“You know, I can still put you back in the desert,” I reminded him.

He sneered at me. “I don’t think your boss would like that. He seems invested in my wellbeing.”

“He’s not my boss,” I said, annoyed. “And you’d be fine. You’ve been too busy complaining to even notice your hand’s healed. If you can shrug that off, a little wilderness should be no problem.”

An expression of surprise crossed his face, and he looked down at his palm, running a thumb over the unblemished rune. Without a word, he stood up and crossed the room, pressing a switch on a silver panel in the wall. A robotic whirr filled the air, and metres away a section of the wall slid open from floor to ceiling, revealing the contents of a hidden compartment, which turned out to be a desk with an expensive-looking computer on it. In silence, he booted it up and started scrolling through search results.

I found a free-standing chair in the oversized kitchen and carried it through to the computer, plopping myself down on it in a spot where I could look over his shoulder. He had several tabs open, and Christian iconography filled the screen. I didn’t have to wait long. Despite his best efforts to ignore me, it was clearly getting to him.

“Fine,” he relented at last. “What is it?”

“Aren’t you even a little curious?” I asked. “Most people have questions when the supernatural comes knocking and never find the answers they seek. Whereas I’m right here, full of the secrets of the universe, and you seem determined to pretend I don’t exist. You’re missing a fantastic opportunity.”

“I doubt it,” he said, not taking his eyes off the screen. “You’re still going to be here tomorrow, aren’t you? Or have you changed your mind about helping yourself to my property?”

“Well, there is that, true. No hard feelings.”

“All the hard feelings,” he corrected. “My life was great until you came along. Now I have to put up with you and whatever this is.“ He gestured to his palm.

Power was wasted on him. “You’re right,” I said. “So unfair that we land in your lap and grant you unimaginable power to reward your familicidal urges. Life can be so hard sometimes.”

“I wish you’d shut up about that,” he snapped. “That was three years ago. I saw what you know about me, and it’s not the full picture.”

“Blame limited server capacity,” I stated. “That’s what we get for using mortal technology. But please do continue making excuses for your shitty behaviour.”

“Really? You’re going to do this?”

I rested my elbows on the desk, eying the selection of over-the-top bejeweled crucifixes up on screen. “What, you don’t want a chance to tell your side of the story?”

What kind of Greed was he, anyway? Money alone felt thin. At the very least, I’d have expected some level of thirst for knowledge and power. Tru’s apparent lack of both was not only irritating, but actively unusual.

Lucy wouldn’t have been mistaken, though. There had to be some form of ambition in there. I could just be looking in the wrong place.

He didn't look my way. “That would require you to listen,” he muttered.

“Hey. Housemate,” I said. “I may not look like it, but I’m an excellent listener. Try me.”

“Fuck off. You don’t get to waltz in, steal my stuff and convince yourself you’re my new best friend.”

He had a point. I would have gone about things very differently if I’d known what would happen. “Yes, alright, we did get off on the wrong foot and that’s my fault. But I wouldn’t be so quick to turn down help if I were you. You’re about to be dragged into some stuff you don’t know anything about which will likely pit you against some very powerful people, and you need allies. And –“ I broke off, reading the words on his screen in greater detail, “- are you hiring an exorcist?”

“Yes. What does it look like?” he snapped, not trying to hide it.

A laugh escaped my mouth before I managed to clamp down on it. “Ah,” I said, smiling. “That might work if I was actually a demon. As things stand, I’d strongly advise against it.”

“Exactly what a demon would say,” he said. “All you do is lie and cause trouble.”

Not an entirely unfair assessment, all things considered.

“Listen,” I said, taking pity on him. “You’ve got the wrong idea about demons. Religion is like state-controlled media – it only gives you the side of the story suiting the agenda of the sponsor. It’s hardly your fault – you’ve grown up in an environment indoctrinated in this sort of thing. But you can choose to stay in it and reap the consequences, or drag yourself out of the clutches of its limited worldview.” He didn’t respond, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. I was aware that the harder I tried to convince Rap Boy of the truth, the more it would come across as stereotypical demon behaviour. He expected demons to tempt and corrupt, and so far I wasn’t letting him down. If I persisted long enough with strong enough evidence I could see myself making some headway, but it wasn’t an efficient means of winning him over.

I toyed with the idea of talking to him in another shape - possibly even the stereotypical image of a winged angel – and decided it wasn’t worth it. Not only did I have a feeling he’d know it was me – the rune on his palm seemed to link us in a way I wasn’t fully clear on yet – but he was going to figure the situation out for the sham it was soon enough anyway. Better to let him shove his face into the bowl of explosives and learn from his mistakes.

“Suit yourself,” I told him, abandoning that line of conversation. “After you’re done booking your appointment with poor life decisions, I expect a copy of your bank logins as per our agreement.”

A buzz from my phone served as a welcome distraction, at least until I saw who it was from. [Meeting at noon PCT tomorrow. Don’t forget.]

The last couple of hours had been blissfully Shitface-free. I supposed it had been too much to hope for that it would stay that way. PCT was of course ‘Providence Company Time’, a necessary specification for an organisation that couldn’t decide which timezone it belonged to. The main entrance had probably moved on to a new location already in the short time since Tez and I had terrorised the local backpacker population in some doomed offshoot timeline.

How much Apollo knew about was what was going on, I couldn't say. Probably most of it. Probably more than I did, at this point. When he‘d asked to join the rebellion, I hadn’t realised he’d meant an immediate one. It would be just my luck if he turned up the next day with an itemised agenda detailing a formulaic corporate takeover, piece by boring piece.

Although if we could make use of Tru’s newfound abilities, there might even be some merit in that. I didn’t know how the board would react if they walked into the office one day to discover fifty-one percent of company stock had been bought out by an independent entity. Legal, Finance and Compliance would have conniptions for certain, but in practical terms I doubted it would be more than an inconvenient blip on the radar. Unless other things happened to go wrong at the same time. Providence held all the trappings of a mundane corporation, but strip away that thin outer veneer and it was anything but.

There was still plenty of time for mischief, but for once I wasn’t in the mood. So much had happened in the span of a few short hours that I needed time to digest, and tomorrow showed no signs of slowing down.

With Tru engrossed in organising what I assumed was his first genuine assassination attempt, I headed out to the infinity pool and turned myself into a fish, where I immediately began choking on the chlorine until appropriate adjustments were made. All my shapeshifting experience had been back before the last three hundred years of technological progress, and there was a lot more for me to work with - and against - these days than there used to be. It was going to take some experimentation. And yet I’d take the chemically-imbalanced swimming pool over the ocean, which by all accounts was soon going to be made of solid plastic. The world was unrecognisable compared to just a few centuries ago. Better in many regards. Worse in many others. Headed for an environmental apocalypse regardless of whether I or anyone else interfered or not, which decided that debate as far as I was concerned. The tyrant would have to get his act together soon or he’d have nothing left to rule over but algae and cockroaches.

And us. It had always been about asserting his dominance over the rest of us. People he couldn’t just destroy in a flood or rain of fire; people who posed an actual challenge. That there was still debate over the callous indifference with which he viewed mortal life was staggering, in the face of the afterlife decision and the species lining up to die out one by unfortunate one. And a full half of Providence’s workforce – the half with any real agency – just let him.

We worked for a monopoly staffed by complacent idiots. When the entire mortal world was locked in the void and most of Providence was out of a job, what then? Would the internal cull begin? The tyrant’s objective was obvious: absolute, unconditional power. He’d announced it enough times in his stupid manifesto, all eight hundred thousand words of it. I had a feeling he was at least a bit like Eris, messed up in the head. Just better at disguising it. Either the executive team were naïve enough to believe they could rein him in, or they’d swallowed his pretty words hook, line and sinker.

According to Lucy, he’d always been that persuasive. And there had always been plenty of people gullible enough to believe it. That was what we’d be up against. Not a power-mad corporate overlord, but the facade of the kindly old gentleman who claimed to only have everyone’s best interests at heart, even while he was hard at work removing the keystones from their foundations to use on the ever-narrower walls around his personal citadel.

To get to him, we’d somehow have to get past the six-person executive team. Each member was as powerful as Enki in their own way, and most were less agreeable. I wasn’t looking forward to having to deal with Odin, and getting past Vishnu was going to be like trying to find a non-existent chink in an impenetrable wall.

But it could be done. Not head-on, no. Either through winning hearts and minds, or, if we were very lucky, sneaking through a back door and striking before the defense reflexes kicked in. It was a long shot, but I was already committed now, wasn’t I? Our mysterious manipulator in the background had seen to that.

I needed to find out who they were and what their goal was. However the revolution ended up going down, I was going to make it my priority.

I had a lot of thinking to do.