“It’s going to be okay,” he said to both children. “We’re safe here.”

Once the children were settled and Aliya began sharing out portions of biscuits between them, Marcus asked Olena, “Where’s your father?”

“He’s gone to where the power is.” She pointed toward the compound.

“Does he know people here?”

“Of course he does. If it’s nuclear, corrupt … If there’s power to be had … My father has a connection to it. Marcus, I think we should not have come here.”

“It was a crazy ride, wasn’t it? But at least we’re all here together.” Marcus, studying the wall behind the cordon of soldiers, said, “We get in there and find someplace out of the way. A room or something where we can lock the door and sit this out.”

“They won’t let us in,” Olena said. “My father, yes. Me, yes, if I would go. But a village of jokers? No. They are here to protect Baikonur, not us. Anyway, that’s not the point. I was so desperate to get away from Talas I didn’t think why my father wanted to come here. Now I’m worried he wants to do something horrible. Marcus, this is Baikonur. Do you know what that means?” Marcus’s expression must’ve indicated that he didn’t. “There are enough nuclear weapons in there to destroy the planet. All of it, Marcus. All of us. I think we’ve come to a bad place.”

Babel set up her staging area inside one of the immense warehouses adjacent to their arrival spot from New York. It seemed a reasonable base of operations: a large contained space they could control … assuming the evil insanity zone didn’t engulf it, and assuming the massive and constantly growing crowd of refugees didn’t force their way inside the facility. Half of it looked like something from Raiders of the Lost Ark; aisle upon aisle of crates and shelves, stretching into the fluorescent-lit distance. The shelves reached a good twenty or thirty feet high in places; Mollie pictured cherry pickers and forklifts on steroids. The crates sported stenciled Cyrillic labels; for all Mollie knew, they might have contained anything from baby food to plutonium. Keenly aware that Ffodor could read Russian and could have explained what this warehouse was for, Mollie swallowed the tightness in her throat and concentrated on where the real work would happen.

In the far corner, Babel and Billy Ray liaised with a Russian officer. Decked out in pixilated tan-grey urban camouflage, he looked like his daily regimen included broken glass for breakfast and afternoon bear-wrestling for light cardio. Mollie wondered how hard it was to coordinate a three-way between the Committee, SCARE, and the Russian army.

Many of the SCARE guys and Russian troops wore hazmat suits. Mollie didn’t know what to make of that. Would she get a suit? Did it even matter? Some cheesy Andromeda Strain suit wasn’t going to do squat against a tidal wave of supernatural evil.