A lot could happen in a few hours. The world had a messiah now, for one thing. One who was presumably very confused.

It had leaked a few hours earlier. Unlike the angel footage, this one wasn’t making the same kind of headlines. Naturally all the reputable news outlets and scientific community pooh-poohed the notion, at least according to the sources on Mayari’s phone. If they were publishing about it at all, it was to dismiss the more outlandish claims from less respected voices in the industry. One went so far as to accuse the church of enabling a con outright.

That was all going to change before long, I suspected.

I was finding it difficult to predict how the tyrant would react to this latest turn of events. On the one hand, it had only slipped through the cracks because of the eight-hour roadblock in Apollo’s foresight. The appearance of a church-sanctioned messiah now, right after the bloodiest targeted strike to come out of Europe in decades, threatened to throw out the carefully-maintained stability of the web of politics in Providence’s divine hierarchy. It threw massive influence the way of the tyrant. The attack by itself would generate sympathy, and fear. Adding the promise of a divine saviour would only compound the latter.

After all, you weren’t supposed to have a saviour without having something to be saved from. Even the tyrant’s own followers had been Stockholm-syndromed into thinking it was their fault if their great leader summoned a rain of fire. I wouldn’t put it past Yahweh, having conquered the heavens, to decide it was finally time to encroach further into the mortal population with such an opportunity. The circle of accountability holding his executive together was starting to fray; the competition holding him back weakening. If he went public – truly went public – how long would it be before his religion was declared the new science?

On the other hand, the tyrant really didn’t like being held accountable. As long as he could keep up the insulating veil of mysticism, he could keep telling himself he was the all-powerful, all-knowing authority his followers wanted him to be. If past history was any indication, the pope’s life expectancy might be only as long as the number of cameras he could manage to stay in front of.

Shitface scowled at me before I had a chance to open my mouth. “I’ll get us through this in the short term,” he said. “He won’t break form. But my reputation’s going to take a hit for this. Don’t count on me to be able to bail you out of every future scrap.”

“And Grace?” I asked.

Apollo turned to the pope. “Stay in front of the cameras. Do your job. Play nice. And Holy Father?”

The new demon lord dipped his bushy eyebrows towards the centre of his face.

“Keep an eye on your guard. You might think it’s funny, but all that fame will go to his head.”

“Doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” Tez muttered in the background. The look on his face suggested he’d been trying to play seer games with Shitface and had lost.

The pope cleared his throat. “Lucifer says it’s a good distraction,” he proposed. “And I agree. If Providence is tied up managing expectations with this messiah, and if we keep playing up the whole ‘end of the world’ drama, there’ll be less attention spared for other certain… discrepancies.”

At that, both of the seers turned and looked at me with expectant expressions. I knew what was coming, and shuffled my feet a little uncomfortably.

“Yeah. About that. Prepare yourself for big news.”

From her seat on the toilet, Mayari raised a skeptical eyebrow in my direction. “Bigger than a messiah?”

“Gods are going missing.” I jerked my thumb at Shitface. “He knows. It’s been going on for years.”

“Missing how?” Mayari asked.

“Well, they’re not running away. I think it’s Yun-Qi’s – that’s the guy we brought in to help with Parvati –“ I added for the lunar goddess’ benefit, “– old buddies, whoever they are. They’re sucking people’s souls out. Who knows how.”

“And speaking of Parvati,” Apollo butted in, “you all need to focus on restoring Durga. She’s what’s important here.”

Durga. Guilt stabbed at me. I’d almost forgotten about her in the wake of my confrontation with Odin. I’d lost half a day asleep in the attic. Which gave us a just a little over half a day to find Janus’ wayward face and figure out what the hell we needed to do with it. “The beacon!” I exclaimed. “Did you –“

“The ‘beacon’, as you call it, takes several days to reset,” Apollo interrupted. “And for good reason. Handling the facility occupants is a delicate undertaking, and Janus isn’t someone to underestimate. Restore him too often, and it’ll give him time to plan. Allow him that, and he’ll break out. If he breaks out, it’s…” he trailed off. “Not good. I’ve seen it happen. But you don’t need a beacon, because you have me.”

“Mayari,” said Tez. He jerked his chin at Apollo.

“Ah,” she responded. “Gotcha. Trying to dodge the conversation, are we? You don’t get off that easily. Tell us about these soul-suckers.”

Shitface winced, and I couldn’t tell whether it was due to being rumbled or the use of the term ‘soul-suckers’. “The official name is Siphon. At least, that’s what we’re calling them. I’m sure they have a different name for themselves. But it’s not my investigation, so I can’t tell you much. Compliance are the ones gathering intel.”

I thought about Themis arguing about jurisdiction over the phone.

“Why?” Mayari continued. “You’re a seer. Gathering intel is what you do.”

“For threats. Siphon are a nuisance at best. Oversight and regulation of day-to-day matters falls to Compliance.”

“That’s not what Themis said,” I pointed out. “She was treating it like a crisis.”

Apollo sniffed. “Themis doesn’t like anything she can’t control. The disappearance of a few people on Helpdesk pales into insignificance next to my job. She should try saving the world once or twice.” He blinked at me, suddenly appearing to realise the import of what I’d said. “Since when has she been passing you sensitive information?”

“She wasn’t aware I was listening, due to the whole ‘thinking I had my soul sucked out’ thing. I was there in Singapore when she locked it down.”

“Of course you were,” he muttered. “Why am I even surprised? Although…” He shifted his weight to the other foot, frowning as he scuffed the heel of his shoe against the bathroom tiles. “She was in Singapore? In person?”

“You didn’t know?”

“Boo-yah,” said Tez, making a finger gun at Shitface, who reacted with a belaboured sigh.

“Listen. You can’t mess things up this royally and expect me not to take a while to catch up. I can’t predict our outcomes if you keep sinking them into holes.”

“Yeah well, Themis is the reason there’s a hole,” I explained. “If you were there in charge of the investigation, like Mayari said, we would all have kept our powers and you wouldn’t have a reason to complain.”

“Don’t you dare try and pin this on me,” Apollo returned, body straightening in challenge. “I will end you.”

I grinned at him. “Will you? I don’t think you can. Not without your golden leash, and not without jeopardising your own position. You’re way too deep into this to dig your way out now. You wanted to work with me, and now you’re going to have to get used to a few cultural adjustments. Deal with it.”

A knock on one of the wall-length mirrors echoed across the bathroom as Grace rapped his knuckles against the silver glass. There was a pause as everyone turned to look his way.

“Honestly,” he observed, “you lot are worse than the cardinals. No one ever solved a problem through squabbling.”

“Actually –” I began.

“Shut up, Loki,” everyone chorused except Mayari, who just gave me a shrug. I shut up.

Grace continued. “Here’s what we do. We have two problems and seven of us to go around. That’s more than enough that we don’t have to choose between them. We split into teams to tackle them together.” Bringing his face close to the glass, he breathed a misshapen blob of condensation onto the surface, then wrote an A on one side and B on the other, finishing off by drawing a vertical line down the centre between them. He pointed to side A. “Volunteers to work on the Janus project, speak up now.”

“That will be myself and Loki,” Apollo announced without a moment’s hesitation. “Teams decided.”

The pope looked at me as if expecting me to argue, but I held my tongue. I needed to be involved to liaise with Parvati and Yun-Qi, and Apollo knew more about Janus than anyone else in the room. We didn’t have time to split hairs.

“Well, ah, that was efficient,” said Grace, when no one protested. He scrubbed the mirror clean with the sleeve of his robe. “I, of course, will not be on either team due to my role as Overseer.”

“Nice try,” Mayari said, with a wry smile. “No hierarchy in the revolution. Not yet. But yes, we could use you as a project manager.”

I used the moment to step forward into the centre of the bathroom. “Three problems,” I said. “Not two. We could create a third team, but I’d rather everyone was in on this one.”

Grace stared ruefully at the spot he’d just wiped off the mirror.

I didn’t wait for my audience to ask, quickly explaining what had gone down in Singapore and at the pearly furnace. “Odin’s onto us,” I finished. “Not us-the-revolution, but he knows I have my powers and he knows about Lucifer’s demons. He’ll figure the rest out before long. There’s only one thing we can do in this situation.”

Mayari gave me a surprised glance. “You’re not really going to do what he wants, are you?”

“Pfft,” I uttered. “No, we’re going to destroy him. Granted, he probably expects me to try, but he won’t expect the rest of you. Not yet. We have a small window of opportunity while the pact holds strong, but we can’t assume it will stay open for long. Miss this chance, and there’s about a 99% chance you’ll be bowing and scraping to your new overlord before we ever get anywhere near the tyrant.”

“You just pulled that figure out of your ass,” declared Tez. His forehead was furrowed, the corners of his mouth turned down. “What happened to a good spot of operational sabotage? Going after the executive without any prep work is a good way to turn every loyalist sycophant in the business against us. It’s nuts.”

“He’s right,” said Mayari. “Unless we set the stage, as soon as one goes down, the others will respond with blazing guns. We have to take them all out at once.” Her eyes went distant. “We’d need one of us each to take them down in a simultaneous strike.”

“Six times nuts! Do you both have a death wish?” He nodded at Apollo. “Talk some sense into them. We need time.”

To my surprise, Shitface shook his head. “We don’t have time. Loki’s correct. Even if I bought us a few weeks, Odin would notice if I adjusted the primary timeline too much. The suspicion I’d draw on myself would negate any benefit gained, and I’ve got enough awkward questions to dodge as a result of yesterday’s mishaps as it is.”

“Besides,” I added, a little stunned people were discussing how to eliminate one of the C-Suite with such casual seriousness. “We don’t have to take down all six, because they won’t notice he’s gone.” Lifting one foot from the ground, I spun on the toe of the other in a tight circle. When the first foot came back down, it did so with the tap of a hard boot against the marble. The same sound Odin’s boots had made back in the vast emptiness of Providence’s once-mighty furnace room. I made the tiniest of bows and flashed them the kind of sneer I’d had all too much first-hand experience with from the receiving end.

“You see,” I elaborated, my voice silky, the silver glittering on my jewellery-laden fingers as I gestured towards my own single eye, “I’m absolutely flawless.”