- Alex wakes up the next morning and the cellar is predictably chaotic. He's bullied a bit by Boris and his buddy Grigory, who stole his boots in the night.
- Peter nips this nonsense in the bud. Still, Alex is determined to leave, so he heads straight out the door into the freezing cold… and immediately collapses. Oh boy.
- He wakes up in the cellar with Miska sitting over him. The small boy hands Alex some soup with "bitter-tasting" (5.37) medicine in it.
- Alex passes out again. This time, Peter's the one standing over him when he wakes up; he tells Alex he needs to get more medicine to replace the stuff he took. But how?
- Fortunately, he'll have a few days to figure it out because poor Alex is still as sick as a dog.
- One day, Alex abruptly asks Peter how he found this cellar. Turns out that this place used to a bakery owned by a dude named Jacob. Jacob gave Peter a job and a home after he escaped from a brutal Moscow orphanage.
- Like a lot of others, Jacob was kidnapped by the secret police. Apparently he had been smuggling "messages in some deliveries" (5.15), but Peter is skeptical.
- Anyway, Peter snuck into the building after this happened and set up shop. Boris was the first boy he invited into the crew (which he dubbed "The Baker's Band") and everything just snowballed from there.