“Who are your friends?” Marcus asked.

Joey shrugged. “Fuck if I know. Dead meat is all. You’d think there’d be more bodies buried around here.” She considered Marcus again. “Heard you stopped some crazy-assed Russians from nuking Talas.”

“I guess,” Marcus said.

“Is that humility I hear?” Joey squinted. “You did it for the girl, didn’t you? What’s her name?”

“Olena.”

“You hitting that?”

Marcus didn’t know what to say. He tried, “Uh…”

“All right,” Joey said, smiling. “You don’t have to answer. Of course hitting it. International style. Got you a little Anna Kournikova.”

“Who?”

Joey shook her head. “Anyway, what was all that hollering about with the soldiers?”

“Just trying to get some help,” he said. “The Russians have my villagers staying in a ruin.”

Joey raised an eyebrow. “Your villagers?”

“Not mine, exactly, but … you know, I owe them. They saved my life more than once.”

Raising her hand and wriggling her full set of fingers. “I hear you. They did me a solid, too. I didn’t thank you properly for having the little guy heal me. I should do that. Thank you, I mean. Must be some way…” A number of things about the way she said this was suggestive: her tone, the pauses, the way her gaze slipped from his face and moved across his chest. Marcus was on the verge of squirming—literally and figuratively—when her eyes popped back up to his. “Fucking Russians. Some coldhearted bitches, ain’t they? Tell you what. Take me to this ruin.” She cocked her head toward the zombies and then swiped the blaze of red hair back from her face. “I’ll get my crew on it.”

She ought to have taken a nap while Babel and company assembled images of the Highwayman’s prison.

Instead, Mollie had gone to Idaho to check on the family. Farmhouses could be quiet at night, but they should never be empty. But hers was. She didn’t know where everybody had gone. Some were still in the hospital, she supposed. Maybe the rest were visiting. Whatever they were doing, they hadn’t bothered to tell her about it. Mollie even checked her phone to see if she’d missed a call, but of course she hadn’t. She wandered the empty Steunenberg farmhouse like a lonely ghost.

Ffodor had been great at times like this. She wished she had never heard of that stupid casino. She wished she hadn’t badgered him into agreeing to rob it. She wished none of this had ever happened. She wished she hadn’t tried to steal that gold, and got Todd killed as a result. She wished Noel had never approached her. She wished she had never gone on that stupid TV show in the first place, because if she hadn’t Noel wouldn’t have found her later and none of this would have happened.

She was still roaming the farmhouse and rehashing her life’s regrets when Babel called.

“Mollie. We’re ready for you.”