Our arrival at the site of the ambush dispelled any mystery about why we were doing this in Bolivia.

We didn’t need to set up a mirror. The place was one.

Cavernous sky stretched out as far below our toes as it did above until you could be forgiven for thinking you were floating mid-air. When I peered towards my feet, my own face stared back framed by ribbons of glimmering stars and changing as I watched to better blend in with the local population. Though I needn’t have bothered – with the exception of Tez, the rest of our small group were being about as subtle as a crowd of trumpeters walking through a reference library.

It didn’t help that we were the only visible disturbance breaking up the level horizon in any direction. Both Apollo and Mayari had summoned light and were shooting it out over the vast expanse, leaving it hanging in respective gold and silver globes to drown out the stars. Their twins shone back, sparkling out of the polished terrain. For her part, Durga was poking at the ground with her feet, disturbing the illusion into revealing its true form: clumps of wet grit.

Salar de Uyuni, this place was called; the great salt flat prone to suffusing the landscape with reflections in the wake of rain. I’d been here a few times before, closer to the fringes, but its ethereal beauty proved to be outweighed only by its loneliness. I hadn’t stayed long.

Tez, who had provided directions, stood slightly off to the side surveying the land, bumping his fists together in anticipatory motion. After all this time, the hand mirror was still clasped in one of his palms. Unlike at the Zambezi quadripoint, I couldn’t sense much out of the ordinary other than the skeleton of a vague, diffuse undercurrent which might have been no more than placebo. But for Tez, who knew mirrors better than Narcissus, it must have been akin to jacking into a powerplant.

Places of power were strange like that. Some, like the pope’s secret room and Providence itself, worked for everyone to varying degrees. Others impacted only a select few. One of my arguable failings as a deity was an inability to connect with any of them beyond rudimentary appraisal, and even that was spotty. If there was a place of power out there for me, I’d yet to find it.

There was a certain freedom to that. If I found one, I might find myself wanting to protect it. Or worse, settle down. Next thing I’d know, I’d be waking up one day in one of those brown leather armchairs with the little sunken studs in them; no aspirations, mismatched socks, my lap covered in a minimum of five temperamental bundles of fluff of indeterminate species. Might as well just throw me in the void.

“You know, the angle’s all wrong,” I called out, crunching my way over. A collection of soggy footprints despoiled the pristine landscape behind me. “It’s supposed to be unnoticeable. Good luck convincing Odin falling through the ground isn’t suspicious.”

My next step wasn't so quick to come, however, pausing with one foot raised above the powder. The gaze Tez had turned on me was dark as night and almost as vast, each eye glinting with a universe’s worth of stars.

It was, I reminded myself, a very big mirror. Big enough to fit several Singapores in it. Which, given Tez' current state, was probably something he could actually pull off.

Lucy had stayed behind to safeguard the spear and supervise Tru and Yun-Qi’s handling of the refugees in addition to Janus’ recovery. Before we’d left for Bolivia, I’d grown the latter most of a new body, minus the brain, and Apollo had made it stick. The rest, Janus had to regenerate on his own. We’d left the body locked away in one of the spare bedrooms surrounded by a folding screen in case the tourists got wandersome. They’d been through a lot, but there were limits.

I was half-expecting the ground to drop out underneath me for my insolence, but instead Tez only grinned and pointed to a spot somewhere over my shoulder.

Mayari and her reflection stared back at us with a mild expression of curiosity, no doubt also wondering why she was being pointed at.

And that was weird. The reflection's eyes weren't focused on my mirror image as they should be. They were looking at me.

I had a bad feeling about this.

“Tez, what are you -”

Mayari’s reflection disconnected from her real-world counterpart with a leap and a forward somersault, catapaulting through the surface of the salt lake head-first without so much as a ripple of interference. Startled by the unexpected intrusion, Mayari raised a hand and the double went flying into the air where it hung there, limbs dangling, slowly rotating in zero gravity.

“What’s going on?” she demanded in our direction. She glanced down at her feet, now reflectionless, lifting one shoe and then the other. “What the -“

The question ended in a squawk as her body lifted from the ground and rose into the air to join her doppelganger, who now also had a hand outstretched and was laughing in the moon goddess’ face.

“Elli’s wrinkles,” I muttered to myself. If Tez was doing what I thought he was, he was more powerful than I’d wager any of us had realised. Even the executive suite couldn’t copy powers, unless you counted R&D’s endless quest to find new ways to stuff them into mass-producible tools to prevent ever reaching market.

Tez had been head honcho of his pantheon, which up till now I’d put down to a compensation settlement for ending his sibling rivalry with Quetzalcoatl. It had always been hard to believe the lackadaisical Helpdesk employee had ruled a civilisation. Now, watching him clone a divine power without lifting a finger, it was starting to make more sense.

“Well, that’s interesting,” I said, careful to keep my voice neutral and not at all indicative of probing for weakness. “Can you do this with any mirror?”

To my right, Mayari and her reflection were still spinning head over heels in circles. It wasn't quite a fair match-up. As I watched, the former flung her twin high into the sky while Durga let out a small cheer and round of claps. Apollo glanced up briefly, only to return to tapping something out on his phone with an expression of mild irritation.

“Just this one,” Tez answered. The next words out of his mouth rolled echoing around the desolate playa with the volume of a malfunctioning foghorn: “Let her go.”

Mayari lowered her hands and the pair stopped brawling, Mirror Mayari dropping from the sky feet-first before landing effortlessly on the surface of the salt flat. The real Mayari followed after a short pause, her expressions passing through a gauntlet of mild horror, frustration and skepticism before landing on intrigue.

Her reflection, on the other hand, wore a vaguely polite smile which seemed quite un-Mayari-like based on the short time I’d spent in her presence. Not a perfect copy, then, and not to the same quality as Tez’s own reflection back at the hotel. Mirror Tez had seemed very real, and if it wasn’t for the prosthetic foot I would have struggled to tell them apart.

Mirror Mayari, on the other hand, was reminding me of an angel mark two. The unnerving kind. Dress her in white and put her on duty at one of Providence's equally creepy subcontracting courier branches, and she’d blend right in. One detail members of the public didn’t realise when they complained about automation encroaching on the economy was that some of the jobs were going to angels, not machines. If they had, it would have prompted an awkward conversation about the lack of functional difference.

“Now, if you’re done criticising,” commented Tez, “watch and learn. Mayari, do your thing.”

Both Mayaris had wandered over by this point. The real one opened her mouth to respond before closing it with an awkward expression as Mirror Mayari turned her back on the group and stepped forward. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this,” she uttered.

Tez didn't respond, instead staring off in same the direction as Creepy Mayari with that terrible, immeasureable gaze.

A distant rumbling made its way to my ears from the horizon, accompanied by the distinct cracking of stone. Before I could sharpen my hearing, it rose in a rapid crescendo until my ears rang with it, the ground trembling beneath my feet.

Scouring the surface of the mirror for cracks left me coming up with nothing but a strange sense of misplaced vertigo. Whatever surprise Tez had in store seemed to contain a city’s worth of detonating explosives, judging by the audio output.

The vertigo worsened for no apparent reason, my balance unsteadying. It didn’t seem to be Mayari’s doing, the lunar goddess occupied squinting off into the horizon. I followed her gaze, about to take to the air in bird form, when I noticed there was something off about the horizon. Nothing immediately obvious. It remained as flat and glassy as ever.

Or was it higher?

I watched, honing my vision, as the stars nearest the horizon were swallowed by the wide reflective expanse, greeting their twins in the polished surface before disappearing from view.

Shifting into an owl’s body, I blinked wide for a better look. It took a few tries before I managed to find a vantage point providing answers, but when I found them, the enormity of the undertaking became clear.

In a great curl scooped from the ground, the salt flat was rising. Subtly at first, the surface – many kilometres of it - remaining intact and unblemished. As it tore itself free of the earth, however, its progress sped up, curve deepening and height extending until it seemed like it was coming at me faster than I could fly. A great shallow gouge sundered the earth behind it as far as the eye could see, enormous fields of brown soil. The crust itself remained intact and pristine as it rose, despite being only metres deep. Adding to the impressiveness of the miracle, the water coating its surface stayed in place somehow, which I guessed was the work of Mirror Mayari.

She and the original were like dots below me, not dissimilar to the distant stars wreathed around their feet. Durga, Tez and even Apollo watched along with them, enraptured enough to cease all other activity, and it occurred to me I was missing out on part of the show.

Rejoining the group in silence, I landed in time to catch the wave towering over us in awe-inspiring geometry, wide as the eye could see to each side and high enough to send every passing aircraft smacking straight into it. I was guessing air traffic control hadn’t been high on Tez’s list of considerations.

But the effect worked. From the ground, the sheer scale made it look like the world was contorting itself into alien measurements, stars on all sides sliding into new configurations every few seconds. Then, upon reaching its apex, the curve flattened out with more thunderous grinding until we found ourselves staring at perfectly level copies of ourselves (except for Mayari) on a bisected lake that appeared functionally identical to the one we started on.

I took three steps forward and extended a hand to my reflection. My fingers touched salt.

“Don’t all rush in with the accolades,” said Tez, after a moment of tinnitus-filled silence. “It’s not like I’ve just created art on an epic scale or anything.”

“I’m impressed,” Durga said.

“I’m not,” Apollo declared in a tone competing in saltiness with the wall in front of us. Up close, its imperfections were more obvious – clumps and irregularities casting shadows along the surface. “It’s a cliff face, congratulations. Four months ago I had to stop someone sucking all the air out of the Earth’s atmosphere. These things are relative.”

Relative. Sure. Right up until the first successful major meeting invite went out at Providence using Salar de Uyuni as a bookable venue and Tez suddenly gained control of several dozen clones with terrifying powers. Half of me wanted to raise it as a suggestion. The other half wanted to survive.

Tez let out a sigh and beckoned towards the real Mayari. “Time for you to take over.”

“What? I wasn’t consulted about this. I came here to overthrow an oppressor, not hold up a wall. Get your lackey to do it.”

“The more distractions I have, the harder it’ll be to maintain the arena,” he argued. “Worst-case scenario, it could collapse and turf us back into reality, and nobody wants that.”

“Why is that a bad thing?” Mayari asked. “Better that than us being stuck there forever.”

“Because that includes Odin,” the seer explained. “If you want this to work, you need two priorities: protect my invaluable self and make sure the CIO doesn’t leave until he’s dead. Or at least incapacitated.”

“Dead,” I butted in. “Definitely dead.”

Mayari scowled. “My skills are being wasted.”

So don’t do it for free, I pointed out in private. Extract payment in moon base services, or whatever floats your boat. He needs you too much to say no.

A calculating expression crossed her features. “I want you on call for humanitarian projects for the next year,” she demanded.

“Fine. Deal. But first -” He pointed at the enormous mirror wall.

When Creepy Mayari dissipated a few seconds later, reappearing inert where you’d expect a reflection to be, the layer of water remained in place. A second examination revealed the imperfections in the surface had vanished. This time when I reached out, my hand went through.

Tez led the charge, his reflection stepping aside to let him pass.

“How’s Odin-watch going?” I asked it as I followed behind.

“That’s not me,” it rebuked me. “You’re thinking of the reflection from the hotel. But it’s going about as well as can be expected. Odin knows something’s up, but he doesn’t seem to be in a rush to do anything about it. Which suits me just fine.”

“Hmm. What’s it like living in a mirror?”

The reflection stole a glance at Tez. “Short,” it said. I waited for it to elaborate, but it didn’t.

Beside me, Durga made a sympathetic noise. I hadn’t noticed her come up beside me. “I’m sorry,” she said, resting a hand on the reflection’s arm.

Mirror Tez the Second appeared momentarily stricken.

“Need I remind everyone we have a job to do,” Apollo announced, the last person to step through the barrier. “Save the pleasantries for after we’re done.”

Other than a vague dimensional fizzle at the edge of my senses – which we’d have to muffle if we wanted to fool Odin – the world inside the mirror appeared indistinguishable from the one outside. Stars still stretched out below our feet, reflections within reflections. Tez had done his job well, the boundary invisible to the naked eye.

It was expansive, though, not what I’d imagined when proposing we set up a trap. We’d have to place Gungnir well within the borders and ensure Odin didn’t make it back to the edge. Remembering the office accessibility annex Apollo had requisitioned back at Security, I tried warping a few metres away and failed. Working as planned. For now.

Before I could raise the dimensional issue, the sun god beat me to it. “We all have preparations to make while Tezcatlipoca starts laying the groundwork. Loki, erase any dimensional evidence. Durga, you’re with me. I need to prep you on your target. Mayari, we need you keeping that mirror up. You’ll also be guarding the exit against escape, with the redundant one for backup.”

Mirror Tez wrinkled his nose amid a look of mild disgust. “Really?”

The original Tez shook his head. “Either of us could wipe the floor with you right now. Want to reconsider insulting the people essential to keeping your neck intact?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” said Apollo. “Taking your insecurities out on me won’t change the fact his lifespan is measured in hours. Emotional attachment is only setting yourself up for trouble.”

The silence which descended over the troupe was sharp enough to cut steel.

“Boss,” Durga broke in, “now might not be the best time –”

“You know nothing,” Tez spat, scowling in his direction. He whirled on Durga. “And you should know better than to stick up for him.”

“I wasn’t -”

“Focus,” said Mayari, stepping forward. The usual asymmetry around her eyes had been reversed upon transit, lending her features a vague sense of unfamiliarity. “Apollo’s a dickhead, but he’s right about priorities. You can hash this out afterwards.”

If there was an afterwards in which to hash. Still, if I had to leave this coil, mortal or otherwise, there were worse ways to do it than with this particular crowd. Even if it did happen to include Apollo.

Not that I had any intention of letting this be the end. There was always a way forward, and with the team we'd assembled and the extra support in the form of Tez's reflections, it was starting to feel like we were in with a mighty good chance.

“When I’m Odin,” I mentioned lightly, speaking to no one in particular, “there’ll be a few changes around the office. Any ideas? I’m taking submissions.”