Strictly speaking, Providence didn’t have a rule against public displays of divine power. It was just common knowledge that you kept them small and for business purposes if you didn’t want to end up in pieces.

It was a concession I was sure the tyrant would have snatched away if not for the circle of accountability in his upper echelons; he needed staff to maintain his stranglehold over the aggregate. Troublemakers and dissidents had their powers stripped or found themselves demoted. Everyone else had the carrot waved in front of their nose for good behaviour. And of course the monitoring, electronic or otherwise, whose influence culminated in the ever-present panopticon effect. Information might have been Odin’s speciality, but watching was Yahweh’s. At least once you had his attention. Another reason to keep footprints unobtrusive.

Vishnu had to be towing a fine line. With no resultant deaths, no rampant destruction and no footage of the tsunami actually colliding, its sensational value was low. It would make the news as a costly environmental curiosity, but fall off quickly. Without tangible evidence, even the people who witnessed the time skip would be largely dismissed, and the disruption of electronic records could be put down to solar flares or government conspiracies, for the more dramatically-inclined.

Unless someone capitalised on it first.

Grace, I shot through via the naudhiz rune, regardless of what important business the pope happened to be involved in at the moment. There’s just been a failed tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Wait till the news breaks, or Yahweh will know you had an informant. The moment it does, give Lorenzo public credit for stopping it.

“I don’t trust that look,” said Mayari, eying me up. “Too much grinning like a maniac.” Her eyes widened suddenly, and she lunged for the ground, rising up a moment later with the divine scanner. Salt water poured from its inner workings as she turned it over rapidly, staring at it in dismay. “No. No.”

Tsunami? What are you gibbering about? said the pope.

Trust me, I advised.

Not on your life.

Fair.

“Gee, Lorenzo isn’t wasting time saving the world,” I replied to Mayari with a wink, sloshing through the oceanic afterbirth towards the nearest spasming marine life. “Vishnu must be suffering without his favourite seer solving his problems for him. If he steps in again, we keep taking credit for it.”

“But that’s exactly what Yahweh wants.” Mayari’s tone was mournful. “Mindless adoration.”

“Or fear,” amended Lucy. “Respect in general.”

“Except it isn’t him they’ll be adoring.” I grinned, reaching the second-luckiest fish on the beach and delivering it back to a place where it would probably just be eaten by a shark. “It’s Lorenzo. They might not know it, but we do, and Yahweh definitely will. All it would take is a word from Lorrikins or Grace to instantly shift public perception.”

“If I were Yahweh, I’d murder him in his bed,” Mayari commented. She tapped the scanner twice with the flat of her palm, shaking it from side to side. “Put the rumours to rest and create a martyr like last time.”

“Maybe. But you have to admit it’s one hell of a distraction. If anyone else makes a move, we’ll claim credit for that, too. Let the tyrant toss and turn at night worrying about his reputation when he should be focusing on his life.”

“The status quo is running away from him,” Lucy mused thoughtfully. “No matter what he does, he’s going to have to act or accept he’s losing control. I doubt it will be the latter. When he acts -“ He shook his head, not finishing the sentence.

“He can’t move against the others without them turning on him,” Mayari stated with a grimace. “Even now, he still needs the facade. There’ll be a scapegoat. Urgh.” She closed her eyes. “Of all the luck.”

“Here,” I said, holding a hand out. “I’ll take it back to R&D, get it repaired. If anyone questions the water damage, well, I am –”

I didn’t finish the sentence, largely due to a unanticipated morass of information dropping into my brain; disorienting in the same way as a volleyball to the stomach. And like a volleyball, the shock only lasted seconds, the intrusions easing off into old, barely-remembered grooves. A powerful wave of nostalgia came with them. I knew exactly what this was.

Whether or not Durga and the other structuralists were right about us living in some kind of contrived ecosystem, worship was one point lending it credence. Any deity with even the most remote notoriety would sooner or later find themself pestered with demands on their time and attention. Ignoring them didn’t make them go away.

Providence, however, had. As part of the onboarding process, all requests and correspondence had to be vetted and monitored by the company. The underlying connections were still there, just interrupted. Redirected and reprocessed; the result of being fed through an amalgamation of divine and technological filters.

That they’d come crashing back now meant, as a newly ‘dead’ – or more accurately inactive – employee, my listing had just been removed from the system.

Providence’s task manager, undisputed chore that it was, admittedly did have some notable advantages on old methods of dealing with worshippers. The main one being that all the requests went straight into an automated computer system.

Now that I’d been removed from the register, they were considered defunct and should have dissipated into nothing, forever unanswered.

Or they would have, except for the small issue of me not being actually dead. The weight of several hundred tasks collapsing into me at once sent the air rushing sharply from my lungs and my head spinning dizzily. Only mine had been transferred, at least - Yahweh’s enormous spillover would have been reassigned to active members of the workforce.

The tasks sat in my headspace like uncomfortable lumps, gnawing annoyingly at my attention until I picked at their scabs to scratch the itch.

“Just fell off the task manager,” I revealed to the crowd of stares. “So that’s fun.”

“Congratulations?” Mayari hazarded. She handed me the scanner.

I hadn’t missed this. Even in my heyday of popularity, I’d only had a few dozen petitioners at a time. There were better gods to ask favours of. Unlike Thor, I didn’t offer glory – associating with me was a good way to get your name dragged through the mud. Unlike Freyr, whose parenting advice had always been dubious at best, I didn’t give people cute bouncing babies destined for a thirty percent infant mortality rate. I offered my occasional charming company, nuggets of sage life advice, and opportunities to get blacklisted by the Aesir. Which suited me fine.

But as a side-effect of a larger global population, my number of tickets had oddly grown, even if they were mainly comprised of hippies.

I ran through the bunch of them briefly. Without the task system, I had access to far less information than I’d become used to. Gone were the insights into people’s lives and histories; gone was the inherent background information on the task. All I could see now were identities and bare requests. If I wanted more information, I’d have to interfere.

Interestingly, Clara was in there with the rest of them, even though the small schoolgirl hadn’t been a specific personal assignment. Her status must have changed after I’d kidnapped her into the office. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen. Usually when people had a falling out with one god and found another on the rebound. To Clara, I could have been anyone, but interacting with her must have been enough. I filed it away for later.

Regina was also in there as her own separate, slightly more obtrusive lump, which, as my only official retainer, made sense. Where the tyrant’s system only accepted people meeting its requirements, the old ways exposed us to everyone and their dog. Retainers had special privileges. In some ways, we were really just household personalities with publicly-listed phone numbers, except with the phone glued to our hands at all times and the knowledge a certain percent of correspondents were in dire need of harassment awareness training.

Given I’d sent Neetu off to enlist the waitress’ assistance, it would be remiss of me not to check in. This was better than using the phone – the fact I could sense Regina at all almost certainly meant it wasn’t affected by Themis’ bubble.

Taking a cue from Lucy, I excused myself and made my way back to the penthouse with its ready-made wardings. Regina’s signature waited for me expectantly, and I pushed myself towards it the old-fashioned way until my vision swam with two sets of superimposed images.

Over the top of Tru’s lounge stood a much narrower corridor laid with white tiles and a few insipid plants; old and worn but in decent repair. Faint echoes of Singapore’s ever-present heat washed over my skin, distant and dreamlike. I was sitting on the sofa but also standing in that hallway, just barely. Upon examining my hands with my second set of eyes, I could clearly see through them. I pushed more of myself through until the hallway whooshed into focus, glad to see my arms no longer resembled knockoff cellophane. Tru’s apartment existed somewhere in the background still, but far away.

Regina and Neetu stood just a few metres away, clustered near the bend in the hallway. The police officer, out of uniform and with a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes, had poked her head around the corner in stakeout mode, tensed and seemingly on a wire’s edge. Regina, right behind her, was staring at me with her signature charisma, the psychic not even slightly fooled by my latest guise.

“So you showed,” she deadpanned, beckoning me over. “After your friend said you’d left the country.”

Neetu glanced back nervously, scanning the corridor briefly. It seemed to be part of a larger office complex. “Who are you talking to?”

“Oh, she can’t see me,” I explained, stepping forward and waving my hand a few times in front of the officer’s face to illustrate. “Divine visitation rights are granted to each worshipper separately. Don’t look at me like that; I didn’t make the rules.”

Regina hesitated. She glanced between myself and the other woman. “I’m in contact with Sørine,” she replied in a low voice, tapping her ear as if it contained a hidden earpiece. “It’s… complicated.”

“I bet it is,” Neetu muttered, turning back around the corner. “I can’t believe I’m doing this. Getting in’s going to be a problem. There’s a cam trained on the door and I’m fairly sure we already passed underneath one on the way here. With these cameras, there’s probably an alarm system installed as well. If we bust the door in or set off an alert, they’ll have our footage on record. It’ll be the end of my career.”

I stepped around the corner into the open stretch of hallway, making my way towards the nearest door. The moment I moved more than a few metres away from Regina, however, my connection to the location faded rapidly, consciousness sliding back to its origin point. I corrected my course before I lost it entirely and snapped back into solidity.

“Tell her we may be able to do this without breaking in,” I conveyed to Regina, plunging my hand into the nearest wall. “As you can see, I’m not tangibly here. Unless they’ve got their hands on some unlikely contraband, I won’t set off any sensors. Can’t touch anything, but it’s a start. But as my precious anchor, you’re going to have to walk me around the perimeter. Do try to look as if you’re lost and not conducting a top secret intelligence mission.”

“These people,” Regina murmured. “Who are they? There’s something in there.”

“Is there, now? I can tell you they’re mortal, or at least they should be, not that that will be much help if you get caught. They’ve been meddling with Providence, which is quite impressive. Though,” I added, examining the surroundings, “apparently not enough to pay for an office upgrade.”

They were also the ones who’d wanted to meet with me. The faction I’d mentally dubbed the Whistleblower, sending a message through the Providence Helpdesk system on Lofn’s computer to warn me about surveillance. Back then, I’d assumed they were friendly or at least neutral, working against the mysterious Hacker monitoring our computers: Canciana, the leader of Xiānfēng.

But the more I discovered, the more it was starting to feel like a lure.

Xiānfēng itself had been founded close to four hundred years ago by my own son, a cult with the ultimate goal of raising mortals to the level of the gods. Its very existence made it Providence’s enemy. Siphon, if I had it right, was its aborted baby; the militant offshoot made up of ex-senior Xiānfēng members. Also Providence’s adversary.

The difference was that Siphon had been stealing the souls of gods. Specifically the ones on Providence’s blacklist who wouldn’t be missed. People like me.

On the rare occasion mortals made their way into Providence’s headquarters, they never got far. Clara’s brief excursion into the office proved that recently, loud and clear. The facility was crowded with too many perceptive gods able to detect that sort of thing – not to mention that everyone knew everyone after centuries of working together. Plus with the entrance moving every few days, it was impossible to track down the building without blind luck or inside information.

So to get their hands on a god, they’d have to make us come to them. Seed messages in the system visible only to the right eyes, lure us in with an intriguing warning. Or perhaps they simply targeted each of us with tailored incentives. If Yun-Qi had told them anything about me, they would have known I couldn’t resist a mystery.

My message couldn’t have been the only one, if that was the case. How many of the tasks currently in the system were seeded fakes designed as deity bait?

It was nothing short of genius, really. Not only had they found a way to infiltrate the Helpdesk task manager and alter its content, but they’d obtained enough of a read on individual employees to restrict view privileges to individuals, cloaking them from discovery and spoofing other requests in the process. They hadn’t gotten it perfect, of course – Themis had seemed to indicate she knew who was being targeted – but by mortal standards it was the kind of once-in-a-generation breakthrough capable of changing the world forever. Yun-Qi had recruited some spectacular talent.

And now we’d turned up at the very location specified by the lure, in all its dumpy glory. Likely still attended, even in the early hours of the morning. It didn’t look like much, but appearances could be deceiving. I had an advantage in that to most extents and purposes I was coddled up half a world away, invisible and undetectable.

The problem was that Siphon dealt with souls, not bodies, and I had no idea what resources they had available. Targeting unpowered staff from Helpdesk meant they probably weren’t used to dealing with powered gods, but even an immortal without powers was no mean pushover. Centuries to millennia of learned skills combined with a disregard for death leant itself a certain resilience. It was possible I was about to walk into extreme danger and expose Regina to it as well. Genuine psychics were very difficult to come by these days.

“What can you tell me about what’s inside?” I pressed my retainer.

“Well, it’s not –” Regina shifted uncomfortably next to Neetu in the quiet hall, and moved some distance away, keeping her voice low. “It’s not one of you. I don’t think it’s even alive. People move and change. The energy generated by living creatures can fluctuate thanks to a hundred different factors. Time of day, food you eat. They’re like flickering candles. But you already know this.”

I didn’t, actually, though the news didn’t surprise me. My expertise was sensory, not extra-sensory. As far as the latter went, I had the bare minimum divinity had to offer, plus a smattering of dimensional and runic awareness which came with the pantheon.

“That thing in there is too still,” Regina continued. “And it has a –” She made a spherical gesture with her hands, “- reach of some kind. Starting at the door. There’s a core, but then it thins and spreads wide. And before you ask, I don’t know what it is. I’ve never come across this before.”

“Hmm,” I said, curious about what she had seen. “Does it cover the whole interior?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see the layout. Probably a lot. There’s a clear patch near the far corner.”

This had trap written all over it. And I’d nearly walked straight into it. “You, Regina,” I uttered gleefully, “are worth your weight in gold. Providence can think again if they hope to get their grabby hands on you.”

Except that they would, if I didn’t do something about it very soon. The protection afforded to retainers only lasted as long as the sponsoring deity remained part of the official office registry. Providence would recognise no affiliations to someone they considered expired. It was probably someone in Odin’s department who’d been monitoring us earlier, which would mean I could pull rank as the abhorrent bastard and claim her services. But it would be too late to hide her existence from the company, though I had no guarantee who had been behind it.

Being in the bubble bought us some extra time, at least, and I could figure it out after dealing with Siphon’s trap. Neetu had already stopped observing the hallway and had taken to watching Regina, a strange expression making its way across her face.

“Alright.” I nodded to my retainer. “Take me to the clear patch and tell me exactly how far I have before it stops being clear.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she replied in a dubious tone.

“I always do,” I lied. “And our friend Neetu here should be armed, if it comes to that.”

“I’m more worried about what happens in the long-term.”

“As am I,” agreed Neetu, stepping forward. She stared in my vague direction, although I noted she was looking down at where Sørine’s short head would have been. Smart cookie, Neetu.

I grinned at them both. “See? Making a good team already. This could be the start of a beautiful new friendship.”

“Oh my god,” Regina muttered.

“Why, thank you,” I said, placing a gracious hand over my chest. “I am.”