with a leg up on the other, balancing a laptop on the raised knee. I recognised it as being the one belonging to her own mind.

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“Hey,” she said, when I walked in, “I’ve been playing around with all this. Do you know how utterly terrifying any of this is? I can delete my own memories with this thing.”

“Been there, done that,” I said, thinking of the geas. “It paid off, too.”

“But –“

“I can see you’re having some trouble with this,” I interrupted. “It’s not hard. Just don’t do anything stupid and you’ll be fine.”

“But I could do this to other people,” she said, lifting her fingers off the trackpad. “I could do it to you. Maybe I’ve already done it.”

Tru glanced at me in the kind of expectant way people did when they could sense what was coming, an impressive achievement for a sheep.

“Okay,” I began, not about to disappoint. “I’m not your conscience or your boss.” I thought about the latter. A word probably didn’t exist to describe our precise relationship. “Technically. I don’t have to explain context to you. Think of your real boss as consequences. The social principles you grew up with, flawed as they are, still apply. You can do things, and a certain number of those come with backlash.” I pointed to the telling bulge at her hip. “If it’s regulation you’re after – and I wouldn’t recommend it – you have the queen of it in your pocket. But you got this far without stabbing people in their sleep, and you can do this. Otherwise it puts you in Baldr territory and we might start to have problems.”

We’ll definitely have problems, stated Tru.

“That said,” I added, stroking my chin thoughtfully, “with the way things are, you may as well go to town. It’s a good weapon against Baldr if we can get you close.” Which would, of course, be the hard part. I clapped my hands together and moved to the back of the metal box. “In any case, there’s nothing useful on this floor, so here’s the plan: we ride down storey by storey and release the grenades. That should clear out most of the trouble, and it’ll join Themis and crew.” I pointed again to the flask. “Whatever’s left, we’ll have to deal with ourselves.”

“And that won’t be a problem?”

I shrugged. “Depending on how much of the building is responsive to the suction effect, absolutely it will. Probably better to stay in the lift. Unless you have a better idea.”

Won’t this effect catch us as well? Tru pointed out.

That was the problem. I’d considered making another trip down to collect one of the remaining Hungarians. The issue with a blanket anti-divinity weapon was that it needed a mortal to pull the trigger. But as with most things, circumvention was just a matter of looking hard enough. We knew Siphon’s bombs were blocked by dimensional barriers, and I could manipulate those at the moment. All I had to do was place them around the elevator, effectively plucking it out of one reality into another, and reach through the barrier with the equivalent of a pointy stick. But I did need something as a starting point, and my last experiment with Providence’s outer boundaries had made it clear I wouldn’t be using those.

Unless the starting point was me. I eyed the enchantment-ridden lift walls with some trepidation. I’d never been able to replicate powers, but a dimensional barrier wasn’t a power so much as a structure, and I could do those. It had just never occurred to me to try. Holding a palm out in front of me, I considered everything I’d learnt from my experiments with dimensional travel, and more recently being part of it, and shifted.

Visibly, nothing changed. But I could feel the difference, currently localised in my hand, and drew in a long breath. Expanding my sense of self to encompass the elevator as a whole, I shifted again, moving the dimensional walls with me until the whole interior chamber was no longer of Providence, or even Earth, but somewhere else again.

I was fairly sure this meant I’d just created my first universe. Which would explain why it felt so difficult to maintain. Somewhere out there, Enki’s afterlife edict would still be in play working against me. But I could keep it up in the short term.

“I’ve got this,” I announced, doing my best to stay focused. It wasn’t every day you uncovered a new aspect of your powers, and it felt like I’d done it with several. Had I been able to do this all along to a lesser degree without the place of power, or had something changed? I couldn’t say, not least because change as a domain could sit far in the abstract. It was possible I’d been quietly altering my own capabilities, much like Hel had done before me. I looked Gia in the eye and nodded towards the hip flask. “Remember what I said about grenades?”

“On it.” She pulled out the object and placed it carefully on the floor of the lift, where it shimmered into a pile of lumpy metallic ovals. “Uh –“

“We need more. A hundred should do it.”

Gia closed her eyes, and I watched as the grenades split and multiplied, stretching apart in growth of dull silver. The pile grew taller, with capsules rolling from the peak onto the ground until they surrounded our feet in a tightly-packed layer. Some threatened to spill out of the lift into the expanse beyond, and I added a lip to the bottom of the door to keep them contained. Startled, Gia shuffled back into the lift with the rest of us.

What is going on? Themis snapped from all of them. Did you partition us?

Of course not, I said innocently. Envy did. Don’t worry – it’s all very orderly, with detonations in order of company hierarchy.

I felt Themis’ alarm. What do you mean, detonations?

“Is this really going to work?” Gia asked. She cupped her elbow with her opposing palms, looking cold even though the atmosphere was fixed at room temperature. She nudged a grenade very carefully with the toe of her shoe. “They won’t backfire?”

“They’re your grenades,” I said levelly. “You tell me.”

“I don’t know the first thing about grenades,” the analyst stated.

I do, said the resident assassination sheep. And these don’t look like any I know of. For one thing, they’re glowing and electronic.

“Don’t listen to him,” I said. “It’s all about intent. I don’t know anything about being an elevator, but we’re all starting somewhere.”

They both stared at me.

Pull out the pin, said Tru, shaking his head a moment later, even if it is glowing, then chuck it as far as possible out the door.

“Now?”

“Yes,” I said, and braced.

Electronics and wires ran through my body, not to mention half a dozen currents and vortices of divine magic I barely knew what to do with. The moment they’d become part of me, I knew instantly what they did, even if I couldn’t control them. Not all of them were playing well with being looped in and out of universes, either.

Gia pulled the pin on the first grenade and hurled it away. With a demon lord’s strength behind it, the capsule barrelled rapidly into the swallowing darkness and disappeared. A few seconds later, I made out a very distant clatter.

No traditional explosion followed, but that wasn’t what I’d been expecting.

I kept up the walls of my small universe and twitched involuntarily as something cold and artificial brushed against them from the outside. I recognised it from Regina’s initial description. But as empty and dead as Siphon’s construct was, I nevertheless felt a strong divine influence lurking within it, expansive and strangely recognisable.

Recently recognisable.

Because I’d been there not long ago. The entity aiding Siphon, and possibly the identity of our elusive chessmaster, was Yggdrasil.