“Everyone always listens to Bex,” Lys said proudly, gripping Bran with both hands as the broom raven ramped up its speed. “But I think it’s time you told us exactly what role you’d been playing in all of this, O Great Prince of Gilgamesh.”
Adrian winced at the title. When Bex opened her mouth to tell Lys to lay off, though, he shook his head.
“They’re not wrong,” he said, fixing his eyes on the endless spiral of dark stairs ahead of them. “I am a prince with the white blood to prove it. I also repaired the Queen of Pride’s horns at Gilgamesh’s request, which I’m still not sure was the right thing to do.”
He glanced at Boston as he said that last part, but while the cat looked conflicted, Bex’s mind was already made up.
“Well,I’msure it was right,” she said stubbornly. “I know Gilgamesh is famously sneaky, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’d all be on our knees waiting for warlocks to put us inchains right now if you hadn’t fixed those horns and Nemini hadn’t put them on her head. If something bad happens because of that, we’ll deal with it, but I’ll take being still alive, still together, and still in the fight over being cautious any day.”
Adrian looked incredibly relieved to hear that, but Bex didn’t have time to enjoy his smile. The mysterious shaking was getting stronger the deeper down they went, and there seemed to be a giant hole in the staircase ahead of them. She could jump over it, but Adrian was going to have a hard time. She was about to offer to carry him when the witch jumped onto his broom instead.
“Get on,” he said as Lys scrambled to make room. “This way will be faster.”
Bex could’ve gotten down by herself just fine, but she was loath to stop Adrian when he grabbed her hand and pulled her onto the broom next to him. Iggs hopped on as well, then Nemini, who reluctantly took a seat on the raven’s wing where her giant new horns wouldn’t poke anyone.
When they were all on board, Adrian put a hand on Boston to steady the cat against his shoulder and tapped his foot. The transformed broom dropped at the signal, plunging them down the center of the stairwell so fast, Bex didn’t even notice they’d reached the bottom until Bran stopped hard enough to knock her off her feet. Adrian still had a firm grip on her hand, so she didn’t actually go flying, but when Bex looked up to thank him, Adrian was staring ahead of them like he’d seen a ghost.
A second later, Bex saw why. The circular floor at the base of the Lowest Hells—which had been dry when they’d left a few minutes ago—was now covered in sludgy, black liquid. The surface had an oily gleam when she called her flames to light up her hand, but while it smelled strongly of the deathly rivers, it moved like no water Bex had ever seen. It looked like industrial waste, and while there was only a few inches coveringthe floor at the moment, Bex could see more oozing out of the seams of the sin-iron pipes that lined the walls. It looked like the whole stairwell was weeping, but the sludge was dripping fastest around the doors that led to the Lowest Hells.
All the breath left Bex’s body. That black sludge was seeping into the Hell of Wrath. If the ground inside was already covered like the floor out here, then her people… her people…
“Bex,no!” Adrian yelled, grabbing her around the waist right before she leaped off the broom. “We don’t know what it is yet!”
“But my demons are in there!” Bex howled, throwing out her flaming arms. “That sludge is covering the floor, and theycan’t move!”
Her scream was still echoing through the chamber when another frantic voice shouted back.
“Don’t touch it!” yelled Prince Leander from where he’d climbed the stairs to get away from the black flood covering the floor. “That’s Protocol Three!”
“What in the Hells is Protocol Three?” Bex screamed.
“It’s a failsafe,” the prince explained, waving frantically for Adrian to bring his broom over. “In the event of a security breach catastrophic enough to make Gilgamesh declare the Hells irrecoverable, the Crown Prince has three protocols he can use to ensure Heaven’s survival. Protocol Three causes the least structural damage but is the most deadly. It triggers a backflow from the stagnation tanks, flooding the Hells from the bottom up with putrefied, concentrated sin.”
“That’s not sin,” Bex insisted, stabbing her flaming finger at the sludgy water. “I’ve drunk from Ishtar’s rivers all my lives, and that isnotthe water of death.”
“It used to be,” Leander said as he hopped onto the hovering broom with the rest of them. “After humanity’s explosive population growth during the industrial revolution,the demon population of the Hells was no longer able to filter sin out of the rivers as fast as it was coming in. Gilgamesh didn’t want to bother expanding, so he pumped the excess into tanks out in the Goddeath Wastes instead. They were designed to let the rivers stagnate, condensing the sins into a thick slurry that could be pumped back into the main river’s flow and increase sin concentration for more efficient collection.”
“That’s horrible,” Bex told him after a shocked pause.
“That’s what you get when you have a frugal engineer for a king,” Leander said, looking nervously down at the pool of thick, oily sludge. “Unfortunately, there’s no way to stop it. Once Protocol Three’s been activated, all the sludge tanks get dumped and the deathly rivers start flowing again at full force. That would not have been a problem a thousand years ago, but with Earth’s current population, I’d say we’ve only got a few hours before this whole place floods.”
He wasn’t kidding. Bex could already see the torrents of freezing, deathly water gushing out of the bottom of every pipe like a broken fire hydrant. The disgusting foamy water on the floor had already risen a foot while they’d been talking, and the fumes coming off it were strong enough to burn the inside of Bex’s nose. If it was that awful to breathe, she couldn’t imagine what it must feel like on the skin, and she turned to Nemini in a rush.
“We have to get our people out of here. Can you order them to stand?”
“Of course,” the other queen replied. “But are you sure you want me commanding your demons?”
“I don’t care about that,” Bex insisted. “They’re too weak to stand on their own after what Gilgamesh did to them. If you don’t use their names to force them up, they’ll drown on their backs before they even get a chance to know they’ve been rescued.”
She looked over her shoulder at the filthy water pouring through the broken doors into the Hell of Wrath, and her hand shot out to grab her sister’s. “Please, Nemini! Make them stand up!”
Nemini clenched her jaw and stood without a word, pulling in the deep breath Bex recognized as the same one she also took before she said something big.
“Demons of Wrath,” Nemini commanded in a queen’s ringing voice. “By my own sacred name Netara, I order you to forget your exhaustion. Rise to your feet and march up the stairs to join your fellow children of Ishtar. Your queen will meet you there.”
“Thank you,” Bex said as the ringing command finished, giving her sister a frantic hug before she leaped off the broom into the freezing, filthy water. The concentrated sin started burning through her boots the moment her feet went in, but if her people were going to have to walk through this, then Bex was going to do it with them. She could already see the skeletal wrath demons rising to their feet inside the Hell. She was bashing her flaming shoulder against the busted doors to push them wider and make more room for the evacuation when Iggs splashed up beside her.
“You shouldn’t be here!” Bex yelled at him. “The sin’s still too strong! I can take it, but you—”
