Marcus and Olena didn’t talk about what happened. They would eventually, but Olena made it clear she wasn’t ready yet. They’d disengaged with the rest of Vasel’s men, both sides backing away from the ace’s remains in an uneasy truce. Olena had kept her coin hand clenched in a fist. Back at the Committee compound, she’d rifled through a first-aid kit, found an ACE bandage, and wrapped her hand with it. Then she found another and wrapped it again. Marcus watched silently, there for her, waiting for the touch of her eyes on his. That touch didn’t come, but neither did she push him away. Together, they’d done the things they had to for the people who still needed them.

The jokers spent the night in a dilapidated hangar. Marcus had protested. He wanted something safer than the sprawling outdoor camp the other refugees were housed in. But Babel had handed them off to the Russians and they claimed the hangar was the only place they could spare. It was an old structure, like something out of a black-and-white newsreel or something. Musky. Dark and dingy, with only a handful of working lightbulbs. One wall had half collapsed, leaving an opening to the outside, and the other walls looked like they were about to give it up at any moment. Hardly the safe haven Marcus had hoped for.

Determined that one night in the place was enough, Marcus rose in the predawn, intent on getting them better accommodations. He left the jokers in seclusion—Olena there with them but silent, staring, holding her bandaged hand a little away from her body, like it wasn’t part of her—and he went looking for a better place, or for someone who could direct him to one.

Despite the early hour, the entire compound thronged with purpose, people and cars and transports and tanks all on the move. Planes arriving and leaving, choppers thwacking through the sky: the place was a confusion of massive proportions. Lost within it, Marcus could barely get within shouting distance of anyone in charge. When he did, it didn’t do any good. At best they ignored him; at worse he found himself staring down machine-gun barrels. The message was clear enough. The jokers were on their own. Still, he kept trying.

He was gesticulating with arms and shoulders and tail, trying to make himself understood to a cadre of Kazakh soldiers, when a smooth, Southern voice asked, “Hey, IBT, you know them fuckers can’t understand you, right?”

Joey. She stood watching him, looking at ease despite being out of place, urban casual. At first Marcus didn’t know what to make of the mildly predatory look on her face. When she opened her mouth slightly and ran the tip of her tongue along her teeth, he kinda figured it out. He flushed, and was glad to be able to look behind her at the rows of the walking dead that had paused with her. They stood crooked and deformed, vacant expressions on their hollowed, worm-eaten faces. Marcus slid close enough to catch the scent of them.