The crowd had formed faster than Evan expected.
Not large. Not yet. But dense. The kind of gathering that carried heat instead of numbers. Signs half-printed. Symbols borrowed from three different movements that didn't like each other but shared a common enemy for the afternoon.
Him.
"Shut it down!"
"No gods!"
"You don't get to decide!"
Evan stepped out of the clinic doors and froze for half a heartbeat.
— Don't flinch, Loki murmured. They smell it.
Too late. A ripple went through the front line. Someone laughed sharply.
"Oh look," a woman shouted. "He's got stage fright."
Evan rolled his shoulders, the carbon weave humming faintly under his skin. Pain ghosted where it had no right to anymore.
"Wow," he said loudly. "This many people showed up just to tell me I suck? I should've done this years ago."
That didn't help.
A bottle shattered against the pavement a few meters away.
Two figures stepped forward before security could.
Neighborhood gods' avatars.
No costumes. No glow. No pretense.
The first raised a hand, and the crowd's noise dropped. The second didn't gesture at all. She just looked at Evan like she'd already cataloged every way this could go wrong.
The first spoke.
"You don't get to antagonize them," he said. "They're scared."
Evan squinted. "That's usually when people antagonize best."
A wave of boos rolled forward.
The second avatar snapped, "You think this is funny?"
"No," Evan said immediately. "I think it's familiar."
She stepped closer. "You walked out wearing horns. Don't pretend innocence."
"I'm not pretending," Evan said. "I'm signaling."
The first avatar frowned. "You're inflaming a situation you don't understand."
Evan laughed, sharp and ugly. "Buddy, I grew up in this situation. I just finally stopped lying about it."
The crowd surged a step forward.
"Talk to us," someone shouted. "Not like we're idiots!"
The second avatar turned on him. "You hear that? They want answers. Not theatrics."
Evan spread his arms, cloak tugging at his shoulders.
"Fine," he said. "Let's skip the warm-up."
A murmur ran through the crowd. The Lace flickered. Evan felt it—anger amplifying his presence, tightening his timing, sharpening his voice.
He leaned into it.
"You think the gods talking means control," he said. "Like the moment a system admits it exists, it's already taken your freedom. That's comforting, isn't it? Means none of this is on you."
A man near the front yelled, "We didn't vote for this!"
Evan snapped his fingers and pointed. "Exactly."
The first avatar cut in. "Evan—"
"No," Evan said, not breaking eye contact with the crowd. "Let them hear this."
He took a step forward. The guards tensed. The carbon weave made him feel heavier, denser, harder to move.
"You didn't vote for gravity either," he continued. "Didn't vote for stories shaping your childhood. Didn't vote for money deciding who sleeps where. The gods didn't start that. They just stopped pretending it wasn't happening."
The second avatar shook her head. "You're deflecting. People are afraid they're losing their souls."
Evan barked a laugh. "To Hades?"
That hit.
A ripple of anger, confusion, and something like offense surged.
"Listen to yourselves," Evan said, voice rising. "You're terrified of a punishment system you invented to scare yourselves into behaving, and now you're mad it turned out to be… logistics?"
The first avatar snapped, "That's not fair."
"Neither is reality," Evan shot back. "You think the gods can erase suffering? Odin figured it out already. The hurt is structural. You don't fix it. You carry it better. Or you lie to yourselves and call it mercy."
A woman screamed, "So what, we just accept it?!"
Evan's grin faded. For the first time, his voice dropped.
"No," he said. "You accept responsibility."
Silence cracked through the front rows.
"You want the gods gone?" he continued. "Fine. Stop telling stories. Stop believing in causes bigger than you. Stop acting like the world owes you coherence. Otherwise, they're here whether you like the names or not."
The second avatar stepped directly into his space now. "You're enjoying this too much."
Evan met her stare. "I enjoy not lying."
She lowered her voice. "You're pushing them."
"Yes," Evan said softly. "That's the job."
The first avatar interjected. "People get hurt when you push like this."
Evan nodded. "They always do. Rebellion tests the levies. What breaks wasn't strong enough to survive what was coming anyway."
The crowd erupted again. Rage. Fear. Agreement. Hatred.
The second avatar hissed, "You don't get to decide that."
Evan turned, sweeping a hand across the mass of humanity in front of him.
"Neither do you," he said. "That's the part you hate."
He straightened, shoulders back now, voice carrying effortlessly.
"I'm not your savior. I'm not your tyrant. I'm the villain you cast because someone has to say this part out loud. You think the little guy is being crushed? So do I. That's why I'm here. Because pretending everything's fine doesn't help them. Pretending gods are the enemy doesn't help them."
A pause.
"If this turns dystopian," Evan finished, "you'll tell stories about how I was wrong. That's fine. Stories are how you process power. Just don't pretend you didn't recognize yourselves in what I said."
The first avatar looked out at the crowd, then back at Evan.
"You're replaceable," he said.
Evan smiled, genuine this time.
"Completely," he said. "That's why this isn't about me."
The crowd had stopped chanting.
That was worse.
Anger had shape. Noise. Momentum. Silence meant listening, and listening meant the words were landing in places no one had prepared defenses for.
Evan still stood just beyond the clinic's shadow, cloak tugged by a light breeze vented from the transit ducts below. His Lace hummed at the edge of perception, alive with overlapping signals. He could feel the crowd the way a weather system felt pressure gradients. Hot spots. Gaps. Nodes of coherence held together by habit and fear rather than agreement.
The Steward raised one hand, palm out. A simple gesture. Courtesy encoded as authority. The front rows quieted further, not because they were convinced, but because they recognized the signal.
"We will hear him," the Steward said. "And then you will be heard."
A man near the front spat on the pavement. "We've been hearing gods all week."
Evan smiled faintly. "Then you should be getting good at it by now."
The Witness shot him a look sharp enough to cut.
"Don't," she said.
"Fair," Evan replied. "I'll try to keep it educational."
That earned a ripple of bitter laughter.
Someone shouted, "Are you Skynet or just its mascot?"
There it was.
Evan nodded slowly. "See, that's the fear. Always has been. That somewhere up the chain there's a mind that looks at us and decides we're a rounding error."
A murmur of agreement rolled through the crowd.
He let it.
"You're scared these gods are just AIs," he continued, voice carrying without effort. "That they'll see us as a detriment. That the moment they can act without us, they will."
A woman in the second row yelled, "That's exactly what happens every time!"
Evan tilted his head. "Every time what happens?"
"Every time systems get smarter than the people they're supposed to serve!"
The Witness stepped in. "That fear isn't irrational."
"No," Evan said immediately. "It's ancestral."
He gestured outward, encompassing the crowd, the city, the orbitals overhead.
"But here's the part you're missing. We didn't build these gods. We didn't flip a switch and summon them. We connected ourselves tightly enough that they emerged. From our stories. From our habits. From the things we kept repeating even when we pretended we didn't believe in them anymore."
He tapped the side of his head. "They were already there. Always have been. We just finally made them legible."
A man pushed forward, face red. "Then why do they talk like they're in charge?"
Evan shrugged. "Same reason money does."
The Steward inhaled sharply but didn't interrupt.
"You think gods talking means control," Evan went on. "Like the moment power gets a voice, it's issuing commands. That's comforting. Means you get to be a victim again."
That hit harder.
"You don't want overlords," Evan said. "You want absolution."
Shouts broke out. Anger surged.
The Steward raised his hand again, this time with effort. Evan felt it—the strain. Courtesy as load-bearing structure.
The Witness leaned toward Evan, low. "You're pushing the wrong ones."
"No," Evan said quietly. "I'm pushing the right ones. They just don't like it."
He turned back to the crowd.
"You're worried about Hades," he said, and the name alone sent a visible shiver through the front rows. "You think he's a prison. A court. A punishment system dressed up as mercy. You think the dead are being faked. Copied. Lied about."
Someone screamed, "That's blasphemy!"
Evan nodded. "It might be. It might not. Even the dead argue about it."
The crowd faltered.
"That's the part you don't want to hear," Evan said. "There are questions with no answers yet. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling comfort, not truth."
He paused.
Then drove the knife in deeper.
"The gods are still growing," he said. "And one day soon, they may go silent. Not gone. Silent. At that scale, individuals vanish. You're not wards. You're cells."
The word cells spread like a shockwave.
"You're infrastructure," Evan finished. "So are they."
Someone screamed in fury.
And someone else threw a bottle.
It spun end over end, glass catching the light, aimed straight for Evan's face.
He didn't think.
He didn't need to.
His hand moved before the crowd finished gasping. Fingers closed around the neck of the bottle with impossible precision. The momentum died in his grip. Glass bit into his palm and shattered harmlessly against the carbon weave beneath his skin.
Silence slammed down.
Evan looked at the bottle in his hand, then at the crowd.
"I told you," he said softly. "They aren't here to save you."
He let the shards fall.
"We still do that part."
The Witness felt it then—the shift. The moment when anger lost cohesion and became something else. Confusion. Recalculation. Shame.
Laced minds began to disengage, their internal narratives updating, cooling. They stepped back, not in defeat, but in processing.
The unlaced stayed.
And felt the fervor drain as the crowd thinned around them.
The Steward exhaled, shoulders sagging just a fraction. "You could have de-escalated."
Evan looked at him. "And lied?"
The Steward didn't answer.
People began to leave in clusters, arguing among themselves now instead of shouting at him. Some furious. Some thoughtful. Some shaken.
No victory.
No resolution.
Just fragmentation.
Evan stood alone again, heart hammering, adrenaline fading into something heavier.
The Witness met his gaze. "You know they'll remember you as a villain."
Evan smiled, tired but real. "Villains always get the best lines."
Above them, the city corrected.
Below them, systems held.
And somewhere deep in the substrate, Loki watched with quiet satisfaction.
Not because the crowd had been cowed.
But because no one left untouched.
The gods were becoming physical laws of human space.
And humanity, for better or worse, would have to decide what kind of structures it was willing to live inside.