“No, I’m not kidding,” I said, taking a guess at what he was thinking. “Welcome to demonhood. And I hope you’re more grateful than the last person we gave the same opportunity.”

“I -” he paused, still speechless, before finding it within himself to recover. “This goes some way to explaining a few things.” His eyes went to his right hand.

“Yes, yes,” I said, stepping out into the corridor where the committee sarcophagus continued to sit undisturbed. “As a growing demon, you may be experiencing some strange feelings. It’s nothing to worry about. This is completely normal.”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” he interrupted, looking annoyed as he followed me out into the tunnel.

“Strike two on the gratefulness, I guess.”

“There are people dead or dying up there,” he replied, jabbing the crosier in the direction of the ceiling. “Now’s not the time for games.”

“Why not? There are millions of people dying every waking moment of the day. Do you let their tragedies stop you from finding enjoyment in life?”

“That’s not the same.”

“It’s exactly the same,” I disagreed, kicking a fist-sized rock out of the pope’s path. “The only difference here is proximity.”

“Which is important, as it turns out,” he said dryly. “If you want people to accept you as a functional member of society.”

“Ah, well, that’s situational,” I admitted. “Right now, the only audience I have to worry about is you. Low risk, high reward.”

I reached the foot of the landslide and put out an arm to stop Grace from stumbling into it. Loose dirt and rocks were mixed in with large slabs of concrete and metal, snapped electrical wiring and assorted other debris representing well over a thousand years of religious ideologues. It would be a difficult climb, not least because the moment we dislodged anything critical it would probably set off another chain reaction and collapse things further. Through the haze of soot and the distant orange glow, I could see straight through to the other side. It was an impressively large hole.

“How bad is it?” Grace asked. He’d put the sleeve of one arm up to his face to filter the smoke.

“Not enough to be an issue.”

There were multiple ways I could deal with the situation, but given the limitations on my powers at the moment, I had to think about what would be the least likely to make Grace vomit up the contents of his last meal. After some deliberation, I realised I had access to the ideal answer.

While Grace craned his neck and coughed, I focused on growing out two new appendages from my shoulder blades, feeling the growths lengthen and gain weight before bursting into a shower of white feathers. I extended the wings, holding them aloft so that the fragile tips didn’t get crushed against the floor. Even with some extra adjustments to make my body lighter, they had to be large enough to support the weight of two people. If there was a more appropriate form for the situation, I couldn't think of one.

Grace looked back at me and made a double-take. “Goodness,” he said. “I’ll never be able to look at Lorenzo the same way again.” He hesitated. “That’s not re – I mean, you’re not really an…?”

I shot him a withering look. “Not everything revolves around your religion’s pantheon.”

“Pantheon? I'm a Catholic. We're monotheistic.”

I snorted. “Only by Yahweh’s reckoning.” Wriggling Shitface’s bangle backwards along my wrist, I extended an arm and nodded towards it. “We’re going on a very short flight. Lean back.”

Lucy wasn’t the only angel in Providence, although he was the sole survivor from the original brood. In one of his more spectacular rages, the tyrant had targeted the entire cluster, and Lucy had gone from being one of many siblings to an only child in a very short period of time.

Until the replacements arrived.

The new generation was, in my opinion, best avoided. Rumour had it they didn’t possess souls, and it showed. Modern AI did a better job of imitating intelligence, and modern AI wasn’t equipped with lethal defense systems.

Grace approached with some apprehension, which I couldn’t blame him for, but I didn’t give him time to think about it. In one smooth motion, I crouched, lowered my arm, flipped him halfway onto his back and brought the other arm up under his knees before he had a chance to react. He didn’t weigh very much. All the thick folds and layers of fabrics he was draped in had served to disguise the fragility of the body underneath. I gave him a final heft to steady my grip, got some motion going with the wings, and sprang up into the gap.

I didn’t fly like an angel. The genuine articles had wings more for show than anything else, with a bit of balance and direction thrown in. Whereas my ability to fly relied on what I could conceivably transform into and was still beholden to inconvenient factors like gravity and wind resistance. It was a sad fact that the human body wasn’t very well optimised for flight and tended to hang vertically, which was why I preferred birds and insects.

In short, it was not a graceful endeavour. But it did the job, and seconds later we popped out of a large sinkhole on one side of St Peter’s Square into a thick blanket of soot. There was sunlight out there somewhere, but it was having to fight to make itself known and it seemed to be losing the battle.

The fallout did not agree with Grace, even as a demon, and sent him into a violent coughing fit. I looked around for a clear place to land while my wings attempted to beat the air into submission, but the smoke was so thick that even my enhanced vision was struggling with it.

“Keep going,” said the pope between coughs, motioning for me to keep heading up. “I want to see the extent of the damage. And breathe. Breathing would be… nice.”

“You realise people are going to see us,” I pointed out. An angel in multicoloured pantaloons wasn’t exactly subtle. Especially not if it was dangling the pope in midair.

“Pfft,” said Grace, then stopped to hack up what sounded like half a lung. “What’s he going to do? Blow up – erk - the city a second time? He just lost that particular hold on me, the controlling – oh, for the - bastard.”

I had misgivings about how well the pact would hold up against the consequences. “Do you really want me to spell it out for you?”

“No,” he said quickly. “I have an overactive enough imagination as it is. Hrrk. Just do it.”

I didn’t need all that much encouragement, and flew up with nothing to accompany the sound of our ascent but the crackle of fire and the occasional wail from a survivor below until we burst out of the smoke cloud into a decent altitude from where we could examine the unfolding crisis.

Yahweh had done a number on the Vatican. To put it bluntly, it looked like a meteor shower had hit. Half of St Peter’s Basilica had collapsed and the other was on fire, and the grand plaza was pitted with smoking craters. Most of the city’s stately buildings were up in flames, with crowds of people out on the streets making a beeline for the national borders, and queues of emergency vehicles on the Italian side lining up to get in. There were other person-sized shapes visible in the smoke, too, ones who weren’t moving and probably, I knew from experience, wouldn’t again. Many of them. Once you got beyond the city walls, the carnage cut off like it had been sheared by a knife. There was no chance anyone was going to look at the aerial images later and think this had been anything but a political attack.

I made a short whistle. There wasn't much of the city left. Yahweh had meant business, and there had been no executive team around to talk sense into him this time.

Grace peered down at the buildings rapidly being reduced to blazes and rubble. “I may not have been a very good believer,” he said, voice wavering, “but this place has been my home for many good years. Can’t you do something?”

Without my powers functioning at speed, anything I tried would be of very limited use. “Me? Now? Not a lot. Apollo might. He spends half his life in disaster zones. He’s probably somewhere down there already.” Even as I said it, however, I knew it was incorrect; the threads of the pact telling me the others were all far away. And if I could feel it, Grace probably could too.

“Some revolution this is,” he muttered. “Lives lost along with priceless treasures, and I can’t even walk away.”

“But you see why there needs to be one. This is nothing.”

“Noth -" He broke off, racked with a new round of coughing. “If my life wasn’t literally in your hands, I would give you an earful the likes of which you’ve never had for that. This is unspeakable.”

“Sure,” I said, angling around to avoid the encroaching smoke drift. “And you need to understand the scale of the forces we’re dealing with. You think this is the first time he’s done something like this? Read your own holy book. He didn’t have some kind of dramatic revelation and change his ways; he’s kept right on at it all through the better part of recorded history.”

“Not like this.”

“Did no one tell you about the afterlives? That’s normally the first question popes ask when they get the briefing. Forget hundreds or thousands. We’re talking billions of people suffering for eternity, and your boss was the one who gave the order. But if that’s a bit too much to take in, think of any large-scale catastrophe. Yahweh doesn’t care enough to bother fixing them, and he doesn’t like being shown up by his subordinates, so we’re forced to spend our time on mindless busywork and propaganda while the world burns. Push the acceptable limits too far - and trust me, those limits are on a hair-trigger - and you get stripped of power or worse.”

“Put it like that, and it sounds like Providence is a prison for gods.”

“It is,” I affirmed. “But don’t think mortals get off easy. The world you know is just another prison for everyone else.”

Grace blinked at me. “Loki,” he enunciated, as if realising who I was for the first time. “Is this where the idea for Ragna -”

Not him too. “Complete that sentence and I will drop you,” I threatened. “I don’t want to get into it.”

Judging by the increasing chaos on the ground, Security didn’t have a response team in place, and Shitface, the one person I would have expected to be here without fail, was still AWOL. What was going on? I pushed through a minor alteration on my hair, changing its colour from red to brown and back again, finding the change to be sluggish. The strain on the pact wasn’t going away. If anything, it was getting worse.

The distinct sound of an approaching helicopter registered in my ears. “Time’s up,” I observed, swooping downwards, avoiding the worst of the smoke. Grace let out a yelp of alarm at the sudden change in orientation and batted his crosier at me in a desperate attempt to hook it around my neck while he clung on for dear life. Once he realised I wasn’t going to let him fall, he calmed down somewhat, though remained as tense as you'd expect from someone with nothing between them and a two hundred metre drop but a capricious pilot.

Arms full of pope, I shook my head free of the crosier. “Where do you want to be dropped off?”

“Inside the city,” he answered. “It’ll look bad if I wasn’t present. People will ask questions.”

“People have seen you in the embrace of an angel,” I pointed out, grinning. “There are going to be questions.”

He sighed.

“Good news is,” I continued, “this puts the ball in your court. You can spin this pretty much however you want, and people will believe you.”

“Unless I tell them the truth. I’m in half a mind to do it anyway.”

“Hah. Don’t do that.” I could see it now. Millions of people being told the lie they were fed since birth wasn’t the way things really were? Evidence or no, it would only end one way – with Grace being discredited. You couldn’t brute force a crowd; you had to guide them gently towards the goalposts before they had a chance to realise they were being manipulated.

“Then what would you advise?”

I made a non-committal sound. “It’s a tough one. I’d like to say it would help to appeal to the old codger’s vanity, but he’s volatile and unpredictable. No guarantees there. What I wouldn’t do is just trot out the standard platitudes and condolences. You’re part of a revolution now; it’s time to kick things up a notch. Just not too much – Yahweh has to think he’s still in control. Someone as ambitious as yourself must have a few ideas, I’m sure.”

My feet hit the ground at the far edge of the city, not too far from one of the gates but out of sight of the main crowds swarming for the exit. I’d made a start on retracting my wings moments before landing, depositing Grace back onto his feet, and just as well – the sound of running footsteps wasn’t far behind.

An assorted contingent of police, brightly-coloured guards and bedraggled tourists emerged from the haze, only to hang back slightly when they caught sight of Grace. Phones were out in hands. Most of the pack looked around and upwards for signs of the angel, and more than a few shot me suspicious glances, but I kept my countenance grave and mildly shell-shocked, adding in a few extra subtle tears, soot smears and grazes to my appearance in ways that wouldn’t be obvious on phone footage.

The police were too professional to waste more than a second or two gawking, and Grace found himself with an armed escort in short order. The other guards seemed as though they were expecting me to join them for a debrief. I assumed I was supposed to know them, but none of them looked familiar. Of the contingent that had been down in the grottoes, there was still no sign.

The police were already trying to chaperone Grace towards the gate, but he planted his feet in place and held up a hand, beckoning at me to accompany him.

“Lorenzo’s loyalty saved my life,” he announced to everyone in the vicinity. “He stays with me.”

It was meant well, but the moment I walked out that gate in the company of the pope, my window of opportunity for inconspicuous departure was likely to evaporate, replaced by police surveillance and, thanks to the pope’s misplaced flattery, probable media attention incompatible with a full time office job at Providence.

The effects of the power drain meant I couldn’t speak to Grace privately in any coherent fashion, but I aimed a general sense of disagreement in his direction until his change of expression told me he’d received it.

“…although of course the people of the Vatican City and its many visitors have a far greater need for the services of the Swiss Guard in face of such irreconcilable devastation,” he continued on, after only a short pause. I bowed my head subserviently in response and headed over to the gaggle of other guards, who seemed torn between looking professional for the cameras and succumbing to the urge to ask questions. The silence didn't hold for long.

“What happened to the rest of your assignment?” the guard on my left asked in a low voice. He was a somewhat stiff, pale-skinned brunette with a waif-like build that got lost in the voluminous pantsuit.

“We lost Raul in the chaos,” I returned, happy I had that tidbit of information to draw on. “Maybe next time they’ll let us each have radios instead of rationing them out like chicken feed, and this won’t happen again.”

“It won’t happen again,” contended the guard on my right. He was as tall as I was, and would have been handsome if not for the fact his face resembled a squashed yet strangely-compelling potato. “There won’t be much left to bomb after this. Closed borders will be the least worst scenario to come out of this nightmare.”

“We don’t know it’s a bomb,” said a third guard off to the side.

“It’s clearly a bomb,” said Potato Face.

“Are you okay?” the waif thought to ask, as the police ushered the civilians towards the exit.

“Yes. Speaking of -” I nodded further in to the city, “- we should be in there assisting with the relief.”

“Our instructions aren’t to -”

I eyed the departing papal entourage. Public curiosity was no match for a demanding authority figure in a crisis situation, so the attention was off a bit and the phones were pointing elsewhere. “Screw that,” I interrupted, channeling a touch of Apollo’s imperiousness. “This is ground zero. People need help, we go and help, not stand around like prismatic buffoons.” I stepped away from the others, raising my hands. “Do what you like, but I’m going to search for survivors.”