The windows blew in. Torrents of broken glass gushed onto the floor. The shockwave chucked Quentin carelessly against the base of the opposite wall. It wasn’t enough to knock him out, not quite, but his brain got stuck for a few seconds, and he forgot where he was. When he’d recovered enough to get to his knees and take his hands away from his face, the room seemed to be full of struggling figures wearing robes.

“What the hell?” he whispered.

Something bad was happening. For a second he thought he’d lost Mayakovsky’s precious coin, but no, there it was, a few feet away on the rug, still shining with unexpressed power, and he had just enough presence of mind to sweep it up and shove it in his pocket. The dimness churned with strange people—two of them had Betsy pinned against the wall, and she was screaming curses at them. There was something strange about them: their hands. They weren’t flesh. They glowed a faint pale gold, and they were slightly translucent—you could see things through them.

He started to get up, but one of them was standing over him. She put a foot on his chest and pushed him over backward; it didn’t take much. Quentin looked at the foot. It was an ordinary foot, a woman’s foot, leather sandal, definitely human.

There were seven or eight of them—it was hard to get a good read in the dimness. Another woman stepped up to the case. Out of nowhere Pushkar popped up behind her and belted her in the back of the head with a pool cue, or he tried to: the cue snapped like balsa wood, like he’d hit a marble statue, and the one who had her foot on Quentin uncorked some spell one-handed that made him freeze and fall down flat, stiff as a board.

Ignoring the action around her, the woman studied the cage Quentin had set up; in the golden light of her hands her face looked mildly amused. She picked it up and tossed it aside, then she spoke a few words over the case in a businesslike tone—she could have been ordering a pizza. There was something weirdly familiar about the way she talked. She pulled the suitcase loose, just like that—there was a ripping sound, exactly as if it had been held down by nothing more than Velcro, then it came free. She tucked it under her arm.

These people were thieves, like them. They let Quentin and his pals be the fall guys and take out the security, then they walked in and robbed the robbery. In his concussed, addled state Quentin mostly felt admiration for their calm competence. They were doing a good job.