And then she saw it. Nightmarepedes and eyeball crabs, thousands of them, an enemy army stretching past the horizon in every direction. Hundreds of suppurating flesh mountains shook the ground as they converged on the five doomed aces.

Part of her wanted to join them.

Part of her wanted to fight them. Destroy them.

The rest of her wanted to GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE.

One last time, Mollie embraced the madness. The madness that let her do things with her ace she couldn’t do when she was sane.

Five portals opened simultaneously. One each beneath Bubbles, Billy Ray, Lohengrin, Recycler, and Mollie herself.

She fell through a ceiling.

For the second time that week, Fort Freak erupted in pandemonium.

Marcus grabbed Bugsy as he came out of the Committee meeting. “Hey, what’s going on?”

Bugsy wore headgear of some sort, with a mouthpiece and a tiny camera perched on the side of his head. He frowned at Marcus and kept walking. “Shit’s about to hit.”

Marcus kept up with him. “Which means what?”

“It’s coming. All of it. The whole nightmare of Talas, times a hundred and ten.”

“But you all have a plan, right?”

“Such as it is,” Bugsy scoffed. “Fucking long shot if ever there was one. Fate of the world in Tesseract’s hands? We’re all screwed.” He placed a hand to his ear and, confusingly, he added, “Oh, come on, Babel. Fuck confidential. He’s here, he might as well know everything.”

Marcus didn’t hear the Committee leader’s response, but whatever it was Bugsy went on. He gave Marcus a quick sketch of the plans, of Tesseract’s mission and the Highwayman’s role in it. None of it made much sense to Marcus—the old dude was the cause of all of it?—but he clung to every word. It had to work. These were aces, the world’s best. Their plan simply had to work. Just the fact that they had a plan at all was comforting. But only for a scant few moments.

Marcus followed Bugsy up a concrete staircase, his tail switchbacking as he climbed. The roof was crowded with people, loud with two helicopters whose engines were on, rotors turning. Bugsy gripped the railing and shouted to be heard over the commotion, “Behold, the coming apocalypse.”

That’s exactly what it looked like, something conjured up out of a fevered, ancient mind, one filled with images of hell. The end of the world, roiling toward the compound across the great dusty expanse of the plains. The cloud billowed and glowed. It ate up the distance with unnatural speed. Marcus could see shapes moving inside it, but what was worse was knowing that its vapor hid much more than it showed.

“They might as well,” Bugsy said, obviously speaking through his microphone. And then, with a change in the pitch of his voice, to Marcus, “Let’s see what the boys in uniform can do.”

Please, Marcus said silently. Please stop them. You have to, for Christ’s sake …