“They’ll never get it fucking done in time,” Ray said to Barbara. “Bureaucracies are like old dogs; they don’t like being pushed, and they bite when you do.”

Barbara carefully put her power around the two of them before she answered, suspecting that the room might have live microphones; if so, they would hear only gibberish.

“Jayewardene knows that,” Barbara told Ray. “We’ll give him eight hours. No more. And we’ll make our own plans based on him not getting Bruckner released. If he hasn’t given us Bruckner by tonight, we’ll get him ourselves.”

Sunday

SUNDAY

IT TOOK SEVEN TRIES to get a portal into the cash register. Even when she was looking right at the damn thing from across the aisle, pretending to browse a rack of ugly-ass souvenir T-shirts intended for tourists with worse taste than a colorblind five-year-old with a kawaii fixation. Space refused to twist and fold to her whims like it used to. It used to be so easy. Now creating a pair of openings in space felt like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. That she eventually succeeded offered little consolation. What was the point? Soon enough the money would be worthless, and there’d be nowhere to spend it. But she was bored and scared and didn’t know what else to do. Anything was better than sitting around with nothing but her own thoughts for company.

I guess at heart I really am just a petty thief, despite Ffodor’s insistence that I could be so much more.

Her phone rang just as she was wrist-deep in the cash drawer. It shattered her concentration. She yanked her hand free of the opening just as it blinked closed. She lost her balance and stumbled into a spin-rack of miniature vanity California license plates preprinted with boys’ and girls’ names. The rack toppled over with a resounding crash. Tammies, Quentins, Siennas, Ambers, Johns, and Dakotas skittered across the floor. Everybody in the store stopped to stare at Mollie.

“Hey!” The joker shopkeeper came trotting over on a pair of faun legs. “What’s the big idea?”

Mollie ignored her. Heart fluttering with relief, she instead looked at her phone, which was still buzzing. But it wasn’t a call from the farmhouse. It was a New York area code. Mollie sighed. Answered.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” said the shopkeeper.

Into the phone, Mollie said, “Whoever you are, you can kiss my ass, because your timing blows chunks.”

It was Ink. She didn’t bother with hello. “Mollie! Administrator Baden needs to see you immediately. Can you please go to Bai—”

Mollie didn’t hear the rest, because the shopkeeper chose that moment to reach for her elbow, which meant it was also the moment when the man started screaming at the top of his lungs. A portal pair blinked into existence, one side hovering just beyond her elbow, just large enough to accept his arm. The portal lasted just long enough for him to get elbow deep before she slammed it shut. A severed arm fell to the platform in a Tokyo train station.