Half an hour later with a belly full of mediocre egg salad, I waved the officer on duty goodnight as he closed the cell door in my face, and settled down on the pallet serving as a makeshift bed. Someone in the cell next door whimpered and moaned in what was presumably some kind of ill-advised drug-fuelled torment. I pushed visions of mewling baby otters into their brain until they quietened down and kicked my shoes off, falling backwards onto the thin foam mattress.

Finally, a non-incriminating place to sleep. Why were the simplest amenities so hard to come by just when you needed them most?

“See?” I muttered at my unseen observer. “I promised you entertainment and I delivered. Boredom is for boring people. Although,” I put on a yawn, “admittedly less tiring. You’ll have to excuse me until our scheduled programming returns in eight hours’ time, give or take.”

Rolling onto my side, I pulled the scratchy station blanket up to my chest. It was too hot for it, but a little extra cover would be welcome here. Back when I’d been on the run from Providence, I’d stayed ahead thanks to a few key tricks up my sleeve, and I was about to pull one of my signature moves. Not that I went around advertising it. That would defeat the point.

I gave it about ten minutes, feigning sleep, calming my breath and relaxing my muscles. Physically, it would be indistinguishable from the real thing. One of the many beauties of my power was that I didn’t need to know how something worked to be able to replicate it.

When the time felt right, I grew myself a second body in my favourite mosquito form, attached at the feet to the rest of me like an inconspicuous tumour, sitting just underneath the sleeve of my blouse.

For a few moments I held the shape, my human and insect brains working in perfect synchronisation. For now, it was only me in there. But I knew without a shadow of a doubt, could feel it like I could feel the air in my lungs, that separating these two parts of myself as they were would result in something outside of my control. What that would be was unclear. Perhaps the birth of a new god. Perhaps a soulmate such as Hel had described. Perhaps a second version of myself running around, with all my memories and ambitions. Either way, it was a line I wasn’t prepared to cross. Not now, and perhaps not ever.

I rendered my human part braindead beyond repair, turning the neural connections into mush beyond what was needed to keep the shell alive and breathing, and jettisoned my mosquito body, casting off the husk of Sørine like the foot I’d given Tez earlier. It would pass muster as a sleeping body, or a coma victim if the situation was dire – though if it came to that point, Providence would already be tipped off to the fact something was up. It didn’t give me a lot of time to work with.

First things first. Warping back outside, I flew up to the nearest rooftop, adopted an unobtrusive human form, and tested out the pact in isolation. The fact I could say the words proved the ruse was working - I’d shaken my watcher.

That established, I made my way to Mayari’s workshop in the hopes of catching her there, and found her firing a soldering iron at a piece of metal the size of a car door, coloured wires poking out from it in all directions.

“Tez said you’d be along,” she commented, not looking up from her project. “Give me another five minutes, and then we’ll talk.”

“He should have told you I’m in a rush,” I asserted, noting the ease with which I could breathe the air this time around. There did seem to be more plants hanging off the walls than there’d been in the last visit. She hadn’t wasted any time. “I need your help.”

“Facility J, right?”

“Right. How did you -”

“While you and Lucifer were off drawing the attention of the snoop brigade, the rest of us have been coordinating. Apollo and the pope, of all people. Never thought I’d see the day.” A click sounded as she switched off the soldering tool and placed it down with a sigh. “It’s very short notice, but I’ll do what I can. The question is, are you sure you’re up for it?”

“Seeing as I suggested it – indirectly, anyway – yes. What kind of question is that?”

“The kind which screens for adverse reactions to personal attachments,” said Tez’s voice behind me. He stepped forward out of the shadows, dressed for the cold in a long black overcoat embroidered in yellow in jagged, geometric patterns running vertically down the seams. “You can make this a rescue mission, or you can get in and out without being noticed. Take your pick.”

I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised to see him. Was it just me, or did he and Mayari seem to be spending a lot of time together since the heist?

“Then we pick Option B,” I confirmed, running with it. “That should be obvious.”

“Just so we’re clear,” he clarified. We shared a look. It was evident he knew about Jörmungand.

“I’m fine,” I stressed, and changed the subject. “Any time-saving spoilers I should know about?” If it was just information we were after, we might not have to go in at all.

“Yeah,” he said. “You should go as Apollo.”

“Easily done,” I said in Shitface’s voice, changing form. “With you feeding me predictions, it might even stand up to a decent amount of scrutiny.”

Mayari cleared her throat. “Tez won’t be there. It’s just us this time.”

“Why?” Without our seer and concealment expert, the whole venture became a great deal riskier. And with all three of us able to access our powers, getting in and out should be a far easier task than it had been at the suppressants bunker. It didn’t make sense to reduce our resources.

He shook his head. “It’s a wall in there,” he said in a smooth voice. “Not just a blind spot. If I go in, that’s it. I don’t come back out.”

“They capture you, you mean?”

“Worse. Everything just… ends. For good. No more Tezcatlipoca. As far as I can tell, I cease to exist.”

I searched his face for cues. Considering the bombshell he’d just dropped, he was keeping it together well. I supposed the fear of consequences lost its impact if you could reliably avoid them.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I protested, out of confusion rather than disbelief. “You fall into some kind of anti-seer trap, you’d still wake up eventually, even if it was on the other side of death and deeply traumatised. And that’s a big ask.”

“Not if the trap isn’t real,” Mayari pointed out. “It could be a deterrant; some kind of illusion to scare people like us away. Or it could be a simple block on Tez’s foresight.”

“Huh,” I remarked, impressed. Maybe I should have been comparing trap categorisations with her, after all.

“Or it might mean my foresight is permanently taken away,” Tez said dryly. “Or they take me out for real and I never recover. I don’t know, and I don’t care to take my chances. Besides," he added, "I have a family picnic in a couple of hours and don't want to miss the chalupas.”

I frowned. “But Mayari and I can go in where you can’t? How does that work out?”

He shrugged. “I see you coming back out. If you go as Apollo.”

There was something off about this scenario. It felt like a trap. Of course, given we were talking about traps, that was to be expected. I wouldn’t be where I was now without Tez and didn’t want to be that person who second-guessed everything the moment they heard a loud noise. The world already had one Odin; it didn’t need another. I glanced at Mayari. “Does this ring true for you?”

“It does. But we can always get a second opinion.”

Which would be Shitface. Consulting with him wouldn’t be the worst thing we could do. But he’d already given me the facility details, and he had Tez beaten in the prophecy stakes. He would have mentioned something earlier if he’d seen problems incoming. Unless he and Tez were in cahoots, plotting some kind of elaborate multi-tiered betrayal – which, to be honest, I couldn’t see him pulling off – then we were probably in the clear. At some point, I had to start trusting my allies.

Between Parvati’s deadline and however long I had before someone checked in on my jail cell, time was in short supply. I couldn’t afford to pad out the prep work.

I let out a deep breath. “Okay. Looks like we’re doing this.”

“At least tell us the intel we bring out.” Mayari pushed her chair out from the workbench and waited, staring at Tez expectantly. Shadows shifted around the room as she moved.

He scratched at his nose. “Well, about that. The thing about Janus is that he’s a seer. Second face looking into the future and all that.”

Mayari and I both groaned. “So we’re going in blind, then,” the moon goddess grumbled.

“Not quite.” He held up a hand and started ticking off points on his fingers. “Loki going in as Apollo gets you through unscathed. No breaking people out -” he looked pointedly at me again, “- ensures no follow-up. And it’s not intel you’re after; it’s a key. Figurative,” he added, directing it at Mayari, who had already opened her mouth. “You’ll need to bring a piece of him back.”

“But no rescues?”

He shook his head, and Mayari and I shared a dubious glance. “Which piece?” she asked eventually.

Tez made a helpless gesture. “It’s hard to say. He interferes. Deliberately. I’m fairly sure he knows I’m watching.”

“He’s been demoted and you can’t even get near him,” the goddess countered. “There’s a limit to how much he can influence, surely.”

“That’s what you’d think. And yet he manages it somehow.”

“Janus is abstract,” I mused aloud, for my companions’ benefit. “I don’t think all the usual rules apply in his case.”

“And that’s concerning,” finished Mayari. She hugged her elbows. “It means his prison will be hard to predict.”

And powerful. It was a good point. It would be a mistake to assume Janus would be automatically on our side – especially if I was too convincing in the role of Shitface. And even if we could, we didn’t know anything about the prison designed to hold him. How did one impose bounds on the god of boundaries?

“Exactly,” Tez said. Flashes of disjointed memories swept through my mind, glimpses of horror after horror, all featuring the same unfamiliar face. Or faces, in most cases – a bearded man, long Roman nose and head full of dark curls, regal in appearance. It had to be Janus as we’d seen him in multiple future timelines. But the visions weren’t clear or consistent, every iteration different, though there were a few scenes that cropped up more often than others.

It was something to go on, still. If nothing else, I now knew who I was looking for. And furthermore, it meant we could expect controlled chaos. Interesting prison.

Mayari spoke up again. “We have to be clear,” she said. “No tricks. No lies. This is a mess, and proper communication will cut through it.”

Straight from the Lucifer playbook, I recognised. But I was inclined to agree. If my experience with seers had taught me anything, it was how to recognise their experimentation when I saw it, and what Tez had just shown us fit the bill. Janus was searching timelines for something. Probably a means of escape.

“Or negotiation,” I amended. “Might be a little tricky with jailbreak off the table, but I think that’s our plan.”

“And the traps?”

Tez took a moment to dig around inside his coat lining, pulled out a rectangular placard on a white lanyard, and tossed it to me. “Apollo dropped it off earlier. It’s a copy, not the original, so I wouldn’t get any ideas.”