A floating layer of dead fish greeted us at Themis’ Singaporean border. Far fewer boats hugged the boundary than at my previous visit, which I attributed to word spreading and – going by the fish – possible hull damage from a divine-strength poison and acid concoction I definitely didn’t know the origins of. At least if anyone asked.

It did make the boundary even more obvious, though, with the exact perimeter defined by a convenient wall of bloated ex-marine life bobbing up against it in a passable impression of a ball pit, if the balls were decaying and smelt like they violated the Geneva Convention. I tested the water, tasted it, and decided it was probably safe enough for a demon lord after a few days of dilution and dispersal.

Splashing noises sounded from behind me as Gia, treading water, pushed armfuls of carcasses away, only to shudder as they touched her skin. Most of them returned on the backswing. She gave up, looked at me and shuddered again. “Why is everything dead?”

I pushed through the fish, picked one up and tossed it at the invisible wall. It squashed against the barrier and bounced off on impact, seawater spurting out of its orifices, before plopping back in with its acquaintances. No fireworks displays, at least.

Swimming forwards, I reached out and poked the barrier with one of my remaining fingers. I couldn’t feel anything there, but my hand stopped anyway, the skin flattening as though against glass. Even the sound around us was oddly directional, with the waves and little splats of the fish bumping off of each other cutting out into silence past the barrier.

Gia came up beside me, still shuddering, and hesitated before touching the wall with a fingertip. “Wow,” she exclaimed when it made contact. “You’re not supposed to get these in real life. If I hadn’t already been there once today, I’d wonder if we’d just hit the edge of the universe.”

“Not quite yet.” I tried to feel out the barrier with less physical senses. Nothing, except for a hard edge to the place of power otherwise surrounding me. Apparently it didn’t agree with Themis. I wasn’t going to find a way in that way. I stared through it to the distant spire sticking up through the centre of the island, still ringed in ivory flames. “Think you can transform this into a physical window?”

Gia pressed her palm flat against the non-existent surface. “I’m not sure,” she said after a moment of concentration. She closed her eyes, and a moment later an alarming splintering noise sounded from the border, much like Tru’s arm had right before he’d exploded.

“Okay, let’s abandon that,” I directed hastily. We wanted to get in behind the wall, not bring the whole thing down and us with it.

The splintering stopped, and I eyed the wreath of flames. Not all of Providence was sitting behind the bubble.

Motion caught my eye halfway around the world, where Tru had wandered dejectedly over to the door of his penthouse and attempted to fall asleep on the balcony doormat. He cracked an eye open as I headed to the edge of the balcony and peered over the railing at a shape in the far distance.

It was an angel mark three, and it was flying.

“Ooh, that’s not good,” I uttered. If there was one, there would soon be more, and I wasn’t sure whose side they were on.

Wasting no time, I transported myself and Gia to the upper end of the spire, plus a few of the fish, which dropped and bounced off the sides a few times before being consumed by the flames in small detonations of internal fermentation.

The clashing divine energies below us raged with the subtlety of a thrashing maw, blasting my senses into delirious overload as all of them were subjected to simultaneous overstimulation. My hair agitated into ropes whipping at my face and eyes, and continued to thrash even once shortened. This close, the breach screeched in a wailing drone indiscriminate of air and soul alike, firing every nerve and standing all my hairs on end, including in places I was sure I didn’t have any.

“Why couldn’t you warn me?” Gia yelled above the roar, clinging to the limb I’d scooped her up in for dear life as her feet dangled above the probable agent of instant disintegration. We weren’t falling because I’d coated my arms and feet in the same sticky resin I’d used earlier on Grace. The spire wasn’t completely vertical, but from this angle the distinction posed minimal reassurance.

This close, the small nuclei shifting within its depths were the size of cottages; blinding and scintillating in compressed layers of condensed magics making Gungnir resemble Eris’ paperclip in comparison. I wished I had the real thing. It could have pierced this.

I pressed my ear to it, trying to draw sense from the pandemonium. This was the edge of the universe, right here on the glass. Despite all the turmoil, I could feel it, waiting to be taken hold of. I eased a fraction into myself experimentally, and recoiled when it burnt, singeing the fringe of my soul in fiery retaliation. I tried again, taking it from a different angle, and suffered the same result.

“Ow,” I lamented unnecessarily, and took a moment to rest my head against the smooth panelling. “Why couldn’t I get an upgrade that let me bypass the most heavily fortified place in existence? That isn’t too much to ask, considering the circumstances.” I wasn’t sure who I was talking to. Yggdrasil, maybe. Durga’s structuralist administrators. Or fate, because why not, at this point? I sighed. If we weren’t listening, there was no reason to think another layer up would be any better. Just my luck, Ponytail would be right and the whole multiverse would be a simulation controlled by a team of poorly-paid interns in what amounted to an extra-dimensional lunchbreak, and in five minutes someone was going to hit the button that turned us all into tortoises.

Gia sagged in my grip and expelled a series of noises echoing my own feelings on the matter. “I don’t think I can be sick,” she uttered. “I don’t know why that surprises me. What thing do you want me to turn into another thing for you?”

I looked at the howling euthanasia ring attempting to pass into its own personal afterlife and considered alternatives. I still had visitation access. Putting Neetu and Regina in touch with Gia’s digital expertise wasn’t out of the question. Or Louis Ngai, if he was still alive. Pending a suitable receptacle, we could conceivably wake up Themis.

I wasn’t sure it would help. There was the matter of Amulet Tez. For all I knew, he’d already spilt the beans on Baldr and the rest of it and compromised my potential allies. Decontaminating him without a fight would be tricky, and alert Primary Tez to my activities. I might as well shout them down the phone to Baldr directly.

For another thing, it was Themis. I couldn’t assume she wouldn’t lock us down to investigate. With all the laws we’d broken, we’d given her plenty of ammunition. She’d wander straight back into a containment field, leaving us all trapped, or straight into the outstretched arms of the opposition. Either way, we’d be worse off than we started.

“Change of plan,” I called over the maelstrom instead. “We’re going in the hard way.”

“Harder than this? Why can’t we leave the stakes at inferno?”

“Depends how many pieces you want to arrive in,” I replied, lowering my voice as the background noise cut out mid-sentence. We stood in a small block of showers in a gym in Zimbabwe. Being in one place for long was already making me nervous. Closed, from the look of it, in line with the new schedule of the sun. I dripped across and flicked on the light switch in time to see one straggling fish ‘thwap’ against the tiles. “Here,” I continued, generating a set of clothes while Gia blasted the shower. “Dry off, put these on and pretend you’re with a particularly obstinate client. You’re going to be doing a lot of computing.”

I turned my back and slouched over the nearest sink while clouds of steam rose up behind me. Raidho hummed away in the back of my mind, along with all the other runes and tasks in it situated further distant. I kept one metaphorical eye on the rune and the rest on my face in the mirror cycling through various restless options until reluctantly settling on the one it didn’t want to. I stared at it in defiance for a minute or two, spat into the sink and turned my attention to making convincing prosthetics. Tez’s foot had been good practice for that, and when I flexed my fingers in the mirror, it wasn’t easy to tell.

Hopefully it would be enough.

Gia reappeared in the mirror next door clad in full business attire, fiddling at the necktie around her shoulders.

“I’ve never done one of these before,” she admitted, startling a little as I switched our location again. A retail storeroom this time, away from any mirrors. I didn’t think Tez could watch all of them simultaneously – and maybe none – but the thought was making me jumpy.

Her cheeks flushed as I did up her tie, and she swallowed uncomfortably.

“It’s still me,” I reminded her. “If it gets too much, just think back to that time I was a centipede. That should still be fresh in your recent memory.” I paused, remembering who I was talking to. “But don’t actually make the change. I need to look this way or none of this will work.”

She turned her eyes back to the mirror, now fogging up from the shower. “What about my hair?”

“Oh, they won’t notice. Trust me, you won’t be out of place. Just stick by me and password-protect everyone you encounter as fast as you can.”

Although I might want to amend it, crazy as that seemed. I was about to walk a very fine line. With Gia, we could remove Baldr’s mind control from specific individuals one by one.

Or, we could use it against him. Just imitating Baldr didn’t grant me the active benefits of his mind control. I wouldn’t be able to use it to cover up the consequences of my actions. Anything I did in disguise could still come back to bite me.

But it did give me his reputation, at least for as long as I could keep it up. Well, that and hormones. I had approximately only as long as it took the real deal to make it into Providence, which wouldn’t be long. And no seer this time to guide me. We were on our own.

A shadow fell over the blinds nearby, and I stepped over to look out the narrow window. Another angel passing by. This far already.

“Be honest,” Gia petitioned me, joining me at the window. “What’s going to happen if we succeed?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I didn’t have much of a plan beyond killing God. But apparently the world decided to approve my probation and wants me to do more of it.”

“And then?”

I thought about it. Burn Providence to the ground, check. Increasingly probable world destruction in the process, check. Start over, ideally, from the void to the rest of it. Rehabilitate several different categories of highly traumatised souls and dissuade them from exploding each other and whatever was left of reality. It sounded like a lot of work.

But it could be fun.

“Change,” I answered eventually. It felt right. It had always felt right, it occurred to me. “Huh.” A few more pieces slotted into place. It wasn’t my fault I hadn’t figured it out sooner. It wasn’t always obvious.

“Ooookay,” Gia remarked, elongating the vowel. “As briefings go, it could be better, but it’s something to start from.”

“Well, we have one more stop,” I said, snapping back to reality. “I don’t think you’ve met another demon, have you? How are you with sheep?”