Hel’s shift didn’t start until mine ended, so I waited out the rest of the work day in typical fashion. Or I would have, but for the fact we had a steady stream of people wandering by in poorly-disguised attempts to try and weasel information out of us about the Vatican attack. After the fifth iteration of listening to Lucy defend his company-sanctioned innocence (I didn’t even bother), it was clear that while management knew it was the fault of its own leadership, popular opinion was convinced otherwise. The focus was squarely on Lucifer for this one, though the looks on people’s faces when they noticed my presence didn’t escape me either. Guilty by association.

When I managed to find a moment, I snuck aside out of earshot to isolate myself and test out the pact by speaking its secrets. Sure enough, instead of the words I expected to hear, I found myself musing aloud about the benefits of introducing seasonal climate variance into the office airconditioning systems. We were on, it seemed.

At ten to six company time, I wandered up to Floor H and lurked next to the travel stations there, where I garnered a few curious glances but nothing too wary. The pot had been stirred, and no one was following routine today.

I caught Hel by the shoulder before she’d taken more than a couple of steps into the office and watched as her initial confused expression melted into recognition. A white lanyard around her neck marked her as a senior staff member. Not management – thanks to Odin, Providence had it in for anyone with so much as an iota of my blood – but she’d done well for herself considering her precarious position. Still on Helpdesk, still depowered, but afforded just enough authority to be allowed to wander about encouraging others on Floor H to meet their KPIs.

Senior Helpdesk service representative was a long way down from being a queen. But it turned out there was significant overlap in those respective skillsets.

“Hi, mum,” she said, pulling me aside with her twisted arm. The shapeshifter blood had come out differently in all my children, and not kindly. With Hel, it manifested in halves. Like me, she could transform into anything – with the caveat that half her body would appear withered and malformed in every iteration. I didn’t know why. It was a cruel limitation. Not insurmountable, but it hadn’t made things easy, either as a child or an adult.

Before Providence had gotten its hooks into her, I’d been set on finding a solution. These days, she was frozen in the body in front of me now – her left half a beautiful pale-skinned brunette, and the right a tangle of shriveled muscles locked in eternal spasm. A silver brace in fiberglass poked out from under the hem of her skirt; modern technology picking up the slack where charity from those in charge failed to deliver.

“You picked an interesting time to come calling,” she continued, fixing me with a small smile and beckoning for me to accompany her to the kitchen. “You didn’t happen to have something to do with all this, did you?”

“You think I blew up the Vatican?”

“Well, did you?”

I gave her the honest answer. “It was Yahweh,” I said, as she began brewing herself a coffee. “I’m not resorting to public terrorism just yet.”

“Heard the news from Lucifer, I’m guessing.”

“Smart girl,” I said, patting her on the head.

She shook off the gesture, batting the hand away. “Smart enough to know there’s something you’re not telling me.”

“Well, that’s because I’m under watch.”

She looked at me with an expression of frustration. “Again? What did I tell you about not giving them a reason to single you out? Was it because of the trouble with Themis? Do I need to have a word with her?”

I snorted. “Don’t bother. Life’s too short to worry about every potential obstacle.”

“We’re immortal.”

“Your point?” But the mention of Themis reminded me of another matter. “By the way, you have a new little sister.”

Turning away from the coffee machine, my daughter raised an eyebrow at me. “Oh? One hopes you aren’t admitting to violating company policy under scrutiny, so I take it this is going to be like that time you adopted a cat. What’s she like?”

I still missed that cat, a one-eared molly with a taste for carnage and an equally insatiable appetite for belly rubs. I'd misplaced it in another dimension somewhere a few years before Providence had caught up with me, and could only hope it had enjoyed living out the rest of its days being a menace to whatever otherworldly vermin called the place home.

“Small,” I replied. “Brown. Portuguese. Not a cat.”

“So you’ve adopted a millipede.”

“Her name’s Clara da Souza,” I said with a grin. “Five years old and fewer than three legs.”

“Oh,” she said, crossing her arms as the coffee machine ground to a halt, forgotten in the background. “The poor kid. Or lucky, depending on how well she acclimatises to general weirdness. Is this why you came to see me?”

“Actually, I could use your expertise,” I requested, reaching past her to retrieve the coffee and handing it over. She accepted it with a miniscule smile, but didn’t drink. “In a hypothetical situation -”

“Hypothetical,” she echoed, raising the eyebrow again. “Really.” I waited for a moment until she sighed and waved the hand holding the coffee. “Go on.”

It was hard to think of a topic most mortals had a poorer understanding of than death. Of course, we had no one to blame for that but ourselves, for failing to provide an adequate explanation everyone could agree on. Once you understood where death fit into the bigger picture, it stopped making a whole lot of sense as a concept. People didn’t stop existing. It was more like taking a one-way trip to a new country, on the condition that said trip involved a certain amount of involuntary deportation. The souls carried on, and when it came right down to it, people were souls. Or at least all the important bits.

Which was why, if you had questions about souls, death gods were the ones to ask.

I hadn’t expected Hel, who as a child had been full of enthusiasm for life, to become an expert in the field. In a brilliant piece of irony, it had been her detractors who brought about her rise to power. With a frightening appearance and a shapeshifter tell far too obvious to hide, Odin’s court at Valhalla, whose primary concern had always been how it could put people to practical use, had deemed her a liability. More monster than god.

Back then I’d been idealistic and blasé – well, more so – laughing in the faces of anyone who dared tell me my children – powerful jötnar all - were less worthy because of something as transient as physical appearance. I wasn’t the only deity who could alter my form, after all. In my naivety, I’d assumed it was obvious to everyone.

Still, I understood the practical handicap. It was all very well to go around scaring people if that was what you chose to do. Less desirable if it was your only available option. Hel had never seemed as bothered by people’s reactions to her as her siblings, but it was still a liability, and one we could do something about. Life, the world, even fate – back when it had been a reality – these things were not fixed. There was always a way through. Or at least a workaround.

I hadn’t seen the disaster coming, but perhaps I should have. Against Valhalla’s express orders, I’d travelled to Ireland to consult with the master illusionists of the Tuatha Dé Danann.

Everything had gone well. They knew how to entertain. Spectacular feasting and games from start to finish. The Danaan weren’t stingy with trade, and I was sure they could teach my pantheon a thing or two about how to hold their alcohol. Yet basking in the satisfaction of success, a glamour in hand for each child, I’d returned only days later to find my progeny missing, a hastily-scrawled letter from their mother claiming she’d left for her ancestral home, and a cohort of Odin’s cronies lying in wait to deal with the predicted fallout.

Exile. They’d taken Hel, then a fourteen-year-old child, and thrown her down alone into the frozen land of the dead. My youngest, Jörmungandr, they cast into the ocean. My second eldest, Fenrisúlfr, they took to Asgard in chains to keep locked and caged where they could maintain a close eye on him. And by extension, keep a handle on me. Only my eldest, Sleipnir, left untouched at the All-Father's side.

It was my first real experience with what happened when you dared defy Odin’s orders. Much like you didn’t defy Yahweh’s in the present day. No wonder they’d ended up joining forces.

It wasn’t long after that that Ragnarok had worked its way into the primary timeline and I got hit with the accompanying fallout. Some part of me wondered if that had been the plan all along, to create a scapegoat he could point to and call villain.

And for what? Associating with the wrong people? Odin always had been a paranoid son-of-a-bitch - not always unjustified – but I hadn’t been there to play at inter-pantheon espionage. I couldn’t tell if he was just that misanthropic or whether it had been a convenient excuse to strike a painful blow against a potential rival. Both options seemed equally likely.

I wasn’t stupid enough to cause a scene, although I did hide the glamours to prevent them being requisitioned. You had to pick your battles, and lashing out while outnumbered by a crowd of immortal goons was not the time.

But he’d made his position crystal clear. After all I’d done for him, we were enemies.

I'd stayed at Valhalla for a while regardless - mainly to see if there was a way to sneak Fenrir out the back door – but the bonds he’d been placed under may as well have been immovable objects, beyond my ability to break. The best I could do was fool the guards long enough to visit.

My attempts to reconcile with my then partner Angrboda failed. She blamed me for the loss and could not be persuaded otherwise. Whatever they’d told her, it had destroyed the trust between us beyond the point where it could be rekindled. Decades of mutual history, snuffed out as easily as a candle.

Eventually I left in search of the others. Jörmungand was easy enough to find, which wasn’t surprising for someone the size of a continent. They’d locked him into his giant form, effectively trapping him in the sea because there was nowhere else on earth large enough to house him. I still had the glamour, but there was only so much illusions could do, and it wasn’t going to help him out of his predicament. I left it with him anyway, along with as many protective charms as I could manage.

But then there was Hel, separated not only from her family, but from the rest of the entire living world. Valhalla had always had a somewhat nebulous understanding of death, in that there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between one side of the mortal coil and the other, but the land of the dead was where the vast majority of the mortal population was discarded when they passed away. You wanted a seat at Valhalla, you generally had to impress someone. Usually Odin, who was fond of his disposable meat shields. There was a reason the place was full of obnoxious dudebros.

Everyone else, unless they were lucky enough to find some other generous patron or defected to worship one of the better pantheons, got stuck with Niflheim, realm of perpetual damp, impeded vision and the kind of crap rain that never worked its way up to anything beyond an unexciting drizzle, and a half-hearted one at that.

It was months before I found my daughter, and by the time I did, guided by a procession of awe-struck dead to her throne of barren bones and brittle branches, she didn’t want to leave. In the absence of existing leadership in a realm no one wanted, and with an unforgettable face, obvious divinity and no one to tell her otherwise, she’d walked straight into it. As for the dead, who could hardly be blamed for being less than impressed with Niflheim, they had latched onto her as a beacon of hope, that something might change and that she might change it.

Much to my surprise, she did.

“Fractured souls,” I said to Hel in the present day, selecting my words with care. Knowing any conversation I had while being watched would likely get back to Odin, I had to approach this from an indirect angle. “What can you tell me about them?”

She frowned. “You’ll need to give me more context than that. Are we talking split down the middle? General traumatic injuries?”

“Dissociative identity disorder,” I clarified, swinging myself up onto the kitchen bench, heels kicking up against the front of the dishwasher. “I want to know what happens to each of the personalities. What happens when they die, for example?”

“Oh. Yes, they’re interesting cases. Fracturing isn’t a good word for what you’re talking about, though. You’d be better off thinking of it like a wheel. Or a pie chart. Something in segments.” She snapped the fingers of her good hand. “The old days of the Hindu pantheon is a good example.”

“Fancy that.”

Leaning back against the kitchen bench, she pinched her fingers together and curved them in an arc through the air. “Picture a code wheel, for example. Metaphorically-speaking, you’ve got one front-facing window representing the part of the soul exposed to consciousness. Most people are static. Their wheels don’t turn, so we only ever see the same part. Whereas someone like Vishnu – at least as he used to be – would have had a rotating wheel. What we think of as different personalities are just different parts of the same whole.”

“So Vishnu wasn’t just mushed up in a blender.”

She looked at me blankly for a moment, then realised what I meant. “More like folded and squashed, to fit the whole soul into the window simultaneously.”

“That can’t be healthy.”

“I wouldn’t want it done to me,” she agreed. “I’m happy for my unconscious parts to stay that way.”

I stroked my chin in thought. “Sounds to me like the real problem isn’t a question of whether a soul is static or dynamic, but that these windows are too small to begin with.”

Her eyebrows rose, and the smile she gave me was wonderfully devious. “Funny you should mention that. This all ties into a larger theory I’ve been working on. The more I think about it, and the more people I talk to, the more I’m convinced there’s something to it. Where our powers come from, for instance. How suppressants work. Maybe even finally shedding some light on the origin of -”

Cutting her off, I held a finger to my lips. “I’m very proud of you,” I assured her, “but don’t forget we have company.”

It worried me, that line of talk. Hel was verging into No-Gos territory there, if by ‘verging’ you meant ‘crashing in with a malfunctioning pneumatic drill’. There was a reason twenty-four thousand gods were still in the dark about basic details like where we came from or how our powers functioned, and it had everything to do with jealous hoarding of information. Research and Development was the official name. One of Odin’s teams, of course; mostly manager level or above, and its members behaved like graduates of some kind of cartel finishing school. Lips sealed shut, no matter how hard you tried to loosen them.

“Sometimes,” she replied, pursing her lips, “said company could do with a reminder that the cattle they watch over are just as capable of putting two and two together as they are, despite the lack of comparative advantage. The spread of information can’t be stopped, only slowed.”

You absolutely could stop it, I thought, but didn’t voice the opinion. The supernatural didn’t even have to come into it – convincing rhetoric could accomplish the job on its own.

“Alright, then, Ms I’m-So-Confident,” I said, directing the conversation back onto its original track. “Share more of your enlightenment for the audience. Forget Vishnu’s soul origami. If you found someone with the regular old DID wheel, how would you go about extracting the different personalities?”

“I would strongly advise you didn’t.”

“Hel,” I cajoled her, “this is a hypothetical scenario. And you trust me, right?”

“Some would say there’s only one possible answer to that question.”

“But you know better.”

She gave me a long look through one blue eye and one gold one. “Splitting a soul into halves is how you end up with soulmates,” she finally capitulated. “Neither one will be happy separated from the other.”

“Even if they hate each other?”

“They’re lying,” she uttered, in a tone that brooked no disagreement. “To themselves, maybe. Don’t do it. It’s cruel and below you. But if the segments are unequal or more numerous, which is usually the case, it gets a little more complicated.”

“Oh?”

“You’re familiar with the principles behind mass and gravity. Souls behave in a similar way. The attraction remains, but lopsided. Smaller splices will be drawn to larger ones, but larger pieces will feel little attraction to the smaller ones. Remove one tenth of a soul, for example, and it will feel compelled to chase the remainder relentlessly. But the remainder will come out relatively unscathed from the process.”

“As much as it can with a stalker hunting it, I suppose.”

“Just so. I told you it was a bad idea.”

“Alright,” I said impatiently. “Consider me warned. How do you perform an extraction?”

She sighed. “You can’t. And I’m out of action, so I can’t do it for you, either.”

“Well, not with that kind of defeatist attitude. Who or what do I need to make it happen?”

“Aren’t you concerned about your voyeur?”

“Please,” I sniffed, rapping my fingers on my knee. “There’s only a handful of people it could be, and they probably already know everything you’re about to tell me. Besides, it’s not like they’ll politely turn up to sign a non-disclosure agreement.” I paused for a second, just in case, and looked around. Other than a bunch of Hel’s usual colleagues clustered around the screens still streaming news from the Vatican, the place was deserted. “See? Nothing.”

Pulling a frustrated face, she put down the untouched coffee, then stepped forward and gestured for my hand. When I didn’t take it – I didn’t expect Lucy’s demon seeding would work on an immortal, but didn’t want to take my chances – she reached forward and grabbed my wrist before I had a chance to pull away. A moment later she forced my fingers open, held them straight and began tracing on my palm with a gnarled claw, covering the palm with her own as she did.

Not a handshake, but letters; spelt out through skin contact. She was being careful. And if she was being careful, she must have thought the stakes were high. Now, what would give her that idea? She didn’t know about Parvati, or the pact. Since the signing, no one could tell her about it. So what had her worried?

Janus, the characters spelt. She squeezed my hand. Face. Another squeeze, and the numeral four. A third and final squeeze, then the phrase find it. She dropped the hand. “Understand?”

The only thing I understood was how confused I felt. This wasn’t an answer. Janus, god of boundaries and transitions, had been demoted almost a millennium ago. Deemed too much of a threat by the tyrant, so I’d heard. “Technically, but -”

“No,” she said, pre-empting my question. “No more detail until your ‘company’ is gone.” She closed her eyes for a brief moment. “This had better be worth it. I hope for both our sakes this stays with you.”

“It will,” I promised, trying my best to bite back the many questions on my lips. “In the meantime, I don’t suppose you have anything a little more expedient?”

“Any specialist with a shred of ethics will tell you this idea is ill-advised. But by all means, you’re welcome to try your luck at convincing them. If there’s even anyone left with their powers intact by now.”

Curse this rotten observation. If it wasn’t for that, Tez and I might have been able to escort Hel on another run back to the moon bunker to remove her suppressants and fix the problem that way. Instead, all I had to go on was a riddle.

At least it wasn’t like Hel to be cryptic; she and Lucy had that in common. The most straightforward interpretation would likely be correct.

“Thanks,” I said, hopping off the bench and making my way back towards the travel stations. “I’ll be in touch. Hopefully without unwanted guests.”

“Mum,” she called after me, “be careful.”

“Easier said than done,” I replied, digging around in my pockets for my access card. “No promises.”

“Oh, and say hi to Clara for me,” she called, not pressing the point. “It’d be nice to have a sister. Even if she isn’t a cat.”

“Will do. Next kidnapping, I’ll bring her in to see you.”