I looked from one to the other. Mayari was leaning back against one of the workbenches, smiling. Tez was watching me with an expectant expression. Both of them seemed to be serious. “And this is based off what, exactly?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.

“Come on,” she said, like she was speaking to a small child. “Opportunity.” She pulled one of the tools out of her belt, a silver screwdriver, and flicked it up into the air. It sailed much higher than it would have on Earth for the amount of effort expended, moving with an eerie slowness uncanny in the silver light. Its shadows danced off the walls. “Or are you telling me you wouldn’t take every chance you could get to hit God where it hurts?”

“We don’t know if this is a chance yet,” I said, as she caught the screwdriver. “There's a reason the powered half of the workforce hasn't already mutinied, and I’m not keen to throw my life away pursuing unattainable ideals. Especially not when I’m just about to get it back. Don’t you think Providence would have been overthrown a hundred times over if it was that easy?”

“This is different,” she said, wagging the screwdriver in my direction. “For a start, they didn’t have the greatest shapeshifter alive. Secondly, you forget who you’re talking to. This is kind of my whole deal. I’m telling you, this is how a revolution starts. The right people at the right time in a room together talking to each other.”

“Really? Because I’m pretty sure it starts with low wages and mass discontent,” I argued. “So yes, the conditions are right, but I don't see what it has to do with me in particular.”

She shook her head. “You’re putting together a dream team,” she declared, folding her arms.

I gestured around the workshop incredulously. “With who? Tez? No offence, Tez,” I added, lest he abandon me on the moon for my insolence, “but I picked you for this job because you don’t create waves.”

“Right,” Mayari said. “And look how close you are to the prize because of it. If you pull this off, you’ll be the first people in Providence’s history to do so.”

“That we know of,” I stipulated, holding up a finger. “Since the only way you can succeed is for no one to ever know about it, this might be just the latest in a long line of successful security breaches. It’s entirely possible that everyone else on Helpdesk has already gotten their powers back and is just too paranoid to talk about it with anyone else.”

She raised both eyebrows with all the skepticism of a full house at an atheist convention. “And how likely do you think that is?”

“We live in a world of miracles,” I evaded. Even if half of them were the dumb things people requested in the Helpdesk ticket system.

“Regardless,” she continued, poking a thumb at her own chest, “You’ve got me. You’ve got Tez. And you’ve got Lucifer.”

“I don’t have Lucifer,” I corrected her.

“You do,” said Tez. “You two are practically a couple at this point.”

“Fine,” I said, sighing. “Let’s assume you’re correct. Everyone gets their powers back. We’ll still have Shitface to deal with. He’s the problem that just keeps on giving. And that’s before we even get to the executive.”

Tez shrugged. “Nobody’s saying it isn’t going to be challenging,” he said, scratching his moustache. “But we’re well overdue for a change in management. Someone’s got to do it, and I intend to be on the team calling the shots when they do.”

“Management change? Forget that. Providence needs to be razed to the ground so fiercely it can never be rebuilt. Ashes scattered to the wind.”

Mayari clapped delightedly. “There it is. There’s the Loki I was waiting for.”

“Well, you didn’t think I was going to say no, did you? Who do you take me for? I told you I was keeping my options open. But whatever we do, if we do it, we need to be smart about it. Part of that is going through and finding the holes other people could pick in our plans.”

“Good,” said Tez. “So now that we’re all in agreement, let’s get back to finding bunkers.” He turned to Mayari. “Thanks for the coordinates. We can carry on.”

Just as well. The headache was rapidly approaching the stage where it was going to make me nauseous.

I was well-acquainted with the look of bewilderment on Mayari’s face as she spoke. “But I don’t know anything about this place.”

“He’s being a troll,” I said. Due to the headache, it came out a little more strained than intended. “It’s part of the standard issue job description for seers.”

He spread his hands in an innocent sweeping motion. “Well, I already know what the place looks like,” he explained. “We got there the long way round on a different timeline. Unfortunately every part of this freezing rock looks the same, so finding a shortcut wasn’t an option. But you, Mayari, advised that if I gave you the time and positions of the stars at the bunker, you could pinpoint its approximate location. It worked.”

“Sounds like I know what I’m talking about,” Mayari agreed. “Also, I want to go with you.”

“If we get caught, you’ll be implicated,” I warned her. “At least if you stay here, they might not trace it back this far.”

“Yeah, you don't tell this one what to do. She’s coming. You’ll still need a suit,” Tez addressed her, bringing one into existence around her. The room instantly fell into darkness, save for a small halo around the front of Mayari’s helmet. “Mainly to block out the light. It’s a problem. As for you,” he said to me, “Take these.”

I held out my hands in time to catch the two tiny cylinders that manifested there, which turned out to be tablets - painkillers for the headache. After I’d downed them, I found myself encapsulated in a new spacesuit as well.

He’d made a number of improvements to the design since the last time, no doubt also on the moon goddess’ future recommendations. The helmet looked like it was better integrated this time round, the material shell thicker and warmer, and it felt a little similar to wearing the kind of padding you got in motorcycle gear. The ridiculous windscreen wiper was gone, and I noticed there was a knobbly button sticking out along the back of the left forearm.

If this was the level of improvement I could expect from Tez and Mayari teaming up, perhaps the latter’s ‘dream team’ comment hadn’t been quite so flippant after all. And this was Mayari without her powers. I’d never spent the time looking into what she could do with them, but she’d always stood out to me for three reasons: Because she was one of Lucy’s favourite people, because it was hard not to notice someone who glowed in any scenario dimmer than an office trying to replicate natural light in order to avoid a negligence lawsuit, and because her glass eye gave me an irrational case of the heebie-jeebies.

I tried pressing the button on the suit, and was rewarded by a brief burst of static emanating from somewhere over my left ear. A comms system? I pressed it again, holding it down this time. “This is better than the windscreen wiper.”

Mayari’s voice answered in a return burst. “Thanks. This was definitely my design. Tezcatlipoca’s abilities are impressive, but he has a lot to learn about tech.”

“Yeah,” I said, depressing the button. “I've seen worse, though. We still have colleagues who think the printing press is going to be responsible for the ultimate destruction of civilisation. On a related note: how soundproof are these suits?”

Her head bobbed around a bit in the dark. “That depends. In here it would be partial. You’d have to be paying attention to catch most of a conversation from the outside. Out there? Well, sound can’t travel through a vacuum. The only place it could go is down through your feet. Even if the noise should be loud, you’d hear very little. And if you lost contact with the ground, say, by jumping, nothing at all. But radio waves solve that problem.”

“Well, I’m impressed how much Future Mayari managed to teach him in a short timeframe.”

“Adversity,” she proclaimed. “It brings out the best in people.”

That was debatable. In the short term, maybe. Over a long timeframe, it seemed to be much better at wearing people down and crushing their spirits.

“Why are we waiting?” she asked a moment later. “He’s just standing there. Are we in trouble?”

I couldn’t see a thing in the dark. No starlight to go by this time. “Eh, probably still scouting things out. If I was building a stronghold to house stolen powers, I’d fill it with at least a dozen different traps. That’s got to take time.” He’d be suffering from the headaches too, of course, which wouldn’t be helping.

It did bother me that this was all riding on Tez. It didn’t feel right to sit on the sidelines. But at this point anything I did to interfere would most likely cause more harm than good.

“Huh,” she said. “Only a dozen? That doesn’t sound it would cover all the exposed vulnerabilities.”

“Depends on the quality of the traps,” I specified. “If your best efforts amount to glorified spikes in the wall, then yes, your valuables are going to walk out of there quicker than a small child on raspberry cordial.“

The headache chose that moment to spike up another notch, and I broke it off to curse to myself. My forehead felt like someone was trying to forcibly insert a ping pong ball into each temple. It was still better than the cold had been, though, and I still had some time before it became too much. The painkillers might also serve to buy some extra time when they kicked in, though I doubted it would be much.

“So what would you install?” Mayari asked. “Indulge me.”

Good question. The most obvious measure would be some means of detecting the presence of anyone who didn’t have security access. There were various powers out there capable of that. None of them common, but that wouldn’t be an issue for Providence, who had a pool brimming with potential project contractors. And in most cases the practical effect would be similar. Lucky for us, Tez was an expert at concealment. He'd have that side covered easy.

There would be at least two measures targeting the body. One for redirection, one for transformation, and if those failed, it couldn’t hurt to cater for containment as a backup. When you were dealing with immortals, even depowered ones, relying on force was usually less than effective.

Similarly, you’d want as many targeting the mind, if not more. There would probably be something in there designed to depower a god – which would be an issue for Tez, if not the rest of us. There would be something designed to obfuscate, misdirect, or both. The ultimate ace up the sleeve would be some way of placing an intruder under the influence of mind control, but it was an unlikely scenario. In his infinite paranoia, the tyrant had had everyone with that ability dealt with since early in his career; then, in a staggering display of hypocrisy, tried to spin it into a positive by making up a bunch of crap about the importance of free will. Not that he was wrong there… but if he’d been able to find a way to make it work for himself, he would have.

Still, when it came to Providence, you could never rule something out completely.

Those were just the traps targeting the intruder. For something truly valuable, I would also be accounting for external attacks and setting contingencies on the target objects themselves. And nothing – nothing – would ever operate as expected. It would be glorious.

And also far more work than I was prepared to put in for something I didn’t personally care that much about. There came a point, after all, where it was easier just to let something go and steal it back again later. Question was, how much work did Providence put into their stronghold, who were the people who designed and built it, and how likely were they to take shortcuts? Were we going to be looking at top-quality professionalism, or a rush job from an unwilling contractor phoning it in? It was probably too late to be asking those questions only now.

In answer to her question, I depressed the comms button. “Maybe once we get to know each other a bit better.” Telling someone like Mayari my favourite strategies would have been equivalent to handing over my bank account details on the first date.

As first dates went, however, this would admittedly be up there.

“Well, we’re going to be working together a lot, I imagine,” she said, over another static burst. She didn’t sound offended.

“You’re confident.”

“I told you,” she said. “Dream team. We can’t lose.”

This was not my plan, I thought. “Next you’re going to tell me something stupid like there being fate involved.”

She snorted. “No, that is stupid. And a little insulting. What we accomplish, we’ll earn by merit.”

I held up a hand and squeezed my thumb and forefinger together so that there was a tiny gap between them. “And maybe just a little bit to do with the fact we had the fortune to be born with more power in our fat little baby fingers than the entire mortal world. Call it a contributing factor.”

“It’s relative,” she declared. “And I was never a baby.”

“Good for you,” I said. “More kids should skip the mucussy phase. Nobody likes the mucussy phase.”

“I don’t think I want to know what your childhood was like.”

“Not very sanitary,” I confessed with a grin.

“Got it.” Tez’ triumphant voice sputtered into action over the radio. “We’re in business. Congratulations in advance. We’ll talk about my payment later.”

I felt a rush of elation at the news, my heart racing for a few moments before it settled back into its usual steady pattern. Best not to get ahead of myself. Seers were fallible, and we weren’t there yet. “Excellent work, Tez.”

I heard a startled exclamation from Mayari. “Wait, payment? I want -”

And then we were back on the surface, back in the cold.