“I saw Canciana,” I yelled as we fell sideways through the tunnel, and not at half speed.

The end of the apple branch caught on one of the roots as we passed, and I wrestled to keep it from being tugged out of my grip. Four of the fruits flew off and into the miniature portals, lost forever.

“Concentrating,” Mayari said absently, snapping her fingers at the encroaching sludge wave rising ahead of us. It imploded in a spray of residual droplets. My skin sizzled where they touched.

I shifted into a heavy-duty apron and begun shoving apples into the front pocket, relying on momentum to prevent them from spilling out again. “She made it,” I shouted again over the roar of air in my ears. “I can’t even be annoyed she beat us.” Even with a two-week head start, making it as far as the temple on a mortal skillset was a feat in itself. Though for her it would all have been made of data.

Gia shielded her eyes as another wave imploded in front of us. The demon’s skin was pockmarked with burns, but she only grunted at the impact. The first round of marks was already starting to pucker and heal. Somehow she was still managing to keep hold of the apples I’d given her.

The far end of the root was rapidly approaching; the light from the temple delineating the exit in a neat, orderly rectangle. I wrangled the last of the apples into the pouch and let go of the branch, where it immediately wedged into a root behind us. The flood drowned it a second later, approaching renewed from the rear.

There was less sludge around the exit; the portals hadn’t fully formed. Mayari looked at it and the mass upended itself and flowed in a cylinder around the edges of the tunnel past us in the opposite direction.

I tumbled out of the root and braced for an apple juice-flavoured impact, but instead found myself deposited gently on the ground along with Gia. Mayari shot out the opening last, whirling midair. She threw up a palm and the sludge chasing us slammed to a halt, spraying a line up out of the altar and into the temple. The rest fell back down the root in a shower in the direction it came from.

Mayari lowered the palm, and her hair stopped floating around her face. She dropped to the ground, placed the butt of the spear against the floor with a decisive clunk, and exhaled.

I reached into the apron and retrieved a single apple, then dumped the rest with their container into Gia’s hands before she could protest. “This,” I declared, tossing the fruit in the air and catching it single-handedly, “is a better start than I was expecting.”

“Oh, is it?” Mayari gazed from the back of the altar to Gia and the pile of apples and back again. “We were supposed to remain ephemeral. Gia can leave, but what if we’re trapped in here? And the spear.”

“I can think of worse than being stuck in the heart of the universe with multiple priceless artifacts. Providence can’t reach us in here. Worst case, the pact triggers and we lose our memories, we wake up next to a trove of the tyrant’s worst nightmares, and we try again.”

“Without any of our hard-earned knowledge of what came before.”

I shrugged. “Apparently I’ve done it before. Chat to Lucy sometime.”

“The world will be unrecognisable after today.” Mayari paced forward a few steps, then turned to look back at me. “What if this was a setup? Odin leaving a nice, enticing gate to enlightenment, safe in the knowledge it would suck up any competition making it that far.”

It was the kind of trick he would pull. It would be just like Odin to leave rotten surprises behind even in the event of his defeat. Where there was one, there would likely be more. Then again, the world tree clearly played by its own rules. Odin might have had nothing to do with it short of securing his own way out.

“Either way, we can still shut this thing down,” I reminded them both as I hoisted myself back over the altar to the main walkway, the world bending back towards reasonable architectural proportions as I did. Yggdrasil’s roots twisted under my feet, becoming smoother as the temple swung into brightly-lit being, until they transitioned into the neat wooden flooring.

I remembered the cracks in the platform outside and wondered how far they’d spread, and how far they had yet to go. How the task system had developed vulnerabilities, flaws and weaknesses that shouldn’t have been possible in a system bolstered by divine magic. Maybe the problem wasn’t the butchering of the bedrock it had been built on, but that it was growing back.

Still. Not fast enough.

My connections to the pact and the other demons were returning. The former seemed a little weaker than it had been before the journey in, though whether from dimensional interference or pressure from threat of discovery, it was hard to say. My data sense was also coming back, bringing with it its odd double-awareness.

Gia dropped down beside me and picked up the apples from their temporary place of repose on the altar.

“You’re up,” I told her. “Assuming it worked. On a scale of one to raving, how lucid do you feel?”

“I feel like both of those are low numbers.”

“It’s a bell curve. Point is, did it make a difference?”

The analyst reached up to touch her head, the fingers hovering just above it as if expecting to find a tiara waiting there. “The information’s still in there,” she said, “but it feels… I don’t know. Calmer. Less like it’s threatening to swallow me if I take my mind off who I am.”

“That’s good,” said Mayari, flickering into existence beside us.

“Is it? I thought it might go away.” The hand not cradling the apples fell to her side.

“Eventually, perhaps,” the goddess replied. “But not for a long time. They’re memories, like any other. What’s important will surface; what’s less important will fade. What matters is that you can handle it.”

Gia was silent for a moment. “What I absorbed must be a miniscule fraction of what regular system users soak up on a daily basis. How are you still – well, you?”

“I’ve asked myself that,” said Mayari. She moved up the walkway to one of the nearest glowing panels, but didn’t touch it. “And I don’t have the answers. Much information has been kept from us, too, you know. I was hoping there might even be some of it tucked away in this system. But it looks like that’s kept entirely separate.” She swivelled back around. “Do you think you’re up for trying to locate the setting we need?”

“I can try. But shouldn’t we rescue Canciana?”

“She doesn’t have a body on Earth to go back to,” Mayari said.

“Neither do you. You were just saying so. If she’s there, we can’t just leave her.”

Mayari and I glanced at each other.

“Frankly, she’s got a better deal in there than most people alive,” I remarked. “You saw it. If anything, the rest of us should be joining her.”

“One thing at a time,” Mayari agreed, but I could see the wheels turning. The world tree was much larger than the moon base and the more recent established island refuge. I’d only gotten a vague sense of it, but it had felt expansive. World-sized, possibly larger. Although it could hardly be called a world in the sense I understood them.

More importantly, its environmental influence could do what even Lucy never could – rapid-onset immortality on an unheard-of scale, if only we could get people there.

Mayari opened her mouth, only to close it again. A flash of a troubled expression passed over her face before clearing. I raised my eyebrows at her, but the gesture went ignored.

“Gianna,” she said briskly, turning to the Italian, “if you could try to create an aspect of the system deactivation setting, I’d appreciate it.”

“How do I do that?”

“Focus only on what you want to affect. We don’t want to change the whole system this time.”

“Sure, but I still don’t know where it is.”

“Then make it so that you can’t miss it,” I butted in. “Everything in this room is sleek, clean and digital. An analogue version should stand out a mile away. Big red button, go.”

“Or a trolley problem lever,” Mayari added helpfully. “Whatever works.”

Gia blinked. “This feels vaguely embarrassing,” she muttered. “Here goes.” She closed her eyes.

For a few seconds nothing happened, and then one of the nearby panels flickered and went dark. A loud creak sounded, and the panel tilted forwards, teetering on its narrow base, no longer affixed to the temple wall. I stepped to the side just in time to avoid it crushing me, whereupon the resulting thud reverberated throughout the building. The walls trembled.

I thought I heard a faint, distant creaking from the walkway.

On the back of the fallen panel sat an old filing cabinet, its drawers torn partially loose from the impact. One or two folders had come loose and fallen to the ground below, spilling out papers covered in charts and numbers. “Close, but no,” I instructed. “Narrow it down more. We want just the deactivation switch.”

Gia stared at the mildly damaged object. “I did this?”

“No, it was a case of spontaneous cabinetry. Switch, please.”

After a brief double-take, her eyes closed again. A moment later the furniture shifted and blurred, resolving into a larger desk I recognised as an old library catalogue. More papers fluttered out of it to the ground in the shape of small beige cards.

“Maybe it wasn’t enough just to bring her through the tunnel,” Mayari theorised in my ear. “Do you think an apple would do it?”

“I’m just saying, I think this is amazing,” Gia interjected. She stepped forward and pulled open one of the drawers. “Oh look, it’s a list of all the people who accessed these settings. This is violating some international data privacy laws.” She turned over the card. “I’m less sure about the ones pre-dating computers. Or electricity.” She turned it over again. “Or the legal system.”

Something was wrong. It might have been Gia, but I’d experienced enough of the demon lords in action by now to have strong doubts.

I whisked the card out of her hands and held it at arms’ length, ignoring the list of names in favour of flicking it with a fingernail. When it didn’t respond, I tore it in half, letting the pieces flutter to the ground. I glanced up at the remaining electronic panels in case something happened.

Nothing did.

“I don’t think –” Mayari began, but I was already tracing runes on the remaining fragment clasped between my fingers.

It vanished unceremoniously. The fragments on the ground disappeared with it, along with the rest of the cards in the open drawer.

“Illusion,” I confirmed, not bothering to disguise the touch of smugness in my voice. I pulled open another drawer and found it, too, empty. “In fact –” I cast the spell again, whereby the whole thing collapsed with a small audible pop and clatter of something small bouncing off the floor, “– multiple layers of it. Peak Odin.”

The moon goddess made a frustrated noise. “I should have guessed.”

Gia glanced between Mayari and I, then stooped to pick up the fallen object. The button was silver and metallic rather than red, and had a blue ring of glowing LEDs around it despite the lack of connected electrical power. It was identical to its counterparts in the managerial elevator, in fact, which was either a remarkable coincidence or indicated Gia didn’t have complete control over the aspects she created. Transformed though it was, it was still an artifact of Providence.

Mayari paled. “For the love of existence, don’t press it.”

The button floated up out of the analyst’s fingers and back towards the altar, before pausing and switching gears to fly straight up. The altar might have been a blocked exit, but it was an exit, and at least one other person could potentially come out of it when we weren’t paying attention. Only when the bane of the task system hovered safely above our heads, tumbling gently in zero-gravity, did Mayari’s shoulders relax.

“Alright,” she said, back to business. “We’re in position. Ish. We’re still stuck in here. I’ve tried. If we can’t leave, Gia will have to carry on without us. But we can’t send her out to face Yahweh alone.”

“Yeah,” the Italian agreed emphatically. “Let’s not do that. The family conversations I’m running through in my head might be awkward, but at least I can still envision a scenario where I live to have them.”

We might have been able to cope with just one of us down, but I still hadn’t checked in with Legba for my part of the plan, and we were somewhat short on replacements. Tez had been adamant about keeping his number of concurrent incarnations to a minimum, and after Bolivia I could see why.

I tried phasing back to the penthouse, and sure enough, hit a wall.

I wasn’t completely cut off from the outside world, at least. Outside the altar tunnel I could still reach the demons, albeit with greater effort. I could feel Tru trying to reach me, no doubt due to my sudden disappearance at the penthouse. But giving instructions from afar wouldn’t be enough on its own. Someone had to be there.

If I’d been better at runic magic, I might have been able to inscribe us a way out. The world tree itself was also an option; squeezing through one of the root’s sky portals and hoping for the best. I could fit through even if Mayari couldn’t. Of course, there was no guarantee it was what it seemed to be, or where, and the last thing I wanted was to end up lost in a cannibalised or – the possibility occurred to me – regrowing dimensional fragment with no way back.

“We have your aspects,” I told Gia, pacing up the walkway before spinning and turning back again. “Problem is, they don’t help with location. It doesn’t matter what form we take if we’re still fish in a tank.”

“What if we all went back through the entrance together?” Gia suggested. “Would that put things back to normal?”

“You and I need to wait here to trigger the downtime,” Mayari replied. “And I don’t know. Even if we make it out intact, we might end up as souls floating around. Loki might be able to make a new body, but I can’t. And there’s the matter of the spear. It doesn’t have a soul.” She sighed, and pinched the bridge of her nose between one thumb and forefinger. “This one blindsided me.”

“We still have the apples,” Gia added, pulling one out of the makeshift satchel she’d folded out of the apron. The artisanry was a little too good to be pure origami, in fact, the edges too straight and precise. She was already making subtler use of her aspects. “Didn’t you say they could be whatever we need?”

“Sure,” I agreed. “Let me know when you figure out how.”

Tentatively, the demon lifted the apple to her face and sniffed it.

“I’ll inform the other demon lords,” I said, making a decision. “I guess I’ll wait here until Tez texts back a message. He’ll probably have something for us. Until then –” I waved around at the glowing panels, “– we have enough stuffy numbers to break the most desperate of masochists. I’ll be taking a nap.”

“Do you think it’s our point of origin?” Mayari asked suddenly, before I could make good on either promise. Her gaze drifted towards the altar. “Yggdrasil. The world tree.”

Despite myself, I found myself snapping back to attention. “Why?”

The point of origin. Where the first gods had come from. No one knew the answer to that question. Or if they did, then no one could pinpoint a clear truth from thousands of other theories and false leads. Accounts conflicted; memories, inconsistent. There were ways you could force them to fit, but none without holes. Theories that whole pantheons’ memories had been tampered with. That history as we knew it, going back far enough, was a lie; a simulation created from scratch with casts to oversee each society. That the real power had lain with mortals all along, whose desires had brought us into being.

For a while, I’d been fond of the notion each pantheon had originated on its own dimension, entirely separate from the others, until some far-reaching event had caused them to merge subtly into one. It explained everything – except for the massive gaping hole where no one had noticed. As stupid as societies could be, an oversight on that scale from every single one was a bit much to swallow. I’d figured the theory was about as valid as the rest.

Though definitely not impossible.

Mayari leant back, as if to rest against an invisible wall. Instead she remained in place, toes leaving the walkway to hover centimetres above it. The tips of her hair floated in subtle bobs around her. “Do you know how my pantheon described creation?”

“I’ve heard the story,” I replied, and wondered where she was going with it. “And it was basically them being annoyed at the first version of Flappy Bird. Can’t hold it against them.”

“Him,” she replied. “There was only one back then. The bird was my father. Sky and ocean as far as the eye could see, but no land.”

“And Yggdrasil comes in how?”

“Because it was there. Or at least a tree. The first land my father found was a piece of bamboo. When he pecked at it, people emerged.” Extending a fist, she held up one finger, added more to it as she went. “Yggdrasil. Eden. Jian Mu. Sidrat al-Muntaha. The Ashvattha. Universal providers of life, knowledge and transit. After seeing it for myself, I’m not sure they’re different organisms.”

“You think our ancestors all found different parts of the same whole.”

“I think they might be from it. Maybe we’re all aliens, technically-speaking. And we just… migrated. My people to Earth, yours to the Nine Realms, the Greeks to Olympus. And so on.”

I thought about it, and couldn’t find any immediate holes in the notion. People had lived in the tree at some point, that much seemed likely. “When everyone leaves a place,” I remarked, “you have to wonder why. So far, angry tree ooze comprises a likely forerunner.”

“If they left,” Gia broke in, “wouldn’t they remember and tell you?”

“Yes. They should.” Mayari’s shoulders deflated. Her feet drifted back to the floor, and her hair lost its temporary buoyancy. “I suppose it was egotistical of me to imagine I’d cracked what no one else could.”

“Still,” I added, making a start on the mental gymnastics required to contact the demon lords, “it’s a good story. I wouldn’t rule it out. And maybe we should look at getting Canciana out of there, after all. Messiah deadline or no, it’s not like we have anything better to do.”