The inside of the casino was a rubbish-strewn mess. Pretty much everything that could be overturned had been. Clothes and bottles and broken glass littered the floor, poker chips and bits of paper and stuff that wasn’t exactly anything but debris. He wove through the betting tables, the roulette wheels, passed the rows of slot machines. He paused for a moment at the mouth of the tunnel that led to the arena, a rush of memories coming back to him. He pressed forward. He was here for a reason. He was going to see it through.

The tunnel opened out onto the arena. The rows of seats, the glass enclosing the fighting ring, the netting above it. All of it looked smaller, more decrepit than he remembered, run-down like some amusement park that had seen better days. Baba Yaga’s box still hung over everything, but Marcus only glanced at it. He didn’t want to think of her if he could avoid it. He slithered down toward the ring and entered through a door that had been left open.

And there he was. Knocked over on his side, half covered in debris. Marcus righted the strange, twisted, achingly beautiful prayer bench that had been—and still was—Father Squid. He hefted it up and walked through the rubble toward Olena and a waiting truck and driver. The man helped him slide the prayer bench into the bed of the truck. “Hey,” Marcus said, “careful. This isn’t just a bench.” He almost said more, but he didn’t know how to say it. The man couldn’t understand him anyway.

He slithered over to Olena, who stood taking in the destruction with awed eyes. When he stopped next to her, she said, “It really all happened? Just like you said.”

“You still don’t remember?” She shook her head, and Marcus was relieved all over again. Just as she didn’t remember the nightmare of Talas, she’d been spared the ordeal of Baikonur. Back at the Cosmodrome, hidden in their ramshackle hangar, Nurassyl had come to their rescue. When things got bad and the beasts were howling around them and the villagers themselves began to lose their minds, he’d urged them to all hold hands, or tentacles, or flippers, or whatever. Once they were all connected, he opened his power to them, letting it flow from one person to the next until they were all soothed by it, letting them forget. He’d dropped them into a sleep so deep that none of the turmoil outside the hangar woke them. He’d gone with them, and thus they’d slumbered through a dream of forgetting as the world raged around them.