On that note, I turned heel and jogged away, opening a subtle eye on the back of my neck to make sure I wasn’t followed. The moment I found myself alone, I hunkered down and shifted into a pigeon, counting the long seconds before the transformation was complete. It was definitely becoming harder to change.

Contrary to the tale I’d fed the ribbon brigade, I made my way back to the grottoes via the sinkhole. The tunnel had collapsed further since I’d been gone and my door back to Providence was blocked off from floor to ceiling, but I was small and resourceful, with as many shapes to call on as my imagination allowed, even if they were running on a delay. Piece of cake. Fortunately the gate was on the other side of the debris, not buried inside it, or I might have had a bigger problem to deal with.

Changing back into Sørine took almost a full minute. As soon as my phone finished regenerating itself in my pocket and picked up signal, it rained down a deluge of pings from the better part of five hundred incoming messages, most of which seemed to be an increasingly frantic exchange between Tez and Mayari.

[Cliff notes, please,] I entered, and hit send. For once Tez didn’t pre-empt the communication, which spoke volumes about how he was faring.

Mayari answered first. [Vatican blew up. Lucifer and Apollo both missing. We thought you were too. Where have you been?]

Well, that wasn’t great. I started to respond but was interrupted by another message. [Also, we have a situation.]

[?]

[How’s your Sanskrit?] Tez sent.

[Seven hundred years out of practice.]

[Good enough. Are you in the office?]

[Almost?]

[Leg it over to Floor T. We’re in the meeting room opposite the infinite time loop.]

[I can’t believe they still haven’t fixed that,] Mayari sidetracked.

[It’s a valuable landmark,] said Tez. [Anyway, get your butt over here.]

I stashed the phone away and made the return trip back to Providence. When I exited the travel stations on Floor L, however, I found myself facing a small crowd huddling around the screens in the kitchen, where a broadcast of the havoc at the Vatican City was being streamed live for all to see. The footage was taken from various media networks, with a smattering of input from Providence’s marketing department. You could tell which was which by the fact one was portrayed in cutting edge graphics and the other projected full sensory illusions into the minds of anyone who walked past within a narrow radius. Because if you couldn’t have the full experience of catching a whiff of the scent of burning flesh while smoke fried the inside of your lungs, it wasn’t the same, apparently.

“Loki!” Latura waved me over before I could slink away.

Like most death gods, he had ended up on Helpdesk after his prior role was lost to automation. After the restructure, the whole department had been depowered, regardless of behvioural standing, out of fear of what might happen if they got together and unionised. Latura was at least nice enough, if a little opaque upon occasion. I was ninety per cent sure he had a crush on my biological daughter and was trying to get into my good books, not that it would have any bearing on whether Hel considered him relationship material or not. Symmetrical tattoos resembling spiked elongated whorls curved down each side of his face from above the eyes to under his cheekbones, accentuating the darkness of his eyes and the thick lashes around them. Every time I saw him, he put me in mind of a young aristocrat who didn’t quite understand the concept of business attire but had tried to jury-rig up something appropriate anyway, only to wind up halfway to goth cyberpunk. Today was no exception.

“Have you heard the news?”

From the way he was peering at me as if trying to divine all my secrets, I had a fair idea what he was thinking. “Little hard not to. Before you ask, I had nothing to do with it.”

Come to think of it, most of the staff were sneaking surreptitious glances in my direction since Latura had called out.

“I wasn’t going to,” he said, pulling me aside by the shoulder and lowering his voice. “Listen, you should know: Odin and Vishnu stopped by your pod just now.”

I felt my eyebrows rise up my forehead. For all intents and purposes, Odin and I had been placed on opposite ends of what was essentially a mutual restraining order. It was a tenuous arrangement at best. “And?”

“And they took Lucifer in for questioning.” He pursed his lips and glanced towards the nearest screen on the wall. “Do you think he did it?”

I stared at him for a moment. “Use your brain,” I replied. “Lucy doesn’t do anything unless he gets something out of it. It isn’t always clear what those things are, but I don’t imagine an afternoon of heavy-handed grilling with the cyclops would be high on his list.”

“They asked after you, too.”

“Did they? I should be flattered. I’m not sorry to see it go.”

My voice carried, and a few more heads turned our way, with reactions ranging from outright disapproval and indifference to reluctant agreement.

“Geez, Loki. This kind of attitude is why people are liable to suspect you in the first place.”

“Like that’s new,” I scoffed, even as my phone emitted an insistent buzz from my trousers. “The city went kaboom, it’s gone, and there’s nothing we can do about it. You should know that. So the number of cares I have to give is limited. Now, I have a meeting to go to.”

Latura fixed me with a firm gaze. “With all due respect,” he said, folding his arms, “it doesn’t look good that you weren’t at your desk. We all pitched in to cover for you. Were we wrong?”

“You did? Why, Latura, I didn’t know you cared!”

“Don’t make me change my mind.”

Truth be told, I was a little surprised at the revelation. I wasn’t used to coworkers having my back; one of the consequences of having a reputation among people with long memories. It beat having to con or bribe people into things. Speaking of, I still needed to address Tez's payment for the heist.

My phone buzzed again. “Urgh,” I said, stepping around him towards the lifts. “I really have to go. I didn’t blow up the Vatican, I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“The truth would be a good start.”

I paused, one foot hovering above the carpet. I’m a signatory to a devil’s pact where we pledged to take down the tyrant, who destroyed his own base of operations in the mortal world out of spite. Except what I actually found myself saying, against my will, was: “I just spent the last hour comparing the differences of fifteen varieties of complimentary gourmet tacos in the Bahamas, Latura. You know, important things.”

Yeouch. That was cold, even for me. Now I knew what happened when I tried to divulge pact secrets.

Rather than punching me in the face, however, he simply looked disappointed.

“That’s a joke,” I added, trying to salvage it. “Honestly, it’s just a case of bad timing.” The lift arrived with a ‘ping’ and I stepped in backwards with a minor salute. “The discretion hasn't gone unappreciated. We can chat later.”

Entering Floor T was in many ways like stepping into a zoo. The entire zone was riddled with spatial contortions to the extent it mimicked an Escher painting in parts, with bits of the floor sitting halfway up walls or poking down from ceilings, all in the effort to fit many hundreds of gods into far too small an area. For now, most of the local staff were camped out in the kitchen similar to the situation upstairs. Where the latter had comprised a cozy congregation, however, on Floor T it was approaching a mosh pit, with people yelling over each other at nightclub volumes and jostling their neighbours for better viewing positions. Nobody noticed me as I exited the lift.

After several minutes of wandering through the chaos of the wider level, I found myself in front of an obvious anomaly resembling a large and bottom-heavy kaleidoscopic cube. Spanning a good three metres on each side, it appeared to shift and undulate with pulsing colours and patterns. At least at first. Closer inspection revealed the anamorphoses for what they were: people.

Nobody knew for sure why the time loop had appeared, although I imagined it would have had something to do with the concentration of warped physics in the vicinity. It had sat there invisibly until someone had walked through on their way past – and then kept on walking through forever. On a fourteen-second timer, resetting with a noticeable jump each time.

The thing was harmless enough unless you were sufficiently reckless to try and enter the field and interact with the people inside; the shadows of people’s passage were not only physical, but immutable, and could not be deviated from their original path. In fact, you could tell the relative age of most of the shadows by watching how they interacted with the others. Pick a fight with one and you would lose. Graphically. More than a few workplace safety incidents had come out of it, which then of course had proceeded to play out infinitely in their bloody glory, much to the frustration of HR.

But you couldn’t be trapped in it, at least. The shadows were, as far as anyone could tell, just recordings of the gods they had copied, oblivious to anything going on around them and impossible to contact. Over time, more and more people had come to poke at the time loop, and these days much of the outside was just covered in captures of ghostly arms where people had stuck a hand in to test the waters, and the occasional spray of blood where some had chosen their spot poorly.

I looked around but didn’t see a meeting room. [Tez, your directions suck,] I messaged.

Moments later, I heard his voice calling me from the direction of the ceiling, and looked up to see him leaning out of a glass door wedged between an air-conditioning vent and a light fixture directly above the time loop, waving one arm in his best air traffic controller impression. “Up here. See that sign on the wall behind you?”

I looked, and found spatial distortion. Easy to miss if you weren't observing from the correct angle. I followed it through into a claustrophic strip of office carpet surrounded by distortions on all sides, bits of floating office leading to half a dozen different places sequestered around Floor T. Ahead it widened out a bit and gave way to ceiling panels where the floor would be, and the flickering shadows of the time loop above my head.

Tez opened the door wider and motioned for me to hurry up, eyes scanning upwards to keep an eye on the activity below. Something had him worried.

“I found out what happened to Lucy,” I opened with, not wasting any more time. “The executive team has him.” I don’t think the power drain is going to ease up anytime soon, I wanted to say, but the words which left my lips were quite different. “Word on the street has it he’s the one behind the attack.”

I saw why as Tez ushered me inside and closed the door. We weren’t alone.

Seated at the head of the table in front of the computer monitor was a beautiful young woman festooned with what had to be an uncomfortable amount of jewellery and dressed in a lavish sari in green, pink and gold. Her posture was formal, rigid and out of place in the casual meeting room, bolt upright with hands clasped in her lap.

Everything about her screamed ‘goddess’, which explained why Themis and crew hadn't arrived on deportation duty so far, and yet I’d never seen her before in my life. I'd thought I knew everyone in Providence, by face if not name. We could be dealing with another shapeshifter, of course, but unless she was a very good actress, I didn’t think so. Little flags and indications here and there. Her bearing being too awkward, her costume being so eye-catching and elaborate.

“This is an unexpected visitor,” I said, surprised. “What’s the deal?”

“She can’t understand you,” said Mayari. The lunar goddess sat at the end of the table furthest from the unknown guest with her feet up on the table, crossed at the ankles. She was on her phone with a headphone dangling from one ear, browsing through what looked like more news footage of the Vatican attack. “We’ve had a hell of a time trying to keep her hidden. She keeps trying to leave and we can’t explain why that’s a bad idea. We need you to interpret.”

“In Sanskrit? I get that some people are uncomfortable with change, but that’s ridiculous. Can’t she speak anything else?” It was an ancient language; if not quite dead then at least in its terminal death throes.

“Not that we’ve tried. And we went through an extensive list.”

What kind of god could only speak one dead language, I wondered? “I can give it a try, but my amateur pidgin isn’t going to go far. You’d be better off asking Durga.”

At the mention of the warrior goddess, the unfamiliar woman’s eyes locked onto me with a stony expression. I shifted uneasily under her scrutiny. “You know Durga?” I asked her in Sanskrit.

At the words in her own tongue, the woman leaned forward sharply, said something I couldn’t make out, and followed it up with a terse ‘yes’. I found a mental image of Durga being projected into my head in confirmation, except that instead of the playful Security officer, this was Durga as I’d never seen her; ferocious, pitiless and unrelenting, and accompanied by a strong sense of dislike. Whatever this woman’s relationship was to Durga, it wasn’t friendly. I could only hope she wasn’t the type of person who let a grudge carry over to the friends of their enemies.

More than that, though, there was something very old about that depiction, carried over in wispy fragments of nuance around the edges. Memories of a time long gone. Except it didn’t feel like memory. It felt like it was supposed to be current.

It clicked. The unfamiliar face, dead lexicon, odd body language, and now this. Whoever our mysterious visitor was, she was displaced in time by quite a long way. How or why remained to be seen.

I looked between Tez and Mayari, neither of whom seemed surprised. “Are you getting this?”

“Yeah. There’s no easy way to say this,” said the latter, in a grave tone. She switched off the phone and rapped her knuckles on the table in an unconscious movement. “Durga’s gone, Loki. As in, gone gone. We think this is Parvati.”