It was true. When he rose up as high as he could on his tail, he could make out the silhouettes of the tanks and barricades and the men who manned them. Not far now, so he kept talking. He felt like he had to, like it was the only way to keep her with him. Since he’d pulled her out of the car and slipped away as the dog-men devoured one of their own, it had grown increasingly hard to keep her calm. They’d found her father’s helicopter soon after, but one of the pilots was dead and the other was nowhere to be seen. Olena had started calling for them, running in circles around the aircraft shouting in Ukrainian. It took Marcus several minutes to convince her they’d just have to keep moving. On foot and tail instead of in the air.

Each time he ran out of encouraging things to say, her eyes became jittery things that looked like they wanted to leap from their sockets. He knew that she was seeing and thinking horrible things. Things that were there and maybe also things that weren’t anyplace but in her mind. Once, she’d panicked so intensely that she fought to get away from him. She’d scratched at his face, seeming, for a few frantic moments, not to recognize him at all. He was crying by the time he got her back, begging her to see that it was just him. Just Marcus.

God, we have to get to the soldiers, he thought. Maybe they had doctors there that could treat her. He clung to the thought, voiced it out loud, making himself sound sure of it. Everything, he told her, would be all right soon.

As if to confirm this, a sleek jet appeared out of nowhere, announced by a boom that Marcus felt through his tail. The jet roared by overhead, straight toward Talas. It looked like a glistening savior, a thing of technology and reason. It was, Marcus thought, the outside world taking notice of whatever was going on here. “Look,” he said, placing one arm around Olena and pointing with the other, “help is coming. People know what’s going on here. I bet they’ll send aces to deal with all this.” He squeezed her, thrilled to see a glimmer of hope return to her face as her eyes followed the jet’s progress. “The worst of this is…”

Olena inhaled a sudden breath. Marcus looked back toward the city. The jet’s nose dipped. Its high-tech power seemed to wilt. It rolled, banked, and then slammed into the upper floors of an apartment building at the edge of the city. It exploded into a ball of fire and smoke and whirling debris.

“Fuck. Fuck…” Marcus exhaled the word several times before he remembered Olena. For her, he tried to regain his certainty. “Come on. Let’s get to the soldiers. We reach them and we’re safe.”