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now, fearsomely close, and gaining. “I hope we’re going somewhere with transit doors?” Thorn asked Karthis.
    “Yes. Leave the girl here. She’ll slow us down.”
    “No!”
    Karthis shook his head dismissively. “Quickly now.” He stopped at a golden grate, which he jerked out of the ground. At his prompt, Thorn jumped down into the resulting hole. He fell a story or two, but hit the ground on two feet and kept Amy in his arms.
    Karthis followed him down, somehow replacing the grate as he fell, then took off once again. He led Thorn on a winding path—through a complex series of hidden tunnels, ancient stone aqueducts, abandoned storerooms, and endless hallways of cracked marble and gold twisting through the rotten bowels of Heaven. When they seemed to have lost their pursuers—and Thorn was thoroughly lost himself—he ventured some hasty conversation.
    “If there are so many rebel angels, why have none of you reached out to us demons on Earth? We could have used your access to invade Heaven again.”
    “We do reach out! All the time. But you demons see our wings and slaughter us before we can make our case. Or God catches us first. We live under harsh surveillance. Most angels are too afraid to do anything but obey. It’s a damned witch hunt up here.” Karthis leaped onto a toppled pillar and kicked through an old stone wall. Rays of sunset poured through the opening. “Hang on to the girl.”
    Before Thorn knew what was happening, Karthis had jumped behind Thorn and wrapped his arms around him. Then Thorn’s feet left the ground, and the wind from Karthis’s wings brushed against his shoulders. He gripped Amy tighter.
    The darkness of the underground chamber gave way to blinding red sunlight as Karthis flew them through the broken wall, back up onto street level, and then higher. They zigzagged around obelisks and spires, over a wide river, underneath a series of giant marble arches. Had his life not been in danger, Thorn might have relished the sensation of flying again after all this time. But when he looked behind them, he saw another host of angels gathering in pursuit.
    Karthis sped even faster as he approached a tall golden building. “Hold tight!” He spun around, and Thorn felt a gust as Karthis folded his wings inward, shielding his accomplices. Glass shattered around them, then blew inward with them. As they slid across the marble floor, Thorn tried to shield Amy from the flying shards. Karthis abandoned them while they were still moving. When they stopped, Thorn saw why.
    Two angelic guards crouched defensively before another large door, similar to the one at the prison. Faster than Thorn could stand, Karthis was on them. He flew in from the left, kicking one in his face, then grabbed the other’s head and swung his own body around until the angel’s neck snapped. The angels collapsed: one knocked out, the other dead.
    Thorn lay there staring at Karthis. “Fairness?”
    “Sometimes life’s not fair,” Karthis said as he untwined himself from the angel’s corpse. “Inside!”
    Thorn scooped up Amy and ran for the door. More shouts came from the broken window behind him. “Thorn! Desist!”
    Thorn entered the next room. Karthis slammed the door, sealing them inside, then lowered an immense bar into place to lock it.
    Thorn took in the windowless room. It was small, but it would do. Each of the three walls—in front of Thorn and to either side—contained a single wooden door. And these were no ordinary doors: these were transit doors, through which the Enemy and His angels accessed His universe. Elaborate engravings covered each door from its pointed top to its wide base, and they glowed with otherworldly light. This luminance also gleamed from a keyhole in each door, pouring in so heavily that the light seemed to have a thickness to it. In the days at the beginning of time, Thorn had sometimes stared at such doorways for hours, mesmerized by their ethereal beauty.
    An emphatic thump