I gazed around at the conference room – a very different one, this time – where a gaggle of hospital managers in suits tried politely not to stare at me in my guise as Yang Yinzhu. It probably didn’t help that I was wearing bright green furs and a giant pair of indoor sunglasses, or had my feet up on the table.

One of the executives coughed and closed the lid of her laptop. “Maybe we should reschedule this meeting for later today.”

A few of the others shared meaningful glances. Framed by frosted glass at the side of the room where he’d been taking minutes, Yun-Qi set his mouth in a firm line. “I’m sure Ms Yang’s concerns are easily addressed,” he proposed. “I can assist her to a solution while the meeting continues as planned.” He inclined his head slightly towards me, holding a hand out towards the sliding door. “If that suits, of course.”

He received no arguments. By the relieved looks on his colleagues’ faces, I understood the ‘solution’ proposed was expected to be along the lines of being politely escorted to the exit, followed by an immediate blacklisting.

Instead, my eldest living child gave me a sidelong glance as he closed the door of the crashed meeting room behind him. “I handed in my resignation an hour ago. But I still have to see out the remainder of my exit period.”

“We’re in trouble,” I told him, winding our way down the length of the building. “I need to know everything about Xiānfēng and whatever Canciana was trying to do inside Providence’s systems.”

Friday had begun in earnest in this part of the world, early hours of the morning giving way to a new business day, albeit one uncertain and confused. After Regina’s demonic transformation – which she’d taken in stride – I’d spent a few hours getting her and Neetu up to speed.

I’d been fairly confident Regina would fall into the bucket of Pride. Instead, her rune surprised me; algiz being the one to glimmer back at me in coruscating orange. As the rune of protection, it made perfect sense. As one of Lucy’s traditional job openings, less so. Although they’d always been ridiculous categories to begin with, when most of them boiled down to different variants of wanting things. The tyrant always had seemed affronted by the notion that humans had the capacity to want anything other than him. Lucy had apparently spent a good few centuries creating the positions in response out of spite.

Through visitation privileges, I would now be able to whisk Regina out of Singapore at a moment’s notice, but the trouble would be putting her back. Once my anchor was gone, it was gone, and I wanted eyes on Siphon.

Although it was ironically Neetu who was best placed for that. I would have preferred to demonify the sergeant, too – or at least try – except for the small problem of the weaponised computer program. She’d escaped the expansion of the containment field fuming but scot-free, supporting my theory of mortal exemption. Staying mortal would let her get close where Regina (probably) and I couldn’t.

I had, however, acquired a second retainer.

Yun-Qi, in the meantime, shot me a small smile. “I never said she was targeting Providence. However, I see it didn’t take you long to figure it out.”

“Well, that piece of information almost just cost me my freedom. Those ex-colleagues of yours didn’t make the best of impressions. Who, by the way, you should steer clear of. Having been their mentor might exempt you from their genocidal rampage, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Yun-Qi’s brow furrowed, and I explained the situation with Siphon and the Singapore barrier, accompanying the descriptions with visuals from my memories.

“So trade in the region continues to be shut down,” he remarked when I was done. “Rumours are starting to spread of it being a veiled attempt at political sanction. Within Xiānfēng, word is the gods are interfering for company gain.”

“Interfering, yes. Gain – they didn’t exactly get what they bargained for.”

We reached a lift at the end of the corridor and stood there, waiting for it to arrive. “This is news to me,” my son admitted, stroking his chin. “It’s certainly a variant on our technology. Yet the version you acquired from Canciana was our latest prototype, and it isn’t capable of generating the field you describe. It’s limited to the technical capabilities of the hardware it runs on, and can’t produce a metaphysical aura out of nowhere. To achieve that, Siphon, as you call them, would have had to enlist aid. Probably of the divine variety.”

I had to agree. Gods weren’t the only magic-users out there, but thanks to Providence’s recent anti-competition policies they were by far the most common. A deity with the right expertise would also have a far easier time setting up something as powerful as a modified soul jar. And by Themis’ own words, Siphon had being stealing souls for at least a year.

If that was the case – we had a fellow renegade on our hands. One apparently fine with the idea of seeing the gods wiped out – or naïve enough to assume it wouldn’t be taken that far.

“Our technology can move souls,” Yun-Qi continued, “but only into one specific location. Providence’s prayer repository. It’s a dangerous undertaking. For most volunteers, the trip is one-way – if the medical procedure doesn’t kill them first. That part, at least, is rare.” He shook his head. “Canciana was supposed to carry out her exploration under observation in laboratory conditions, with a team who could pull her out. Instead, it seems she disappeared for a month, only to turn up dead when you discovered her.”

I raised my eyebrow at that. Convincing people to throw themselves into the path of near-certain death was no easy task. “And what do you explore?”

The lift arrived, its doors silently gliding open. We stepped in.

“I’ve never been through the process myself,” Yun-Qi admitted. “I’m too valuable to risk. The few volunteers who returned struggled to describe the experience. Others didn’t adapt well to the transition. We try to predict individual reactions in advance, but our estimations only go so far.”

I could imagine. “So you can’t manipulate the system tasks, then?”

“Not the way you think. Mostly, our people avoid them altogether. We seek our goals and filter out the remainder. To observe too much of Providence’s secrets at once is to invite insanity. Nor are they useful secrets.”

True. Gods of knowledge and the like were better at it, but even most of the divine cohort couldn’t handle massive information dumps. To the enormous font that was the Helpdesk system, the average mortal was a sitting duck. I could also speak from experience that knowing what nineteen thousand people wanted out of their lives wasn’t going to overturn any empires anytime soon.

“Then why connect to it at all?” I asked.

Yun-Qi’s gazed bored into mine. “Because we are aiming for what lies underneath,” he replied. “A sliver of Yggdrasil they couldn’t extinguish. The one which runs and always ran through this world. The one the conquerors needed to hold their constructs together.”

“Ah.”

Legends spoke of Yggdrasil as a tree. The great world tree encompassing dimensions and holding the whole messy shebang together. In reality, Yggdrasil was to a tree as a tesseract was to a child’s wobbly drawing of a rectangle. Tired of having to explain its complicated web of interlocking connections to each other, the Vikings had come up with a simpler analogy. It had hit the right populist notes.

At least, that was my interpretation. Odin had always sworn half-blind he’d hung himself on its literal branch, but in all my interdimensional travels I’d never seen so much as a hint of a leaf.

It was real, though – something existed in the space between space. And something had to be powering the behaviour making it possible for tasks to reach their intended recipients, although whether those things were the same was anyone’s guess. It far outdated Providence, as evidenced by the fact I currently had several hundred of the things taking up space in my head since falling off the system. It was easier for me to think of it as an invisible force, like magnetism. But the magic filtering the desires of the world was linked to it, and Xiānfēng had found a way to trace those connections back to their source.

I was out of my depth here. Even under a geas and stripped of his powers, I supposed Yun-Qi had had four hundred years of uninterrupted research to figure a few things out. “And then what? Are you trying to destabilise the foundations of divinity?”

“Not the way you think,” he replied, echoing my own words back at me. The lift drew to a halt, its doors sliding open again and revealing a more public-friendly environment, complete with lime green wallpaper and seating. We stepped out, my outfit drawing a few stares from passing workers and patients, and headed for the door. “If only we could change that much. We don’t have the power or expertise; our interaction extends to the code running the adjacent machines. Mortal methods for mortal technology. Once we push past that –” he shrugged, sidestepping a hurried woman in doctor’s robes, “- it’s new territory. But there are a few factors we know for sure. It is a surefire path to immortality. The returnees who made it back came back changed. Not always entirely without harm, but with their aging frozen and health restored. Some with very minor powers we encourage them to keep hidden. None have ascended to godhood, but it’s a start. Expanding the immortal population buys us resources and time.”

“Which you need, because it sounds like this process ends up throwing your people away. Suicide volunteers won’t be easy to replace.”

“They aren’t. We send only the most highly trained. Each failure means the loss of decades of experience. And often a friend. But you know how it is. Without us, they would die anyway. With us, at least they have a chance. And through them, the hope that one day it may be shared with the world. Xiānfēng teaches them the truth of the world. Exposes the lies they were told. We choose candidates carefully. Offer them inarguable proof immortality is possible.”

I glanced at him through narrowed eyes. In the reality we lived in, where the public’s access to on-demand evidence had been stripped away piece by piece, I had a feeling I knew what that proof would entail. Namely a process involving sharp implements and a certain amount of blood loss. Fenrir had never been one to balk easily.

“You know, I have to congratulate you,” I commented. “You’ve managed to hit almost every note in the handbook of classic villainy and yet actually managed to retain people. It’s a good thing you look good in a suit.”

“Appearances,” affirmed Yun-Qi, “are deceiving. We teach people to look past their assumptions, recruiting the finest minds. Make no mistake, our operatives are akin to the first cosmonauts humanity sent into space. Even in the old days, Yggdrasil was closely guarded by gatekeepers hoarding its knowledge. Now, we have an opportunity to rediscover what was lost.”

Such as plenty of the volunteers themselves. Ironic.

Separating souls from bodies was a lot like death, when it came right down to it. Except that instead of ending up in the void, they stayed floating around elsewhere. Achieving it wasn’t easy. Most of the time, mortals separated from their bodies would simply die. Even Tru, a demon lord, had been on his way there at the hands of his exorcism; it had only been Lucy’s readiness with the soul jar to have saved him.

Xiānfēng’s true miracle hadn’t just been finding a way to send people through the divine bedrock. It had been implementing a method of forcibly bringing them back. Even if it didn’t work a hundred percent of the time.

Souls were inherently immortal. If anything, death removed the mortality along with the body, the soul finally able to escape from its chrysalis phase. Unfortunately it also stripped powers, leaving the dead wide open to the same kinds of power imbalances that plagued them in life.

But Yggdrasil was not death. It bordered death, like it ringed everything. Or used to. If travelling there could spark the same kind of reaction as dying, but without stripping a soul’s powers… it could change everything.

“So why did your esteemed leader embark on a permanent arboreal residency visa?” I pressed. “Why Peru? Why now?”

“I don’t understand it either. Fate, perhaps.”

“You’re out of the loop. Fate’s been dead a long time. It warred with the seers; the seers won. Good riddance.”

“Is it, though? What if it wasn’t dead, but temporarily absent?”

“If I wanted a philosophy debate, I could induce the same level of headache at will in about a millionth of the time,” I said. “Regardless of fate’s involvement or lack thereof, Canciana went to Peru for a reason. She was monitoring Helpdesk computers.”

Ones belonging to the same candidates Siphon had earmarked, I realised suddenly. She’d known about them. And apparently hadn’t wanted to share that fact with her colleagues.

But while Siphon flailed around in the dark spamming the task system with hollow tickets, Canciana’s incursions had been far more direct. Seeding software onto specific devices. Xiānfēng were the better hackers, it seemed, the brain drain not quite enough to lose them the edge.

Siphon’s advantages, on the other hand, looked increasingly like they came from cheating.

Was Canciana monitoring her rivals or helping them? Finding out was probably a good idea.

We emerged into the same foyer I’d visited earlier in the week, Yun-Qi escorting me towards the entrance, the morning sun filtering through a thin white haze. “It’s a bad time for a proper catch-up,” he stated, hands stiff by his sides as he gestured in apology. “The news you bring demands urgent action. And at your end, it must be worse.”

“Hey,” I clarified, sweeping him into a hug. “I will always have time for you. Even if I can’t get there immediately. I even have a phone you can contact me on this time.” I squinted at him for a moment. “Unless you want some new demon powers. You’d be a shoe-in for Gluttony, and you won’t even have to bark up any trees, mythical or no.”

He squinted at me. “Would that work?”

“One way to find out.”

We shook hands. Yun-Qi pulled his back a few seconds later with a quirk of his lip. “I suppose not.”

“Worth a try. Lucy did say he was aiming for mortal stock. Looks like I’m stuck investing my options in Cremation Rings.” I paused as a new thought occurred to me. “I assume Siphon are also punting sacrifices in Yggdrasil’s vague direction, then.”

“They’d be limited,” he replied. “Only a small contingent left the organisation, and adequate training takes years. They can’t afford to risk resources like we can. It’s one of the reasons we haven’t pursued more aggressively. It would only be viable if they were sending in untrained neophytes or unwilling volunteers. No doubt they will send people in, but we have time. Or had. It seems they’ve stumbled across a more efficient strategy.”

“Only the deity cleanse to keep track of, then,” I muttered. “This is going to be fun, knowing that every computer might have a mine buried in it. I don’t imagine getting close will be straightforward, either. Not if they keep holing up in range of the things.”

“Are you planning to eliminate them? If you can locate their operations, any long-range missile will do the trick. Or a proxy, for that matter. But they’ll most likely have contingencies for this eventuality. It was part of our training. Provocation may be unwise.”

“Well, we’ll see,” I said. “As incredible as it sounds, it’s not my only priority. These are interesting times.”

Yun-Qi’s default poker face cracked a little, naked curiosity edging its way through the creases in his skin. “Then I’ll help however I can.”

“I know,” I grinned, giving him a light push back in the direction we’d come. “And if you get bored of stuffy meetings, give me a call. I’ll make them think twice about stopping you.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Yun-Qi. But he smiled.