Screw Talas. She was never, EVER going back. It was a fucking lunatic asylum hellhole, and she wanted no part of it. Somebody must have decided to use it as a testing ground for chemical warfare or something. To see what happened when you doused an entire city with something that turned people into psychopaths. Yeah. That was probably it. Well, to hell with the second safe. They’d taken as much as they could from Baba Yaga, so Mollie had no absolutely no reason whatsoever to return. Good.

Except: the chair.

The lone Louis XIV chair standing incongruously among a dozen other pieces of furniture, no two of the same style. Lost and abandoned in a city full of psychotic madmen. They’d break into Baba Yaga’s quarters eventually. Would they smash to flinders everything they found in the insane scramble to destroy one another as fiendishly as possible?

She couldn’t leave it vulnerable like that. It was already going to be hard to face herself in the mirror every day in the aftermath of whatever had come over her and her siblings. But if she left Ffodor there, inside that horrifying maelstrom of sickness and madness …

Mollie reopened the portal to Talas.

Writhing on the floor, her father cried, “Mollie, no!”

Mollie leapt back into Baba Yaga’s quarters. Somebody was just outside, shouting in Russian and kicking the door to the apartment. The locks looked ready to fail. The door frame had cracks in it.

The chair was heavy, but she could lug it. She couldn’t bear to damage it by dropping it through a hole to slam into the barn floor like the slot machines, so instead she pushed it through an opening in space between Kazakhstan and Idaho, then closed—come ON, close you son of a bitch—the doorways again. It took a few seconds, but by the time she broke the connection to Talas, Troy was already hefting the crowbar again and leering through his unrecognizable toothless ground-hamburger face. He dropped the crowbar and started keening again. But it wasn’t mindless screaming anymore. The wounded Steunenbergs raised their voices in a chorus of despair.

The Louis XIV chair couldn’t have been more out of place amid the dirt, hay, and cow shit of the family barn. But Mollie dragged it into the corner of the cleanest stall, curled up in it, and cried herself asleep.

There were military police and barricades at the entrance to the Shymkent International Airport. Franny, trapped in a line of cars, watched as car after car came to a stop, had a conversation, executed a U-turn, and left. While he was waiting a military jet came screaming in overhead heading for a landing.

Eventually it was their turn. A guard leaned in the window and peered at Franny and at Baba Yaga. Franny stiffened until his muscles felt like they were going to crack. The man said something, and Franny shook his head.

“English?” he said hopefully. The guard shook his head.