They crossed the Atlantic at twelve thousand feet, engines droning like a perpetual Litany.
Brother Anselm and Brother Raphael—both monks, both pilots—flew by compass, stars, and grace alone.
The old DC-3 had no transponder, no GPS, no radio that still worked after the vanishings.
It was a silver ghost in a sky now owned by the enemy.
Sofia knelt in the narrow aisle between mail sacks full of blessed salt and crates of brown scapulars, olive-wood rosary wrapped around both hands.
She had not slept.
She had not stopped praying.
Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious, Luminous—over and over, one decade flowing into the next without pause, voice hoarse but unbroken.
Every completed mystery sent a pulse of gold through the fuselage that the pilots felt in their bones.
At 41° North, 40° West—halfway between nowhere and Rome—the sky tore open.
Not clouds. Not lightning.
A rip, like black velvet shredded by invisible claws.
Out of the tear poured things that had no names in any human tongue.
They were not fallen angels.
They were older.
They wore the shape of smoke and broken wings and screaming mouths where faces should have been.
The DC-3 bucked as if hit by a hurricane that came from inside the air itself.
Alarms that hadn't worked in forty years began shrieking.
Brother Anselm wrestled the yoke. "We've lost number two engine!"
Brother Raphael crossed himself with one hand while pulling the throttle with the other. "Not lost. Something's on it."
Through the starboard window they saw it: a creature the size of a city bus clinging to the wing, talons sunk through aluminum like paper, mouths opening and closing in silent fury.
Sofia stood, steadying herself against the bulkhead.
She walked to the cockpit door, dress whipping in the freezing wind that now howled through cracks in the fuselage.
The creature on the wing turned every mouth toward her and screamed.
The sound was the death of hope.
Sofia lifted the olive-wood rosary.
She began the Sorrowful Mysteries again, louder, in Latin now—every syllable a hammer blow.
"Pater noster, qui es in caelis…"
Golden light exploded from the beads.
The guardian angels who had escorted them from Michigan appeared—not gentle this time, but terrible.
St. Michael himself stood on the nose of the plane, six wings of white fire, flaming sword longer than the aircraft itself.
He drove the sword straight through the creature on the wing.
Black blood that smoked and hissed sprayed across the windshield.
The thing let go and fell, shrieking, into the tear it had come from.
But the tear did not close.
More came.
Dozens. Hundreds.
They swarmed the plane like hornets around a lantern.
The DC-3 began to fall.
Brother Anselm's voice was calm. "We're going down. Two minutes to impact."
Sofia stepped into the cockpit, placed one hand on each pilot's shoulder.
"Keep flying," she said. "I'll handle the rest."
She opened the cockpit side window.
Wind roared in, ripping her hair free, turning her dress into a white banner.
She climbed out onto the wing.
Barefoot.
Fearless.
The swarm converged.
She raised the rosary high and began the Glorious Mysteries at the top of her lungs.
First Glorious Mystery—The Resurrection.
The moment she said "Jesus rose from the dead," the Host in the pyx against her heart blazed so brightly the entire plane lit up like a flying monstrance.
Every demon touching the aircraft screamed and let go, skin boiling off in strips of shadow.
Second Glorious Mystery—The Ascension.
The plane stopped falling.
It simply hung in mid-air, three miles above the Atlantic, engines dead, wings level, held by hands that were not human.
Third Glorious Mystery—The Descent of the Holy Spirit.
Tongues of real fire—gold, white, gentle—appeared above the heads of the two monk-pilots.
The engines coughed, caught, roared back to life.
Fourth Glorious Mystery—The Assumption.
Sofia felt herself lifted six inches off the wing, dress no longer touching metal, hair floating as if underwater.
The tear in the sky began to close, edges knitting together like living flesh.
Fifth Glorious Mystery—The Coronation.
A crown of twelve stars appeared above Sofia's head, spinning slowly.
Every remaining demon fled howling into the shrinking rip.
St. Michael drove his sword downward like a lightning rod.
The tear sealed with a sound like a thousand church doors slamming at once.
Silence.
The DC-3 flew on, steady, serene, three miles above an ocean now calm as glass.
Sofia climbed back inside, closed the window, and knelt again in the aisle.
Her dress was shredded.
Her feet were untouched by frostbite.
Her voice was gone—only a whisper left.
But she smiled.
Brother Anselm looked back, tears cutting clean paths through the oil on his face.
"We just flew through hell," he said.
Sofia shook her head.
"No," she whispered. "We just flew through Purgatory.
Hell is waiting in Rome."
She pressed her hand to the pyx against her heart.
"Thank you, Mama," she breathed.
Outside, the first light of European dawn painted the horizon rose and gold—the exact colors of the miraculous medal now flying at the speed of prayer toward the city that had once belonged to Peter.
Six hours to Rome.
Six hours until she stood in front of the man who had sworn by the Name he hated.
Sofia closed her eyes and began another set of mysteries.
Because the war for the world was no longer measured in armies.
It was measured in decades.
To be continued…