This was getting ridiculous. She had to start making time to pawn the stuff she snatched, otherwise what was the point? Yes, indeed. What was the point of all this? But that was a dangerous train of thought, so she shied away from it. Instead she power-cycled her wireless router and got comfortable on the bed while waiting for the tablet to find the network. Web surfing wasn’t particular exciting—everyone knew that half the people on the Internet were trolls, the other half assholes—but it gave her something to do until her stomach growled.

She put the tablet aside, then opened a new pair of gateways: one in the bedroom wall a foot away, and another inside the refrigerator of a farmhouse a half-hour drive outside Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

A sharp metallic snap echoed within the refrigerator, accompanied by a stab of agony in her fingers. Mollie yanked her hand back through the opening into her own apartment. She pried the mousetrap from her fingers and flung it aside. It bounced off the wall hard enough to leave a ding in the drywall (Great, another chip off the deposit) before tumbling under the bed.

It hurt so much that at first Mollie thought the fucking thing had broken her fingers. But she could still bend them. She flicked the portal egress from her parents’ refrigerator to the freezer and (after checking for another mousetrap) grabbed some ice. She used another opening to grab a washcloth from the bathroom. Having made a makeshift ice pack for her fingers, she glared into the Steunenberg kitchen while nursing her fingers. It smelled faintly like sour milk but also like pot roast. The TV blared from the living room; Mom and Dad were watching Wheel of Fortune. A pang of homesickness caught her off guard. But then she inspected her fingers, which were already swelling up like sausages, and remembered why she didn’t come home more often. She hadn’t felt welcome at the farm since Noel had killed her brother Todd, stabbed her brother Brent, and shot her dad. Nobody ever came out and said it was her fault. (How could it be? Mollie just provided the opportunity. Dad and the boys were the Einsteins who’d come up with the actual plan.) Still, Todd’s death had left an ineradicable pall on her family relationships. Including Mom and Dad. But they hadn’t been the ones to set the mousetrap. They weren’t that childish.

Mollie leaned through the hole in space, and shouted: “Brent, you greasy turd! You’ll regret this!”

After closing the hole she went into the kitchen—her own kitchen, in her own apartment, walking there on her own two feet like a nat—and poured a bag of frozen stir fry into a skillet. While it simmered, she went into the bathroom and took a leak. She didn’t flush.

Eating dinner beside a fist-high pile of stolen jewelry, some that she’d snatched over a year ago and never bothered to pawn, she couldn’t help but wonder why she did this. She wasn’t a kleptomaniac; she liked money, wanted money—wanted a metric crapload of it—and didn’t steal just for the thrill of it. Her ace made stealing practically trivial. So why was it that without the drive to be a good pupil for Ffodor she’d become so lazy about turning the goods into cash?