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.

Blood fountained across the T-shirts. It spewed from the severed shoulder like something in a Monty Python skit, except nobody was laughing. Instead, the other shoppers joined in the screaming. Several ran for the door.

Motherfuckers. Mollie stationed a new portal to intercept one of the stampeding shoppers, its twin inside another. An instant later viscera geysered across the display window as two bodies tried and failed to occupy the same space all at once. The wet explosion sounded like the world’s wettest fart. Teeth, vertebrae, and shattered ribs clattered against the walls, floor, and ceiling like so much hail. It was annoying as hell.

A tinny voice hollered, “Hello? Hello? Mollie, are you there?”

Mollie still held the phone to her ear. Irritated, she stepped from Half Moon Bay back to the Committee offices at the United Nations. Ink started, broke off in mid-sentence when Mollie emerged from empty space to stand next to her desk.

Mollie hung up. “I’m busy. What?”

Ink’s face twisted in a scowl. She covered her nose. “Oh, my God! What happened to you?”