"Halt! Who goes there?" bellowed a guard so loudly that the walls shook.

Glitter snapped back, "I am the Superintendent of Reincarnation. As you know full well, Lumen."

"Yipes!" yelped Guard Lumen, who'd obviously had run-ins with the cranky old star sprite. "Ahem. I mean, Superintendent of Reincarnation, what brings you to the warehouses this late?"

"Bureau business, boy. Go harass someone who actually doesn't belong here."

"Uh," said the other guard with more backbone than any glorified lanternfly should have, "sorry, Superintendent, but I have to ask: What Bureau business brings you here?"

"Stars! What is the Heavenly Guard Force coming to? Have you not memorized the most basic map of Heaven? Are you not aware that these warehouses store robes for clerks, including the clerks who work at the Bureau of Reincarnation?"

"Uh...well...yes, Superintendent, but…."

It sounded like Glitter had the guards well in hand. Now, if we could just escape these imps who had us penned in. The warehouse had no windows, but how about a back door? There had to be a back door. No one would design a warehouse with only one exit. If it caught fire, you'd never save your goods – and workers, I supposed – in time.

"Heavenly Lady," growled an imp.

Oh no! He'd recognized Aurelia!

We'll charge them and make a break for the back door, I hissed at her and Floridiana. On my count. One, two, thr–

"You promised True Change," growled the imp – not at Aurelia, but at me.

Aha! My speech on dragon-back was producing results, just as I had known it would.

"What do you mean by 'True Change,' Heavenly Lady?"

Well, this was the first time anyone had addressed me as a goddess. "Heavenly Lady." It had a nice ring to it, although not quite so nice as –

Heavenly Majesty, I corrected him. The appropriate form of address for the ruler of Heaven is "Heavenly Majesty."

Aurelia emitted a choked noise.

"Piri! Is this the time for etiquette lessons?!" hissed Floridiana.

I didn't break off my staring contest with the imp. It is always the time for proper behavior. For example, if the gods and goddesses behaved properly, if they carried out their duties as they should, none of us would be here, would we? You would be on Earth, living a contented life as a human woman, never fearing that a god might cut short your life or the lives of your loved ones at any moment on a whim.

The imp stared back at me, challengingly. For all I knew, imps didn't need to blink.

The Star of Reflected Brightness would be in her office in the Bureau of the Sky, overseeing the grounds and gardens of Heaven. Or, since it is the middle of the night, she would be in her bed, sound asleep. As should you all be.

I swept my gaze from imp to imp, meeting each pair of gleaming eyes in turn.

If the gods were not so selfish, so negligent of the needs of others, none of us would be here right now.

"We'd be asleep," rumbled an imp.

"In beds," added a second.

"Not on pallets on the floor," said a third.

"We want beds," they chorused. "We want more food. We want shorter hours."

And you shall have them, I vowed. You shall have beds. You shall have food to fill your bellies and more. You shall have the time to sleep in your beds and to eat the food.

Aurelia stirred. "More than that, you shall have the time to dream. Everyone deserves the time to dream."

The imps gawked at her as if they had no idea what this goddess was blathering about.

"You will have the chance to join the hierarchy. To climb the hierarchy," Floridiana put in. "We'll institute a system of exams to promote those who do well."

Spoken like a true scholar and headmistress. Although we hadn't discussed it ahead of time, it sounded reasonable enough, and implementing it would be her job, not mine.

That is the True Change we shall bring, I concluded. But we need your help to do it. Will you help us?

The imps growled and barked at one another, debating the matter. Meanwhile, outside, Glitter snapped, "Put that in your report! Instead of patrolling Heaven for invaders, you stopped a Superintendent to harass her!"

The guards mumbled apologies. I pictured her stabbing them in the chest with her knobby forefinger.

"I want to be her when I grow up," Floridiana whispered.

You already are, I retorted, which earned me a very Glitter-esque scowl.

"We have a barge. Come," one of the imps ordered, still in such a guttural, angry tone that it sounded less like an offer to save our lives and more like a vow to disembowel us.

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Aurelia inclined her head, eliciting shocked hisses from the shadows. "Thank you."

More imps than I'd realized were in the warehouse detached themselves from the darkness and surrounded us, funneling us between two racks of black robes. The brush of cotton reminded me of all the times I'd traveled inside Flicker's sleeve.

Wait!

Aurelia and Floridiana froze. "What is it?" whispered Aurelia.

"Keep moving," growled the imps. "Angry" seemed to be their default accent.

Ignoring them, I nudged a fold of fabric with my nose. Put these on. No one looks at clerks. You'll blend in.

"They're looking tonight," Floridiana pointed out, but Aurelia slid a robe off its hanger and draped it over her shoulders.

With a groan, Floridiana put me on the floor, shook out her arms, and rolled her shoulders before donning one too. I really wasn't that heavy.

Stoop. Hunch over like you sit in front of a desk all day and never go outside.

That was mostly aimed at Aurelia, who carried herself like an empress. Floridiana already had the look down. Experimentally, Aurelia bent her spine and rotated her shoulders forward.

That'll do. Let's go.

Outside, Glitter commanded, "Be off with you! Go bother someone who has time for this nonsense!" As the guards' boots tramped off, their rhythm much less measured than when they'd approached, the front door of the warehouse slammed open and then shut behind Glitter. "What are you doing?"

"These fine imps are bringing us to their barge, Superintendent," Aurelia explained. "They're helping us."

Glitter sniffed. "Of course they are. You promised True Change, didn't you?"

Not just promised, I corrected her. We are bringing True Change.

She flapped her hand in a motion that simultaneously dismissed me and shooed us on. "I'll meet you at the Bureau of Reincarnation. Come in the loading dock."

She stayed in the warehouse, continuing the fiction that she was inspecting the robes, while the imps shoved us out the back door and onto a dock. An empty barge bobbed on the canal. The waves glinted red under the Moon's bloody light.

"Sit." An imp pointed at the center of the barge. They heaped crates and barrels around us until no patrols could see us from shore.

What about the guards in the air –

Thunk. A wooden board thudded across two barrels, forming a shanty roof. The imps piled more crates on top of that.

It better not collapse and crush us, I muttered.

"They know what they're doing." Aurelia seemed oddly at ease crouched in a space the size of a children's pillow fort. "Trust them to do their job, as they trust us to do ours."

Since I had no choice in the matter, that was what I did. We lurched along the canal, propelled by the imps' poles. Guards on land and overhead bellowed challenges at anyone unlucky enough to be working late. The gods really weren't winning themselves any allies among the star sprites and imps – who vastly outnumbered them. Why hadn't Lady Fate foreseen this threat and warned the Jade Emperor? Or had she warned him and been ignored?

I recalled my trial, the reverence with which the gods treated her cryptic utterances. No, I couldn't believe that the Jade Emperor would disregard her warning. So why was she letting this happen? Had her moon blocks failed her because she'd asked the wrong questions? Had she foreseen that we'd fail without her needing to intervene?

Or had she foreseen that we were going to win no matter what she did?

No! I couldn't let myself get distracted thinking in circles like this! We were doomed to fail, or we were destined to succeed. Either way, we didn't know the outcome ahead of time, so all we could do was proceed as if we stood a chance, and by doing so perhaps generate enough twists and deviations that we could alter our Fate.

"Oooh," moaned Floridiana. "I'm getting seasick."

"It isn't much further," Aurelia consoled her. "You need only endure a little longer."

Immortal goddesses must have had a different sense of time and distance, because I would not have qualified the location of our barge as "almost there." We changed directions twice more before we finally struck something hard enough to send the crates and barrels skidding across the deck and banging into Aurelia and Floridiana. While the mage grumbled and rubbed her bruises, I was sheltered between their bodies and hence remained completely unscathed.

People tramped around on the barge, making it wobble and bob until even I felt queasy. Wood scraped; light appeared between cracks. The imps tugged us out and shooed us onto the dock. Annoyingly, the jerky barge ride hadn't affected Aurelia at all. Floridiana and I, on the other hand, needed a bit of time to find our land legs.

"Oy! Hurry up!" snapped an imp.

They surrounded us, making a show of staggering under the weight of the crates to hide us until we were indoors. After the darkness outside, the light was blinding. I blinked and blinked, cursing these mortal eyes until my pupils adjusted. The imps had brought us into a warehouse-like space at the back of the Bureau of Reincarnation. Dusty shelves held yellowing scrolls, and more documents were stacked in open boxes. I sneezed and sneezed again. This archive was not only dusty but moldy. Fuzzy stuff grew over the spines of an entire section of ancient books.

Which, I realized, I could see clearly not because the room was lit by lanterns or oil lamps, but by the glowing skins of row upon row of star sprite clerks. My eyes swept over them, marking the ones I knew – the ones who had cared for me while I was in the Archives, the ones who had brought me to Flicker's waiting room for my reincarnations, even that really grumpy one who'd chastised Flicker for letting me talk in the stairwell. All of them were bowing, with Glitter at their head.

Without needing any prompting, Floridiana picked me up and helped me climb onto her shoulder.

Thank you for meeting us here.

Some clerks twitched in surprise. Others bowed lower.

Glitter, do you have the seals?

The Superintendent straightened and held out a lacquered casket inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Since I had no hands, Aurelia accepted it, opening the lid to reveal five bronze seals, nestled in shallow holes cut to fit their bases. Yep, I recognized the one on the end as the one Cassius had used to stamp "White" on my file.

You're mine now, I told it silently. The loop on its top twinkled defiance. Aloud, I asked, Does anyone have a silk cord?

After some rummaging of pockets and sleeves, one of the younger clerks presented me with a piece of string. Not silk, but good enough.

Thread it through the seals and tie it around my neck.

Aurelia sucked in a breath at the sacrilege, perhaps imagining her own seal treated as a bauble on a necklace. The clerk looked worriedly between me and her, unsure which one of us held the ultimate authority.

Aurelia resolved his dilemma with a nod, and he carefully passed the fraying end of his string through the loops of each seal in turn before tying them around my neck. Bronze clinked like the tinkle of bells. Aaah, I sighed.

"If anyone has another piece of string, I, too, would like one," said Aurelia.

A different junior clerk proffered the string, blushing furiously when she thanked him. I eyed her sidelong.

"We're splitting up, aren't? It will be easier to carry the seals this way."

And, I supposed, to prevent the capture of one of us from delivering all the seals back into the hands of the gods. I got half, she got half. Fine. I could live with that.

The door opened, and in scampered the star-child runner, followed by White Night and his Accountants. A horde of imps flooded in behind them, spreading out to fill the shadows between shelves and boxes.

"I brought everyone!" chirped the star child.

Then we were set. I stood up and placed my paws on Floridiana's head.

Thank you all for coming. Since I know you are practical people who dislike long, flowery speeches, I will get right to the point. We are taking over Heaven, and we need your help to claim all the seals of office.

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