“Why do you always step on my lines?” Michelle asked Billy Ray, poking her head through the shattered door. “Hello, Mr. Bruckner, please get your ass out here as fast as possible. Billy Ray is twitchy, and honestly, what I just did to your door should definitely get your attention.”

Bruckner coughed and waved his hand to clear the debris smoke in front of him. “Jesus,” he said in a thick cockney accent as he stepped forward. “Billy Ray, you’re still a faggot in a jumpsuit, I see. Oh, and look, you’ve brought along an enormous cow. You a dyke, honey? Most of you fat cunts are. I’d’ve rather been rescued by a nig…”

Michelle stepped into Bruckner’s cell and let a baseball-sized bubble fly at him, hitting him in the chest as hard as she thought he could take without killing him. He sat down like a toddler surprised to discover it was walking.

“Asshole, please,” she said as he tried to get to his feet. “Bad day. Getting worse. Billy Ray loves that jumpsuit, and you’ve just insulted it. Now me, I’d just as soon leave you where you are, but we need you, you sorry excuse for a human being. Now get up and move, or I will encourage the director to kick your ass in all the creative ways I know he has in him.”

She grabbed Bruckner’s arm and yanked him up from the floor.

“I said, MOVE!”

Bruckner looked as if he were about ready to run, and Ray grabbed the man’s arm, shaking his head. “Uh-uh,” he told him. “You’re coming with us.” He glanced around at the array of cells. The prisoners were nearly all well back from the bars, huddled in corners away from the uproar. A bullet pinged from the wall near them. “Any ideas?” he asked Barbara.

The block door had closed them off from where Molly’s portal had been: a solid steel door. She pointed to it, hoping she was right. “We need to go that way,” she said. “Michelle, we need a door.”

“It’s coming,” Michelle told her. Another bubble was already rising from her open hand, a larger one this time. It sped away as if pushed by a wind none of them could feel; when it impacted the wall, the thump of the explosion was a hard punch to Barbara’s chest, and for a moment, her concentration wavered. They could hear shouts in French as a hole appeared in the wall, with sunlight glimmering through the curtain of dust as concrete and rebar continued to tumble down. Barbara quickly put the barrier back up.

“Let’s move,” she said with the roar of the explosion still deafening her, with the effort of altering the barrage of words in her head causing her temples to pound. “Hurry!”

The quartet went through the hole, Barbara marveling at the thickness of the steel, which only emphasized Bubbles’s power. “Up there!” Barbara pointed: a small window of silver shimmered on the wall a floor above them.