Only a seer could influence the future, I thought to myself dimly as a strange invisible pulse ratcheted through the landscape, standing my hairs on end. Gather enough of them in one area and there were too many forks in the road to be sure how things would play out anymore. Even allowing for that, I’d have thought the enormous gap between Apollo and Odin’s divination skills would have ensured the former would come out on top.

Evidently I’d been wrong.

Where the two high-ranking managers had stood, the landscape was now in complete turmoil, reality itself seemingly engaged in battle with its residents.

Shards tore themselves from the ground and thrust themselves at their adversary. Pits opened up in the ground, tombs of rock materialised around him out of air, only to crumble to dust like the first. Space warped, rent and shattered, reflecting in on itself until it hurt to look at it.

Apollo’s corpse was lost somewhere in the mess, but I didn’t need to see it to know he was gone. Even if I hadn’t been close enough to sense the soul blinking out into the void, the absence of his thread of the pact in my head rammed it home. He was gone. Only six of us left now.

Five, even, depending on whether Tez pulled through. His end of the pact had had something weird going on with it ever since he’d summoned the first reflection back at the pope’s hotel – almost a splitting effect, like the unfurling of the individual strands making up a single piece of twine – but now that my attention was on it, I could see one of those strands was in significantly worse shape than the other, like it could snap at any moment.

But Tez wasn’t accountable for an entire department. Especially one relying on divination to cope with every tiny issue. After today, it was entirely possible enough of Providence’s seer supplies were going to dry up and cause a serious skills shortage.

Managers and directors had come and gone before. But not often. And not usually before a handover process had been initiated, willing or otherwise.

Apollo’s soul had been tied to Providence’s security processes. He’d said as much back at the hotel. I’d watched him use it in his office earlier, registering the mirrorverse as a new office location.

Which meant – unless they’d found a way to tie employee access to the void now, which seemed like a serious security breach - Providence’s security measures would be down.

The pit of my stomach dropped out from under me and it felt as though every iota of attention I possessed homed in on Durga still crouched some distance away with a gaping wound in her arm.

Gungnir was still clasped in her fingers, but the self-inflicted strike had taken its toll on more than just the rune virus. Few people simply picked themselves up after a hit from a weapon of Gungnir’s calibre, fatal or not. The fingers holding the spear were shaking.

And Odin was nowhere to be seen again. In death, Apollo hadn’t even slowed him down.

Anger surged through me, directed largely at Lucy’s absence. He was the missing piece of the puzzle here. I’d seen him possess people, and he didn’t need to physically sense his target to do it. If he’d joined us like he was supposed to, he could have possessed Odin or at least identified his location in the attempt. I didn’t understand what his game was, but whatever it was, it had to have been a mistake.

Because the alternative was worse.

Far in the distance, a small figure was zooming towards us; Mayari, who couldn’t have missed the initial pulse and the encroaching fractalisation spreading out from the site of the kill. She hadn’t realised.

Neither had Durga, I guessed. She had risen back to her feet, but too slow. With security down, every fraction of a second counted.

At the rate Tez, or his reflection – I wasn’t sure – was tearing apart the universe, it was a safe bet he wasn’t thinking about it either. The landscape around me was filled with distortions not dissimilar to those in the office, making it difficult to tell what was where and how basic three-dimensional directions operated.

We were screwed. We were so royally screwed.

Six against one – seven, if you counted mirror Tez – shouldn’t have just hammered the nail into the coffin but sent it crumbling to filings under a trash compactor. Yet here we were. Failure here was just death or demotion waiting to happen. It would be a manhunt. That Odin would be leading the charge and not Apollo was small comfort. If I had to die, it should have been for something more impactful, not scrabbling around trying to make a dent in an institution whose dominance had always been a foregone conclusion.

There was no time to explain. It didn’t matter who got their hands on Gungnir now, as long as it wasn’t Odin. With Apollo down and Tez and Durga injured, the battle was probably lost; the best we could do would be run away with Gungnir as the last line of defence. Though where we could go that they wouldn’t find us, short of Lucy’s stash, I didn’t know.

And I had serious questions about Lucy’s intentions right now.

I warped across to Durga, just out of spear range, announcing my presence with a slight mental nudge to avoid getting murdered on reflex. “We have to go.”

“No. We can take him, we just –”

I couldn’t tell if she hadn’t registered we could all travel again, or was just shocked into missing the significance. Her hands had ceased shaking, but she was still facing away from me, scanning the horizon searching for Odin even as she leant on the spear for support. A wet circle ringed the base of the haft where it had sunk an indentation a centimetre or two deep into the salt.

“Not negotiable,” I snapped. “We’ve lost this one. Apollo is dead; I think maybe Tez too. Get your cat; we’re out of here.”

“We won’t get another chance like this,” she rasped. “He’ll never let himself be this vulnerable again. I’m unbeatable in combat.” Except to herself and other variants thereof, apparently. I had no doubt Odin would find a way to exploit that particular weakness.

“Are you serious? We stay, we die!” I stalked forwards and grabbed the nearest elbow, pulling her up and turning her to face me.

Where Durga’s right eye was supposed to be was a hole. A hole casually carving its immutable absence through the universe from the inside of a human skull. A hole into which all of my hope disappeared as something heavy and solid barrelled through the centre of my body. I recognised the wet sucking noise accompanying it. It sounded like death.

I stared downwards at the shaft of the rune-covered spear protruding out of my chest, then back up at the person holding it. Wild glee had spread across Odin’s features, the triumph unmistakable, her hands clasped tight around its padded grips.

“Sweet dreams,” she said.

The breath died in my chest, my lungs refusing to operate around the foreign object impaling them. Weapons worked best within their own pantheons; apex predators operating within their native ecosystems.

The metal burnt, easily the equal of anything I’d experienced in the worst possible way. Even two hundred years of that fucking snake venom hadn’t hurt this much, although much of that would have been down to it periodically rendering me unconscious. My mind reeled, fighting to focus. I tried to shift, push my flesh away from the spear, but my body quivered and refused to change. A cold numbness began creep down my spine.

This was not how I’d meant to go, I thought, slumping forward along the instrument.

Except - I seemed to be taking a while to die.

By rights I should have already been floating along in the void wishing I had something as exciting as HR forms to sign. This was uncharacteristic for Gungnir, which generally tore through its victims, gods included. Again, something niggled at my brain, through the haze induced by the wave of agony rushing into me on some kind of sick and twisted delay. My hand somehow found the shaft, my fingertips brushing its smooth surface. Perhaps if I could pull it out -

Odin twisted the implement, driving it deeper, but the smile had dropped from her face.

I’d held Gungnir on multiple occasions, back in the old days. Its surface wasn’t smooth. The runes glimmering along its length were engraved. These looked convincing, but the effect only extended as far as the eyes. And now that I could see it far closer than I’d ever intended, they did look familiar. Recently familiar.

If I wasn’t mistaken, this was a copy of the same binding spell we’d pulled together in the pope’s secret room earlier in the week, complete with identical typos.

Because Lucy didn’t know what the originals said.

This wasn’t Gungnir. The spear was a goddamn fake, and I wasn’t going to die.

Though the moment I passed out and became a sitting duck, I’d be as good as dead anyway. It felt like I was losing enough body fluids to supply the blood clinics of half a dozen small countries, and whole swathes of my vision were rapidly going dark.

In not killing me instantly, however, Odin had made a critical mistake.

The Allfather’s hands jerked back, lifting from the spear – but she’d been occupied holding a polearm and my arms were right there, ready to go.

Mustering all my remaining strength, I leaned forward into the spear, pushing through the torment, and slammed my hand down on Odin’s arm.

Teleporting her back into the now undefended main office, straight into the Floor T time loop.