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IT WAS ONLY FITTING that if Eleven's sealing of the gate had prevented the world from ending, its reopening by the Russians would be the catalyst that triggered the re-emergence of the dark forces that had been banished to the Upside Down for what felt like not long enough. All their efforts to protect a town that didn't want to fathom the notion of anything unordinary from a supernatural threat – one that had against all odds helped Amara to realize that she wasn't the one who needed to change – it was all back no sooner than it had left. They had to get out of the bunker, they needed to forewarn their friends, but could they even make it back in time?
"Shit, this is bad," Steve declared, bathed in the fluorescent lights the machine was emitting. "This is really, really, bad."
"That's the gate you told me about, right?" Robin inquired of Amara, holding out a sliver of hope that the Russians were merely excavating a cavity within the earth to destabilize the town, which she was sure had to be better than the resurgence of a doorway between their world and an alternate dimension. But deep down she knew that it was exactly what she presumed it to be.
"I really wish it wasn't," Amara responded, snapping herself out of her paralyzed state and making her way to the door behind them, the first to guide them down the set of stairs back to the comms room before any of the scientists could so much as glance in their direction. "But it is."
"I don't understand. How could they have found out about it?" Robin questioned, jogging to keep pace with Amara.
"Nancy told me that if the Russians ever found out about the gate, they wouldn't consider it a mistake," Amara hastily explained, recalling the account the girl in question had detailed to her about her and Jonathan's successful endeavor to obtain justice for Barb a few days after their battle against the Upside Down, the one she had so foolishly believed would be their last. "Looks like she was right."
"But why here?" Robin asked next, still wrapping her head around what she'd just witnessed. "Couldn't they have just done this in Russia?"
"Maybe it's easier to open a gate somewhere it's been opened once before," Dustin speculated, too wondering the same thing. "Either way, this is bad. Like end-of-the-human-race-as-we-know-it bad."
"We have to warn them," Amara stated in reference to their friends who weren't in the know of what the five of them had unearthed, the friends they'd originally journeyed to the comms room to broadcast their location to. But now the group understood that they weren't the ones who needed to be saved, not when the world was at stake once again. "Dustin, do you know which channel they're on?"
"Last I checked, channel ten," Dustin relayed, the quintet now back in the suspiciously vacant comms room. "Let's just hope they're not all busy sucking face or something."
"Um, Steve?" Erica interposed, the first to notice that they were the only occupants of the room. The only evidence that Steve had fought and won against a Russian guard was a streak of dried blood on the grated floorboards. "Where's your Russian friend?"
