Eris was up on the fifth floor of Helpdesk. Ms Head of Compliance liked each letter of the alphabet to have its own storey because it was ‘orderly’ and ‘logical’. In practice this meant some floors, like mine, were standard and uncluttered, while others, like Tez’s, were ribboned through with warped dimensional space in order to fit everyone into an area physics did not want them to go. Eris’ was somewhere between the two.

We garnered a few whispered words and surreptitious glances as we passed through. Lucy was a big name wherever he went, and I also had my fair share of notoriety around the office. For different reasons. There wasn’t much cause to visit the other Helpdesk floors unless I was after someone specific, so it had been a while since I’d been in this neck of the woods.

Eris had one of the desks over near the corner, a seating plan which had been the result of numerous complaints by her coworkers. Themis, being Themis, had refused to disrupt the seating order, but a few things had nevertheless been shuffled around to make it happen that Eris’ place in said order happened to coincide with the corner spot to keep her out of other people’s way. I noted with a smirk that the neighbouring desks were empty, and there were a few extra people working from laptops, doubling up at other desks further away. Eris was an acquired taste in reverse, in that people acquired the taste to stay away from her over time. Not very much time.

The former goddess of discord was slouched so far down in her swivel chair that only her head and shoulders were visible above the desk as we approached. Half her head was shaved, not neatly, along with one eyebrow, and the other had been dyed bright blue at one point but was now more of a washed-out shade of fake grey. She had taken a pot of what looked like green paint and smeared it in a messy line down the centre of her face from forehead to nose. It looked awful, despite the exquisite elfin features underneath. Original punk rocker, Eris. Supermodel looks with none of the fashion sense and the posture of a lumberjack.

“Sup, dudes,” she greeted us. “Let’s talk about your frogs.”

Lucy shot me an unimpressed look, as if to say, ‘I told you so’.

I raised my hands, empty palms up, and tried not to think about my eardrums. “No frogs. Why?”

“It’s the International Day of the Frog, man,” she replied. “Show a little appreciation. Adopt a frog. Or eat one. Tasty stuff, frogs.”

“Yeah, I couldn’t care less about frogs,” I said. “We’re here to ask about Lien Yun-Qi.”

“Lien-what, now?”

“He’s the executive assistant at the People’s Clinic of Hangzhou,” I explained. “You spoke to him at one point about a task.”

Eris wrinkled her nose. “No chance, dudes. I remember maybe two dozen people clearly from the last five centuries. Unless he was the old biddy who killed and ate her five sons in order of how tasty they looked, and let me tell you chances are low, I have no idea who that is. The others are probably all dead by now.” She paused. “She might be, too. She was looking not long for the grave.”

“Ugh,” I said, mildly horrified. “What kind of task did she put in?”

“Oh, it was great. She wanted the tastiest one raised from the dead so she could eat him all over again.”

“Did you do it?”

“No way, man. Don’t get me wrong, it would have been hilarious, but have you seen the forms they make you wade through for resurrections?”

Had I. “I gave up after the first two.”

She nodded. “No one has time for that shit. I sent her a fuckton of drugs, though.”

“She sends a lot of people drugs,” Lucy murmured in my ear. “I usually end up with their subsequent tickets.”

“Yeah, stealing all the credit,” Eris said sharply, overhearing. She rammed a finger up one nostril and pulled out a glob of mucus, flicking it towards Lucy, who stepped out of the way.

“We just need a few minutes to look through your task history,” he said. “It shouldn’t take long to find.”

“Yeah? What are you looking for? Figure I have the magical silver bullet that can put down Yahweh?”

“Lien Yun-Qi,” I reminded her.

“Though we’ll take the bullet on the off-chance you have it,” added Lucy.

Eris smiled, ignoring Lucy and focusing in on me. On her, it was predatory and disconcerting, her stare bearing down like an incoming wrecking ball that never quite hit, but threatened to on the next swing. “For you, Loki? Be my guest.” She kicked her swivel chair back and gestured towards the computer, using her bare feet to push off from the desk.

There may have been a bit of unresolved history there.

Lucy took the opportunity to sidle in and take over, bringing up various back-end screens and command prompts I only vaguely understood the purpose of.

I didn’t trust Eris enough to take my eyes off her. Behind her, from this angle, I could see halfway around a corner which hadn’t been there while we were walking up to the pod of desks, no doubt one of the spatial distortions full of more despondent Helpdesk lackeys wondering how their lives had come to such an ignoble existence. If I kept my feet planted in the same spot and tilted my head forty-five degrees, I found I could see all the way round the same corner, which at once confirmed my suspicion and raised some interesting questions about the structural integrity of this particular floor plan. There were no windows. There were never any windows.

“So,” I said, while Lucy channeled computer science, “how’s life up on Floor E?”

She swiveled and lolled her head back, not taking her eyes off me. “In Barcelona,” she announced, chin pointed at the ceiling, “there’s an unexploded nuclear warhead under one of the city’s most popular museums. One-in-twenty chance of going off every time someone opens the door to the archives. Two decades later, nothing’s changed. Exhibits don’t rotate, no one visits the archives, bomb doesn’t trigger. Everyone goes home safe. Joker who planted it didn’t count on the world moving on.”

I hummed non-committally. “Apt metaphor. I’d argue with you on the ‘moved on’ part.”

“Oh, devil’s advocate, are we? Oh.”

“Technically,” said Lucy, sounding amused.

“Yes and no,” I corrected.

“Well, it’s a real thing,” said Eris. “One day - boom, Barcelona goes bye-bye. People will wail a lot and hand out platitudes like fucking unoriginal candy. And after the viscera stops raining down, Barcelona will be archived like every other dead city and the world will move on.”

She finished with a small giggle and silence descended for several moments.

“I haven’t forgotten you stabbing my eardrum,” I said at last.

Her smile widened. “Hmm, shame. Guess that means I owe you one. What do you want? Ear for an ear?”

Nothing good was going to come out of a smile like that, even if the words accompanying it hadn’t been as ominous. “You know,” I said, “let me think on it.”

She waggled a finger at me that looked like it had been dipped in orange lacquer at some point in the recent past. Not the nail. The finger. “Nuh-uh. What kind of scumbag host would I be if you walked away today minus your due? Especially after you’ve waited so tragically long?” With some effort, she struggled back upright and landed a few dizzy slaps on the shaved side of her head. “It’s only fair, dude. If you won’t choose, it falls on me to take the burden off your hands.” She paused. “Ironic, considering.”

“Lucy,” I called out, a little louder than intended, “How much longer -”

Before I could finish, Eris raised a finger to her mouth – not the lacquered one – and bit down, and by the time I realised what she was doing, it was already too late. Now I did avert my eyes.

There came a sickening, drawn-out crunch, followed by the sound of Eris spitting onto the floor. Something small thudded on the ground. Her breath was loud and a little strained, but there was no whimper.

“Debt. Paid,” she rasped, and spat again. Other droplets splashed on the carpet in an arrhythmic pattern.

With some reluctance, I surveyed the damage. Staring down at the conspicuous gap in Eris’ hand, and the flood of red fluid cascading down both it and her chin, I decided I’d had enough, regardless of where Lucy was up to in his investigation. There were other ways.

“I’m done, Lucy,” I informed him, and spun on my heel. Eris’ laughter pealed behind me, belaboured and irregular. Victorious.

My annoyingly fragile stomach was betraying me, and it was going to be a while before I could unsee that image. Dammit, Eris. This was why she didn’t have friends.

Swift footsteps – feet wearing shoes – sounded at my back, and a few moments later I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Could have used a bit more time there, but it will do.”

“You could have stayed.”

“Not much point,” he said. “There are more distracting things than bearing the unmitigated brunt of Eris’ attention, but I can’t think of many.”

“That woman has serious issues,” I declared. “If anything, she’s getting worse.”

Lucy made a thoughtful sound. “Is that so?”

In truth, it was hard to tell. Even with our powers gone, Providence couldn’t scrub away every trace of our former natures. For many, aspects of their personality had once embodied (and arguably still did) their area of expertise, especially in the cases where someone had been the god ‘of’ something. Eris was Greek, and nowhere did this apply more than the Greek pantheon, who had gods of everything from specific fruit varieties to individual hours in the day. Knowing that, you had to expect a goddess of strife would be a little… unstable.

I hadn’t known Eris long, relatively-speaking, but she seemed more volatile every time we met. How much longer would it be before she cracked enough to land herself a demotion?

Not a great line of thought. “So did you find anything?’

“More than I expected, actually,” he said, lowering his voice as we approached the central lifts. “I found the ticket, which you should read if for no other reason than the entertainment factor. No particular insights there. What is interesting is that someone else has been monitoring her computer, and as far as I can tell, it’s not Providence.”

That was interesting. “Anything we can use?”

“A couple of things. I know what software they’re using, and I installed a second instance copying its parameters. If you’re so inclined, you could use it to see what our mystery infiltrator is so intrigued by. More importantly, though, I have their IP address.”

“And Security doesn’t know about this?”

“I don’t think so. They might just not care.”

I could find that one out from Tez easily enough. I made a note to ask, and half-expected a text to come through from him then and there, but it didn’t. Probably best not to cross my interactions with him and Lucy until after tonight, anyway.

My phone alarm went off in my trouser pocket in a blare of orchestral instrumentation, signaling the end of shift. The ringtone was currently set to the finale of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung – the bit where all the gods burst into flames – for that little extra splash of passive-aggressive flavour. Judging by the eye rolls on some of the people around us, I was guessing the staff on this floor: A.) got the reference, and B.) didn’t appreciate it. Well, you couldn’t please everyone.

“That’s my cue,” I said. “See you tomorrow for shenanigans.”

“Sure. Just try not to get demoted in the meantime,” said Lucy. The lift arrived with a little ding and he stepped into it. “I’m going to see what I can find on this IP.”

I waved him goodbye and headed back through Floor E to its travel stations, dodging one or two more misaligned spatial contortions along the way, and rekeyed my access card to take me home.