She didn’t ask where she’d gone, didn’t ask if she was okay, didn’t ask if she’d changed her mind. Babel acted like Mollie’s participation was a given, as though Mollie’s word were an inviolate covenant. Nobody believed that, not for a millisecond, but it was a nice gesture of trust.

“I’ll be there,” said Mollie.

And, after six attempts to open a portal back to Baikonur, she was.

“I swear to God, Director, you hit like a tiny, fuzzy kitten,” Michelle said. Billy Ray had just delivered one hell of a roundhouse to her chin. It hadn’t hurt a bit, so now she just wanted him to go on hitting her. Even though it didn’t put on fat as quickly as the truck that had just run over her, knowing she could take a beating and have no pain was a relief. (But you’re going back into Talas, came a soft voice inside her that wouldn’t shut up. You know what happens there. Pain. So much pain.)

Billy Ray stopped his next punch a fraction of an inch before he slammed it into her gut. “You’re really weird, Michelle,” he said with a hint of dismay. “You’re kind of taking the fun out of this.”

Michelle looked around the makeshift headquarters at her companions and tried not to despair. Babel looked confident enough. But she always did. Mollie was shaking like a junky getting off meth. Joey looked pissed, but that was reassuringly normal.

“I dunno, Billy Ray,” she replied as she released a little bubble and sent it bouncing across the floor. “My standard for weird has gotten pretty skewed of late.”

He nodded, then pulled back to punch her again. “Michelle, for once, we see eye to eye.”

Getting a portal inside the Belgian jail was shaping up to be a monumental pain in the ass.

Utterly unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a conveniently placed webcam pointing at the Highwayman’s accommodations. Not even one showing the yard. Assuming war criminals were afforded the right to use an exercise yard; that seemed like a crunchy-socialist European thing to do. But St. Gilles might as well have been the center of the Australian Outback for the dearth of useful webcams.

Even Babel couldn’t pull enough strings to get a blueprint or floor plan of the place. Not on such short notice, anyway. And the Belgians sure as hell weren’t sharing information about all the anti-ace contingencies they’d undoubtedly worked into the building.

So Mollie would have to get the team on the premises, and portal them inside once she got the lay of the land.

Probably while guards shot at them. Awesomesauce.

Street-view images only showed the gate to St. Gilles prison, which huddled between two hulking towers complete with crenellations, turrets within turrets, and arrow slits—goddamned arrow slits—everywhere. It looked like something from HBO, or a history book. Very Gothic, this place. But the gate was closed in the street view, and the walls were thirty feet high, offering no way to see inside the prison grounds.