Mollie opened a doorway in the back of the bathroom stall door. Its twin opened half a world away. A warm breeze and the scent of hibiscus wafted into the bathroom. She stepped from New Mexico to Punjab.

The hedge kept her in shadows. That was good, too—it meant her doorway into the casino wouldn’t shine like a beacon if the place was dark. Footsteps, and a pair of voices laughing in a language she didn’t understand, approached from the other side of the hedge. They passed. She waited for a moment to convince herself her arrival had gone unnoticed. Then, very carefully, she created a new doorway in the terrace. This was much smaller than the one in the bathroom, though, more porthole than portal. Its twin opened in the ceiling of a casino in Talas, Kazakhstan.

It showed her rows of overturned slot machines and stools, illuminated by the erratic flickering of damaged fluorescents. Some of the machines had been smashed until they spewed out coins. A rhythmic metallic crunching and jingling told her somebody was nearby. Mollie leaned left and right, peeking around the edges of the portal, until she glimpsed one of Baba Yaga’s thugs and two of her “hostesses” scooping the loose money into pillowcases. The hookers had to keep pausing to pull up their tops lest they’d spill right out of their clothes when they bent over to scoop up more change.

Petty cash. Not worth it if Mollie could find a better score. Ffodor had taught her to appreciate the trade-off between time spent and reward gained.

She moved the Talas end of her transdimensional doorway to another corner of the casino. This time its opening favored her with the stench of rotting food. Mollie glimpsed an overturned buffet table, dented steam trays (one looked like it had stopped a bullet), and snowdrifts of slimy black caviar on the floor. She also saw plenty of smashed and battered furniture including a leather couch stippled with bullet holes.

There were bodies, too. Including—

Mollie gasped. Something sour crept up her throat. She coughed twice, trying to force it down.

—Jamal Norwood lay strewn among the wreckage, half his head caved in from a monstrous punch. One of his eyes was … She’d bolted the second she saw him go down. Put a continent and more between herself and Jamal’s killer. Fuck. He’d been pretty nice to her for a Fed, especially given the attitude she’d shown him. He sure as hell deserved better than to rot abandoned and forgotten in this shithole at the ass-end of the world.

Mollie swallowed down sour gorge. This was a dangerous train of thought. None of this was her fault. None of it.

Her third field of view looked over the gaming floor. This had attracted most of the looters, and these guys actually knew what they were doing. Organized bands of mobsters armed with automatics and crowbars worked down the aisles between the tables. She recognized some of them as Baba Yaga’s thugs. They moved in teams from one table to the next. When Franny and Jamal had started evacuating the jokers and the place erupted into pandemonium, the gamblers had abandoned everything as the bullets flew. Unfinished drinks, canapés, even their chips. Those gamblers who had run out of chips had tossed watches, rings, earrings, and other collateral into the mix. The looters took everything they could find. Some of the tables had cash boxes fastened underneath. But it seemed to be slim pickings, though, since most of the money circulating on the gambling floor did so in the form of chips. But that didn’t stop the goons from emptying the pockets, purses, and billfolds of every dead gambler they found. Or making a badly wounded gambler a dead gambler. They even—Jesus—they even checked the mouths of the dead for gold fillings. Mollie only had to watch one example of postmortem dentistry (this using a claw hammer) to know she wanted to stay way the hell away from those sick fuckers. She closed her viewing portal before somebody saw her.