Humor. She was too shattered to appreciate it. When she had made it back to her apartment after the gun battle and explosion, an improvised bandage on her head, she’d planned to crawl into bed and not come out for a long time. With some effort, and with Sokolov’s help, she had goaded herself into making a trip out to the wangba to send out a distress call. Adrenaline had propelled her through the last hour’s events. But as soon as she felt land under her feet and exited swim-or-die mode, the bottom fell out. She dropped to all fours in the shallow surf, not just as a way of keeping her head down but because she did not think herself capable of standing up. Like a prehistoric fish dragging itself up onto the strand by its floppy, vestigial fins, she followed Sokolov up into shallower and shallower water and finally onto a sandy beach guarded by a vast defensive works: a double picket line of spikes angled toward the mainland. As became clear when they got closer, each spike was a railroad rail that had been planted in a massive tub of concrete and cut off at an angle to make it sharp. A fat eye bolt projected from the top of each cement block, which was apparently how they’d been lifted from a barge and dropped into place, one by one, during some long-forgotten Cold War defensive buildup. Rust had thinned the steel, barnacles thickened and furred it. The blocks had settled into diverse angles. Sokolov was right that this was no impediment to them.