She called, “Everything okay back there?”

Brent said, “You done yet? Why are you stopping?”

Mollie shrugged. Weird.

But just as she was about to return her attention to the half-extricated safe, she heard it again. And this time she heard it clearly. This was more than shrieking; it was an almost inhuman wailing, coming from outside the casino. Something about the noise triggered some remnant of the hindbrain that evolution had forgotten to remove from modern humans: she jolted with a physically painful urge to flee, and the nape of her neck broke out in tingling gooseflesh. She dropped the cutter and went to the bedroom window.

Given what she knew of the casino and the people who ran it, not to mention the people it catered to, she’d half expected to find a demilitarized zone outside the window. Her mental picture of Talas was of a place that could have been featured for a cover story in Shitholes of the World magazine. But in fact Baba Yaga’s apartments overlooked a scene that might have been anywhere in Europe. Folks on the street weren’t dressed any worse than they might have been in New York, or Perth, or Johannesburg. The streets—clean, leafy boulevards—featured fountains, pedestrian arcades, and an impressive investment in public art. She saw cafés, tram stops, people strolling hand in hand or pushing strollers. Oil money at work, Mollie realized. Maybe the local oligarchs preferred not to live in a shithole. Even the mountains in the far distance were rather picturesque. It didn’t seem so awful.

Except for the guy sitting outside a sidewalk café near the end of the street, shrieking like a monkey with its arms stuck in a garbage disposal while he repeatedly rammed the neck of a broken water bottle into his own eye socket. Bloody debris rained over his and neighboring tables.

Nobody tried to help him. Nobody tried to stop him.

“What the fuck?” she gasped.

In fact—

Mollie emptied her stomach. Half-digested chunks of bacon and egg spewed across the window sash. Runnels of yellow chyme trickled down the wall. She staggered, caught her balance on a divan, realized the divan had probably been a person once, nearly choked on a second wave of stomach acid, and stumbled against the wall.

Fuck Talas. She’d thought the joker fight club was the sickest shit she’d ever seen, but compared to the self-inflicted carnage on the street it was downright tame. What the fuck kind of messed-up shit was that? To hell with Bumfuckistan. She’d take Baba Yaga’s money and get way the hell away from here.

The shrieking hadn’t stopped by the time she wiped the worst of the taste from her mouth. If anything … the hair on Mollie’s nape tried to stand on end again … it was stronger now, a chorus rather than the lamentations of a lone viciously suicidal nut job.