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The third floor is the old-fashioned black-and-white Boris Karloff Bedlam I’ve been looking for. Dim, wet, and stinking. This is where they keep the one-percenters. All the cells on the lower two floors are open, but these have double-thick bars surrounded by bonding hexes. And they’re working because most of the cells are still occupied.
The good news is that the few third-floor patients who’ve escaped their cells look more dangerous to themselves than to me. Two grimy Hellions roll around on the floor, each gnawing on the other’s straitjacket. I can’t tell if they’re trying to help or eat each other. Going by the holes in the material and their broken teeth, it looks like they’ve been going at it for quite a while without getting anywhere. Still, you have to give them points for hanging in there.
A Hellion as big as Crab Man emerges suddenly from the dark and lumbers past without looking in my direction. He must have been shackled to the wall of his cell. He has metal cuffs and chains attached to his wrists and is hauling two huge carved stones behind him. Going by the deep scratches on the floor, it looks like all he’s done since getting out is drag his heavy chains and rocks around and around the third floor. As he passes each locked cell, damned souls and Hellions pound the doors and howl at him.
There’s a short hall off the main corridor. The worst of the worst will be down there. I go through the hall quietly and peer around the corner. Just two guards at the end. That’s where Alice will be. My breath cien My breatches in my throat. This is the closest I’ve been to her in over eleven years and there’s only a couple of bored doormen in the way.
For the first time I’ve been down here, I’m scared. Normally I’d get out the na’at and go completely brontosaurus on two lousy guards. But if I do anything spectacularly stupid, there might be another guard in the cell who could kill Alice. The angel reminds me that I’m also wearing a brand-new arm that I’ve never used in a fight. For once I need to think this through.
A couple of minutes later the rock-dragging Hellion makes the turn to this end of the corridor. The guards by Alice’s cell don’t even look up. They’ve heard him walk by a hundred times. The guards couldn’t look more bored.
I flatten myself against the wall. As the backwater Sisyphus passes, I get out the black blade and slice through his heavy chains while giving him a little kick in the ass. Not enough to hurt him. Just enough to push him into the side hall so that the guards will be the first thing he sees when he realizes he’s free.
At first he stands there, probably feeling off balance with the big load off his back. Then he looks at his empty hands. Sees the dark and gangrenous flesh around the shackles where they’ve been biting into his wrists for who knows how long. The guards aren’t pleased. They want him to keep dragging the stone exactly the way he always has. They don’t want him to improve himself. The boy with the wrist shackles must be picking up on the guards’ negative waves because he heads right at them for a heart-to-heart. I can’t be sure exactly what they’re saying, but I hear a lot of “ows” and “don’ts” along with the kind of crunching I’ve come to associate with smashed bones. The angel reminds me to be patient and wait for the conversation to die down by itself.
In a couple of minutes a still-disoriented giant wanders out of the side hall. He’s covered in blood and other colorful fluids that I don’t want to think about. He stares at his stones, lost and desperate without them. I go over and pick up the end of one of the chains. He looks up when he hears the links rattle against each other. I hold the chain out to him. He eyes me for a full minute. I’m not sure what he sees. I wonder if the insane can see through glamours? I still have Hellion skin plastered on my face, so I’d be pretty confusing to look at if he can see my living body.
Slowly, he puts out a hand. I wrap the chain around his palms and close his fingers over the metal. He leans forward. The weight is different, but familiar enough that he knows what to do. The moment he puts his head down, he forgets about me. He leans into the weight and pulls. The stones scrape reassuringly along the floor behind him.>He nods.
“Lucifer was always the smart one. That’s why he and the kid never got along. One’s all heart and one’s all head.”
“This all happened after Lucifer left. Why don’t you send him down here to fix it?”
“It wouldn’t help. You’re right about one thing. I didn’t build everything as well as I might have. This was going to happen sooner or later.”
“Do the five of you know what the others hear and see?”
“Not everything. We like some privacy, too. Otherwise we’d all still be together.”
“Do they know about us talking right now?”
“They can hear every word.”
“Then you got the message I sent back with the angel from Eden?”
“We got it. You didn’t have to cut him up like that.” He nods at my new metal bug arm. “But I guess you’re even.”
I look away. The building the Kissi torched is really roaring. I can feel the heat all the way over here. I wonder if we should move, but Neshamah doesn’t seem worried, so I decide not to be.
“Maybe I was a little harsh. I’d just gotten over being dead. And he threw the first punch.”
“I guess that makes it all right, then.”
Neshamah walks across the parking lot and looks out over another part of Hell. The view isn’t any better from over here. I don’t say it because I can see it on his face.
He says, “He’s not Lucifer anymore, by the way. He’s Samael.”
“So I heard. Speaking of your kids, what’s the story with Aelita? She makes Lilith look like Mother Teresa. Didn’t she get enough face time with Daddy?”
“You’re not a parent. Don’t tell me how to raise my family.”
“I don’t know if she has Electra complex or Oedipus complex or diaper rash, but she really wants you dead. You need to get her some Prozac.”
We walk all the way around the roof. The sky remains a solid mass of smoke. Earthquakes rumble on the horizon.
“I knew that Lucifer was a troublemaker, but I also knew he’d grown out of it. But I never saw this coming with Aelita. I’ve tried talking to her, but she might be a lost cause.”
“You could always kill me. That’s what she really wants.”
