"Yes, Sasha. Let's go, OK?" Hender said.

"OK." Sasha rose from beside Ivan. "Follow me, Hender!"

The others rushed behind Sasha and Ivan as they headed west. They turned north through a tall, arched corridor. At the end, Sasha opened a door into the hallway between the underwater window and the palace foyer.

Turning left, they emerged in the room with the window on their right, its red velvet curtains open and revealing the aquatic half of Pandemonium.

"That's the hatch to the secret passage," Nell said, pointing to the left. "Those stairs lead to the gondola." She pointed to the spiral stairway in the far right corner.

Hender and Nastia stopped before the dark window in awe. Glowing colors and forms surged in schools and waves before them like abstractions in the dark.

"Most are mollusks and arthropods," Geoffrey said, leaning on his cane. "All are new species. I'm Geoffrey Binswanger, Nell's husband." He reached out and clasped Nastia's hand.

Nastia took his hand without taking her eyes off the window. "Nell's husband." She smiled. "You are a lucky man."

"I know." Geoffrey turned on the battery of lights with the switch beside the window, illuminating the lake. "It's saltwater. We think it must be hundreds of millions of years old."

Hender cringed.

"Hender doesn't like saltwater," Nell said, joining them as the soldiers started breaking out their gear behind them. "Saltwater kills species from Henders Island. It's why they never left."

Abrams unbuckled himself from the XOS and started pulling packs off its back as Dima and Bear helped him.

Nastia held out her phone as she recorded video through the window in reverence. "The Urals were formed when Baltica, Siberia, and Kazakhstania smashed together to form the supercontinent Laurasia," Nastia said. "That a cave system from that time could still exist..."

"I know," Geoffrey said. "It's unprecedented."

"No, not unprecedented," Nastia corrected. "The Jenolan Caves in Australia are three hundred forty million years old. But it is remarkably rare."

"Saltwater?" Hender asked.

Nell patted one of his "shoulders" reassuringly.

"Why can you touch Hender and not Geoffrey?" Nastia wondered.

"Yes?" Geoffrey asked. "Why is that?"

"I can control nants," Hender said. "But Nell can't."

"Nell?" Geoffrey gasped.

"I didn't have any body armor, so Hender gave me his."

He looked at her, terrified as he noticed the purple sheen of the nants coating her skin. "Are you OK? Is she safe, Hender?"

"Yes," Hender said.

"I'm OK," Nell said, shaking her head in amazement.

"That's good ... so you got your symbiants back, Hender?"

"Yes!" Hender said, flushing green and blue with pleasure.

"But why don't they attack Nell?"

"They think she's my child," Hender said. "I'm pregnant, Geoffrey."

Geoffrey opened his mouth. "Oh! Congratulations."

"OK," Hender said.

"Hey," Abrams said. "Why can't we unleash hell on those monsters? I mean, if there's another window upstairs, why couldn't we just blow it up and open the gates? Then they could duke it out down here."

"That's actually not a terrible idea, Abrams," Geoffrey said. "Using one ecosystem against the other-"

"And if we blow the windows down here, too-" Nell suggested.

"Saltwater!" Geoffrey agreed.

"Brilliant," Nastia said. "An Augean stables solution."

"What's that?" Dima asked.

"The Fifth Labor of Hercules," Abrams said, impressed. "King Augeas commanded Hercules to clean out his stables, which he knew was impossible, but Hercules diverted two rivers into the stables and got the job done."

"Right," Nastia said. "That's very good."

"Thanks," Abrams said. "We have enough explosives. If that lake is big enough, we could flood the whole damned city."

"It's big enough," Geoffrey said.

"It probably wouldn't drain more than a few feet and still flood Pobedograd," Nell said. "So long as we plug the drain."

Abrams nodded. "We're working on that right now." He reached up to one of the two snare drum-sized robots strapped onto the rack of the exosuit. He unclipped the ROV and set it on the floor before them on its four legs. "The Dalek combat robot."

"Do you know how to work it?" Bear asked.

"Jackson said the dog whistle operates all of these, didn't he?" Dima said.

"Yeah, it's easy," Abrams said.

"Can that make it through the tunnel with all those ghosts in there?" Bear asked.

"It can go twenty miles per hour, which may be fast enough to get by them."

"How can we transmit radio signals to it through solid rock?" Geoffrey questioned, dubious.

"It drops a trail of remote signal relays-it should have, let's see-" Abrams counted the detachable transponders on board the device. "-five. I should be able to set them to deploy every five hundred yards or so. That should be enough." Abrams raised his eyebrows at them. "Let's wake it up!"

He pressed the select button on the dog whistle, scrolled down to DALEK-1 and pushed START. Two rotors popped out of the unit and whirred in different directions, lifting the bot off the floor. It stopped before hitting the ceiling as though repelled by an invisible cushion and then hovered with a loud, high-pitched whine.

"Let's see if the cameras work!" Dima shouted.

"Yeah, I see you!" Abrams yelled.

"OK, set it down. Maybe we can put a charge on it," Dima said.

"Not one big enough to seal that tunnel," Bear said.

"No. But big enough to detonate the charges already set in the tunnel," Abrams said.

"If they were set," Bear glanced sideways at Hender.

"Kuzu wouldn't lie," Hender said.

"He did lie," Abrams said. "He said one of those octopus-things killed the other guys and then later he said Ferrell did it. One of those was a lie, Hender."

"He would not lie to me," Hender said sadly.

"Oh, great," Bear said. "Kuzu is two moves from checkmating the entire human race, man! How do we know this one isn't in on it?"

"I'm not Kuzu," Hender said.

"Presuming he's not," Abrams said, "even if they didn't set the charges, there's a full pack of sixteen charges in that tunnel. If we can reach it and detonate the Dalek next to it, that should do the trick."

"Da," Dima said. "We have to try!"

"We'll set a charge on the Dalek to go off in, say, seven minutes," Abrams said, punching in the number. "That should give me enough time to find the charges in the tunnel and park this thing right there."

"Sounds good," Dima said.

"How can you steer it through the tunnel?" Nastia asked.

"Just like a video game." Abrams pulled the dog whistle from around his neck. "I just point it where I want to go. It's got wall avoidance sensors built in, so it can't crash-theoretically."

"Let's do it," Dima said.

"Hoo-ya," Bear said.

"You guys rig the charges," Nell said. "I'm going upstairs to check out the gondola."

Bear glanced at Nell. "A lot's riding on that gondola, darlin'."

"I know!"

"Dima, why don't you go with her?" Abrams said.

"Yeah, OK." Dima nodded at Nell as she climbed the spiral stairs inside the glass vestibule. He caught up to her as Bear rigged the ROV with explosives.

"We can set some charges in the underwater bedroom as well as this window," Geoffrey said.

"Hey," Sasha objected. "That's my room!"

"We need to, honey," he said.

Sasha frowned.

"Can you show Bear where it is? And leave all the doors open, and open the door to the foyer, too, OK?"

"OK. Come on, Bear. Ivan and I will show you the way."

"Nastia, come here and help me," Abrams said as he revved up the Dalek.

"I'm worried about Kuzu," Hender said.

"Then let's go upstairs," Geoffrey said. "We can check the security monitors there."

01:16:10.

Kuzu had located a camera view from inside the room with the underwater window where they had gathered. He had turned up the volume on Maxim's laptop and heard every word they said.

He rose now and tossed the laptop onto the bed. He grabbed his backpack full of explosives. "Come now!"

Maxim gripped the pistol he had slipped into his pocket as he went with Kuzu to the limousine.

01:10:10.

Nell and Dima reached the gondola deck one hundred feet up.

Dima peered through the window in the granite wall, inspecting the landing of the gondola. The car was a '50s Soviet space-age shape encrusted with rainbowfire except for its windows, which had been kept relatively clean, perhaps by mollusks like those that scraped the underwater window and the walls of Sasha's bedroom.

"That's it," Nell said. "It's driven by a diesel engine. Cans of diesel fuel are stacked next to it-see?"

"Yes. So we have to make sure it's fueled up and prime the engine. It probably hasn't been started in sixty years."

"They started it recently. At least I think so," Nell said as she threw the switch that turned on the bank of floodlights above the window. They illuminated the gondola's dual cables that curved down and then up across the lake to a pylon rising from a nearby island. The vast space beyond the floodlights was aglow with creatures, some of which loomed like pink blimps in the distance to their right. Firebombers flared as they rose and fell in slow motion, streaming vivid pink tails. Orange bubbles flowed in flocks, changing direction in unison. Vividly colored balls rolled down the walls, and hundreds of yellow and orange gammies leaped on their long legs past the window with alarming speed. Hordes of creatures writhed on the gray mats that spread across the surface of the lake, which was filled with glowing shapes like giant flowers and winding snakes.

"What do those words say?" Nell asked, pointing to the sign over the hatch.

"'Hell's Door,'" Dima muttered, looking at her.

"Ah." Nell nodded. "It says 'Hell's Window' downstairs."

"Oh," Dima said. "This gondola-it's supposed to get us across that lake?" He frowned. "And then-where?"

Nell shrugged. "It must be another escape route for Stalin. We think it must lead out of the mountain."

"We hope?" Dima shook his head. "Well, it better."