He didn’t have to find me on the next jump. Only a pane of glass separated us, one side of Providence’s foyer to another. Baldr’s demeanour more closely resembled his true self this time: lawless, unhinged and rabid. Coated in dust and streaked in blood, an army of willing recruits stood with him.
In burnished, pristine boots reflected in the marble beneath them, I stalked up to the barrier and stared back.
Pieces of crumbling tower rained from the sky.
Ephemeral, the world turned.
---
In Singapore, the belly of Siphon, I woke to a repeat of my covert invasion.
I sidestepped out as Baldr crashed erratically in, smashing both soul jars to oblivion. No more Vishnu and Themis to call on now.
He was starting to realise it now, I wagered; the imminence of his return to the void. Desperate and propelling himself at the wrong enemy. Clawing and grasping at promises sprinting away from him, denied another day. Powers deserting him, gifts ungiven.
In an attempt that backfired, I warped again and landed in crushing pressure, my trajectory predicted by the powers of a hunter, warrior and seer.
I lost consciousness in an instant.
---
I roused in another. It looked awfully like an airport.
My nemesis dived at me out of the aether, faster but weaker. I took the blows, but the thrashing was that of a drowning man trying to wrestle water. Violence and games were all he understood, and neither would help him here.
When I exhaled poison, my pursuer breathed it. As he choked, I absorbed the terminal whole and crushed him with the power of a city.
---
Baldr’s face loomed at me out of a cloud of steam, and I caught myself a fraction of a second before smashing myself into the mirror.
Tense, I waited, but the real one didn’t arrive. It was dark. My skin tingled in the transition between temperatures. The rush of warm water drummed from a shower nearby.
Perhaps he hadn’t internalised Pakhet’s tracking yet. Perhaps he could no longer steal anything. I never had learnt how he’d acquired the ability. It must have been a rapid ascent.
Time travel wasn’t what I’d expected. It wasn’t enough to send me back; it had to kick me when I was down and make me watch it unravel.
It took me a second to notice the second face encroaching through the vapour and lunged into gas form, sending tendrils of steam into violently swirling havoc as the real Pakhet manifested claws and ripped through the mirror.
The water cut off abruptly, only a few lingering drips pattering to a slower demise.
I reconstituted below Pakhet’s feet and sliced through the back of her heels, or tried to. The Egyptian’s ponytail swung. She bounced on her toes and slammed backwards onto my arms, cracking the bones painfully. I grabbed at the room and melted her into the floor, but she blinked out and came back at my face.
I hadn’t quite made it back to gas when something and someone else struck me from behind, severing my fortifications. Glimpse of red flashed in the corners of my eyes and I was gone.
---
“I approve of this plan,” Enki startled me from inside a golden cylinder.
I glanced around warily, ready for another surprise appearance.
Lucy regarded me with a similar taut, full-bodied tension. “There’d better be an excellent reason,” he announced tersely.
Underwater grotto, just after Baldr’s return. Some of the aches plaguing my body this whole time had finally faded. I held up a palm attached to blissfully unsevered fingers while I tried to place where we were in the conversation. If I had it right, just before making myself look crazy.
Round two, then. “Okay,” I said, matching the first palm with the other in a peace offering. Seconds passed while I attempted to compose myself. There couldn’t be many stops left, and I knew what was coming next. “I promise I’m not making this up. I’m from the future.”
“That does seem unlikely,” Lucy remarked. He folded his arms. “And why does the future need Enki alive?”
“It didn’t go well,” I understated. “And I need him alive. I don’t have much time.”
“I’ll take it,” Enki said, somewhat breathlessly. “How did you do it?”
I opened a few extra eyes to check for incoming deity hate, aware it made me look rattled. Not that different to the first time. “Your stupid swirly lighthouse thing,” I said of his masterpiece, coming to stand in front of the golden cylinder. “More importantly, I need to know how to undo its activation counter, or I’ll have the full weight of the executive after me.”
“You know about this?” Lucy asked the god of magic, raising an eyebrow.
Enki gave a thin smile. “Somehow I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about the executive,” he mentioned, gesturing towards the walls of his prison. “And time travel isn’t to be messed with. Unfortunately, this seems to be your problem.”
“I’m not there yet,” I countered. “And it’s your problem, too. You used it first. They’ll find a little number ‘one’ belonging to Enki and have a serious chat about consequences.”
The smile faded from Enki’s face. “I take it that didn’t go well for me,” he said, resulting in Lucy raising the other eyebrow.
“It didn’t. Tell me how to undo it, and Lucy will let you go.”
The infernal subject of the sentence slid an arm in between us. “In what universe –”
“If you tell me,” I interrupted, lifting it away, “and I ruin everything, you can just go back and undo it again by overshooting my downwards spiral. You’re already culpable anyway. Fair?”
I wasn’t worried about him actually doing it; a few more moments and I’d be gone. Pakhet still hadn’t arrived; perhaps it was too early.
Enki shook his head. “I should never have built that thing.”
“It wasn’t your smartest move,” I agreed. “Fix it by saving the world.”
Enki gave me a long, calculating stare cut short by the incessant tapping of my foot. With a sharp twist of his fingers, a small number ‘2’ appeared in glowing pink light above his digits. Constrained by the light wall, he manoeuvred his neck with some difficulty to look at it, and sighed.
“You can’t,” he revealed. “You won’t be able to reach it, and even if you could, it wouldn’t do you any good. The alerts have already been sent. The process is intended to be so secure even I can’t bypass it, and for good reason. Imagine if Odin got hold of such power. The only way to remove it would be to take the whole edict apart. That’s the price for tampering with the forbidden.”
“So no way out,” I grimaced.
“You don’t need a way out,” Enki proclaimed. He snapped his fingers again and the cylinder surrounding him shattered. Sparkling trails trickled to the grotto floor. “My peers are out of the way, and I’m on your side. All we need to do is work together –”
---
But we were no longer together, unless you counted a second-hand visitation. Enki had already forgotten our conversation, and I was paralysed on my knees at the back of a Roman stage.
The pale man at the front of it snapped to look at me. I expected a bloodbath, but it didn’t come. In the time it would have taken me to blink he warped a hand’s breadth from my face, staring into my eyes with the false composure of a desperate soul.
Crowds screamed their adoration behind him.
“You win,” he announced.
I stared back, mainly because Bragi wouldn’t permit me to do anything else. Declaration of victory or not, the timeline’s lack of permanence didn’t entirely quash my fear for the safety of my eyeballs.
“I’m not a proud man,” Baldr said. “Pride is broken so easily. Time ensures I can’t defeat you physically, and I doubt you’ll listen to any attempts to bargain.”
Surprise, surprise. Funny how consequences took a while to sink in.
“So that leaves me with two options,” my enemy continued. “Hurting you, or giving you an opportunity to converse about something interesting.” Belatedly, he waved at the muttering Bragi to release me, and the compulsion gradually faded.
I twitched as movement returned, sorely tempted to stab him directly into the next jump backwards. But it was the end – for now, anyway – and if he made his way back to being a threat again in the past, shaving a few seconds off here wouldn’t change much. Temporarily, at least, time made slaves of both of us.
“Well,” I slurred once I could get the words out, “you’re not braindead. Just extremely emotionally stunted.”
Legba, who I’d barely remembered was next to me, raised a hand to slap me across the cheek. Baldr caught it before it landed and snapped the wrist into splintered pieces.
The Chief Marketing Officer screamed.
“You’re not disproving me,” I said. “And you’re right about the bargaining. So with that in mind, what would I supposedly find interesting? What marvellous trick are you going to demoralise me with at the last moment, unsuspecting? Or conversely, lull me into a false sense of security? What shred of empathy are you hoping to tease from me? Do tell: I’m listening.”
“Yes,” he replied. “You are. You always have been. I want to know what you think of me. Hear it from your lips. The only true recounting I might ever hear. Tell me.”
It wasn’t a bargain; he had nothing trustworthy to offer me. He didn’t ask for a favour, his promises being worthless currency. It was an order, with no compulsion to follow it and no promise he might change.
I told him anyway.
All the spite, derision and rage earnt from hundreds of years of enslavement, trauma and misrepresentation. The pain of sheer powerlessness; the guilt from running away. The loathing and hate at what he had done and what he might still, and when I threatened to run out of words I made him feel it, though the effort was probably wasted.
As I talked, it became harder to separate what was about him from what was about myself, because so much of one was shaped by the other. Rome hovered dimly around my awareness in the background.
Baldr’s face was rapt –
---
– and I was locked in battle with an angel high above the surface of the moon, clinging to a screaming demon lord while elsewhere Lucy sent Janus to freedom. My place of power waned.
Of all the moments to be sent back. Baldr was gone, wasn’t he? He had to be.
I tried to recover my bearings, but with a heave from the angel, Gia was torn flailing from my grasp. In my mind, her rune instantly winked out.
In that instant of distraction, brief, shattering pain bloomed in my temples, and I remembered there’d been a second one.
Everything was abruptly gone.
Sharp, disconcerting and swallowed in enveloping absence. My body, the demon runes, my magic – all of it rendered down to formless, inscrutable nothing.
But I was still here, alone with my thoughts, and I knew this place; I’d been here a few times now. No Janus or Apollo this time to keep me company, no backdoor out, and no hope… except for the loophole of time travel.
A stark reminder of what might have been, had things been very slightly different.
I chafed somewhat at the indignity. Sixteen hundred years successfully evading death, and an angel was what finally got me. Not even one of the good ones. Wielding a godkiller, yes, but urgh. It was a good thing there were no permanent witnesses.
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I held onto that pettiness, because the alternative meant dwelling on the possibility of death nullifying the effects of the edict. No one had rewound time and died in the process to my knowledge, and Lucy and meddled with it as well. Important permutations remained untested that affected my wellbeing.
The long seconds counted down.
---
Death did prove to be fleeting.
Other jumps followed. For the first few, I looked over my shoulder in case Baldr had found a bypass, but of him there remained no sign.
Without him pursuing me, events proceeded more or less according to memory. With a few differences. I gave Yun-Qi my blessing to mobilise Xiānfēng into Yggdrasil, and realised I should have the first time.
Siphon fell, again.
When I finally caught up with Tez, descending on him from the other direction, the dishevelled seer took one look at me and simply said: “Oh.”
“Oh,” I confirmed, which ended the conversation.
I bit into Yggdrasil’s apples, and streamed digitally through the Helpdesk task system. I revisited the red dust of Lucy’s abyss and came face to face with Tez again.
“Oh,” the seer said.
“Oh,” I agreed, and grinned.
The threads of a devil’s pact wove secrets in my head. Tru and I drank tea in Vince’s cottage. In an abandoned Soviet monument, I shared executive secrets with a delighted Pakhet. On a skyscraper scaffolding I told Hel everything I could, with the exception of Baldr’s name.
I landed in Hera’s office with Vishnu and an un-amuletised Tez.
“Ohhh,” the newly-promoted seer drawled out.
“Oh, yes.” I hadn’t been sure how far back he’d been infected. Apparently further than this.
I debated multi-tiered destiny with Janus and made sure Clara didn’t drop her gelato. I sprawled on the roof of Valhalla. In Yahweh’s executive shaming session I hijacked the meeting to reveal the truth about Baldr, and died again. My chest grew a hole in it. I played enthusiastic corporate subterfuge with Legba, revealed divine secrets to the People’s Clinic of Hangzhou, and pulled Regina out of Singapore early.
On Mayari’s sunlit island mid-group strategy meeting, all my worshipper information missing from my head, Tez looked at me and said: “Oh.”
“Oh,” I nodded.
Time jumped back a little further.
Tez threw a bottle of sunscreen at Lucy. “Durga’s going to be late,” he announced sourly, and fell back into a beach chair that appeared out of nowhere. A moment later, some of the sourness vanished as he raised a wary head towards me.
“Hi, Tez,” I waved back. “I’ve been waiting.”
It took a few moments for his expression to change again. “You’re not serious.”
“Yes, it’s not quite the same as being a seer,” I commented, “but it’s certainly an experience. Trust me when I say you don’t want to look into these futures.”
“What are you talking about?” Mayari queried, glancing between us with open concern. “What did Tez see?”
“Not what I expected,” Tez deadpanned, “and I didn’t get past this meeting.”
“There is no past this meeting,” I followed up, and dropped onto the warm, soft sand. “It’s a sunny day, Odin is paste in a vat, nobody is in the office and we’re on a beautiful island full of confused refugees. Things are good. Enjoy it before the tsunami.”
“We’re the tsunami –” Mayari protested, but Tez cut her off, looking stricken.
“Listen to him. The planning can wait one more day. What if it’s our last?”
“Hah,” scoffed the lunar goddess. “Exactly why we need to plan now.”
“Then wait five minutes,” I enunciated, leaning back. Putting my head on my hands, I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the pain in my chest. “Let me have this.”
What’s really going on? Lucy asked me privately while Mayari grumbled.
I cracked one eyelid back open to observe him. This time around, he seemed less concerned with the sunscreen. I’m travelling in the wrong direction, I answered.
And?
And it’s heartbreaking.
I’m not sure I follow, Lucy said. Is this supposed to be a metaphor?
He was going to die again, or as good as, in a matter of seconds. They all were. A little bit more erased.
This is where I want to stop, I stated, as much to myself as anything. I could do a lot from here. But if I can’t, at least let’s enjoy –
---
I sat on a fence in downtown Lima with Durga. The Hindu goddess tilted her chin quizzically at me.
I put my head in my hands.
Shortly after, I found myself being introduced by Vince to Gia. Neither were demons.
Apollo’s ghost stared at me in horror in an executive boardroom as I threw off my guise and freely admitted to treason.
---
I found Tez alone on Floor T, hours old and squeezing a sponge into a bucket. The wrongness in my chest was young and fresh.
“I am,” I began, gazing at the infinite time loop’s infinite bloodbath, “going to make sure you never get that promotion.”
The seer lowered the sponge and turned to face me. He cracked a thin smile. “You make it sound like a threat. And you shouldn’t know about that. Yet.”
“Secret technique?” I threw out as a half-hearted suggestion. The time loop reached its fourteen-second limit and lurched as it reset.
“What the hell is going on with you? You walk in and the future doesn’t so much change as crack like you walloped it with a sledgehammer.”
“Eh, you already know,” I replied.
“I know what you tell me,” he clarified. “And time travel is hard to swallow.”
“Good. Keep it that way. Because I’m going to see you only once more after this, and that’s it. If I don’t skip it entirely.”
I thought I could see the hairs rising on Tez’s arms. “Don’t do that,” he chided me. “Don’t try and talk like a seer. You’re twisting our power and making it creepy.”
“Sorry,” I said, and plucked the sponge from his fingers. “I didn’t do right by you in my timeline. Hold onto the promotion thought, and know that I also promise to do my best to save you and your predecessor.”
“Yeah,” he said, giving me a look. “Still creepy.”
I squashed the sponge into the office carpet and watched the red seep in. “I’d prefer creepy. Actually, it’s just sad.”
Tez sighed. “You and me both, amigo. There’s never enough time.”
Enough or not, I used what I had to sit with him in the shadow of the blood cube.
---
The sun behaved and religious fervour died.
Yun-Qi fell back under his geas, Janus into sleep. My chest became whole, and Apollo and Tez lived.
The instant I spotted Odin, I ran, my allies’ protests of abandonment in my ears. Knowing what I knew, it wasn’t worth the risk. Even now, I wasn’t certain he wouldn’t have a contingency sequestered away for a situation like this.
Tez’s new incarnation became only a memory. Durga, swallowed by Parvati; Janus by the void.
Many of my jumps involved dealings with Apollo. I braced for confrontations, but in every case he seemed troubled and left me alone.
“What’s with him?” Mayari asked in the pope’s hotel bathroom, swinging her foot against the toilet.
“Leave it with me,” I evaded. “I can tell you the whole plan.”
I hibernated as a mosquito in Hungary, endured an encounter with Enki.
Odin stood before me; the pact’s kill switch loomed large in my head. I triggered it, and freaked out at the threat of my enemy.
One jump later, I remembered it all again.
Singapore emerged from lockdown. Tru cursed me for saving him from an exorcism, and I pretended not to recognise Lucy.
---
“Have you considered the favour I asked?” a nameless goddess asked me in Facility J.
“Of course,” I answered, and handed her my lanyard. “Why do you think I’m here?”
---
Regina forgot my name.
I told Hel I loved her.
Truncated snippets of office hours crept back in.
Apollo arrived early to Tez’s payment and removed Athena’s bridle from my wrist. It came straight back on at my introduction to Parvati.
---
I was surrounded by screams and ashen rain.
---
The stakes lowered inversely to my sense of foreboding.
The naudhiz rune vanished as Grace lost his immortality. He, Vince and Lucy traded banter over an extravagant walkie-talkie, which Apollo failed to destroy this time. Without saying a word, the seer removed the bridle again.
It was almost, but not quite, as if he was travelling with me. Like me, the seers changed their course in the current-bound river, and finally I was in a position to perceive it.
Every time I thought about raising it, Apollo managed to be elsewhere being busy. Avoiding me.
---
Vince and the pope forgot me. One demon lord left.
More of my jumps involved sitting at my old desk. Surely I’d gone back a week already. Apprehension at overshooting ate at me and kept gnawing. What if it didn’t end? What if I leapt back forever, on and on until my soul unbirthed itself out of existence?
I thought about it distractedly looking at a corpse from Cianciana’s bed, letting Lofn take swigs of my coffee, and watching Lucy drill magic into an unwilling Tru. Time was flying past, as was my motivation to affect it. I willed the reversals to stop. They didn’t. Ahead of me loomed the lunar vault, the mountain to my plummeting plane.
“I’m a time traveller,” I confessed to Lucy while our new demon lord slammed his way into a hot shower. “We did actually destroy the world in the end.”
“Clearly that went well,” my friend returned airily. “We must have done it your way.”
“Pfft,” I responded. “One data point doesn’t define a trend.”
Lucy snorted. “Learn any exploitable secrets?”
The penthouse living room filled with the rush of running water, and I leant back against my housemate’s elegant sofa. Something probably showed on my face. “Plenty. We’ve had this conversation before.”
“That does sound like time travel.”
“Eight or nine times.”
Lucifer twisted towards me in a slow, deliberate motion, his brown eyes intent. “Really.”
“I was prepared for the moral quandary,” I confided in him. “I didn’t expect it to be so sad. Even with the possibility of something different at the end.”
“And how likely is that possibility?” Lucy asked more seriously.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The executive will be stacked against me.” Holding up a hand, I twisted it into a faceted jewelled claw and turned it from side to side. I wouldn’t be able to do it much longer.
“About that,” Lucy began. “I –”
“– have an army,” I completed. “And demon lords. Yun-Qi is that guy I put a geas on that one time, and he’s Fenrir. You know Odin’s a mind-reader, and have been safeguarding the Spear of Destiny.” I reached further afield, watching his eyes widen. “Tez has been killing himself and Durga was never consolidated. Mortals built a device to destroy us. Yahweh’s been keeping the rest of your pantheon hostage, Providence was built on Etemenanki, and Yggdrasil is not only a tree, but a seer. I,” I paused for dramatic effect, “have a weapon. And a place of power. Eventually.”
The final point seemed to break my companion’s fascination. “What is it?” he asked.
“Given my current situation, something very ironic.”
He stared at me for a few beats, then grinned and snapped his fingers. “Change.”
“Much faster this time,” I applauded him.
“And despite holding all the pieces, you’re terrified,” he noted correctly. The shower cut off in the backdrop, exiting stage with a few lingering drips, and his voice lowered accordingly. “Is it Odin?”
I opened my mouth to say it was Baldr. “It’s the forgetting,” I found myself saying instead. “We had some times, you and I, that you’ll never get back.”
“Mmm,” the devil noted. “Eight or nine conversations.”
“I’m sorry, Lucy,” I said.
---
The Head of Security snapped a golden bangle around my wrist, uncomfortably face-to-face. This close in proximity, I saw the dissonance land in stages on his features, stuttering through in short-burst waves. In the background, I noted the cloying humidity and musty smell of my old shoebox apartment.
I swallowed the whiplash and waggled the ornament in his face. “Boy, have you made mistakes.”
The sun god started to roll his eyes, stopped halfway with a disconcerting jolt, and more of his waning smugness faded. He hadn’t mellowed yet, at least not outwardly, and whatever he saw was taking a toll. Flashes of conflicting personality warred for dominance faster than I could put words to the observation, the experiences changing him in some small way right in front of my eyes.
I held out my wrist expectantly. “Revolution not what you thought it would be?”
To my surprise, the look Apollo shot me had more in common with a wounded dog. “You shouldn’t be –” He struggled to get the words out. “How –”
“Mmm,” I nodded thoughtfully, walking the chain around him. “Devil’s pact got its hooks into you? Or maybe we didn’t go that way this time and you’re just tongue-tied. Or trying to lie.”
A little of the seer’s more familiar self returned. “Whatever you think you know,” he announced in a disparaging tone, “is only a fraction of what I see. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
With a flick of his wrist, the bangle cracked open from my arm, barely after its tenure had started. Every time I crossed paths with Apollo on my rearwards trajectory, it was the same. I grasped at the trailing chain, but too slow; it slipped out and away, retracting into his earring between thumb and forefinger.
Tru’s rune was gone; now it was just me.
“Hmph,” the seer grunted, and vanished.
---
The moon rose: dark, cold and difficult to breathe. My suffocation persisted on the other side of it and refused to leave. Through subsequent jumps, I flexed my magic and found nothing but disappointment to greet me.
Mayari dropped back into distant acquaintance status.
Tez and I eschewed evening rebellion in favour of swimming. It was nice, and less cold. I had a while yet with Tez, even on fast-forward, and resented my brain for making the calculations. I still held out hope I hadn’t overshot the edict’s target, but it was dwindling.
---
“Tell me how to endure,” I asked Durga over dinner as she wielded the end of a spoon. Mouth-watering scents rolled over us, with Regina observing clandestinely from a distance.
The warrior goddess lifted an eyebrow. “Aren’t you already?”
I raised my shoulders in a casual shrug. “Like everyone else, I became complacent. I thought myself vigilant, but it snuck up on me. Providence is awful, but there are worse things than Helpdesk.”
Durga gave me a concerned look. “I hope you’re not considering skirting demotion, Loki. It’s not worth the risk.”
“Of course not. I just figured,” I added, coming back to it sideways, “that if anyone knew about skirting danger, it would be you.”
“Worry about yourself,” she replied.
I did.
---
“I’m ordering you to break your geas,” I said to Yun-Qi.
The executive assistant dropped his tea.
---
“Put that hat out of its misery,” I instructed Tezcatlipoca, who tipped it gleefully in my direction.
---
“I’m ordering you to break your geas,” I repeated to Yun-Qi, this time over the phone, and heard his astonished intake of breath.
---
In a Portuguese classroom, I found myself in front of a sea of children presided over by a colourful teacher with big hair and big proportions. Many small eyes turned towards me.
“Wrong classroom,” I apologised, closing the door again, and left.
---
I slumped at my computer monitor at the start of three and a half abridged centuries of mind-numbing corporate torpor, with thousands of email notifications blinking at me. It was the best it would be for a while. Lucifer tapped at his keyboard opposite my desk over the subtle hum of fluorescent lights and office air-conditioning, oblivious to what might have been.
The tasks were ones I’d seen before, even more boring on the second run. I could always leave them, walk out and wait for the rewind to kick in, though I didn’t imagine I’d get very far. And to what end? Without my powers, I felt tired. One more slave relegated to accomplishing nothing, and not just in relation to Helpdesk.
Somewhere out there, Yggdrasil waited for someone to push it into a fresh start. That person had almost been me. Now, I wasn’t sure it would be anyone. Sure, I could affect things now, but time was still rolling back. Maybe it would restart when I eventually fizzled out of existence sixteen hundred years from now, but what was to prevent it from starting all over? The failsafe’s activation counter, the one piece of hope, had been configured to run from the day the device had been built. Not before it existed.
I wondered if this had all happened before, and if so, how many times.
I racked my brain trying to think of a way out, but it all came back to the timeframes. My only hope was activating some kind of edict override in the short window between jumps, and that took time and knowledge I didn’t have. I needed a skilled working group, or even just Enki, to press towards it in tiny increments, carrying it back alone through dedicated memorisation. Assuming I didn’t waste each jump just trying to convince them.
The task felt insurmountable, only worsened by hope dangling just within reach.
Truly, this was hell.
I rose from my jammed swivel chair and went for a coffee. It occurred to me that if someone exceedingly clever and motivated wanted to punish me, this would be one conceivable way. Build an invisible prison with a false exit. Steer the prisoner towards it with incentives and flashing lights. Watch as it crashed down around them. Repeat. I knew at least one person who met both criteria.
I want you to know that everything to come was only possible because of you, Odin had said. Whatever I thought he knew, he knew more.
Was this my real demotion? And how long, exactly, had it been running?
No. No, I was being paranoid. Shivers still ran over my body, and I numbed them with coffee and spite. Breathing heavily, I swung about, back to the kitchen bench, and slammed the drink down with closed eyes.
When I opened them again, I found myself staring at Shitface, dressed in the outfit he’d worn to my initial interrogation.
Cold hope reignited in the pit of my stomach. Every other jump, he’d gone out of his way not to engage. Not this time.
It occurred to me it had been more than a few minutes and I hadn’t been snatched away.
“Well?” Apollo asked. “Are you going to say it?”
I peered at him over the coffee slowly lowering from my lips, then went back for another, less-defeated sip. This was what he’d been avoiding. I pushed myself off from the bench, and made sure I enunciated the word carefully:
“Cataract.”