“No one thinks of everything,” Adrian insisted. “Gilgamesh himself told me that even the gods were forced to build their creations around what was already there. He’s made a lot of renovations, but ultimately this is still the same Paradise the gods attached to the Great Cycles like a bead on a string. So long as it’s connected to the living world, we can find a way back. We just need to keep trying.”
“Let’s get to it, then,” Bex said. “Where do you want to look first?”
That question was supposed to be for Adrian, but as she asked it, a wave of dizziness washed over her. That’d been happening a lot over the last hour, but she’d always been able to hide it. This time, though, nothing could stop her from listing into Iggs. She was still trying to get herself back upright when Lys grabbed her face and forced Bex to look at them.
“You need to sleep,” they announced, staring hard into Bex’s glowing eyes. “You’ve been going for fourteen hoursstraight with multiple battles, and that was after you worked a full day at the Blackwood’s festival.”
“I’m fine,” Bex insisted, pushing them away. “It’s just a little dizziness.”
“If you don’t lie down soon, your body will make the choice for you,” Lys argued, getting right back in her face. “Do you want to faint in front of all the demons you just saved?”
Bex heaved a long, angry sigh. She knew Lys was right—Lys wasalwaysright—but that didn’t make the truth any easier to swallow. They were still in the middle of their fight for freedom. She didn’t have time to sleep, but her head was spinning nonstop now. She couldn’t even tell who was pulling her in which direction until she found herself being carried in Iggs’s arms as Lys directed him down the stairs like a drill sergeant.
Since this was the building with the best view of the enemy’s palace, Bex’s crew had commandeered the entire top floor as their operational headquarters. This apparently included a master bedroom suite for Bex herself, a luxury she didn’t know she had until Iggs set her down on the bed. Lys was still removing her boots when Nemini appeared from nowhere to press something warm into Bex’s hand.
“What’s this?” Bex asked, wincing when she heard how slurred her voice sounded.
“Water,” the other queen replied. “The sin in the rivers might be too polluted to eat, but the water’s still drinkable if you run it through an evaporative still. There’s a whole platoon of war demons using the forge fires to boil out enough water to keep us all from dying of thirst. I brought you one of the first mugs.”
Bex grabbed the cup at once, pushing up on one elbow so she could gulp down the mug of lukewarm water withoutchoking and spilling it. “Tell them thanks for me,” she said when she finished. “That’s a lifesaver.”
“Ishtar’s children are survivors,” Nemini replied with quiet pride before she slipped back into her usual monotone. “Not that it matters, of course, since we’re all going to die in the end no matter what we do.”
“Well, it still tastes amazing right now,” Bex insisted, falling back into the surprisingly soft bed with a sigh. “Do they have any more?”
“I’ll go check,” Nemini promised as Lys pulled the covers up to Bex’s chin. “You rest. We’ll wake you if there’s an emergency.”
“I’m not waking her unless Gilgamesh himself comes down,” Lys grumped as they pulled the covers tight. “Nowgo to sleep. You’re no good to us if you can’t swing straight.”
That felt a little harsh, but Bex was having a hard time keeping her eyes open, so it was difficult to argue. The room was still annoyingly bright, but Bex’s body must have been even more exhausted than she’d realized, because the moment she decided it wouldn’t hurt to take a little rest, she passed straight out, sinking into a deep sleep before she’d even figured out which of the bed’s dozens of decorative pillows were actually supposed to be used for sleeping.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Bex woke up an unknown number of hours later feeling like a new demon. Her body was still weirdly heavy, and her head felt packed full of cotton, but she wasn’t dizzy anymore, and there was a whole pitcher of water on the nightstand beside her.
She felt even better after she drained it and used the strange waterless toilet in the unknown warlock’s fancy master bathroom. There was no sink or bathtub, but there was a largetowel that seemed to be enchanted to always feel moist. Bex used that to wipe herself down. Someone had found her backpack as well and left it by the door, which meant she even had a fresh change of clothes.
It was just leggings and a T-shirt this time instead of combat fatigues and a knife-proof shirt, but Bex was so happy to be out of her filthy, sin-caked outfit that she didn’t care. She used the enchanted towel to wipe the grime and blood off her leather jacket as well, though she didn’t want to touch the warlock’s hairbrush. She made do with finger-combing her black hair instead, leaving it loose around her shoulders to give her scalp a break as she headed out to see what had happened while she was asleep.
The answer seemed to be not a lot. Demons were still moving around the square by the Hells’ gate when she looked out the window, but she must not have been the only one who was exhausted, because all the crowded apartment buildings were quiet and dark. There was no sign of violence or fear. Just demons taking a much-deserved rest. That was a miracle Bex was loath to interrupt, but now that she was awake, she needed to get back to work. She was creeping toward the stairs to go find someone for a status update when she spotted Adrian sitting in the apartment’s lavish kitchen.
Like everything she’d seen in Heaven, the kitchen was white from floors to ceiling. Appliances that would’ve been stainless steel in any other luxury home were made from shiny white plastic in this one, making her feel like she was peering into some kind of minimalist spaceship. But while the rest of the room was oppressively modern, the table in the middle looked like a scene straight out of her best memories of Adrian’s cottage.
“Welcome back,” he said when she walked in, smiling at her over the piles of dried fruit, dried grains, dried nuts, anddried herbs he’d spread all over the gleaming white kitchen table. “Do you want something to eat?”
“Only if you’re not using it,” Bex said as she pulled up a stool, which was also made from polished white metal and ridiculously heavy. “What’s all this?”
“False hopes, mostly,” he replied with a sigh, running a hand through his curling black hair, something he’d been doing a lot, based on the way it was sticking up in all directions.
“Did you get any sleep?” Bex asked.
Adrian shook his head. “I tried, but I’m a bad sleeper under the best circumstances, which these are not. I tossed and turned for a while, but all I was doing was keeping Boston awake, so I came out here to spend my time on something more productive.”
“Always a good move,” Bex agreed, then she frowned. “Though from what you said earlier, I’m guessing it didn’t work.”
“It worked a little,” he said, flashing her a sly smile as he waved his hands over the food-covered table. “Heaven has a prohibition against growing things, but the pantries here were still stocked with plenty of legumes, grains, and seeds. All of those have the potential to germinate, so I made an array of the most likely prospects to use as the base for a finding charm. My aim was to see what I could dig up in the immediate vicinity without actually having to go through a hundred apartments’ worth of cupboards and pantries by hand.”
“And?” Bex asked.
