“Look, Pouncy,” she said. “I know enough about religion to know that even if there are gods, they don’t exactly hand out holy fire like candy. There’s only one way this story ends. It’s Prometheus all over again. Phaëthon. Icarus. Pick your sucker. You fly too close to the sun, the thermal energy from the sun overwhelms the weak attractive forces that allow the wax in your wings to maintain its solid form, and down you go, into the sea. No fire for you. And that’s if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky you end up like Prometheus. Birds eat your liver forever.”

“Usually,” Failstaff said. “There are exceptions.”

“For example, not everybody is such a complete dink that they make their wings out of wax,” Asmodeus said.

Briskly, Failstaff walked Julia through the enormous diagram on the table in front of them, sketching arcs and connections with his thick, soft fingers. The diagram showed the primary narratives of the major and minor religious traditions, collated and cross-referenced—and color-coded!—to highlight areas where they overlapped and confirmed one another. Apparently if you’re enough of a power nerd, there is nothing that cannot be flowcharted.

“The hubristic scenario, the pride that challenges the gods and leads to the death of the challenger, is only one of a number of possible scenarios. And usually the bad outcome can be traced to poor preparation on the part of the principals. It does not at all imply that it is categorically impossible for a mortal to gain access to divine power.”

“Hm,” Julia said. “Theoretically.”

“No, not theoretically,” Asmodeus said sharply. “Practically. Historically. Technically the process is called ascension, or sometimes assumption, or my favorite word for it is translation. They all mean the same thing: the process by which a human being is brought bodily into heaven, without dying, and accorded some measure of divine status. And then there’s apotheosis, which is related, whereby a human actually becomes a god. It’s been done, tons of times.”

“Give me examples.”

“Mary.” She ticked off a finger. “As in Jesus’s mom. She was born mortal and ended up divine. Galahad. Arthurian legend. He was Lancelot’s son. He found the Holy Grail and was taken directly up into heaven. So was Enoch—he was an early descendant of Adam’s.”

“There’s a couple of Chinese generals,” Gummidgy said. “Guan Yu. Fan Kuai. There’s the Eight Immortals of Taoism.”

“Dido, Buddha, Simon Magus . . .” Pouncy chimed in. “It just goes on and on.”

“Or look at Ganymede,” Asmo said. “Greek legend. He was a mortal, but of such great beauty that Zeus brought him up to Olympus to be a cupbearer. Hence the project name.”

“We think cupbearer was probably a euphemism,” Failstaff added.