“Sin-iron security doors, huh?” Bex said, tapping her boot. “How thick are we talking?”
“Thick,” the general replied grimly. “The security doors are Heaven’s final defense. They’re designed to hold back hordes of rebelling demons. I actually used to train my war demons on them back when I was assigned to the Upper Hells. Young demons get cocky, so the warlocks considered it good practice to pit them against a wall they couldn’t possibly break in order to curb their spirits.”
“You mean break their spirits,” Bex growled, craning her neck back to look up the spiral toward the top of the tower. “But there’s no such thing as an unbreakable door. You keep things moving here. I’m going to go see what I can do.”
“Yes, Great Queen,” Kirok said, bowing his horns as Bex gave the still-silent Iggs a final squeeze before calling her fire and blasting herself up the broken tower.
Ten seconds later, she landed back on the platform where she’d confronted Nemini. She’d been too distracted by the miraculous revival of the Queen of Pride to notice anything else at the time. Now, though, Bex wondered how she could’vemissed the gigantic slab of sin iron that filled the entire ten-foot-wide entry tunnel to the Upper Hells.
The black metal was so thick, it didn’t even clang when she banged her fist against it. The banishment hallways were bigger and taller, so maybe the doors blocking them weren’t as ridiculously thick, but Bex didn’t feel like going all the way out to the edge of the Hells to check. Even if the banishment tunnels were easier to break into, jumping off a cliff wasn’t an escape. Enough of her people had died already. If she was going to do this, Bex was determined to take them on the path that led to Heaven. That was where the chains that could take them safely back to Earth were, along with everything else Bex was now determined to seize. This wasn’t just about getting her horns and name back anymore. She wanted it all—her sisters’ crowns, the destruction of Heaven, the rebirth of the Riverlands, and Gilgamesh’s smug head on a pike.
That wasn’t just her anger talking. Even if the banishment tunnels had been open and jumping off the cliffs wouldn’t kill them, getting back to Earth without destroying Heaven wouldn’t change anything. Even if they all made it, Gilgamesh would just rebuild the Hells and hunt them down again, and without her horns or sword, Bex wouldn’t be able to stop him. Therewasa chance she could do it right now, though. The fact that the Hells were still on lockdown proved they had Heaven on the back foot. If they kept pushing, this could be their best opportunity—maybe theironlyopportunity—to topple Gilgamesh’s Eternal Kingdom and set Ishtar’s children free for good. Bex just had to get them up there alive. She was superheating her fist to get to work on that when she felt someone step out of her shadow.
“I didn’t realize you could still do that,” she said, glancing over her shoulder to see Nemini standing behind her.
“As you said, I’m still me,” the Queen of Pride reminded her calmly. Then her face fell. “I wasn’t able to wake them up.”
“Oh,” Bex said, crushingly disappointed. “Does that mean they’re lost forever?”
“I don’t believe so,” Nemini said. “Their souls still exist, but they’re in a very different situation than you were. We were together when you fell, so I was able to hold on, but our sisters were alone. They’ve also been falling for five thousand years. They could be anywhere in the infinite void at this point, and unlike you, none of them love me enough to answer when I call.”
“Would they come back if we return their horns?” Bex asked desperately.
“I don’t know,” Nemini replied, which wasn’t the answer Bex had been hoping for. “They’ll probably respond to their Ishtar-given names, but only if we get close enough for them to hear us across the infinite void,”
“Damn,” Bex muttered. There went her dreams of backup. Not that she wasn’t happy her sister’s souls were just far away rather than lost forever, but she didn’t have time for things that didn’t fix problems right now, and six comatose bodies were not what she’d hoped to get out of this.
“Okay,” she said, rubbing her hornless temples. “What else have we got to work with?”
Nemini tilted her head to the side. “Seven hundred and ninety-four thousand demons.”
Bex stared at her in awe. “How do you know that?”
“My sword counted their names for me.”
“I thought you said it was broken!” Bex cried.
“Itisbroken,” her sister said. “It can’t speak or tell me what those names are, which is why I can’t cut their slave bands. It does still give me a nudge every time it finds a demon, though, so I counted those to get the tally.”
Bex still couldn’t believe it. “You personally counted seven hundred and ninety-four thousand demons?”
Nemini nodded. “I’ve been working on it since we arrived.”
Bex whistled, stupidly impressed, but Nemini wasn’t finished.
“I’m fairly certain of my accuracy within the bottom eight Hells,” she went on. “But my sword hasn’t given me any taps for the war demons above us.”
“Probably because the Queen of War is hiding their names,” Bex said, glaring up at the ceiling. “I bet she’s got the whole damn Hell waiting to ambush us.”
“That is what General Kirok suspects as well,” Nemini agreed, staring through the broken windows at the distant walls of hovels that ringed the Middle Hells. “Maybe weshouldtry jumping off the banishment platforms.”
“No way,” Bex growled, calling her fire back to her hands. “I didn’t break everyone out of the Hells just to turn around and tell them to jump off a cliff.” She nodded at the sin-iron-filled tunnel in front of them. “I’ve beaten war demons before. I can do it again.”
She’d already raised her fist to start working on the tunnel when Nemini said, “You didn’t beat the Queen of War.”
Bex’s body went still, and then she swung with a roar, punching the security door with all her might. The result was a bruised fist and no visible damage to the actual metal, but Bex hit it again anyway, because what the hell else was she supposed to do? They were trapped in a cave with the water rising, and it was all her fault. She was the one who’d decided to come hereandthe one who’d decided to keep going. An actual wise queen would’ve cut her losses and retreated as soon as the plan went off course, but Bex had kept charging ahead like her mother’s famous bull, making reckless promise after reckless promise. No one could live up to the hype she’d built around herself. Was it any wonder she was failing now that the buck had come due?
She punched the door again, screaming in frustration that rapidly turned to pain as the hit drove the sharp edge of Drox’sring into her finger. Bex clutched it with a curse, squeezing her eyes tight against the throbbing that always hurt no matter how fast she healed. But as she stood there clutching her bruised hand, she could feel the cold, hard metal of Drox’s ring against her skin like an admonishment from the sword himself, and suddenly, Bex felt very stupid.
