Contrary to my expectations, the sound of the safety coming off was masked by the click of my apartment door unlatching, and my finger loosened on the trigger in an involuntary moment of surprise. I’d been expecting intervention, but not like this.

Shitface himself stepped out of my apartment with an unimpressed expression. He was a tall golden-haired man, young, athletic and to all appearances barely out of his teens, with hair cut and styled according to current fashion. Where Obvious Thug had cultivated a deliberate style bringing to mind associations with poor criminal gangs, he couldn’t have gone further in the other direction. It looked like he’d just stepped out of an exclusive golf club or someone’s private jet, and I’d have staked my apartment on him regularly getting mistaken for a professional tennis player. He glanced at Obvious Thug, who was closest to the doorway, and gave her the once-over. “What are you doing here?”

“Are you Loki?” she asked, somewhat less menacingly than when she’d directed the question at me.

“That’s none of your business,” said Shitface, without missing a beat. I was already lowering the pistol at this point, but he moved a hand and I witnessed it vanish from my grasp and reappear in his, where he replaced the safety mechanism and stashed it inside his blazer.

Obvious Thug did not miss the sudden appearance of the gun, and backed up a bit. “’Yeah. ‘Course. There’s been a misunderstanding. I’m just leaving.”

I gave him the finger behind her back, dropping it when she turned around.

“Good luck on your interview,” she murmured as she retreated. I wasn’t sure if it was meant to be sarcastic.

I hoped Tez knew what he was doing. In all the tests we’d run, this was the first time Shitface had actually shown up. It wasn’t a good sign that he had.

Shitface watched Thug leave and made a dissatisfied noise once she was out of earshot. “You’re trying my patience today,” he said, nodding towards the apartment interior to indicate I should follow. “One would think the threat of demotion would be enough to stem the constant flow of interruptions to my schedule, but apparently not.”

“So it was you who put ideas in Themis’ head,” I griped. “Figures. And I want my gun back.”

“You can’t have it,” he stated as I brushed past. “I don’t need to tell you how illegal it is. And secondly – murder? Really?”

“Hey, if she keeps messing in Providence’s affairs, she’s got a fast-track to the void ahead of her anyway. I was saving her the effort of doing it herself.”

Picking past the random crap on the floor, I made my way to the bed, shoved everything on it to the side, and sat down.

Calling my apartment modest was an understatement. It had one small main room with a fold-away bed crammed against the far wall, designed to be packed away when not in use. It hadn’t been stored away once since I’d moved in, acting as my sofa, table, bench and most other flat surface types at one point or another. The air conditioning unit had been malfunctioning over the last few days and there was a lump of sheets bundled up at the foot where I’d kicked them down due to the heat.

A tiny bathroom sat off to the side of the main room, just big enough for a toilet and small wall shower. Everything in the apartment was the same depressing shade of slight beige you got when fittings that had once been white had endured through several owners who didn’t care about maintenance.

It would have been the stereotypical bachelor pad, if not for the fact every other raised surface in the apartment was packed with clothes, books or a combination of both. They lined the bed cavity, filled the wardrobe and crowded the cupboards in the kitchen alcove, where my single cup, plate and cutlery set somehow survived being squashed in on the side.

Shitface nudged a rogue book pile out of the way with his shoe, which managed to weather the onslaught. “Killing random bystanders is low even for you,” he said.

For a given value of low, of course. If it came through on Helpdesk, murder was perfectly acceptable according to Providence. Lucy’s task list was the perfect example. And if a murder was committed in the natural course of things, unrelated to Providence, the organisation couldn’t have cared less. The rule was purely in place out of self-serving interest.

Well, the gun was a valuable asset down the drain. Tez had better be making the most of this opportunity.

“I’m hearing that a lot today,” I commented.

Shitface and I had a somewhat uniquely strained relationship. While I was by no means the only recalcitrant employee in the company, nor even the worst – Eris came to mind, among others - I suspected I was one of only a few who put much thought into how Security played out at a meta level.

I’d made it something of a sport to waste his time on days when I was especially bored, and they weren’t in short supply. That said, going for the literal kill wasn’t my usual go-to, and we both knew it. That had to be raising a red flag somewhere.

But I hadn’t killed anyone today, because Shitface stopped me. There wasn’t much Providence could do about things which might have been, or they would have had to indict every powered employee for accidental mass destruction several times over. Gods were many things, but ‘safe’ was not one of them. In fact, as far as I was concerned, if you were a god and you couldn’t cause the apocalypse, you were doing something wrong.

“And for the record,” Shitface continued, “Themis acted of her own accord. I had nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, I bet you were pleased, though,” I noted.

“Hardly. Evidently it only motivated you to start terrorising the local neighbourhood.” He scowled. “I’m missing a hostage situation to come and deal with your petty misconduct. People are going to die today because of you.”

“Well, there you go, then,” I said, smirking. “It’s all much of a muchness. But since you’re still hanging around for some life advice instead of pissing off to hostageville, you should just let it go. Stop reading the news. Take a leaf from Buddha and just accept that people suffer and you’re probably part of the problem.”

I was expecting some form of indignant retort, but to my surprise he said nothing. Instead, his eyes narrowed and lost some of their focus. Faint traces of uncertainty began to show up in his eminently punchable face, along with the start of a frown.

Oh, shit. Leaning forward, I snapped my fingers in front of his face and waved a hand from side to side. It registered, but barely. I got up off the bed and paced around him, trying similar things from a few different angles. He turned to face me as I went, sometimes even a little ahead of the curve, but his eyes were watching too many possibilities as once to hone in with perfect precision.

It presented like a moment of weakness, but it wasn’t.

I knew what he was doing – this was a full-blown interrogation. Exactly what I couldn’t afford to happen. He was running through all the questions he would ask me and seeing how I responded in the near future. It was also possible there would be more than questions involved. There wasn’t much I could do here but trust in my potential future selves’ ability to talk myself out of whatever situations he was putting them through. Surely I wouldn’t be stupid enough to mention the heist in any iteration of this conversation, but the problem was that each iteration gave him more information to use against me in the next one, and in those first few seconds before I realised what was happening, he would have been able to blitz through at least a few scenarios where I wasn’t aware of what was going on at all. Meanwhile, the present me remained ignorant of his line of enquiry. That might just be game over.

A lesser seer wouldn’t have been able to pull this off. But Shitface wasn’t a lesser seer.

Crap. Crap crap crap. I shouldn’t have antagonised him so close to the heist. Even with Tez backing me up, we were a poor match for him. That look of uncertainty was a good sign, and I clung to it, because everything else about this situation was rapidly going down the toilet.

In the immediate term, I could at least try and get a clearer picture of what I was up against. I resolved to follow up every question or statement he put to me – no matter what it was - with my own query, and then asked it for good measure in the only timeline I could perceive: “How long have you been questioning me?”

He blinked, annoyed, and dropped out of the fugue state for a second. “About an hour.” And then he was straight back into it again.

“Rude,” I said, to silence. “This is why nobody likes you.”

No response. I groaned. I supposed one more insult on top of the many my future selves would be hurling his way wasn’t going to have much of an impact. Throwing up my hands in mock defeat, I picked up one of the tomes close to hand – a Thai language manual, because you could never underestimate the usefulness of being able to understand people - and began leafing through until I found the place I was up to. Trying to engage Shitface when he was like this wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

After a couple of minutes he stopped, shook his head a little, pursed his lips and vanished without a word, taking my pistol with him. Just like that.

“Ugh,” I snarled at the empty room. “You’re not even going to tell me the verdict after all that buildup?” Disgusting. Who knew how many iterations he’d been through, and what I’d told him for the duration? If that was how it was going to be –

From my pocket, my phone rang. It was Tez.

“Congratulations,” he said when I answered. “That was a successful test.”