Yun-Qi twisted the handle of the fallen door and pulled it ajar, but I could already feel it; only the cool stone of the cell floor lay beyond. Yggdrasil was gone. He closed the latent portal again, carefully, and stepped back without a word. He wasn’t the only one. The members of Xiānfēng, previously so animated, had fallen into that particular frequency of silence common to crushed hope.

Gia folded her arms and raised the tip of her chin into the abruptly hostile environment. Her words entered my head faint but discernible. Fainter than they should have been. The pact was failing, drawing on our pooled power to stay intact even on its last legs. I still have your protection, right?

“Of course.” It was mostly true. “You made the right call.”

Yun-Qi handed over the spear and turned his back to the quailing demon lord. “We have work to do,” he announced in Mandarin to the others. “We’re not dead yet. Remember your preparations. These inbound personalities are powerful, but prone to error. Unused to failure, they will be overconfident. Our two advantages are planning and deceit. I want you to split up. Use the notes you’ve been taking on this deathtrap of a venue and use them against your opponents. Most gods aren’t equipped to deal with dimensional faults. Bait them into making the same mistake as our colleague Hualing. If they act quickly, without thinking, we have a chance.”

“We’re low on light sources,” Wen spoke up, the first I’d heard from the Xiānfēngite senior developer since our last conversation.

Gia stared between the members of the dispirited crowd, straining to decipher the narrative in the unfamiliar language. I steered her back towards the exit, and no one made a move to stop her. “We also have work to do.”

But I can help, she protested, even fainter than before, twisting to glance over her shoulder. The effort made her wince, and she raised a hand to the head still riddled with holes, hissing involuntarily when her fingers made contact.

Yun-Qi didn’t so much as twitch.

The dismissal landed with all the impact of a bullet to the internal organs, specifically the one housing the centuries of accumulated goodwill I could feel rupturing into the cracks in the facility corridors. Benefit of the doubt had borne me through Xiānfēng’s global decimation, but only went so far. It only took one read of the room to see the only help anyone wanted from us was us leaving.

Most of my selves were now muddling around in the dark. I generated bioluminescence where it was needed, making sure Vince had enough light to assist Lucy, who was already rousing from his bump on the head, if groggily.

Half a dozen fatal potholes lay between Xiānfēng’s setup and the disused facility entrance. I guided Gia past them around a corner into a relatively stable pocket and dropped into a seat on the floor where I could keep my eyes on the entrance. I made a few extra while I still could, and tapped the ground next to me. If the pact was failing, it couldn’t wait. “Favour time.”

“I thought we had more important things to take care of,” Gia said.

“That was before I understood what we were dealing with. Bring that laptop out again, but make one for me this time.”

The look she shot me was somewhat confused, but she obliged nonetheless, the machine materialising inconspicuously as she took a seat beside me. It took several seconds to appear, unlike the previous time. Interestingly, it was a different model. The new version followed the basic structure of a laptop but appeared partially organic, with parts appearing to transition continuously by miniscule increments in bulk, consistency and frame. When I reached out to touch it, my hand found solid matter. It shifted under my fingers.

“Listen,” I said, as Gia opened it up. “It’s all fun and games until it isn’t.”

“Yeah, I think I got that memo, what with the murders, terrifying surgery and giant death tree. Oh, and having a world-changing decision riding on my shoulders.”

“Now you have another one. Security’s your area of expertise, so I know you can do this,” I stressed. “I want you to find wherever the password protection is on that thing and activate it. But don’t type anything in. I’ll do that myself.”

She scrutinised me blankly for a few seconds before understanding washed over her face. “You’re worried I’ll tamper with it. No. I wouldn’t.”

“Perhaps. In any case, it might not be up to you.”

The way my heart pounded in my chest wasn’t making it to my face, which I was grateful for. Mind control in any form was thankfully rare, and – aside from partial cases like Lucy and the occasional observable geas – stamped out by general consensus. When it went bad, however, it went ballistic. If the tyrant found out a new potential weapon had emerged for his arsenal, he’d forget about Legba’s marketing stunt and divert every resource to its acquisition. And not just him. Every unscrupulous bastard who thought they could get away with it would gun for the chance – if they knew about it.

The practical and cruel thing to do would be to dispose of Gia now, while she was still unprepared and the news hadn’t spread. I’d lose my anchor in the pocket dimension, but Mayari could manage on her own.

I hadn’t taken my eyes off the screen as the demon lord pulled up a series of windows. With a understated flourish, she depressed a final key and passed the computer over, where it continued subtly mutating in my lap. “Here.”

I examined the active popup and its single text field, considering what to do. I could lock myself and everyone else out of my mind forever if I wanted. All it would take would be closing my eyes and pressing buttons at random. Anything else came with a loophole. Another mind-reader could get it, or any authority with the right coercive power.

But permanency was too… permanent. As with most rules, there were exceptions. After all, I’d tampered with my own mind once already. So had Lucy. If we hadn’t, I’d be wasting away alone in the void while Odin enacted his takeover attempt. Another day might come when I needed it changed, and I’d have no way out. So, loophole it was. I didn’t have to make it easy.

Positioning the shifting screen out of view, I typed a long line of characters on keys that slanted under my fingers and submitted the prompt, at which point I remembered how to breathe.

“Repeat that for yourself,” I advised Gia, handing it back.

“But the plan –”

“Now. And don’t tell anyone else you can do this, on pain of death.”

The demon stared at me wide-eyed. “Alright, then.” The laptop disappeared slower than it had appeared, and a new, more stable one began to form in its place.

An enormous explosion sounded from the direction of the entrance before it finished. It was followed by a distinct heavy slam. The latter sounded a lot like the sound a stone door might make when being blown in from the outside.

Gia and I glanced at each other, and at the spear lying within arm’s reach. Incomplete, the laptop sputtered into non-existence as the demon lord picked up the weapon. Not enough power.

I could read the obvious question in her expression. “Well,” I answered it, standing up, “if it’s Mayari, we have her delivery. If it’s Yahweh, I’ll pull you out of there before you die, and we fall back to plan B.”

“And what’s that?”

I ducked my head out of the cell to check the corridor for new activity, then beckoned my companion forward. The hallway appeared untouched by whatever had gone on outside, though loud cracks continued to sound from the entrance. “I’ll tell you when I think of it.”

The explosion had shifted the immediate boundary of the facility; a plane disrupted and fractured, its remnants hanging at a disturbed angle. In the space behind it, I could feel the edges attempting to plug the gap with imperfect substitutes, some of which involved rather unpleasant directions like inside or in-between. On the plus side, it would make it harder for anything hostile to get in. But that worked both ways.

I checked on Lucy as we ran. The devil was conscious but dazed; barely reacting to Vince’s attempts to help him up, let alone the specific symbols on the grotto walls around him. My light wouldn’t reach him, the benefits of the visitation confined to their direct recipient. Only Yggdrasil allowed for cheating.

Vince shot me a worried glance as he heaved him by the shoulders into a propped-up seat against the wall. Lucy’s eyes were still white, and his head lolled to the side. Vince repositioned the body to set it straight, only for it to pitch forward the moment he let it go.

I shifted gears in a hurry as I narrowly avoided walking Gia and myself into a new spatial distortion. I was fairly sure it hadn’t been there on my previous walkthrough. It was visible to the naked eye – obvious, in fact – a brown filament of perfectly straight stone the width of one of my thumbs, emerging from one of the corridor walls at a low angle and disappearing into the side opposite slightly higher up the wall. Within the filament, the rock was lined with fractures, crumbling in parts. I poked it with a tentative fingertip and immediately knew the extremity was elsewhere.

“He’s not responding,” said Vince in the marine grotto, as I carefully pulled the digit out again in one piece. “Something’s wrong.”

“Pact’s failing.” And eroding by the second. Lucy would be working through the task bombardment, I knew, but weakened powers would make it that much harder to manage. If we were really unlucky, he might have stalled.

“Then you need to fix it!”

It would have been better if it had just ended. We’d hit a point where the protection was doing us more harm than good, and with Lucy out of action, it was left to me to coordinate. I couldn’t do that if the pact took my powers with it. It was a blind spot, a gap of uncertainty in the plan. If it failed entirely, taking all our energy with it, we were still bound by its terms. ‘Until the tyrant topples’, the wording had been. He wasn’t toppled yet.

No amount of excuses now would hide the fact someone was making a move against Providence. The only question would be how long it took them to figure out who.

If it hadn’t been for the place of power, I wasn’t sure I’d have been able to hold on to my visitations for as long as I had. Already I felt lightheaded. I’d have to drop my numbers soon if I wanted to remain on good terms with coherence.

Below us, Lucy stirred. He extended a palm in front of him and Vince took it in both hands.

“That’s a good sign,” I surmised hopefully, though the follow-up I’d hoped for wasn’t eventuating. Other than that one movement, Lucy resembled one of his temporary hosts in the moment of transfer, complete with drool. “At least part of him knows where he is. The rest should follow once he works through the mess.”

“And how long will that be, pray? Longer than it takes the pact to swallow our memories?”

I was having trouble focusing on an answer. With a word to Regina, I let my visitation in Singapore fizzle away. Clarity seeped back, though not as much as I’d hoped.

Approaching footsteps interrupted my estimate at an answer. Chisel still in hand, Janus made his way across the barnacled chamber, unbothered by the dark.

His opera mask stared down at the infernal pair. “This is a problem of the soul,” the god announced in Latin. “I can fix it, but the window to do so is rapidly closing.”

Vince looked at him in incomprehension.

“Repeat after me,” I instructed him, and switched to Latin. “If you can help him, do it.”

“I can add distance between Lucifer’s soul and others adjacent,” said Janus. “But it will hurt his ability to interact with them, potentially crippling much of his power. I can see at a glance he uses it this way often.”

If possessing hosts, meddling with people’s memories and performing demonic uplifts didn’t qualify as messing with souls, I didn’t know what was. “Tell me you heard that, Lucy,” I muttered, but he wasn’t reacting.

I wanted to be in the room, properly, to slap him in the face or poke him with whatever means necessary until something got through. I’d never seen him this vulnerable, even in all that time I’d spent believing he’d lost his powers. Knowing it had been coming somehow hadn’t helped me imagine it, despite it being one of my most reliable qualities.

“You have about one minute to decide,” Janus observed, just to add to the pressure. “I am also affected by this waning bargain of yours. Take too long, and it’ll be beyond me to help. All my remaining focus must go towards dismantling this edict. Whether you’re ready or not.”

“What about the pact?” I asked, Vince’s translation a second and a half out of synch behind me. “Can you annul that first? If you can break one, surely you can manage another.”

“Not from the inside, and it’s powerful magic. Less a boundary than an agreement. I may be able to make headway with time, but you don’t have it. Your best chance lies with the one who created it.”

“What’s he saying?” Vince hissed at me.

“He’ll help Lucy. Tell him to do it.” The last part was in Latin, and the inconvenient details would get in the way.

In a way, it was payback for all the times Lucy had tampered with my memories; whole parts of myself killed off I’d never get back, all in the name of protecting us both from a regime incapable of stomaching dissent. Lucy’s powers would come back, at least, even if Janus wasn’t around to restore them directly, and we wouldn’t be cutting off his entire arsenal.

The rationalisation felt hollow, though, and I felt more of a traitor than I’d ever been. I was about fifty percent sure Lucy would have pulled the trigger on himself, but the rest of my brain seemed intent on convincing me he’d had some backup in play I was inadvertently shutting down; that he’d come to and inform me we’d already lost, and if I’d just waited another minute he would have woken up and been fine.

But Janus was already bending over him, fingertips to forehead.

I pulled my focus back to the pocket dimension and Gia, who’d woven her way past several more out-of-place rock filaments on the way to the exit. More of them spiked through the walls the closer we came to our target, tripwires as placed by a maniac.

Ahead of us lay the explosion site, line of sight only confirming what I’d already sensed. As we rounded the corner to the entrance hall, it revealed a forest of the shafts piercing in every direction, the bulk of which speared the ceiling all the way to the edge of this particular reality.

I could see why. The entrance had not only blown in, it lay on the ground in shattered pieces, taking parts of the dimensional boundary with it. The entrance hall had been rendered a minefield of splintered reality, which for some reason seemed to involve a lot of fractured rock. Beams of it speared out from the fallen wreckage, some as long as my arm. Most were much smaller. Gravel, dust and fine particles extruded hair-like filaments of it all over the passage and through the internal walls, and I counted us lucky we’d been distant enough to avoid having them skewer our insides. Even in visitation, I wasn’t immune to spatial disruption.

The creaks were all around us now, ranging in volume from ominous to ear-splitting at irregular, frequent intervals.

Where the door had been, the boundary of the pocket universe had flowed in to fill the break. Not a passage, but an impenetrable wall copying the fixtures around it in a crude attempt at self-repair. It had the effect of someone pinching reality until it puckered; the texture of the floor bleeding halfway up the wall to meet a knockoff ceiling in an unholy sphincter. No escape that way.

The entrance still existed, though, in dozens of pieces casting their projections of Earth all over the hallway. The largest fracture looked wide enough for Gia to squeeze through without too much trouble. But we had two problems. First, the dimensional needles full of rock. Second, whatever the hell had filled them with said rock in the first place. They should have been projecting out into an empty cavern. Either the point of reference had shifted, or something had collapsed the cave.

It wasn’t hard to figure out which.