Just like I hadn’t intended to unleash hell on earth. But he had, and what did it matter if they ever caught Wilson’s killer? In just a few more days Wilson would be just one corpse among thousands. Maybe millions. Sickened, Franny pushed back from his desk, the crooked wheels on his chair chattering like skeleton teeth on the stained linoleum.

“I’m gonna get some lunch. Want to come?” he asked Michael.

“Nah, I promised Minal I’d meet her for lunch. She’s pretty upset, too.”

Franny had managed to get a temporary ID, money, and a new phone. His replacement badge was going to take five working days. At which point it wouldn’t fucking matter.

He stood on the sidewalk, bounced the phone, and dithered. He finally dialed Abby’s number.

The morning was nothing but frustration. Marcus and Olena spent it moving through the growing crowd of refugees locked out of the Cosmodrome. He rode high on his coils, his torso well above eye level, fists clenched at his side in threats that didn’t need translation. People cleared the way for them. That worked to get him through the fugitive camp, but they were searching for a way inside the barricades. On that they were striking out. Each time he approached the buffer zone, Russian machine guns honed in on him, warning him off. Once, he’d swallowed down his fear and kept going, thinking he’d just leap the barbed wire and the fence and make his case from inside. A quick barrage of machine-gun fire drew him up. The ground in front of him came alive with little explosions of dust. A ricocheting bullet flew past his ear, singing as it went. So much for that. He retreated, much to Olena’s relief.

“These fuckers meant business!” she scolded. “You see the bodies strewn about sections of the buffer zone? Don’t become one of them.”

Truth is, he was lucky they didn’t gun him down on sight and he knew it. There was more than the usual amount of anti-joker sentiment in the air. It was as thick as ripples in the evil miasma back in Talas.

He did flare with hope when he came upon a contingent of blue-helmeted UN soldiers. They were guarding a side gate away from the main refugee camp. Behind the entrance, big warehouses stretched into the distance. A bustling confusion of military and nonmilitary people came and went. Marcus approached the gate slowly, with his arms raised and as little menace in his posture as he could muster. Olena stayed at his side. The soldiers’ guns came up just like the Russians.

“Hey, are any of you American?” he asked. “Help a fellow American out?”