Ffodor had insisted she could open portals within solid objects because it was no different from opening them on a wall or in midair. It was the closest they’d ever come to an argument. Of course it was different: air was invisible, and it moved. Her one attempt to visualize a portal inside something else had given her the worst headache of her life.

The handcuffs clinked. The second cop, the one in the passenger seat, Monsieur Electrocute-First-And-Ask-Questions-Never, shot a glare over his shoulder. It was a look of naked disappointment: they’d nabbed a short, slightly plump, twenty-two-year-old American with too many freckles to be cute and unnaturally coppery curls in blue jeans and blouse rather than a tall, leggy, teenaged heroin-chic Parisian runway model in a skirt that reached just below her pubes.

Mollie returned the glare. “Supermodels are all shrews and cokeheads, you know.”

He said something to his partner. Everything sounded snide when you didn’t speak the language.

The car swerved, pressing her face into the seat upholstery again. Her stomach lurched in response to a strong whiff of the foot stink. Mollie wormed upright into a sitting position before she upchucked all over herself. She resigned herself to watching a rain-soaked City of Light slide past the windows.

The car passed a fountain. She smiled.

Fine, she thought. Let’s do this the really easy way.

Even with her brain half scrambled from the Taser it was easy as breathing. With barely a conscious thought, she opened a pair of twinned doorways: one atop the dashboard, and a much larger one in the fountain basin.

Cold water gushed into the car as though somebody had pointed a firehose through the vents. The frogs swore in unison—“Merde!” (even Mollie could understood that)—as the driver planted his foot on the brake. They skidded. The water, already over her knees, sloshed over the headrests. Mollie slammed her forehead against the Plexiglas divider. She closed her eyes, concentrating on holding her breath to feign unconsciousness.

The water kept coming. In seconds it was over her waist, but then it dropped as the befuddled cops bailed from the car. Mollie kept the doorways in place. Now the water gushing from the dash mostly poured out the open doors, but enough pooled in the backseat to pose a drowning hazard.

The hard part was maintaining the act while the gendarmes dragged her from the car like a sack of fertilizer. Her lungs were well and truly burning before the idiots realized they had to take the cuffs off before they could do CPR. Mollie abandoned the act as soon as the cuffs fell from her wrists. She leapt to her feet, stumbling a bit thanks to the lingering dizziness from the Taser and holding her breath.

“Thanks, morons,” she said.

The driver barked at her. He didn’t sound happy. His partner scrabbled at the Taser on his belt.

“Oh, yeah,” said Mollie, “please try it again.” He wouldn’t catch her by surprise this time.