I let that sink in for a few moments. “You know,” I remarked, “I didn’t think anything was going to top getting my powers back, but congratulations. You somehow managed to do it. Going back to work tomorrow is going to be tough.”

“Work is somewhat lower down the priority list than it was this morning,” he said. “With Greed in play, it’s only a matter of time before the wrong people start to take notice. And not much time. To be honest, we’re lucky Security haven’t picked up on it already – they’re usually not so slack.”

Funny about that, I thought, eying Shitface’s bangle. When I looked up, I discovered Lucy had followed my gaze - but if he suspected anything, it didn’t show on his face.

“We’re going to have to escalate,” he advised. “Tomorrow will be the formation of the revolution.”

And there it was again. Revolution, rebellion, whatever you wanted to call it – everything had been building up to this over the past few hours, accelerating far beyond the point of reason. “Lucy,” I prompted him, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. We’re being manipulated.”

A bemused expression crossed his face. “Of course. I’m the one doing the manipulating.”

I shook my head. “Not you. There’s a lot I need to fill you in on, and I will fill you in, but you need to trust me on this.”

“Who, then?”

I made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know yet.”

“Security? They’re a problem, but a known quantity.”

“Hmm. Less of a problem than you might think,” I suggested. I was going to have my work cut out for me explaining the incident with Shitface.

Behind the bathroom door came a loud clatter and a string of echoed curses. Tru was not happy.

Lucy glanced over, but no follow-up eventuated. “You surprise me, Loki,” he said, crossing his arms and propping up a foot on the edge of the sofa. “I would have thought you’d be pleased at this turn of events.”

“I would, normally,” I agreed. “But something is amiss here. Someone tries to push us into a revolution – and make no mistake, we are being pushed.” Especially me, for some reason. “It should be a win-win situation; that’s a no-brainer. And yet they’re hiding behind a veil of secrecy. Think about it - why would they go to so much trouble to hide their involvement unless they stood to benefit from our ignorance? I don’t like it.”

He shot me a curious look. “Assuming you aren’t just being paranoid, you make a good point. But what’s the alternative? If you’re right, holding back the revolution might alert this entity to the fact we’re onto them. Better to play along until we have more information to work with. It’s not like they’re posing a hindrance. Besides,” he added. “Don’t try telling me you aren’t at least a little excited. Premature, yes, but this is what we’ve been waiting for.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but was interrupted by the door to the bathroom slamming open. Tru stomped out in a fresh dressing gown without bits of wild grass and dirt hanging off of it. The rune-marked palm was bleeding heavily, and in his other hand he was wielding a naked razor blade. He homed in on me like a cat noticing a fragile object on the edge of a high shelf.

“What the fuck have you done to me?” he bellowed. “How do I get rid of this?”

“You’re dripping blood all over our carpet,” I pointed out, to cover up the fact I had no idea. “I’m not going to clean it up. Are you?”

He faltered. “A professional cleaner comes in every Tuesday. Don’t change the subject. How am I supposed to go around with this thing?” He shook the bleeding hand at me, sending more droplets flying. “It glows through fabric. And it’s messing with my head. I can feel things. Vast, evil things.”

“Good,” said Lucy, repositioning himself to lean over the back of the sofa. “That means it’s working. You’ll get used to it before long.”

Tru’s face turned an angry shade of dark. “I don’t want to get used to it. I want it to go away.” He thrust the razor in my direction. “I agreed – under extortion – to share my apartment. That’s all. I didn’t sign up for whatever this is.”

Lucy shrugged. “No. You didn’t. And I wouldn’t have picked you for the job either. But there's no going back. You’re stuck with it and we’re stuck with you. That’s the bad news. The good news is that this is definitely the best thing that’s ever happened to you. Congratulations, you won the lottery.”

“Like I’m going to trust anything a demon says,” he sneered.

The corners of my mouth quirked. We probably shouldn’t tell him straightaway, I said to Lucy, who sent back a vague sense of agreement.

“You don’t have much of a choice,” the devil responded. Disembarking the sofa, he approached Tru with complete disregard for the razor now being waved in his direction. I leaned over the back of the furniture and rested my chin on my hands. “Those things you feel will be aspects you have power over. What we need to figure out is what they are and to what degree. I have some ideas, but -” he glanced at me briefly “- I expect it to have turned out a little different this time.”

Tru lowered his arm. “Power?”

“Exactly what it sounds like,” said Lucy. “Control. Influence. The supernatural kind.”

“You mean corruption.”

“Oh, you've got your work cut out for you with this one,” I directed at Lucy.

He waved me aside. “Power isn’t an inherently evil thing,” he explained. “It depends on what you choose to do with it.”

“And I suppose you have ideas of what that should be,” Tru said, lip curling.

“Of course I do,” said Lucy. “And I expect you to do what I ask of you. But in your own time, you can do what you want. If you want to save malnourished children in orphanages, that’s up to you. If you want to spend it all on personal gain, your choice. The single worst thing you can do is ignore it. Now stop playing the contrarian and describe to me what you feel.” He paused, a sinister gleam in his eye. “Or I can make this much less pleasant for you.”

Rap Boy made an exasperated noise. “It’s large,” he said eventually. “Grid-like, made up of lots of smaller bits. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

“Interesting. Show me.”

He looked like he had it in hand, so I made to leave.

“Not so fast. You need to see this too,” he said, waving me back. “You’re as responsible for him as I am.”

“Oh, no,” I demurred. “This is entirely your area of expertise.”

He sniffed. “Then you need to upskill. How are you supposed to lead an army if you can’t even handle one person?”

I stared at him. “Well, that escalated quickly.”

“What, did you think the rune was just for show? He’s yours as much as mine.”

Tru scowled as he looked between us. “I belong to nobody but myself,” he said. “And I’m right here.”

“Yes, resorting to slavery isn’t the greatest start,” I mentioned. “It’s kind of the opposite of what we want to achieve.”

Lucy rolled his eyes. “Just show me what you’ve got,” he said to Tru. "You should be able to do this. Picture a line running between us, and send the information through it." Like so, he said as an example, including me in the loop so I was aware of what was going on. You don't need to worry about us reading your mind; we can't do that.

"Some people can," I stipulated.

"Yes, and those people are not us." And quite rare, as it happened. He gestured at Tru to give it a try.

There was a high amount of variance in the way powers presented, but there were also certain constants. Almost everyone with a degree of supernatural ability benefited from an extended lifespan and physical resilience, even if they weren't strictly immortal, and it was likewise unusual to find someone who couldn't put thoughts into the heads of the people around them, with the caveat that it was generally very obvious who those thoughts were coming from. Otherwise everyone would have been a mind control wielder to a limited extent, which would have been a receipe for endless hurt feelings and unmitigated chaos. Instead, we just had chaos of the mitigated variety.

Why this was the case, no one knew. It fed into the origin theories a fair bit. Structuralism was one - that we'd been designed this way because it was convenient and efficient. One of the other dominant schools, Purism, liked to insist it was because gods and immortals were closer to the unblemished state of the soul, which sounded like hogwash to me. You could see the pure state of people's souls when they were dead, and the dead didn't have any agency to speak of. Even before the restructure, what a soul could do had been dependent on which afterlife it had ended up in, and most of them hadn't been very happy about their eternal allotments. Probably because they were still being ruled over by despots.

Tru, for his part, looked a bit like a deer caught in headlights, not an unusual reaction for someone discovering they were expected to participate in an impromptu and compulsory training seminar they weren't prepared for. "You could also just draw us a rough diagram," I suggested. "There's more than one way to skin a cat. And as alleged demons, you could argue we're the experts on that sort of thing."

Lucy paused and pursed his lips. "No, he's getting it." He gave Tru a thumbs up. "Well. A bit. I'll relay."

It was messy. Suffering through a new demon’s attempt at communicating a complicated concept telepathically could be best described as being in a car with someone who had never driven before while it bunny-hopped down the wrong side of the road in the rain. Little of it made sense and I kept getting flashes of bad rap verse in the mix, which Tru had apparently not grown out of over the last three years. I was beginning to understand how it had ended up on his task description. It didn’t help that I had no experience with the type of power he was trying to convey. Combined with Lucy’s attempts at translating the resulting mess, it felt like my head had become the dumping ground for the mental equivalent of the trash accumulated after a local garbage collection.

Between the three of us, however, we did make some progress. The grid Tru had described was indeed that – a massive structure spanning, as far as I could tell, the entire world. I'd known demon lords were powerful, but Tru's area of influence seemed to be on par with the average Providence employee. It was uneven, too. Similar to looking at electrical lights from the sky at night, there were large clusters of strong nodes and connections amid vast fields where little was happening. Across all of it were overlaid connections ascending into a vast sheet-like entity hovering above everything else like an atmospheric layer unto itself.

Wealth is correct, Lucy said to me privately. He’s more specialised than I would have expected, but no less powerful. I believe we’re looking at the world’s financial system.

Which would no doubt make the sheet the financial reach of Providence.

A backdoor into Finance? We could do a lot with this.

Only if he doesn’t make any rash decisions and alert the company. Which is why we need to keep an eye on him.

Lucy, I said, a thought occurring to me, what type of revolution are you planning, exactly?

There were armies and then there were armies. Legions of death, spy networks, cultural warriors and storytellers, just to name a few. I’d been picturing internal change – winning staff over through perception and narrative - but a weapon like Tru gave us more of a direct influence over external factors, too.

He looked at me. I think I know where you’re going with this, he said. And much of it depends on how the demon lords turn out. I’m not above destroying the world, and I’m not above saving it. It’s still early days – so we’ll see how things go.

Being next to useless in this scenario, I sat back and watched as Lucy attempted to run Tru through a few different exercises without crashing any important financial markets in the process. By the end of the next hour, the latter had managed to refine his focus onto a particular node and get a sense of what it was. I had no idea what normal training and development was like for demons, but Lucy seemed satisfied by his progress. Tru simply looked drained.

Lucy called it to a close not long after.

“I’ve stayed as long as I can,” he said. “They keep me under pretty tight surveillance; it’s going to look suspicious if they notice I made a random stopover in the US outside work hours. I probably can’t visit like this again. Take care of the boy and don’t shake anyone else’s hand in the meantime.”

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” I said, nodding, and he vanished. With everything that happened with Tru, I hadn’t even gotten around to telling him about Tez and Mayari, let alone Apollo.

“Well?” I asked Tru. “Feel like you learnt anything?”

“Fuck off,” he said, collapsing onto the sofa.