She bowed her head. He could see the line of white between scalp and the bright red where her hair was growing out. “I will tell you a little story. Once I was young.” She shot him a bleak smile. “Yes, it’s true … and beautiful. My companion and partner was a hero of the Motherland, handsome, brave, fearless.” Her hand went unconsciously to her breast and that medal. “He had a great power that he used in service of the revolution. He was known as Hellraiser, but I knew him as Tolenka.”

“Okay, great. This is relevant how?”

“You met him or his body in that hospital room in Talas.”

“That joker?”

“He was not a joker. He was an ace. What is in him has twisted and deformed him,” she said.

“What is in him,” Franny repeated with a growing sense of dread.

Baba Yaga looked up. “A creature too powerful, too fearsome to be banished.” The flow of words stopped and she gazed at memories. “All we could do was hold it at bay.”

The nurse arrived carrying a steaming bowl of soup. Baba Yaga waved Franny away.

It was a clusterfuck.

There was no other way to describe the conglomeration of military, medical, and media clumped together outside the fog-enshrouded city of Talas. Michelle closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead with her index finger. Even by normal FUBAR standards, this was a corker.

As they pulled up in the armored Hummer, Michelle saw that the Kazakh army was dominating the area. There were khaki military tents set up, but they seemed to have been placed haphazardly. Michelle saw pairs of guards walking the perimeter.

About seventy-five meters from the military camp was the Red Crescent encampment. Like the military setup, there were tents erected, but the pattern to them was even more haphazard than the military one—as if they had gone up fast. There were people in yellow hazmat suits removing patients from ambulances. Michelle saw that most of the people on stretchers had drawn a Black Queen and some appeared to be jokers. A handful looked like nats, but they were crying or babbling incoherently as they were carried off. A frantic hum was in the air.

A phalanx of media was set up behind an orange honeycomb-plastic barrier. The stretchy webbing was doing little to stop the TV crews from encroaching on the buffer between them and the people doing the real work inside the Red Crescent compound.

Just inside the barrier, a woman—Michelle assumed it was one of the Red Crescent doctors—was talking to a reporter from MSNBC. The doctor had her hazmat helmet cradled in her right arm. Michelle couldn’t hear what was being said, but from the expression on the doctor’s face, she wanted nothing more than to end the interview.