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"Silent Running"

Teach the children quietly

For some day sons and daughters

Will rise up and fight while we stood still

- Mike and the Mechanics

Joyce's eyes fell first on Eleven, who was clearly in pain, her face drawn and heavy dark circles under her eyes, and she hurried to the girl's side. "Are you all right?"

Hopper joined her almost immediately. "What happened?"

Eleven leaned her head against Joyce's shoulder, shutting her eyes briefly as if in relief, and reached a hand out to Hopper.

"It was the Mindflayer," Dustin said behind them.

"I can feel him," Will added softly.

"Oh. Oh, no." Joyce reached her free hand for her boy, who took it for a moment before remembering that he was a cool teenager and snatching it back. "It's still here?"

"We think part of it got stuck on this side when El closed the gate." Mike was kneeling at Eleven's other side, his hand on her shoulder. "And now it's—"

"It's killing people." Jonathan's face held nearly as much weariness as Eleven's, and Joyce, with a final squeeze, left Eleven to Hopper and Mike and got up to hold Jonathan close. She reached out a hand for Nancy, too. Just having them all in her arms again, in reach of her touch, made her feel better. Stronger. This little group of people, young as they were, had saved themselves and Hawkins and possibly the world already multiple times. Working together, she believed they could do it again.

"Killing people how?" Hopper asked, even as he was gently lifting El and helping her find a place to sit up, leaning against his shoulder. The others followed, standing or sitting around the fountain and the bench Hopper and El were sitting on.

Max spoke up, looking as pale and dispirited as Joyce had ever seen her. "It's taking them over. It got Billy." It surprised Joyce a little that the girl cared that much about her step-brother. Joyce strongly suspected Billy of having hit Max a time or two. Still, family was family.

"What do you mean, taking them over?" Hopper never had gotten the hang of the way the kids talked, one at a time, over each other, little bits of the puzzle coming together piece by piece.

"It's … it's transforming itself into them, somehow, and when you kill them, it becomes this big melted pile of … people." Nancy shivered.

"What the hell is going on here? Aren't the Russians enough?" Joyce didn't recognize the girl talking, but she was wearing the uniform of the ice cream shop Steve Harrington worked at, so it seemed clear how she had been roped in to this situation.

"There's a gate in Hawkins to another world, a dark version of our world," Dustin explained patiently. "El closed it, but there's a monster who lives in it—"

"The Mindflayer," Mike said. "It built this monster in Hawkins, to stop El, to kill her and pave a way into our world."

"And it almost did," Nancy added. She nodded toward the smear on the floor where the something Hopper had stepped on had been. "That was just one tiny piece of it."

"How big is this thing?"

"It's big," Jonathan said. When Hopper frowned at him for the lack of any actual clarification, he added, "Thirty feet at least."

"Yeah," Lucas agreed. "It … sorta destoyed your cabin. Sorry."

To his credit, Hopper took that in stride.

Steve Harrington looked like someone had beat him up. Which seemed to be the way he looked every time things went bad in Hawkins. Joyce appreciated him putting himself in harm's way, but someone really ought to teach him how to fight better. "Okay," he said, "just to be clear, this … this big fleshy spider thing that hurt El, it's some kind of gigantic … weapon?"

"Yes," Nancy confirmed immediately.

"But instead of, like, screws and metal, the Mind Flayer made its weapon with melted people."

"Yes, exactly," Nancy said again, impatiently.

"Yeah, okay. I— yeah, I'm just making sure."

Joyce sympathized. Most people didn't sit around closed malls and talk about this kind of thing. "Are we sure this thing is still out there, still alive?" she asked, more because she hoped it wasn't than because she really believed it might not be.

"El beat the shit out of it, but, yeah, it's still alive," Max confirmed.

Will began, "But if we close the gate again—"

"We cut the brain off from the body," Max continued.

Lucas finished the thought. "And kill it. Theoretically."

They had all completely forgotten Murray, who had disappeared almost as soon as they came into the mall. Now he reappeared, shouting out "Yoo-hoo!" and waving papers above his head. The diagrams Alexi had drawn! Murray must have gone back to the car for them.

"What are you doing here?" Nancy asked him.

"Oh, it's you." He smirked at both Nancy and Jonathan. "And you. Slept on any pull-outs lately?"

Neither of them seemed to find him funny, and Joyce was pretty sure she never wanted any of them to explain any of it.

"What've you got there?" Dustin was peering at the papers over Murray's shoulder, and Murray wrinkled his nose at the kid.

"Shouldn't you be home in your jammies?"

"Shouldn't you be locked in a bunker somewhere?"

"Yes. Yes, I should. But since I'm not, how about we focus on the problem at hand." Murray moved to the food court, spreading the papers out on one of the tables. Joyce and Hopper looked at each other, then got up to follow, Hopper helping Eleven walk over and easing her into a chair. The rest of the kids came after them. "In case you don't know, we're standing on top of a Russian installation, and they're about to open some gate. And we have to keep them from doing that."

The kids all murmured at that, drawing closer so they could see the papers better.

"We had a Russian sp—helper named Alexi, he told us about it." Murray's voice cracked a tiny bit, but it steadied and he went on, pointing at the center of the paper. "Okay, this is what Alexi called 'the hub'. Now, the hub takes us to the vault room."

Hopper looked over Murray's shoulder. "Okay, where's the gate?"

"Right here. I don't know the scale on this, but I think it's fairly close to the vault room, maybe fifty feet or so."

A new voice spoke up. "More like five hundred." Joyce recognized Lucas's little sister, Erica, wondering how she had gotten caught up in all of this. Murray stared at the girl, and she shook her head at him. "What, you're just gonna waltz in there like it's commie Disneyland or something?"

Murray clearly had not spent enough time around kids, particularly smart kids—he seemed startled to have one correcting him. Joyce had gotten used to that feeling years ago. "I'm sorry," he said, "who are you?"

"Erica Sinclair. Who are you?"

"Murray … Bauman."

"Listen, Mr. Bunman, I'm not trying to tell you how to do things, but I've been down in that shithole for twenty-four hours. And with all due respect, you do what this man tells you, you're all gonna die."

Murray had had enough. "I'm sorry, why is this four-year-old speaking to me?"

"Um, I'm ten, you bald bastard!"

"Erica!" Lucas said, shocked.

"Just the facts!"

"She's right," Dustin agreed more calmly. "You're all gonna die, but you don't have to. Excuse me." He reached for the papers. "Sorry, may I?"

"Please," Murray said, in the tone of a man who knew he was outnumbered. Joyce knew that feeling well, too.

Dustin sat down, pulling the papers toward him, and took a pencil out of his pocket. "Okay, see this room here? This is a storage facility. There's a hatch in here that feeds into their underground ventilation system." He drew a line from there to the gate. "That will lead you to the base of the weapon. It's a bit of a maze down there, but between me and Erica, we can show you the way."

"You can show us the way?" Hopper repeated dubiously.

"Don't worry, you can do all the fighting and the dangerous hero shit, and we'll just be your … navigators." Erica nodded, and they both looked up at Hopper expectantly.

"No." When they stared at him in disbelief, he shook his head and said it again. "Nope."