I made a brief detour to Singapore to test out the pact on Yun-Qi, only to find both he and Parvati absent. They hadn’t wasted any time. Later, then.

At the People’s Clinic, a small crowd of people was still hanging around when I stopped by to pick up my return ticket to Providence. Among them was a group of confused officials bearing the distinctive look of annoyance people were prone to adopting after suffering through repeated nonsensical explanations. The fact I whistled to get their attention before shifting into Sørine and stepping backwards through the office gate wouldn’t have helped matters.

If Shitface had been ‘interrogating’ Lucy, then hopefully the latter had also been released from captivity, as much as going back to work could ever be called ‘freedom’. Sure enough, he was at his desk when I approached.

He saw me coming and waved. “You missed the cross-examination,” he said, before I had a chance to get a word out. “They didn’t like that. It’s safe to assume this pod will be under direct surveillance.” And not by Apollo, he added in private. Be careful.

Bleurgh. That was going to make things annoying. Even being able to talk telepathically wasn’t much of an aid in an environment where everyone around us was well-acquainted with the signs. All it took was one observant person to figure out we had access to our powers and we could be in deep trouble. “Yeah, I heard about it from Latura while everyone was exposing themselves to voluntary fumigation,” I replied, giving him a slight nod as I slid into my chair. “Up against Shitface himself, I hear. What dirty secrets did he tear out of you this time?”

“None he was hoping to get, I’m sure. Hardly surprising, since I’m innocent.” He raised his voice slightly on the last part, no doubt directing it at some unseen observer.

There were so many questions I wanted to ask, stymied by the notion we were being observed. My mind raced ahead, trying to think of the best way to broach them. It was hard to narrow down what we were dealing with, too – it might be anything from physical bugs to clairvoyance, acute vision or hearing, or any number of other things.

Phone texts seemed like a good workaround. Other than Providence’s in-house computer systems, which had had large teams working around the clock to develop its hybrid custom programs, modern technology was relatively free from divine influence. Part of that was due to sheer laziness from gods who used magic to do everything technology could imitate. But it was also accepted wisdom that no new gods had been born in a long time. In a world without Providence, perhaps a god of computers might have arisen, of robots and AI, of cars and planes and machines, or a god of information to put the No-Gos to shame. No such luck.

“Surveillance doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” I suggested, logging into my workstation. Had to put in some work hours to keep up appearances. “Captive audiences are just opportunities in disguise. I’ve been hoarding up anecdotes about interesting bowel movements, for example. Must be several days’ worth of material by now, and that’s before we even touch on the non-human side. Have you ever wondered what happens when you go on a strict diet of wild asparagus for several years? Or rats and cave mould; I’ve done that one too.”

A groan sounded from behind Lucy’s computer monitor. “Must you?”

“That reaction is the point. Although…”

“Hmm?”

“I’d wager there’s also a high chance anyone listening is curious about the asparagus. It begs the question -” I grinned and threw out a conspiratorial stage hiss, “- which one is it?”

I could hear Lucy quietly losing it behind his monitor as I discovered my to-do list had grown to 15,288 tasks in the scant hours I’d been away. Since the easy ones could often be solved with as little as some life advice worthy of controversial and poorly-edited self-help manuals, I could knock off a bunch while catching Lucy up to speed, and vice-versa. It went without saying that we kept our contributions terse to avoid being obvious; in my case peppered in amongst the slew of promised fun digestive facts. And even that was a risk.

It had been a short but stressful interrogation. Lucy’s papal visit was somewhat overshadowed by Yahweh’s subsequent overreaction and the ensuing fallout. Once it had been established that Lucifer was in the clear on the explosion front, the secondary violation had been of less interest. Just as well, seeing as it was a tough one to wiggle out of.

If I was to believe Lucy, most of it had been down to Apollo putting on a show for Odin and Vishnu, not only to present the story they wanted to hear, but also to hide the matter of his rapidly failing powers. Lucy had attempted to keep up with whatever adjustments Shitface was making to counter any incoming problems. Odin might have been the executive team’s resident seer, but compared to Apollo, or even Tez, he was quite poor at it, for all he claimed otherwise. I was far less concerned with him discovering the conspiracy through foresight than via the power of bullheaded paranoia.

We’d have to deal with him soon. The idea of leaving it unaddressed even for a short period kicked up a red flag as far as I was concerned. That the interrogation had gone well and Apollo’s loyalty to Providence remained unquestioned only served to entrench the sense of foreboding. Odin might not have been the most powerful god around, but he was a master at delivering nasty surprises. And while the pope visit was a small blip on the radar, it was a blip nonetheless.

And he was still a seer. Even a poor seer could steer the future. We couldn’t rely on our edge in that area giving us an edge overall.

How to deal with Odin was something I’d given great thought to over the years, and not just during my time at Providence. If it was only a matter of innate magical strength, I’d win against him every time. Instead, it was ever the story of my life that I ended up working under him in one way or another, a relationship we seemed doomed to repeat throughout history. Less authoritarian than the tyrant, granted, but every bit as terrible. And then some.

With the tyrant, you at least knew where you stood. Odin, on the other hand, presented himself as the capable parental figure Yahweh liked to delude himself he was; could spend mortal lifetimes building up the act, only to pull the rug out from under your feet when the stage was finally set and every ruthless trap was laid. Right when you were finally convinced. He hadn’t made a move in a while, seemingly content with being one of the major players behind the chief executive. You could be forgiven for buying into it - decades of pop culture indoctrination regarding evil viziers didn’t mean squat next to halfway decent acting skills - but this was when he was at his most dangerous. To Yahweh, mostly, one would hope, although it would just be replacing one monster with another.

Was he the manipulator? It didn’t make any sense for him to be. Which was exactly why he might be. We could test out that theory using the pact, preferably with Shitface playing the sacrificial guinea pig.

But for all his wiles, he did have weaknesses. Odin was what happened when you took a compulsive hoarder and gave them immortality. His collection included trinkets for every occasion, many of which he kept on his person at all times. Of course, as befitted Providence’s Chief Information Officer, he collected much more than physical baubles and protective charms. Knowledge, favours, power – and powers, through artificial enchantments such as Futhark. For all he resembled a walking arsenal, however, the compulsion to expand it remained. And like most compulsive behaviours, it was ripe for exploitation.

Taking out Odin, therefore, had to be a combination of two factors. First, you dealt with the seer. Shitface going turncoat was a major boon, but not enough on its own. And even if we got in with the initial attack, what then? As soon as we lost the element of surprise, it would be all over as the reinforcements arrived.

We had to give him something he couldn’t see coming. This was an order of magnitude above Tez and I sneaking around in restricted areas; this was a direct personal attack. Distraction wouldn’t cut it. We’d have to construct a false reality and place him in it, whether by messing with his mind, constructing a real or illusory simulation from scratch – although I doubted we’d be able to make it convincing enough – or finding a way to somehow capture a benign offshoot timeline and place it in its own dimension. I’d never heard of anyone successfully pulling it off, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be done. Or we could just use Tez, god of mirrors and reflections, and Lucy, god of making people believe in them. I could only imagine what might have been accomplished if the former had decided to hop off the fence sooner.

I was optimistic.

Still, it was only half the battle. The dilemma remained about what to do with Odin’s collection of accumulated pointy surprises. I was familiar with some of his tricks, but it was a safe bet there would be at least two more for each one I knew about. He probably had multiple ways of exposing illusions and mental tampering. While I would have loved to use Apollo against him to tease out those secrets, it wasn’t a strategy we could employ against another seer.

But we could poison the chalice from within. Dangle a choice morsel in front of his nose he couldn’t resist adding to his collection. Mayari was good at that sort of thing. The poison, that was. We could use something like Shitface’s sister’s bangle, perhaps – or bridle, I supposed. We just needed to figure out what he most desired.

I needed to find out how Grace’s demon powers worked.

It was starting to come together. It would take all of us to pull it off, but it would represent a major victory.

An unexpected prick of pain blossomed at the tip of my index finger, and, with a blink, I noticed I’d been ramming my fingernails into the small crevice on the edge of my desk where the gloss veneer peeled back from the splinter-filled wood underneath. I withdrew the hand, resisted the impulse to heal my finger and placed it gingerly in between my teeth instead, trying to pick out the intrusion via the tried-and-tested technique of precision and bone.

“So it was Yahweh, you say?” I asked around the extremity, for the sake of the surveillance.

“I didn’t,” Lucy replied. “But it’s not that hard to figure out. Same tactic he used with the dinosaurs. The repertoire is somewhat limited. Fire, water, disease… mass murder in general, really.”

“If they haven’t announced it yet, it’ll be another cover-up,” I remarked, withdrawing the finger and wiping the nibbled bit on my trousers. “Typical. I’m surprised they aren’t just outright pinning it on you. Are you sure it wasn’t you? I mean, the Vatican exploded and an angel was sighted, and if generations of horror movies have taught me anything, it’s that you have a bit of a thing for stigmata, if you know what I mean.”

Façade or no, I found Lucy peering around the edge of his computer monitor at me with an unimpressed expression. “Save your fractional entendres for someone who cares about them. If I was going to destroy something, I would have done it properly. And I thought you were supposed to be telling bowel stories?”

“Eh, plenty of time for those. Good thing, too, because there are just so very, very many.”

He rolled his eyes at that and went back to his computer.

Can the pact deal with indirect surveillance? I asked privately, as I spotted one of my personal tasks on my work list and sent it to the bottom. There seemed to be more new tasks than usual at the top of the list, too, I noticed. Too early to spot a trend in themes, but -

Yes, but don’t push your luck. You saw what it was like before. It can get worse, and it can break.

This is going to follow you around, isn’t it? My hopes of it being tied to a physical location like our desks were fading. Couldn’t even sic Tez on it for disruption, because interference would only create more cause for alarm.

A sense of amusement entered my head. Like I’m not used to that already. You should be watching yourself, not me. If they haven’t started watching you yet, they will after what went down in that boardroom.

Just perfect. Every time I managed to throw away one leash, a new one appeared.

Worse, if I had the attention of the company watchdog, then it seemed I had now dug myself into a bit of an unforeseen awkward hole. I couldn’t go home to my new apartment, because, aside from being highly suspicious in and of itself, it would lead an observer straight to Tru, a contraband demon bearing what amounted to my mark. And I couldn’t go back to my old apartment, because it would lead them to Parvati, an old enemy of the tyrant who wasn’t supposed to exist. Nor could I simply commandeer a new house, even without powers, because that was the kind of thing that got you arrested and accompanied by friendly police escort back to your old apartment where, again, Parvati was waiting. I couldn’t even hunker down out on the street, not that I was that desperate, since it would look suspicious and provoke investigation. Why had I not gotten Yun-Qi’s phone number?

I still had to solve Parvati’s problem under these conditions, too, and the clock was ticking. And Tez had better have the foresight, no pun intended, to wear long trousers.

Fighting the urge to sigh or give any visible reaction away on my face, I slouched back in my broken chair, opened a new task, and settled in for the long haul. It looked like we were having this conversation here, after all.

So, about what you missed…