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wasn’t one of location? What if the reason Tisiphone couldn’t exercise her admin powers over reality was because the system that granted them had gone down? Tisiphone had called the abacus network Necessity’s soul. What if all that fuss and bother was Necessity well and truly crashing? What if the computer that ran the universe had . . . died? I was still trying to get my mind around that idea when Tisiphone turned my way.
    “Why are you just standing there doing nothing?” she demanded. “Don’t you want to know where we are? Or how we got here?”
    “I . . .” How to bring this up gently? “Has it occurred to you that the problem might not be at our end?”
    “What do you . . . Oh. Shit. Melchior?”
    “Yes?” He startled, looked very nervous, and who wouldn’t with an upset Fury glaring at him?
    “Can you connect to the mweb?”
    He shook his head. “Sorry. I’ve been trying since we arrived, but I’m getting nothing. It’s simply not there.”
    There was a time when that would have hit him almost as hard as not knowing where she was affected Tisiphone, but the world that held Raven House—our home—had been off the net so long that Melchior was more used to being disconnected than not.
    Tisiphone closed her eyes, and her face sagged. “I don’t want to think about this.”
    I stepped forward and put a hand on her arm. The fire of her hair and wings flared suddenly bright and hot, and she glared at me so fiercely I stumbled backwards.
    “Don’t touch me,” she said, very quietly. “I don’t know what’s happened with Necessity, but if it’s bad, you and I are going to have a problem.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “If you think even for a moment that I’ve forgotten where I found you and what you were doing when all of this started, you are seriously mistaken. Necessity is my mother. If you’re responsible for harm coming to her, there will have to be consequences.”
    She held my eyes one moment more, then with a powerful leap and a beat of her wings launched herself skyward.
    “That went well,” said a new voice—male and sardonic, verging on snide.
    I turned around and found myself facing a stranger. He was around my own height of six feet and athletically slender. His brush-cut hair and thin scruff of beard were dish-water blond. Despite the roundness of his face, he looked somehow lean and hungry. He had circular rimless glasses and wore a plain black long-sleeved tee, blue jeans, and black sneakers. He also had a dog, a very strange dog, black to match his shirt.
    A giant of a standard poodle in a lion cut, it must have stood thirty inches at the shoulder and weighed a hundred pounds. I’ve never thought of poodles as being particularly fierce or intimidating, but this one broke all the rules. He was a huge brute, with hungry eyes and a big, ugly-looking iron thorn stuck deep in his lower lip like some weird doggie piercing. To make matters worse, he was leashed with only the thinnest of silvery cords, barely more than a thread, that went from his neck into the pocket—and presumably hand—of his master. Despite the dog’s demeanor, he ignored me in favor of quietly munching away on a long tuft of grass at the base of the signpost declaring the miniature YORK MINSTER.
    As I met the man’s mocking eyes, I couldn’t help but remember that my own were still the slit, chaos-pupiled version I tried to hide from all but my pantheonic fellows. Though, if he noticed either that or my pointed ears as out of the ordinary, he made no sign. Of course, since he seemed more amused than alarmed by the flying departure of a naked and fire-winged goddess, he was probably not your standard-issue human-type being.
    “Do I know you?” I finally asked. He didn’t seem familiar, but many of the gods and other Olympians are shape-changers.
    “If by that you mean, do we know each other, the answer is no. Though the chances are good that you know of me, or at least have heard my