“We have a plan that we believe—we have to believe—has some chance of success, and we know who we need in order to complete it, and that’s all of you here in this room. Now—does anyone have anything concrete to say?”

There was silence around the table until Ray leaned forward, elbows on either side of the report in front of him. “I’ve already seen everything that you’ve all described inside the disturbance,” he ventured. “I’ve seen it before—because I’ve ridden with the Highwayman and I’ve seen what’s outside the windows of his truck. Whatever dimension he travels, it’s the same place that Hellraiser has tapped into. It has to be.”

“Yeah. Fucking maybe,” Michelle said.

“Maybe’s the best we have,” Barbara said. “But we need the Highwayman, and we need him now.”

Ray nodded. “Babel’s right. We break him out without asking ’em. We don’t have time for negotiations and bureaucratic red tape and legalities. And if the fucker doesn’t want to help, well, we don’t give him a choice.”

Barbara looked around the table. “Anyone got something better?” No one spoke, and Barbara nodded.

“I’ll be going with you,” she told the others. “I can make sure that the guards won’t be able to coordinate well enough to stop us. Michelle, we’ll need you: for St. Gilles, and for Talas.” Michelle’s face showed distress at that, but Barbara didn’t let her interrupt. Not now. Not when things were at least moving somewhere. Klaus would have just bulled through without a plan, without support.

“We act now. I had Ink send us maps and photographs of St. Gilles, and of the hospital in Talas from before this happened. We’ll find Tolenka easily enough without him.”

“Finding Tolenka isn’t the problem,” Michelle said.

Barbara let herself smile at that. “No, it’s not,” she said. “But we’ll manage it. We have to. Let’s get started.”

“What about Jayewardene?” Ray asked.

“He already knows what we’re doing,” Barbara said. She glanced at everyone. “Let’s go over everything one more time, so we all know our parts and what to expect.”

“Fucking bureaucrat,” Ray said, but a smile creased his face.

“Just making sure we’re all on the same page,” Barbara told him. “Including me.”

Babel was pacing with her back to the door of her makeshift office at the Cosmodrome, talking to somebody on a speakerphone, when Mollie stumbled in with her arm over Ink’s shoulders. The tattooed woman was stronger than she looked, and thank God for it; Mollie could barely open the portal from New York to Baikonur, and wouldn’t have been able to stumble through it without help. Like everything Mollie touched, Ink was smeared with blood.