“- to know what I’m signing myself up for, and a proper negotiation process,” she finished.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “Tez and I already made a deal; there’s no need for you to come into it.”

“Really? That’s… surprisingly generous.”

“The best payment you can give him right now is fewer delays against this interminable jurisdiction headache,” I explained. “Right, Tez?”

“No.”

“Lovely,” I said. “We’re all agreed. So what have we got here?”

The new suit was holding up much better than the last one. Still freezing, but in a way that made me shiver rather than causing all my limbs to swell and lock. No mist, either.

“Watch and see.” He held out a hand in front of him and a gust picked up – no small feat for a place with no atmosphere – scattering the top layer of soil into a plume of silvery dust. It picked up speed quickly, growing in size until the entire area for hundreds of metres in each direction had become a field of low-lying whirling particles.

When he dropped the hand, the cloud settled and cleared, leaving behind a scoured plain with one notable blemish marring its otherwise uniform surface. Less than a blink later, I found myself standing right in front of it.

Like the entrance to Mayari’s bunker it was circular, but this one looked older, using simpler materials. Made from solid stone, it boasted the sort of flawless appearance that gave away the fact it had been created from an idea rather than tools and hands. The edge consisted of a raised, minimally-ornamented ring about a handspan across, and inside it sat a sheer rock floor, unweathered by age. I didn’t see an opening.

“It’s covered in writing,” Mayari remarked. “Some form of pictograms. But I’m not familiar with the language.”

“Loki thinks it’s Akkadian,” stated Tez.

“I think I can’t see anything,” I amended. “Are we going to have to do this whole thing in the dark?”

“Yep,” he confirmed. “Shining light around down there doesn’t end well.”

In response, I just stuck my arms out at the glowing moon goddess in our group and looked at him expectantly.

“I can deal with her,” he said.

“You’d better. This is going to be the most disappointing infiltration of my life,” I groaned. “’Oh look, we’ve entered the next chamber. It’s completely black, just like the last three.’ And for what? Trying to afflict intruders with seasonal affective disorder?”

Tez chuckled. “I’ll send you screenshots.” Sure enough, a moment later an image of the writing on the bunker entrance entered my head. Dense, angular hieroglyphs with lots of lines, covering the wall.

“Yes, okay,” I conceded. “It does look like Akkadian. Unfortunately, I don’t speak it.”

“None of us do,” said Tez. “Pity, because it might have saved me a lot of time figuring out what to expect. But we’ve got this in the bag anyway.”

It did provide one very valuable hint, though. Akkadian, here, now, not just written but inscribed, had Enki’s handiwork all over it. So even if he hadn’t built this place himself, he’d certainly had a heavy hand in its oversight. “It’s an edict,” I observed. “Probably more than one.”

Not great news. Enki’s signature power was similar to Themis’, except where she enforced laws, he changed them, literally writing them into existence. It didn’t sound so bad until you realised it was up to and including the laws of science, magic, and the principles on which the universe operated. If he decided he was tired of gravity one day, he could not only make it go away, but decide whether it meant everyone got to float around by propulsion from now on (which sounded like it could be fun), or whether objects would now be attracted to the greatest concentration of vacuum (less fun for everyone on Earth who suddenly found themselves hurtling out into space), or whether it went down to a molecular level (in which case it would be moot because that would be it for the universe as we knew it).

It was how they’d gotten rid of the afterlives and all the other dimensions. Billions of people snuffed out of existence – pop!­ – for no reason other than that they were too inconvenient to monitor. Now everyone who had been happily pootling along in the afterlives was stuck in the void, and anyone unlucky enough to reside in a different dimension was simply… gone.

But here, the implication was clear – this edict was limited, contained by the bounds of the bunker.

“The rules change within,” Mayari murmured.

“Right,” said Tez. “I figured out some of them. There might be others. As long as you do what I say, not that's a whole lot of choice in the matter, we don’t need to worry about those. Got it?”

I offered him up a salute. “You’re the boss.”

A burst of static rumbled through my helmet for a few seconds before Mayari chose to speak. “It’s light, isn’t it? One of the edicts.” She paused again for another few moments. “I can’t turn it off, you know. What’s going to happen if some escapes?”

“It won’t,” said Tez, avoiding the question. “But I am going to black out your helmet from now on and you’ll need to wear a mask.”

“At least we’ll be blind together,” I said in a consolatory tone.

“In there,” began Tez, rubbing his hands together, “Light is motion and motion is light. That’s the edict. So I’ll be doing your moving for you.”

I tried to wrap my brain around how that would work and found myself coming up with more questions than answers.

Mayari just made a strangled kind of noise.

“It gets worse,” he said. “You won’t have a way of communicating inside, so you’ll just have to do exactly what I tell you. Don’t worry about why; we can talk about it later. Loki, this means you.”

I depressed the comms button. “It sounds like I’m not going to have a choice. Are we really needed in there? If we’re not going to be able to move, see or talk, what’s the point of us tagging along? We’ll just get in the way and you’re better off going it alone.”

“It's one of the security measures,” he said. “We try and take anything out of that chamber, it sets off every alarm there is, beyond even my ability to block it. We have to deactivate the suppressants while we’re in there, and that needs you to be physically present.”

It was probably also insurance, I suspected.

“Wait a minute,” I said, making a double-take. “You set off alarms in one of the timelines? You ran through that future, and Shitface didn’t notice?” If Tez had botched up a timeline that badly, by rights it should already have been game over, and we’d be on a fast-track to demotion.

He sounded a little sheepish as he answered. “Look, I tried my best,” he said. “It’s a high-security facility; it was always going to be high risk. I busted my ass on this. But mistakes happen, what can I say?” He shrugged. “But to answer your question, no. He didn't. Or at least, he either didn’t notice or he’s not doing anything about it. So for now, we’re in the clear.”

A cold feeling spread through my stomach that had nothing to do with the temperature. How had Shitface missed something like that? Had my encounter with him earlier been that good a distraction? Or was he aware and holding back for some other reason? Why? To catch us in the act with more evidence? If it had been someone else, I would have considered the possibility they were holding out for blackmail, but Apollo was the kind of person who would shoot you a pitying look at the mere suggestion and inform you about how he was above such degenerate habits.

“Maybe it’s one of those situations where he’ll congratulate you on exposing a vulnerable security flaw,” Mayari spoke up.

“That never happens,” Tez and I stated in unison.

“Pssht,” she said. “No one ever appreciates thorough testing. At any rate, what’s done is done. We’re so close, and speculating doesn’t help anyone.”

I took a deep breath. “Tez,” I said, “One more thing. If you -”

“It’s alright. You can trust me,” he interrupted.

“For crying out loud,” I protested. “I had a whole miniature speech planned. Now it’s not going to have the same level of emotional impact.”

“You can still deliver it,” he said. “But I already know what you were going to say.”

“No, it’s ruined. You’ve ruined it.”

Mayari raised a hand. “I’m curious.”

I hurrumphed. It wasn’t going to be the same. “As I was saying, Tez, if you even think about betraying me and leaving me in there, I am going to eventually get free and hunt you down, and make you suffer proportionately for every single minute I endured alone.” It came out sourly, much less intimidating than it would have been with a proper delivery.

“Mmm,” said Mayari. “You were right. He ruined it.”

Tez sighed. “Never change, either of you,” he delivered in a sarcastic tone. “And since nobody has any further observations, it’s time to go.”

What little vision I had went dark, and in the same instant a harsh stillness fell upon me.

Nothing was interfering with my sense of touch – I could feel the floor beneath my feet, the weight of the spacesuit and of course the ever-present headache. But despite this, my body had forgotten how to move. Everything from swinging an arm to drawing a breath or blinking an eye. A sense of wrongness in my chest drew my attention to the fact my heart had stopped beating, and by extension it seemed likely the blood had also stopped flowing through my veins.

Ordinarily, this would have been enough to render me unconscious in instants. But other than an annoying level of discomfort, it neither hurt nor appeared to be worsening. Within the sphere of Enki’s influence, traditional rules did not apply. There must have been a second edict at play keeping my condition stable. What was it? Some kind of stasis effect?

Regardless, I thought, mentally checking containment off the list of potential security measures, it gave me some insight into how Enki had approached the project. I had to admit equating light with movement was clever, hindering not only people’s physical movement but also throwing up a simultaneous smokescreen. It forced people to operate blind or be hit with force upon entry. Obfuscation and destruction, tick. Although there were plenty of gods who didn’t need light to see, so it was a weak measure on the obfuscation side. There would likely be some other form of misdirection lying in wait for us.

There had to be a temporary way to shut it down. Enki wouldn’t be the only person with access to the bunker, and there had to be contingencies in place if he became unavailable. There would be other high-level people whose job it was to come in here and add or remove suppressants. It was probably tied to security access, though, and I didn’t think Tez would have considered shutdown an option. We had to leave no trace we were ever here.

Courtesy of Tez, an image of the bunker interior entered my head. It seemed we were in a relatively large, exitless room with high ceilings. Rows of recessed shelves lined each of the walls around us, filled with what looked like small identical cubes about four or five centimetres wide. The image I was receiving covered a full 360 degrees in three dimensions, seemed to originate from every part of the room at once and didn’t include Tez himself, so I was guessing he had transformed himself into a gas. It got around the movement restriction. Smart.

Processing all that information at once in a human body should have resulted in a blinding headache, but, since I already had one, it barely made a blip on the radar. Loophole, I thought. Not that it made a whole lot of difference, but you had to take wins where you could find them.

I could see myself and Mayari standing in the centre of the chamber like two frozen astronaut statues. I would have grumbled, except that the rules of Enki’s micro-universe wouldn’t let me.

The cubes were positioned symmetrically along the shelves at perfect intervals, with no distinguishing features to tell them apart. Under each one was a tiny plaque, but they were all blank. Or… not blank, exactly. Just unreadable. Tez could see perfectly well in the dark, but he needed eyes to do that. In gas form, the image he was feeding me was composed more from textural than visual feedback. The end result was akin to seeing an incomplete rendering of a 3D model before any textures had been applied.

Watch this, said Tez. Through my own eyes, not far from the edge of my peripheral vision, I saw a bright flash as a narrow beam of white light, thin as a laser, breached the gap from one of the cubes to my hand.

The reaction was immediate. Via Tez’s vision hack, I witnessed the cube shoot forward along the line the light had traced. It hit the side of my hand at a high speed, which hurt, and remained there, hanging in the air. Even gravity couldn’t override the edict.

A moment later, he did the same for Mayari.

Alright, now we both had a cube we couldn’t interact with. Were these the suppressants? Was it really that simple? If so, Enki had cut more corners than I’d expected. All the suppressants in a single room, accessible to anyone who could manipulate light and shadow? True, Tez’s foresight and stealth abilities gave him a rare edge. There were probably other contingencies he was taking care of. Even then, it still seemed a little light on security.

Unless it wasn’t, and all of this was part of a misdirection trap. It’s what I would have done, and I wouldn’t have put it past Enki to have one of those up his sleeve. It was possible that nothing I was seeing was real, or that our attention was being drawn to the wrong thing. If I’d been designing this place, the boxes would have turned out to be bombs or miniature black holes, and whatever the plaques said would be just incorrect enough not to scare people away but to cause them to make terrible mistakes.

So, Tez said, you’ve probably already figured it out, but these are the suppressants. The ones you’re holding are keyed to you specifically.

It was official – Enki’s security system sucked.

Edict number two, he continued. Nothing degrades. So damaging or destroying them isn’t an option. And you know what happens if we take them out.

Huh. They’d gone for straight up physical protection, then. How boring. It did explain the dearth of bombs and black holes. I supposed it did fit with what I knew of Enki’s personality. He always seemed more deluded than destructive.

If we couldn’t eliminate the suppressants, there was always transformation – but no matter what form they took, it still left us in the position where we couldn’t remove them from the bunker.

Fortunately, I figured out a way to separate the essence from the object, said Tez. A thin rectangular object shimmered into existence next to the cube. It wasn’t clear what it was meant to be. Through the visual hack, it looked like a flat dull surface, same as everything else.

My mind’s eye went blank for a second, and when the visual feed recovered, it was from a more familiar human perspective. Tez had transformed back to his usual self, manifesting in front of me where he had a good view of both the box and the rectangular object, which I could now clearly see was a hand mirror. Rendered as motionless as Mayari and I, his vision was fixed on a single point.

Good thing I don’t need light, he said. Or we’d have a bit of a compatibility problem.

Through careful manipulation of artificially shortened laser beams, he adjusted the angle of the mirror so that he had a good view of the cube’s reflection. I wasn’t sure how he was able to see a reflection in the dark, or how any of that worked, but he could and it did.

For a few moments, I could see both boxes – the original and the reflection.

Loki, Tez warned me, sounding deadly serious, whatever you do, don’t leave this chamber until I give the go-ahead. Otherwise this whole exercise will fail.

In the mirror, the reflected cube shimmered and dissipated.

And for the first time in over three hundred years, I felt my powers come back.