New portals. She stepped from Chandigarh to New York City. The cops at Fort Freak were too busy, and her entrance too quiet, for anybody to notice right away when she stepped into a corner of the precinct house. The casino evacuation had sent everything into chaos that hadn’t subsided a day later. She gathered they were also trying to figure out where the hell their colleague Franny Black had gone. He wasn’t among the casino dead, though, so he’d get in touch with them soon enough. It wasn’t her problem. But she figured the cops would have Jamal’s family notified and his remains treated properly. So she envisioned the spot in Talas where poor Jamal lay, and opened a doorway under his body. She gently deposited the deceased agent just outside the door to the captain’s office.

The atmosphere in the precinct went from vigorous turmoil to undistilled mayhem. Which conveniently kept the cops distracted. She tried to be quick so they wouldn’t notice her when she stepped from the precinct house to the teller cages in the casino. But the screech of the power saw gave up the game. The cops noticed her departure at the same moment Baba Yaga’s goons saw her enter the cage.

People on two continents shouted at her simultaneously. Nobody looked happy to see her. Well, fuck ’em: she was accustomed to that. And about to get much more unhappy, all of them.

Mollie envisioned the ceiling of the police station halfway around the world, where she’d been an instant earlier. She put a portal roughly over the middle of the cops’ desks. Then, as fast as she could manage, she opened a succession of portals under the thugs’ feet.

Fwump, fwump, fwump, fwump.

They fell through the casino floor in rapid succession, plummeting through the ceiling in New York to crash into desks, cops, and each other. The tumbling power saw smashed a coffeemaker, sending up a black geyser. Peering down through the final hole, Mollie got an overhead view as one of the thugs tried to pull his gun only to get tackled by a big furry guy who looked like something from a children’s book. The remaining goons went down under a scrum of uniformed patrol officers, including one who looked like she was half racing hound, and some ass-ugly bug-eyed motherfucker. The shouting drew the captain (Mendelberg, according to the door) from her office.

Mollie closed the transdimensional doorways. It left her conveniently alone with the cash drawers, free to empty them at her leisure. She could hear people elsewhere in the casino, now that the power saw had been silenced. But the hookers were unlikely to bother her.