I had about fifty minutes before I was due to meet Yun-Qi, which gave me just enough time to tick a couple of boxes.

Leaving Lucy to face his enormous pile of tasks alone, I took the elevator eight floors down to pay a visit to Tezcatlipoca, the reason I had any viable plans at all.

He was waiting for me when the lift doors opened, like any soothsayer worth the trip, eyesore of a striped hat perched on his head like an irritating afterimage that wouldn’t fade. I wasn’t about to say anything, though – I needed him onside.

Aside from the headwear, he wasn’t a bad looking fellow, with slightly messy hair and the kind of earnest, wholesome appearance that tended to put people at ease just by seeing it. (Those people would be making a mistake.) Today he also wore glasses he didn’t need, and a prosthetic foot he did. The foot looked a lot better than the hat, obsidian black with what appeared to be a line of diamonds helixing up the ankle out of his shoe. The glasses were okay.

“Word has it you’re in trouble,” he said, putting out a hand to prevent me exiting, and getting in instead.

“Word travels suspiciously fast,” I observed. “Who blabbed?”

“You do, in a couple of minutes.”

“That… makes sense,” I said. Conversations with seers could be remarkably efficient once you got past the initial confusion, although that was a big ask. “How much do I need to rehash?”

“Well…” he said, “you could start by rethinking the part where you criticise my fashion sense.”

Placing my hand over my heart, I adopted a wounded expression. “I would never -”

Tez cracked a smile just as the lift door pinged open again. "Liar. You should see the look on your face. Speaking of, you need to work on your poker face. You couldn’t keep your eyes off my delectable headpiece mere moments ago.”

I almost made a comment about how I’d happily eat his hat if I never had to look at it again, and bit my tongue instead, since that would only make his prophecy come true. And what was all that rubbish about my poker face?

The smartass was watching me with an expectant expression, and grinned when I failed to deliver.

“You’re learning,” he sniggered.

“You’re not making it easy,” I muttered, suppressing a sigh.

Tez bowed and motioned for me to leave the elevator. “Come now. What would be the point of existing if everything was easy?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Fun? Delight? Every day being better than the last?”

Emerging from the steel box, I recognised the foyer on the ground floor. White marble for days, vaulted ceilings stretching out over distances I knew mortal engineering wasn’t quite at the point of being able to replicate yet, though it wouldn’t surprise me if it was only a few years off. To break up the silvery expanse and reduce the likelihood of visitors developing temporary vertigo, a few abstract paintings hung on canvases larger than a couple of elephants stacked on top of each other, providing splashes of bright colour here and there.

It looked this way because Providence liked to position itself not only on the cutting edge in all things in the public eye, but as being the ones wielding the bleeding knife. The bigwigs probably thought it made up for them being absolute cheapskates in everything else. And white? White was the tyrant’s colour. Pearly gates, holy aura, interminable lack of imagination; it conveyed everything people expected.

I had to admit it looked pretty impressive, though. And the acoustics were incredible. Our footsteps rang out as we crossed the floor. It was easy to picture an angelic chorus filling the hall with sonorous refrains, or -

“Discussing secret plans,” I spoke at a normal volume. It tore through the foyer like someone had let off an explosive. There were a few very casually-dressed visitors in the vicinity, and for a brief moment, we had everyone’s attention. “Yes,” I announced again, raising my voice slightly. “This is the perfect spot to concoct a devious plot capable of destroying the world and all life within it.” I paused for a few seconds to give the echoes time to die out. “And also cost Providence four hundred billion US dollars,” I added, to provide an element that might be of actual concern.

I gave it a moment. Nothing changed other than the snort that rolled around the hall when Tez failed to hold it in.

“Did not disappoint,” he whispered, which didn’t do much to counteract the volume.

“Well, Shitface didn’t turn up,” I said, emphasising the insult to the tune of at least three distinct echoes. “Success?”

“Nah, he doesn’t waste his time on hollow promises,” said Tez. “I just wanted to hear you say it.”

I knew this already, of course, and knew it well. If you were about to do something that would actually pose a threat to Providence, you would know about it because you would receive a visit from Shitface, a.k.a. Head of Security. Shouting at the ceiling was entertaining in small doses, but hardly warranted more than a slap on the wrist. Which was important, because I could no longer afford much more.

"Seriously, though, we should head outside," Tez added. We had some big things to discuss.

---

We walked out the giant glass doors into an arid yellow desert, heat bearing down with a force to be reckoned with. A few dark wooden structures – most could barely be called shelters, let alone buildings – dotted the immediate landscape, with a single lonely road winding away from a central cul-de-sac. Beyond and between them, thin-leafed, yellowish scrub coated the sandy earth.

I smelt the tang of salt in the air, felt its uncomfortable stickiness on my skin. Wherever we were, it was near the ocean. Touristy, too, evidenced by a few information signs I could see nailed to supports.

Behind me, the building Providence had taken over was a contemporary bungalow in a style probably considered avant garde a couple of decades ago; slanted asymmetrical ceiling, exposed steel beams, corrugated steel roof, all supported by the same pitted dark timber used to construct everything else. ‘Information Centre’, it proclaimed in English, in giant steel letters along the rim of the roof. Well, that was one way of putting it.

Sweat was already forming beads on my neck. “We really need to do something about climate change,” I complained, rolling up my blouse sleeves. “This is intolerable.”

Tez ‘tsked’ at me. “Europeans. So sheltered.” He jerked his thumb to the right. “The beach is that way if you want to cool off. I’m not going to stop you.”

Tempting, if not for the fact I’d have to drip my way back through the office afterwards, or worse, into China in the middle of winter. I took out my phone and checked how we were doing for time – we still had over forty minutes. Just long enough.

Instead, I pulled Tez aside, into the shade of one of the structures. Before I could speak, he held up a hand, a more serious expression on his face. “Limited time, I know.” He pulled himself onto a low support beam and balanced on it, legs dangling below. “We’ve already covered what happened with Themis, no need to go over that again. I want to be sure I’m clear on what your plan is.”

Despite myself, I hesitated. Tez hadn’t done wrong by me yet, and I was ninety per cent sure he was being honest with me, but that other ten per cent knew that if I’d gotten him wrong, I could kiss goodbye the life I knew for the worse. A line delivered like that last one had all the hallmarks of someone pressing for evidence.

On the other hand, ninety per cent confidence was excellent, I needed to learn to overcome my more paranoid moments, and the little voice in my brain was used to its warnings being ignored.

“I want to bring things forward,” I revealed. “Far forward. Tonight, if the tests go well.”

He nodded in the way someone did when hearing something they already knew confirmed. “Then here’s what I can tell you. We’ll run a test here, now. You’ll have another opportunity tonight, and you should take it. It’s a good one.”

“Good how?” I questioned.

“It’ll help you grow,” he said vaguely.

The hat conversation kind of ‘good’, then, where I wasn’t going to get any specific pointers and there was going to be a strong possibility of slipping up if I wasn’t careful.

“Grow? I’m older than you, smartass,” I said, which both was and wasn’t true.

“But so short,” he replied.

I should have seen that one coming. When I’d taken this form, my height had been bang on the female average. Turned out nutritional improvements had a dramatic impact on people’s heights over the centuries. It wasn’t an entirely irrational fear to worry about one day looking in the mirror and realising my proportions had become downright freakish compared to the average population. I figured by the time that happened, though, it would be a few more centuries down the line and humanity would have larger problems to worry about, like being infected with nanobot viruses or fighting over scarce resources in a post-apocalyptic wasteland or whatever. Not that I had any intention of letting it happen.

“And you can’t provide any extra details?” I pressed.

“If I did, you’d change your behaviour and it would alert the higher-ups to my involvement,” he said. “They watch for that sort of thing. So no. Occupational hazard.”

I nodded. Risk versus near-suicide, got it.

“High-risk, then,” I stated.

“That’s why it’s a good test. After a few of these under your belt, the real thing will seem like a breeze.”

The real thing should also be tonight, I thought, but didn’t press it. I had limited patience for trial runs, and if this would exempt me from a few down the track, all the better.

Tez was studying me. "I can't give you a guarantee on the outcome. Be careful."

Prophecy was an ever-present thorn in my side; the ultimate piece of red tape Providence could throw at things that didn’t meet their business objectives. The most I could do with it was use it against Shitface to waste his oh-so-precious time, but, while entertaining, it didn’t actually help me accomplish anything.

To my understanding, there were only two ways to avoid prophecy: fly under the radar, or fight it with counter-prophecy. As the saying went, you had to know the future to fight the future. Otherwise you were at best a stick in a river being swept along by the current; at worst, an unwitting pawn in someone else’s game. My preference was for the former option, but that wasn’t going to cut it here.

I had been plotting ways to restore my powers since the day they were taken, but prophecy always managed to get in the way. It had been a lesson I’d had to learn the hard way, multiple times, before resigning myself to lying low and pretending to go through the motions even if they meant nothing. Occasionally I would still poke management where it hurt, or try to, as an experiment. But it boiled down to hopeful optimism on my part.

Enlisting Tez had been one of those ideas that seemed so obvious in hindsight I couldn’t understand why nobody had thought of it before. Black swan events, they called them. Presumably people had, if only the seers themselves, but if they’d tried to con Providence, they’d either failed or the success had been buried to time and obscurity. A more cynical part of my brain argued that perhaps they’d intentionally avoided being asked.

Tez wasn’t the best seer around, but he wasn’t bad, either. And importantly, he was friendly to the cause (such as there was one), at least on the face of it. It was almost unheard of for someone as anti-establishment as he to be allowed to keep their powers, but he managed to do it by virtue of not getting caught. Management were all obnoxious to a fault, but they were still bound by checks and regulations. More so, even, with corporate leadership apparently being fraught with internal politics and tensions simmering under the placid surface they put so much effort into trying to hold together. They couldn't lay out explicit punishments without evidence of wrongdoing. But you could tell Tez wasn't in the good books by the fact he hadn't been promoted out of Helpdesk. Someone in management must have really hated him. As long as they weren't being used against him, active powers were a resource the tyrant typically liked to put to use. And Tez had a lot more than just foresight up his sleeves.

There were protocols, I knew, for breach of practice, arranged in tiers according to severity. You could be forgiven for thinking everything involving thinking for yourself was an offense. It spoke volumes about Providence’s business priorities that one of the few things not included on the higher tiers, at least for those of us on Helpdesk, was failure to complete the tasks we were set. It would have been hilarious if it wasn’t so infuriating. If you completed a task in the wrong way, however, or ignored a high-priority request, that was bad for public relations, and that was when they came down hard.

I liked to think there might be some skilled seers still out there, unbeholden to the otherwise all-consuming reach of the tyrant, planning the rebellion to unseat the authoritarian empire, so to speak. It was unlikely, but possible. Tez had explained it to me in an earlier conversation. A conflict between seers was all about observation, planning and stealth. Observation in that it was about keeping an eye on the primary and, if you were good, secondary timelines for any changes made by other seers or the people they influenced. Planning, to counteract those changes through your own actions down the track. Stealth to do it in such a way as to not be noticed by your competition.

Unfortunately, Tez was up against Shitface, and there was a reason the latter headed up a department. We would be relying heavily on the stealth aspect here.

“So. The usual?” I asked.

“The question is, how much damage can you do in half an hour?”

I grinned.

Even in someone’s desert park in the back of beyond, we were surrounded by ripe ammunition. The more ambitious ideas like using Tez to blow a hole in the side of the information centre had to be discounted, since we didn’t want to attract too much attention. Shame, because I had no idea what would happen if the transition between territories became disrupted, and wanted to find out. I also had questions about where exactly we were sitting relative to sea level and how far away, on the off-chance we could flood the foyer with ocean water. But this was also out of scope.

Best to keep things simple. Starting a cult was a good bet. All the pieces were already in place. Anyone entering the information centre was no doubt already wondering how it managed to be larger on the inside than the outside, with an out-of-place aesthetic to boot. That was our first miracle. Given I had Tez with me, we could then provide more than enough subsequent pieces of evidence to back up any story we wanted to tell them.

I wouldn’t use my own name, of course. My religion was long dead and lacked serious weight in the modern world. Instead I would present myself as an angel from Heaven, building on a framework everyone had heard of and at least some of the people here were already likely to believe in. A few impossible feats later, they’d be eating out of my hand. It’d take ten, maybe twenty minutes if I rounded them up into a group, and they could sort the rest out between themselves under the dubious guidance of some ‘divine instructions’.

Logistics aside, I needed a compelling narrative. As an exemplar of all things good and righteous, I would naturally be concerned with the welfare of humanity. The building foyer would become ‘a miracle sent by God to reward the worthy’, or some such similar drivel, and I would spread the word about the enemy of Heaven known as Providence, who were trying to plunge the world into eternal damnation. They’d buy it, even if Providence sent in a damage control team later, because the party who acted first got to set the ideas. A nice little advantage others had to later expend effort to disprove.

As I was about to set off to start rounding people up, a hand fell on my shoulder. “Nice work,” Tez said. “You can stop now.”

Intent mattered with prophecy. It wasn’t enough to come up with a plan to change future events – one had to be prepared to follow through with them. It was harder than it sounded. Anyone could come up with ideas, but fewer people were willing to take the risks involved in making them a reality. Fewer still would take the kind of risks I was facing. Even just knowing an action was an exercise designed for the purpose of a test could be enough to subconsciously prevent people from carrying it out, by lowering the way people perceived its urgency and importance.

Following through was where I excelled, however, a fact I acknowledged with no small amount of pride. For now, though, I aborted the plan. That was the problem with these tests - I never got to go through with the fun part. That perk had to be saved for the real deal. “How did it go?”

It was a success, of course, because I wasn’t currently being carted away and lectured to for insubordination. But the details were important.

“You got their attention,” Tez replied. “Marketing picked up on it first through media reports. I told you to ensure the cult remained secret, which killed that timeline before it got going. Security got onto it instead the second time round, much faster. Not sure how. We had to create some false leads in response to pin the blame on someone else, but it did the trick. This wasn’t important enough for them to invest too much effort into.”

I breathed out. “Good to know.” And now, calling quits on the cult option, we were reverting back to the initial timeline, or something close to it. Now wasn’t the time to be taking too many chances.

It had taken less than a minute from start to finish, because prophecy was unfair like that. “Is there anything else I should know?” I asked, wiping the worst of the sweat off my brow.

“Nothing important.”

I eyed him suspiciously.

“You could learn to be more trusting, Loki,” said Tez, twirling a corner of his mustache between thumb and finger. “It makes for a healthier working relationship.”

“Ha,” I said, which was about the most civil response I could give to that suggestion. “Until later, Tez.”

He gave me a wave and vanished, much to the consternation of one of the tourists who had been looking our way.

I called out to her in English. “Hey! Backpacker! Have you been to the information centre yet?”

“No,” she called back, sounding confused. Australian or New Zealander. Very distinctive accent, even on a single syllable.

“You should,” I advised. “I think you’ll find it very interesting.”

Who knew, maybe a cult could still get going after all.