Decent weather in the Sahara was too much to hope for, and grains of sand kept being blown into all my orifices faster than I could shift them away. I eyed my companion enviously. Mayari had surrounded herself with a little bulwark of pressure so that her hair was barely touched by the wind even as I found myself struggling against the urge to spit out half the desert every few seconds.

We were waiting in the middle of a desolate plain with no artificial structures in sight. I lay on my back on the sand, late afternoon sun beating down on me, while my companion pored over documents on her phone. It wasn’t very Apollo-like of me, but after the first fifteen minutes I was already bored out of my mind.

“Five paces east,” Mayari was murmuring. “One hundred and twenty-two centimetres high – no, that’s not right.”

I closed my eyes again.

“Accounting for variance in elevation, give or take either build-up or erosion, and we can safely narrow it down to this vertical window.” There was a soft swooshing sound as she swiped the sun god’s access card through the air for the umpteenth time. A muttered curse followed shortly after.

“Paces,” she growled. “Who uses paces as a unit of measurement?” Then another string of curses. “Yo, Shitface. These are the worst instructions I’ve ever seen.”

I cracked my eyes back open as I realised she was talking to me, and immediately found them full of sand again from a fresh gust of wind. “You’re doing it wrong,” I remarked, squinting. “The real Shitface wouldn’t be using logic and doing maths. Think like a seer. Why would he bother to give you instructions in the first place if he knew they wouldn’t work?”

“Because they do work eventually,” she answered, not missing a beat. “He’s not here; he’ll only see the end result. It’s just a matter of trial and error and process of elimination.”

I worked myself into a sitting position, rivulets of sand cascading down the contours of my clothes, and held out my hand. “You’re giving him way too much credit. Here, throw me the pass.”

“Good luck with that.”

I caught the lanyard between my fingers and got to my feet. “Read me the instructions?”

Mayari sighed. We’d been over this several times already. “Jump to the following coordinates.”

I did so, reappearing about five metres away.

“That’s not central enough,” she said, and pointed at an X she’d drawn in the sand some distance to the left. “This is the perfect midpoint you get from the coordinates provided.”

“And you think Shitface uses the Maps app, do you?”

“It’s not like we have the task manager to refer to. How else are you going to get an accurate point of reference? What you’re doing just gives us a random start point. If we’re going to do that, we may as well just sweep back and forth across the entire area until something triggers.”

“Run with it,” I insisted. “Let the stupid fill your mind. What’s next?”

“Eleven paces north.”

“Done.”

“That’s not north. You aren’t accounting for seasonal variance -”

I gave her a look, and she bit back the rest of her sentence.

“Five paces east.”

“Done.”

“Swipe directly ahead.”

Instead of following instructions, I put on my best Apollo impression, looked down my nose at my companion, and casually held up the lanyard next to my right shoulder.

There came a small ‘beep’ from midair, followed by a loud clicking noise. A thin grey crack appeared in reality, extending from a metre or so above my head to the ground; a shadow with nothing to cast it.

I had never seen a person explode without outside assistance before, but had a feeling Mayari might just be the first. “How?”

“Laziest possible means of accomplishing anything. He hasn’t had to do things the hard way for a very long time.”

“I don’t believe it,” she grumbled. “In fact, I refuse to believe it. There’s no way you could have randomly happened to find the correct starting point, if nothing else.”

“What is chance, when seers are involved?” I posited. “Now there’s a lovely existential note on which to start this excursion.”

“Charming.” She paced up to meet me and tilted her head, examining the crack. “Pocket dimension, is it? It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of those. I was expecting another edict.” There was something hungry in the way she said it that made me think of a predator sizing up its next meal.

I reached out and poked at the space next to the crack, where the widest part began to taper inwards towards a distant point. My fingers felt nothing but air, but the shadow widened, following the path of my hand and revealing a shaded passage in the space beyond. Warm air wafted out at us, and there was otherwise a stillness present to contrast against the flurries of sand outside.

Eager to get out of the latter, I hopped inside and down a half-step. Mayari followed shortly after, along with enough sand to fill several buckets and prevent the door from closing. You could see it from this side, a great stone edifice fading into reality halfway along the seam, like vanilla Earth made up the transparency channel in someone’s divine graphics editor. She kicked the debris further into the corridor and pushed the opening closed behind us, whereby it hit the wall with a solid ‘clunk’ reverberating into the distance.

The compact dimension had been built some time ago, with patches of somewhat modern technology added in after the fact. A decade or two ago, judging by the clunky design. Despite the languor of the air and a presumable lack of traffic, a certain amount of weathering dotted the walls, ceiling and floors. Layered on top was a distinct oppressiveness to the place that made my skin crawl; dimensional perception masquerading as claustrophobia.

We were in a somewhat nondescript antechamber, the kind of place you’d dust off your shoes and shake the rain out of your umbrella, except it was set up for neither. It extended forward ten or so metres before ending in a similarly polished wall, symmetrical paths lying at right angles on both sides, with no indication where they led. I clacked my way up to the corner to investigate, footsteps at once both amplified and contained, and found more corridors stretching out in both directions. If there were doors, they were well hidden.

The quasi-directional sense of the pact was going haywire in here, with every thread but Mayari’s so distorted they felt like they’d been left in a multi-dimensional washing machine by accident. Funnily enough, the runes were holding up better, though I had a feeling I’d have to contort any messages through some impossible metaphysical geometry if I wanted them to make it through. If Grace did try to reach me here, he’d likely run into problems.

The sound of a throat being cleared solicited my attention as Mayari broke the silence. “We’re after enclosure number ninety-eight,” she said, putting away her phone again, and gestured towards the T-junction. “If you take left, I’ll take right. Backup plan of attack?”

I shook my head. “Do what you need to do.” We’d already agreed ahead of time to present Mayari as an installation contractor if we ran into trouble, though it didn’t seem likely. Apollo’s notes indicated the facility security systems were largely automated and neutralised by the access card, so the worst thing we were likely to run into was an unexpected visitor.

I set off down the left-hand path, keeping an eye out for security cameras. The passage remained broad and well-lit, with sunlight filtering down through rectangular slats in the ceiling, casting shadow patterns on the floor where it was interrupted by intricate stone latticework. Unlike the late afternoon Saharan sun, the light here shone straight down. Either we’d just happened to come by at noon local time, or it never changed. Given how small the miniature universe felt, I figured it was the latter. No room for a real sun in here. Probably a glowing beach ball on a tripod or something equally as shoddy.

A small placard marked the first enclosure, a metallic rectangle engraved only with ‘J-1’. Because more information would have of course been too much to hope for. I was curious about the date in particular. If the numbers were any indication of chronological order – and that seemed like a very Themis thing to do – I was probably looking at the oldest cell in the facility. It didn’t show, at least not from the outside. A card scanner sat below the nameplate. If there was a door, it was well-hidden.

Hard pass. Going back that far, it was unlikely I’d know the occupant. Chances were I wouldn’t even have heard of them. No need to be the deliverer of false hope.

This place resembled an art gallery more than it did a prison, I thought. Something about the light and the quiet. I kept expecting to find fire extinguishers hanging from the walls and modernist rest benches interrupting the walkways.

After some time and several more hard turns, I reached enclosure ninety-eight – and kept going. Old Two-Face had waited hundreds of years; he could stand to hang on a few more minutes.

Jörmungand had been demoted not long after Janus, I was fairly certain, around about the time of the last internal uprising. After being turned on by some of his underlings, Yahweh, as the stories went, had transferred ownership of all political prisoners under centralised control, and thus my son had gone from being Odin’s personal monument to glory to disappearing off the face of the earth.

Enclosure ninety-nine seemed like a good place to start. I wasn’t sure how this was going to work, but no time like the present.

As I swiped my access card across the reader, some kind of force rocketed through the device, into the card and through my fingers, spreading throughout my body until it settled throughout my entire frame and stayed there. I had the distinct sensation of being observed, though only for a second, and since nothing immediately bad happened I assumed I passed muster.

Unfortunately, nothing else happened, either.

In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have skimmed Shitface’s notes. There was some other step I was meant to take.

I tried warping through to whatever was on the other side of the wall and found myself blocked. It wasn’t that. Altering my vision in various different ways didn’t reveal anything new, either. It was only when I started prodding at the wall and my hand went through it that I realised what was needed.

I stepped through.