Like I said, I probably should have guessed things might be different this time, but what with everybody trying to hack me to pieces or torture me I’d been a bit distracted. So now I had a new crisis: I couldn’t afford to get out of the lifter yet, because Niloch’s troops were working their way upward from Abaddon. But every second I stayed was making me more and more certain that my head was going to explode in a splatter of flaming nerves and brain goo.

As the levels passed, and my limbs jerked and my nerves sizzled, I kept singing cartoon theme songs over and over in my head just to keep myself from thinking about how much I was hurting, but Spider-Man was already doing me less good than the Flintstones had, and I had a feeling I probably wouldn’t even get to start Yogi Bear. Still, I hung on in desperate agony until the lifter sank past the Abaddon stop, then I gasped out the name of the next level. When the lifter ground to a halt and opened, I stumbled out into the deserted little station at Grey Woods and then out into the city beyond the station. Except there was no city.

At that exact moment I was having trouble focusing, what with something inside my head chewing on my neural fibers, but I realized a little later that I was in one of the places I’d actually read about, not in any Camp Zion briefing, but in the words of Dante himself. (We read The Inferno for extra credit, even though it’s mostly made-up. Surprisingly, old Dante got quite a few things right, including the idea of Hell’s vertical arrangement.) If you’ve read him too, you might remember “The Wood of Thorns,” or, more directly, the Forest of Suicides. That’s where I was now. The lifter building here was like a remote stop far out on a suburban train line, one of those little places where you think there couldn’t possibly be enough passengers to warrant a station.

Not only was the station empty, outside the station was a sort of platform, which was really just the edge of the building, and then . . . nothing. Not literal nothing—although this being Hell, that would have been possible too, I guess—but nothing resembling infernal civilization. The woods stretched as far as I could see and were as gray as reported, a heavy, dripping forest of oak and alder and other ancient European trees tinseled with thick moss. In the spots where you could see ground through the mist, it was covered with grass of such a dark green that it appeared nearly black.