The perks of being an executive – or at least the semblance of one – in a divine global monopoly were more than making up for the position’s associated lack of depth perception.

I couldn’t replicate the true nature of the void stagnating in the eye socket of its previous holder, but I could at least make it look the part. Mostly. In my head I held a mental shortlist of people I figured capable of seeing through the ruse, and planned to make a beeline post-haste in the opposite direction should any of them appear.

Since one of them was now supposed to be my immediate boss, this was a problem I’d have to address fairly soon.

I added it to the increasingly long list.

Well over half the eyes in the office followed me as I strode through the building, multi-layered fabrics billowing out behind me in faithful recreation of Odin’s signature aesthetic. The company still hadn’t managed to get the sun working again – not that you could tell the difference in this windowless prison – and no doubt Providence’s low-level Helpdesk staff were wondering why someone as high-up in the hierarchy as myself was wasting their time among those at the bottom. Especially during a crisis.

I turned my single eye on some of the onlookers, only for most to hurriedly look away.

Earlier in the week, the explosive destruction of the headquarters of the Catholic church had sent the office into a cloud of frenetic activity. Now, with the advent of a second public emergency in quick succession, the atmosphere had changed again. Floor T, usually a hub of energy, had gone strangely quiet. Employees sat at their desks, some still trying to work through the piles of unresolved wishful thinking which passed for ineffectual busywork in the modern era, while others conversed in low voices and careful tongues. An undercurrent's hum of gossip filled the air.

Part of the attention, and a part I was trying to downplay, was that it was beginning to look a little like I might be lost.

This was not my fault. Spend decades – let alone centuries – working in the same office, give or take a few complete repair jobs, and even a dunce was going to learn the building layout. Short of a few migrating spatial distortions, I knew all the areas I had official access to back to front, as well as a few I didn’t.

Currently, I was searching for a certain time loop. Even if I hadn’t already known where it was, a large, blood-coloured prism sitting bang in the middle of an office walkway was hard to miss. Yet I found myself walking past the same set of desks for the third time in a row, no loop to be found, setting a bad precedent for the remainder of my undercover promotion.

It was a bad look for Providence’s Chief Information Officer to seem confused. It just didn’t happen. Until an hour ago, I’d put it down to insufferable arrogance and ego. Now I knew better – it was insufferable arrogance, ego, and the ability to read the minds of the unfortunate souls around him. Luckily for me, he’d kept it a secret. Unluckily, if I started drawing the wrong kind of attention to myself now, staff were going to start asking questions. And gods were not generally people you wanted asking questions. At least not the powered ones.

As far as management was concerned, Loki was gone, stolen by the rebellious group Siphon for its nefarious ends. The wider office knew even less, probably under the impression I’d been demoted away into some unending hell for crossing the line one too many times.

I just had to make sure it stayed that way.

The fact I couldn’t find the time loop meant someone was hiding it. Under normal circumstances this would have been a problem. Here, though, I had an ace up my sleeve.

With senses the average mortal wouldn’t have possessed, I could feel five ethereal threads extending out into the nebulous distance like radii on a spiderweb. Not so long ago, that number had been six.

One was much nearer than the others. I couldn’t tell where it was leading, exactly, but as I set off for the fourth time I kept it firmly in the centre of my attention even as I scowled at any of the nearby employees showing an interest in my activities.

I didn’t get far before the thread started directing me back the way I’d come, and I paused in my tracks, scouring the office around me. I knew I was heading in the right direction, and that turning around would take me straight back to the same desks again for the fourth time in a row. But I did it anyway.

The background chatter faded, voices dying out one by one. Desks emptied in greater numbers, and instead of the same sets of prying eyes I found myself in a more isolated section of the office. My senses tried again to warn me I was heading the wrong way, and again I ignored them in favour of the pact thread, turning towards what my brain was insisting was the way to the bathrooms.

Instead, I found myself rounding a corner into a vacant walkway. Vacant except for the giant writhing death cube and a single figure in black and yellow crouched on its hands and knees in front of it, scrubbing at the floor with a bucket and sponge. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Any plans I had of sneaking up on Tezcatlipoca were scuppered by the small but important fact he was a seer. And with the presence of fewer competing prophecies to mess him around, one who’d just received an accuracy boost. Barely had I stepped into view than he turned, still in a crouch, and waved me over.

The contents of the bucket were bright red, as was much of the surrounding carpet. “Is that who I think it is?” I asked with a sly smile. There were countless people I would have sympathised with for meeting such a fate. Odin was not one of them.

Providence’s real CIO might have gone in whole, but the immutable force of the loop’s time clones had ground what remained into a fine puree as it pushed the original out to the edges through whatever small gaps had remained. There would be none of him left in there by now. Indeed, the already bloody cube was looking even bloodier now. No hiding that for long, I guessed.

Tez only grimaced in response, an uncomfortable reminder he was not quite the same man I was used to dealing with. “We need to figure out what to do with this,” he said, and squeezed a stream of red into the bucket.

I knew what he meant. Gods were astoundingly difficult to kill without the right tools. Despite appearances, Odin was far from dead. If we left the bucket’s contents alone for long enough, it would eventually regenerate back into the bane of my existence. It would take weeks from its current state, but still.

Tossing the remains into an active lava stream might finish the job – or the sun, if it hadn’t just gone AWOL – but then we’d have the even worse problem of his soul passing on into the void, where it could be located and interrogated. Given Yahweh’s personality, I wasn’t convinced the chief executive would be keen on resurrecting Odin despite their close alliance, but it was also a possibility.

No, the best we were likely to get would be to stash the remains somewhere and prevent them from regenerating until we could figure out a way to extract the soul into a soul jar for safekeeping. Or possibly an alternative. My daughter Hel would know something about that. And so would my son Fenrir – or Yun-Qi, as he went by these days. A warm feeling spread throughout my chest when I thought of the latter, and I found myself smiling. For all its problems, today was a very good day.

From the way Tez was watching me, I had a feeling we’d already been through this conversation in some future vision of his. “There’s also this,” he said, reaching into a pocket. His hand came out with a ring in it.

The silver jewellery lit up to my senses as a band of runes along its inner edge flared to life. One of Odin’s many useful but ultimately not life-saving trinkets. I peered along the edge of the time loop, keeping a safe distance from the injury zone. “Any others?”

“Twisted scrap. Chances are good you destroyed half the company’s research progress this morning.”

“Oh, it’s not that sophisticated.” I turned the ring in my fingers, reading the inscription. Something along the lines of support, which didn’t narrow it down much. It wasn’t immediately clear to me what the object did, but having a genuine magical artifact in my possession would help support the charade I was going to pull. After my last unpleasant runic surprise I was a little hesitant to put it on, but I’d tested a few quick spells before returning to the office, and as far as I could tell they’d returned to their usual neutral selves upon the fall of their master. Dissolving one of the fake magical rings adorning my fingers, I replaced it with the real thing and was reassured when nothing bad happened. I could figure out what it did later.

Tez pulled a face and stared at the bucket. “It pains me to say it, but I think this has to come home with me. Your apartment has a bit too much going on right now, and Apollo’s cabin is about to get raided. The moon base is a little insecure. And the idea of handing this over to Lucifer to take care of doesn’t thrill me. Besides,” he added, not looking particularly happy about it, “it’s a little easier for me to supply extra hands to watch over it.”

“About that,” I said, sitting cross-legged on the closest available patch of clean carpet. I poked at the remaining bloodstains with an index finger. “Next time we need to dispose of a god, we’re gaffer taping a hundred hand mirrors to you face-down. Then we can have a hundred-strong Tez army to take down anything that gets in its way, and you get to keep your hands free. Or is that giving you too many ideas?” A further thought occurred to me. “Does it apply to your reflections as well? Could you go infinite?”

He glared at me for a moment, before throwing his head back and expelling a sigh. “This is why we don’t spread it around,” he grumbled. “Our lives aren’t expendable. Every version we – I – bring into being is real. Complete. But there can only be one source. Eventually, the others have to go back. To oblivion.” The fist around the sponge clenched as it poured another stream of red into the bucket. “We – I – already lost two today. If you miss your Tez at all, you’ll understand. Because he’s gone, and he isn’t coming back.” The fist unclenched and the stream stopped. “Any army I create comes with an inbuilt death sentence. I was just the lucky one this time.”

The smile faded from my lips. I’d lost people too, of course, but I’d also defeated an enemy and been reunited with long lost family. Tez had just lost people. More than the rest of us. Given he’d only been alive for a few hours in this incarnation, it wasn’t a great start. “Of course I do,” I said sincerely. “And as far as I’m concerned, you’re my Tez too.”

“I get it,” the seer said coolly, meeting my eyes before I had a chance to continue. “But every one of my lives begins with a death. And many more deaths besides. This isn’t new.” He shook his head. “I need to finish cleaning this up. It won’t be long before people start to notice they can’t get to their desks.”

“I’m about to get myself accosted by the senior delinquents,” I said, changing the subject. “Any advice?”

“Don’t draw me into it,” he replied.

“Why would I do that?”

“They’re going to want to fill the gap. You’re going to want to install a friendly face. I’m asking you not to. I can’t fill those shoes and I don’t want to.”

He was talking about Apollo’s position, of course. I tried to imagine Tez taking up the intense mantle of Head of Security and failed. I tried to imagine anyone stepping into that role and failed. It took a special kind of insanity and base disregard for the increasingly distant concept of happiness.

But if they replaced Apollo with another seer on the enemy team, even a less powerful one, it was going to make our lives difficult. Apollo’s eventual treachery had been the key part of what made our plan viable in the first place. “I’m VIP level now,” I said with a shrug. “I’ll order a resurrection. Problem solved.”

“Not going to work.”

“I’ll be convincing.”

The god of night gave me a belaboured look. He tossed the wrung-out sponge in my general direction, where it bounced off my shoulder onto the carpet. “Shitface dies under mysterious circumstances. Not many things even had a chance of bringing him down. Who do you think they’re going to look at first? Point fingers all you like, but there aren’t that many other seers in the business. Either you find one of them you don’t like and wait for your fragile story to fall apart, or –”

“- we scapegoat Apollo,” I finished, seeing his point. By far the easiest way to thwart prophecy was with, well, more prophecy. In that field, the Greek god of divination was the unquestioned authority. As seers – albeit a fake one, in my case – it made Tez and I instant suspects in his disappearance. Not wrongly, either, considering Odin had been the one to actually pull off the deed.

I picked up the sponge and turned it over absently in my hands. It wouldn’t even be much of a lie. Apollo had been a traitor and had plotted against Providence. Rather than committing something so gauche as murder, Odin was simply nipping a serious threat in the bud as befitted his responsibilities. There would be questioning, of course, and plenty of it. But if I couldn’t turn it to my advantage, I had no business impersonating one of the most powerful people in the known universe.

The downside being that we wouldn’t be able to get Apollo back. Which meant we still had to fill that accursed position.

“Maybe if it’s just acting Head –”

I scrambled out of the way before Tez could throw the bucket at me.