Mollie shuddered again. She counted off the days on her fingers. Six. Had it really been less than a week ago when her biggest problem was dealing with a couple of trigger-happy Paris gendarmes? That couldn’t be true. That had been a million years ago. A different planet. A different Mollie.

“Did you hear what I said? I said—”

Babel’s phone rang. As the Committee leader lifted it to her ear, Mollie glimpsed the caller’s name on the glassy screen: Ink.

“Sorry. I have to take this,” Babel said.

“Sure. Whatever.”

Mollie checked her own phone. Nothing. Nobody from Idaho had called her back.

She thought about going to the hospital to see for herself how Dad and the boys were doing. She even started to call up a doorway to Idaho, but then she imagined the naked disdain on their faces when they saw her. The nascent portal disintegrated.

“Fuck this,” she said. And decided to distract herself with some shoplifting. She stepped around the corner and opened a doorway to Half Moon Bay.

The cold walls of the building in the Baikonur Cosmodrome surrounded them, adorned with peeling curls of green-grey, thick paint. Barbara wasn’t quite certain where in the huge, sprawling complex of buildings, launch pads, and mission control areas they were in; the building into which they’d been ushered looked to date back to the Soviet era and didn’t appear to have been updated since. The curtains of the meeting room where they were gathered were simple white cotton cloth unrolled from hangers along the top of the windows. The table in the room was thick oak ringed with the residue of a thousand coffee mugs. On the walls, posters in Cyrillic script overlaid images of serious, uniformed soldiers, reminding onlookers of the need for discipline. A row of ceiling fans twirled lazily overhead, and the room was lit by a phalanx of inset ceiling floodlights, the fan blades throwing sweeping shadows around the room.

To Barbara, it looked like a shot from a film noir set. That seemed apropos enough.

The only other person physically present in the room was Billy Ray, now in his white fighting suit, as if he were anticipating action. Two cameras had been set on tripods in the center of the table, one pointed toward where Barbara sat, another facing Billy Ray. Several flat screens, looking as if they’d just been unboxed a few hours before, faced them and trailed wires over the table to a server on the floor; in them, solemn faces were arrayed: Secretary-General Jayewardene, in Brussels; President van Rennsaeler in Washington; President Putin in Moscow; General Ruez of NATO; President Karimov of Kazakhstan.

“Thank you all for being here,” Jayewardene said. “Your cooperation is greatly appreciated in this crisis. We are facing critical decisions that must be made quickly, and it’s imperative that we all understand and realize the consequences of those decisions before we proceed.”