Somewhere during the desecration, I lost myself to autopilot. By the time Themis’ latest floor report snapped me back to full alertness, Gia and Inanna had taken care of Legal and were halfway to Business Insights. The latter ended up posing the biggest threat yet, indicating at least one of the insights had been the location of the managerial lift, along with the expectation of its arrival. Inanna deflected the initial volleys in a blur of shield-like wings, long enough for Gia to lob it in after and bring the conflict to a sudden, shrieking end.
The groans and rasps shaking the building were now almost constant. More concrete rubble dropped on my roof and rattled like hail. I kept the doors closed in spite of the beauty outside them.
Every storey bore traces of Yggdrasil now, if not burgeoning forests. HR erupted in colourful flowers pushing up through the carpet, and Compliance could barely be seen among its tendrils.
All joined Themis in the soul jar.
Headcount? I asked the goddess of justice, as we descended towards Helpdesk. The site of my recent captivity loomed up ahead.
Eight thousand, one hundred and seventy-two, Themis replied. She sounded frayed. Her voice had been growing ever dimmer as more of her had been left behind. This is well over half of the upper workforce. If I can’t hold on to them all, we’ll have a disaster in progress. Another one.
A gigantic ‘crash’ sounded from the roof again and sent the elevator rocking. I gifted the ominous fallen support beam responsible with a generous head start to the bottom of the shaft, and forcibly untensed my shoulders.
Floor A was riddled with much smaller roots, the depowered contingent only starting to wake up to the former’s march through the building. Opposite my doors, I made out orderly queues in the far distance as employees contained their panic long enough to send teams filtering through my opposite numbers. Next to the regular lifts, the travel stations sat neglected and abandoned. No one was using them now.
We made them quieter still.
Floors B and D were much the same, though I could hear music by the time we reached the latter. It revealed itself soon enough to be coming from Floor E, the one I’d turfed over to Eris. Dubstep blasted out at ear-splitting volumes, somehow not quite enough to smother the joyous peals of laughter coming from the goddess of strife while packs of inexplicable guinea pigs advanced in scurrying waves across monitors smashed on the carpet. I watched, bemused, as another guinea pig dribbled out of one of the floor’s characteristic spatial rifts halfway up a wall panel and dropped, wriggling, onto the coating of wreckage.
No orderly queues formed at the back wall here. Most of the level’s residents had already left. Those who hadn’t appeared to have joined in the smashing. More had stayed than I would have expected.
I almost wished I could join them.
Eris tucked securely in the soul grenades, we descended.
The queues were shorter and less orderly further down. More staff had made it out, but those who hadn’t had started to show concern. Roots had overgrown most of the desks, spurting from ceiling vents and raging out the bathroom exits. A lift on the opposite end pinged and gods pushed forwards in swarms. It didn’t matter, of course. They didn’t make it past the grenade.
Floor L was barely recognisable. The roots had outpaced us, turning the walkways into paths of curling timber. Colleagues I’d grown familiar with over the last sixty years clambered over the growing mass in smart business shoes not designed for the task. Multiple people pried at the lifts at the far end, with what looked like desk legs wrenched off of their original fixtures, levering one of the doors open that had gotten jammed, while others barricaded the boundary from encroaching roots. It was a valiant attempt, and they almost succeeded.
Into the soul capsules they went.
It grew worse the further we descended. The tremors and clatters were constant. Our small brigade, already quiet, turned to silence and efficiency as the floors’ inhabitants grew increasingly panicked, their small spaces overgrown. I gestured at Inanna and Baal – whichever one of them it was – to slow down, but either they couldn’t or wouldn’t, and when Floor T opened with gods mired up to their shins and the cracking of bone, we worked faster.
Seventeen thousand souls, Themis whispered to me from the diminishing pile of grenades. Only a few handfuls remained; just enough to see us the rest of the way. Most of the former Head of Compliance was lost to the upper floors, buried in otherworldly vegetation.
I shoved back a questing root before it could take hold in the elevator, and sent us down.
Between Floors U and V, one of the cables suspending my nascent universe snapped, sheared in two by some unseen force. The inside of the lift plunged into darkness. We swung, dipping out into the kaleidoscope of knitted space, passing through borders that pushed and pulled with different physical forces, including some I was fairly sure shouldn’t have existed based on my understanding of the physical world. Thanks to a few rapid changes in gravity, we almost didn’t swing back. Whatever had hit me hurtled past on its way down, a massive grey chunk, and hit the bottom with a distant, thundering crash.
Stabilising somewhat, the lift hung at a forty-five degree tilt until I reconfigured its internal proportions to sit level again.
Large concrete chunks continued to batter me from above, and the button for Floor U was as dark as rest of it. I pressed it, to no avail. Whatever machinery or magic had sustained it, a key part was now broken. Thinking fast, I made some changes, placing the remaining cable at the centre of the lift, with an old-fashioned mechanical contraption attached resembling a reverse bicycle brake. Squeezing the levers reduced the pressure on the cable, and I did so, sending us down in less controllable fits and spurts.
We arrived at Floor V a little off-centre from the designated doors, but it was close enough to roll out a grenade. Though there was much less space available than there had been, and many more sounds of pain and panic. I smelt forest.
The mechanical lift got us as far as Floor X. The second cable snapped while Gia was pulling out the pin, and sent the armed grenade flying back in with us. I vanished the floor out from under it before it could do any damage and watched it hurtle out into the myriad of exposed patchworked spaces, even as I dug myself into the concrete shaft with giant talons. I clawed us back over the lip of Floor X, now poking through the very top of my doors, and motioned for Gia to push a second offering through. She did so, gulping and standing on tiptoes, while the others clustered and stared at the flickering lights glowing up through the floor hole.
Those lights went dark a moment later. I closed the hole.
Whining screeches emanated up from the lower shaft, and pieces rock crumbled away from my claws.
Faintly in the back of my head, Themis reeled and made a pained whimper. What did you do?
I could barely hear her.
With the supports gone, I took us down manually with my own light to see by, stabbing pick-like claws into solid material to carry us down the shaft. When the segment for Floor X ended, I braced and leapt, dropping a long distance until careening into the shaft for Floor Y, claws screeching deep trails into concrete that crumbled apart on contact.
The impact was rough and might have killed its mortal occupants. But everyone here had been cured of that particular affliction. Gia’s head and lips were bleeding, and Tru had been thrown into Baal, himself thrown sideways against the back of the compartment. Even I hurt, and abandoned the remnants of my human form entirely in favour of hard metal shell. Inanna had simply floated in place, her toes barely leaving the steel of the floor. Now, she crossed the unstable compartment to pick up the injured Tru. Carrying him over to Gia, she stood beside Envy and helped her brace.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Floor Y was almost entirely closed off, though it hadn’t stopped the sounds of its trapped inhabitants. We pushed through a grenade and moved on. It needed another giant leap, every bit as bad as the first, but no one complained.
I had to dig out a space at Floor Z, hammering the soul jar in before daring to let Gia pull the pin.
The last floor – the one for all the gods whose names began with special characters – was blocked by roots. They filled the space where the shaft had been, questing for further purchase in the open nexus of dancing lights. Belatedly I realised they were the ones I’d seen from the outside.
A floor – a whole storey – fell past in a scatter of broken panels and concrete, fracturing through a tangle of interlaced dimensions on all sides. One of Providence’s outdated telephone cords snagged on a nearby support beam, stretched and snapped, sending the phone it was still attached to ricocheting off through a wormhole and appearing a hundred metres distant.
But no time to explore now. With no easy way to avoid it, I dropped to the tip of the largest root and sheared with sharp metal pincers at any others making a swing for me. Pained grunts filled my interior as its battered occupants protested. I carried on, fighting off Yggdrasil to dig my way down the outside of the shaft.
I didn’t need to make the last jump. Yggdrasil had done it for me. I climbed down the dwindling tip of the root as it reached for the last, miraculously empty shaft, then leapt off the end into plunging darkness to race the world tree to the exit with all the speed and clicking steel I could muster. I clattered my way violently down in a tortured cacophany the disintegration somehow still managed to overshadow, inactive grenades bouncing in all directions, until reaching the final set of double doors. The stainless steel remained obstinately closed. I wedged a good number of pincers in and pried at the centre of the device, but the aperture refused to budge.
Out there, only a few centimetres away, stood the foyer. I wasn’t sure what state it was in, or whether Djehuti would still be there. I tried my luck anyway, banging rhythmically on the doors in a manner I doubted a tree ever would. I bolstered it with runic magic, all the patterns for incursion and destruction I could think of scratched into the walls, but I still wasn’t very good at it and the doors were strong. Not surprising for something designed to be impenetrable.
And then they slid open.
I shot out, skittering to a halt in a pristine white foyer untouched by the ravages of chaos or flora, only to find a large cluster of gods – powered and depowered alike – and the remaining occasional Hungarian scattering out of trampling range. The ones at a safer distance gawked up at my passable imitation of a giant metal crab, albeit one on the oblong and boxy side.
Beside the doors stood Djehuti, placing his access card back around his neck after it had somehow, miraculously worked.
Well, we were in the business of miracles. And Djehuti was good with space. He stared up at me now with an unimpressed, expectant expression, and I grudgingly had to admit that, even with most of the office in hand, we still weren’t equipped for taking on this many gods at once. Let alone who were hyped up, on edge and ready to fight, if my read of the mood was right.
The elevator was now tipped on its side, the doors sealed and facing downwards. I opened a conspicuously grenade-shaped hole in the centre, waited for Inanna to set down the demon lords, and watched as she dropped one of the two remaining soul capsules through the gap.
It disintegrated the moment it left the chamber.
It had been worth a shot.
I dissolved my shape, letting its miniature universe spill its contents back onto the foyer floor, and reconstituted as Odin next to my sprawled companions. Next to Baal and Inanna, the latter still carrying my beleaguered housemate, I only received less than a hundred percent of the attention. Inanna spread her wings to the side in battle mode, commanding more with her presence. In the corner of my eye, I could already see Gia taking out a new laptop for the first of many new decontamination candidates. The last Themis grenade rolled to a stop at her feet, and when she stooped to pick it up, it was a hip flask she lifted. I managed to breathe a little.
Behind us, the lift doors closed, only to halt and reverse direction again. A small brown tendril curled out from under the top of its frame, seeking outwards into the white expanse. A few cries rose up from the crowd of alarmed deities, and a contingent hurried over to sort it out.
It wasn’t the only problem. Down here, the devastation sounded like volleys of distant explosives not unlike the ones at the Vatican. Across the expanse, another crowd manned the standard set of lifts, including some of the missing Security employees. I saw depowered Helpdesk employees shearing at branches with magically-supplied chainsaws, while their few peers still in possession of their active abilities erected barriers and sparked fires on the leftover branches. Others still guarded the front doors, barring them closed with bodies and vigilance.
Djehuti sidled up to me, the only manager in sight. He waved back the worst of the crowd out of earshot and faced me with an accusing expression. “You’re not Odin.”
“Haven’t been for a while,” I admitted. “What gave it away? Too much crab?”
“That was the lift,” he ignored me, still on the accusation train. “The last one. Are there others coming from upstairs? Do they bring help?”
I noted the company foyer was all that stood between Yggdrasil and Siphon’s original suction jar. “Possibly,” I remarked. “It won’t be easy. The ones with the most chance are Facilities, but I doubt even they can stop this now.”
Djehuti gave me a tired look. He didn’t ask my name, and he didn’t look like he cared.
Surprisingly, we weren’t being attacked. Confused and shellshocked, the survivors weren’t clustered by hierarchy, or even confronting Inanna. Past alliances meant nothing here; powered or depowered, familiar or unknown, the immediate goal was the same.
A large, dark shape dropped past the windows and landed with surreal, soundless impact, coming to rest against the undamaged glass; a chunk of skyscraper the size of a small hotel. Magic leaked from it in sparking white rain. It flowed against gravity, pouring skywards in pale glowing currents; surreal elegance amidst the exploding clouds of dust. Providence’s foyer weathered the crash without so much as a shiver, but the impact had opened a minor crater. Grey dust filled the outer windows and reduced our view of Singapore’s business district collateral to shadows, leaving the foyer lit only by its internal fluorescent fixtures. They shouldn’t have been working, of course.
I stared past Djehuti to the nearest feature artwork, an abstract number in shades of bright red, and started laughing. Then continued while the god of words stood in silence with me until water irritated the outer corners of my eyes. “Think you can hold it off?” I asked eventually.
The lifts at the far end not yet forced open by roots had started bulging outwards, the metal warped and convex. Adjacent walls cracked, to be replaced with new ones in hardier materials – and those were bending, too. More gods abandoned the centre of the foyer to shore up the fringes, some cajoling Inanna to join in the efforts. She didn’t move.
The doors to the managerial lift hadn’t budged, but it would only be a matter of time. Not much time.
“Yggdrasil alone didn’t induce this,” the manager stated, avoiding the question. “Was this planned?” He glanced across at me once again. “Are we being retired?”
“If we were, what would you do about it?”
He threw up a hand in exasperation, the blue of his sleeve slipping back along his arm. “Are you trying to entrap me? I hold things together as best I can, until I can follow the hierarchy. Anything else means losing another war.”
“Well, you’re it,” I imparted with a shrug. “The hierarchy, I mean. You, Themis and Brigid – but they’re labouring under varying degrees of indisposition. I hope you didn’t have higher expectations of a promotion.”
“If you have a point, I suggest getting to it.”
A second monumental collision sounded directly above us from the inside of the building. This one did rock the foyer, and cracks appeared in the ceiling. Djehuti shot me a frantic look, and waved a hand at the ceiling. Vertigo contorted my vision for a few moment as my frame of reference shifted. The cracks now appeared on the back wall near the lifts, the ceiling pristine once again, and we were standing on a layer of glass, grey dust swirls under our feet. The abstract red artwork was nowhere to be seen. Nothing was where it was meant to be. Around us, other disoriented gods were figuring it out, also looking for reference points.
“I can get you all out of here into Singapore,” I said, shoving both hands up their opposite sleeves. “For how long, I can’t say, but it’s that or taking your chances here. Your choice.”
“How?”
“Well, it’s less economy class than cargo hold.” I gave another shrug, then battled another brief episode of vertigo as shadows moved under my feet. “I can’t fit you all in the crab, and now’s not the time to be stretching the boundaries. Plus side, Themis can explain everything to you during the ride.”
My companion made a double-take. “You found Themis? Have her remove the barrier, for curses’ sake!”
“Two problems,” I said, raising the relevant number of fingers. “Area creep, and –”
The second part of my answer arrived in the worst possible way, as the shadows under my feet resolved into recognisable human bodies, offset from the interior at a ninety-degree angle. Not Hungarians, military, or mortals at all, but gods, fresh from Rome. Faces familiar from hundreds of years working at Providence. And in the lead, right under my feet and exhibiting his pretty, pretty face as the weapon it was, was Baldr. Next to him, withered and almost vanished into the fabric in a gnarled crumple of black and yellow, was a figure I guessed to be Tez.
The barrier was down. And worse, they’d seen me.