Tuesday, Singapore time. Back in the body of Sørine Krogh. I felt like a trauma victim forced to relive their trigger event, jittery and on edge, battling the compulsive urge to cycle parts of my body through different forms just to prove I still could. Instead, I focused everything on a freckle on the back of my left hand. Now it was there. Now it was gone. Deep breaths. I only had to keep this up for an unspecified duration from now until the end of eternity.

Shitface might have destroyed my old phone, but I still had my access card. That should be enough to get me back through the open gate I’d left behind the day before. Still had to walk in through the travel stations or the jig was up.

The office hadn’t changed since my last shift, but I had. It was already colouring all of my interactions. I felt hyper-alert, which was part apprehensiveness and part deliberate modification on my part. I went and poured myself some coffee anyway before heading over to my pod.

Lucy wasn’t in yet, and I found myself in the familiar-yet-bizarre position of having little to do but twiddle my thumbs while I waited for his shift to begin. To pass the time I checked my to-do list – someone wanted to conceive a child today, to which I left a comment linking to several videos of screaming toddlers having fits in restaurants and supermarkets – and checked up on the progress with bowel cancer guy. Yun-Qi had taken steps to arrange to have him booked in for treatment in a few days time, so I at least I had something to impress Clara with next time I saw her.

I made the freckle on my hand reappear and looked through my task list again, this time with more of a plan. I didn’t imagine yesterday’s run of dramatic events was going to be all there was, and Durga’s description of unusual activity had stuck in my brain. If I was a target, then perhaps they would go after my task list.

At a surface examination, it was bland. No pagan hippies today, not that I was complaining, and the standard number of terminal illnesses. A few rogue tasks in the mix, but that wasn’t unusual in itself. No leads.

Lofn was stationed at the desk next to me finishing up the tail end of her shift, typing furiously away as usual, her blonde braid snaking down the back of her neck in a tightly bound noose. I scooted up behind her to see what she was working on and found her in the process of composing an essay in the comment field. She froze when I approached and attempted to position herself between me and the screen.

“I can’t work with you looking over my shoulder,” she protested, but it was too late.

“You don’t need to turn everything into a trashy romance novel,” I said. “The woman’s asking for a cure for chronic depression, not a steamy love interest.”

Her cheeks reddened. “He’s a psychologist. It’s relevant. And they’re perfect for each other. You wait – they’ll be so happy together, her loneliness will melt away. Love -"

"- is the greatest cure of all," I finished for her. I'd heard this line innumerable times. "That’s adorable,” I said, patting her on the head. “Please don’t ever become a doctor.”

“What do you want, Loki?”

“Well, let’s see. Any high-drama items on your list in the last day or two?”

She brushed her fringe away from where it had fallen across her eyes and shot me a wary look. “Why?”

Lofn and I went way back. As long as I’d known her, she’d had a wistfulness and romanticism about her that drove her to pursue ambitious goals on behalf of others with an impressive attention to detail, while failing to maintain a similar state of self-care. It was hard not to warm up to her, but she was the kind of person who, if left unattended, would walk headfirst into a glass door and then apologise to it. I’d seen her do it multiple times at the travel stations.

“Bored,” I answered, and held out the mug I’d taken from the kitchen. “Coffee?”

She took it from me and gulped down a swig, wincing as it burnt her tongue. “It’s all high-drama. I’ve got international refugees and political detainments, multiple people trying to avoid honour killings, and people having stress-related breakdowns. And you want to criticise me for trying to find some happiness in the middle of all that? Since you’re asking, though, I did have a task come up that looks like it should have been one of yours.”

“You can have it,” I told her. “I can only take a certain number of deluded hippies before my brain starts blanking them out to preserve its neuron count.”

“No, I mean –“ she took another sip and winced again, “- it mentions you by name, but it got sent to my list. Some kind of bug?”

We didn’t get bugs. The system didn’t make mistakes. “Doubt it,” I said slowly. “Mind if I take a look?”

She made a few quick movements and wheeled her swivel chair aside to reveal a new task.

Deliver respectful treatment at work, the title read. Somewhat generic. The description, however, didn’t match up. In fact, it wasn’t a description at all. My eyes skimmed down many paragraphs of text, but the message my brain interpreted could be summed up in only a handful of words.

Loki, it read. We need to meet. You’re being watched. Plus an address in Singapore. That was all. No listed user, no background information, no context. It was little more than an empty container designed to look like a task, assuming the standard characteristics of one while having none of the substance. Some form of illusion, perhaps? If so, it had been applied on an abstract level to a piece of sophisticated hybrid technology.

I raised my eyes to meet Lofn’s, who stared back with a curious expression. “What’s your take on this?” I asked carefully.

“You sure you want to hear it? It involves ‘trashy romance’. But -" she never could resist an opportunity to talk about her solutions, "- I think it's pretty obvious this guy is chasing after the wrong coworker. Sami would be a much better fit, plus he has the right sort of hierarchical standing to solve both problems at once. I mean, yes, it violates some professional ethical standards, but what's that next to true love, right? I could push them into a mentorship. It'll be perfect.”

She couldn’t see it.

“Bad move,” I extrapolated, with only Lofn's explanation to go on. “Sami's going to steal all his thunder. Short term, sure, maybe he gets a career boost. Long term, it’s only going to lead to resentment. What if he gets a promotion? He’s always going to wonder if Sami’s influence was the only reason he got recognised, rather than earning it on his own merit. And their other coworkers are going to see it and assume it’s nepotism. Not a good foundation for a happy relationship, professional or personal. Unless destabilising their workplace is what you want, of course.”

Lofn groaned, pouting. It made her look childlike. In appearance she was even younger than Apollo, with fair skin, cool eyes and hair coming loose from the braid in wavy uncooperative wisps. “You’re the worst.”

“Yes, but I’m right."

She drained the rest of the coffee in one go and thrust the empty cup back at my face. “You see what I mean about the odd name drop, though?”

“You were right,” I declared, nodding along. “It does look like a bug, after all. And now I need a new coffee.”

Thoughts abuzz, I headed back to the kitchen. Had a new player just revealed themselves? Or was this a message from the master manipulator? Someone wanted to get my attention, but didn’t want to go directly through me. Why was that? They said I was being watched. I was assuming that didn't refer to Providence, since I hadn't been demoted since the heist. Did it include my task list? If my computer was under surveillance, it would go some way to explaining the indirect approach. And – I felt a brisk shiver run down my spine as I put two and two together – we already had evidence of covert monitoring. Eris’ computer, for one.

I had to get Lucy to run a diagnostic on my machine as soon as possible. How far did this go? If it wasn’t just Eris, it was unlikely they’d have stopped at monitoring only two people.

There were further implications here too. If Person A – who I mentally dubbed the Whistleblower for placeholder purposes - wanted to warn me about Person B (the Hacker), it followed there were multiple potential outside interests at work here, one who might be friendly and one who might not. According to Lucy, the Hacker wasn’t related to Providence, but did the Whistleblower know that? Was the Whistleblower related to Providence?

There were other ways to observe people than through their computers, too. While I waited for the coffee machine to finish brewing, I used the time to still myself, dulling all extraneous senses to see if I could sense anything out of the ordinary. I didn’t learn much. Providence in its modern incarnation was, predictably, a hotbed of divine energy; several dozen storeys of crisscrossing currents and vortices. For someone of my very limited ability in that area, trying to make sense of anything specific was a fool’s errand. It had still been worth a shot.

One unexpected thing I did find was a tenuous awareness of a distant presence. Remote as it was, it was the only thing I was able to pin down to a concrete source. The fehu rune, a tiny violet anchor in a vast indecipherable sea. It didn’t help me in the immediate present, but perhaps the information would come in useful down the track.

Still niggling at me was the detail of how the Whistleblower had known to contact me through Lofn. I hoped it wasn’t as simple as her and I belonging to the same pantheon, because that implied others would have been contacted as well, and that was attention I did not want. But there was also someone else who had displayed a recent uncanny knowledge of Providence’s Helpdesk seating arrangement, and who had a confirmed connection to Eris, and his name was Lien Yun-Qi. The two incidents were connected; the only question was how loosely.

As a supplier representative, Yun-Qi didn’t have a known entry in the task system, which was unfortunate. No instant information repository this time. It was possible – likely, in fact, given his lifelong obsession with mythology – that he had at least one task in the system somewhere, but you needed management-level access or above to conduct a search of the whole database, and it could have ended up with anyone. Shame. I would have very much liked to get my hands on it.

A finger hooked into the back of my blouse collar and pulled me rearwards. “You look like you’re planning something devious,” said Lucy, helping himself to the coffee I’d just made. “Don’t forget we have an appointment at the Vatican.”

Finally. I filled him in on what had happened with Lofn on the way back to our desks.

“I take it back,” he said. “Good work with your Chinese contact.”

“We need to run those tests,” I told him. “This takes priority over Old Pointy-Hat.”

“Agreed. We need to know who we’re dealing with. There aren’t many viable candidates, so I’m very curious.” He tapped on his phone, and a moment later I received a message containing a string of numbers and a street address in Vietnam. “While I’m working on that, you should take a look into this. It’s the IP location of our hacker. Likely a fake, but it’s worth looking into.”

I raised my phone in a mock toast. I was itching to get some answers and wasn’t short on ideas for finding them. “I’ll see what I can do.”