The Magicians

MANHATTAN

Two months later it was November. Not Brakebills November, real November — Quentin had to keep reminding himself that they were on regular real-world time now. He lolled his temple against the cold apartment window. Far below he could see a neat little rectangular park where the trees were red and brown. The grass was threadbare, with dirt patches, like a worn-out rug with the canvas backing showing through the woven surface.

Quentin and Alice lay on their backs on a wide, candy-striped daybed by the window, limply holding hands, looking and feeling like they’d just washed ashore on a raft that had been gently, limply deposited by the surf on the beach of a silent deserted island. The lights were off, but milky-white afternoon sunlight filtered into the room through half-closed blinds. The remains of a game of chess, a sloppy, murderous draw, lay on a nearby coffee table.

The apartment was undecorated and barely furnished except for an eclectic collection they’d trucked in as the need arose. They were squatting: a tiresomely complex magical arrangement had allowed them to secure this particular scrap of underutilized Lower East Side real estate while its rightful owners were otherwise occupied.

A deep, thick silence hung in the still air, like stiff white sheets on a clothesline. Nobody spoke, and nobody had spoken for about an hour, and nobody felt the need to speak. They were in lotus-land.

“What time is it?” Alice said finally.

“Two. Past two.” Quentin turned his head to look at the clock. “Two.”

The buzzer rang. Neither of them moved.

“It’s probably Eliot,” Quentin said.

“Are you going over early?”

“Yes. Probably.”

“You didn’t tell me you were going early.”

Quentin sat up slowly, using just his stomach muscles, at the same time extracting his arm from beneath Alice’s head.

“I’m probably going early.”

He buzzed Eliot in. They were going to a party.

It was only two months since graduation, but already Brakebills seemed like a lifetime ago — yet another lifetime, Quentin thought, reflecting world-wearily that at the age of twenty-one he was already on his third or fourth lifetime.

When he left Brakebills for New York, Quentin had expected to be knocked down and ravished by the sheer gritty reality of it all: going from the jeweled chrysalis of Brakebills to the big, messy, dirty city, where real people led real lives in the real world and did real work for real money. And for a couple of weeks he had been. It was definitely real, if by real you meant non-magical and obsessed with money and amazingly filthy. He had completely forgotten what it was like to be in the mundane world all the time. Nothing was enchanted: everything was what it was and nothing more. Every conceivable surface was plastered with words — concert posters, billboards, graffiti, maps, signs, warning labels, alternate-side parking regulations — but none of it meant anything, not the way a spell did. At Brakebills every square inch of the House, every brick, every bush, every tree, had been marinated in magic for centuries. Here, out in the world, raw unmodified physics reigned, and mundanity was epidemic. It was like a coral reef with the living vital meaning bleached out of it, leaving nothing but an empty colored rock behind. To a magician’s eyes, Manhattan looked like a desert.

Though like a desert, it did have some stunted, twisted traces of life, if you dug for them. There was a magical culture in New York outside the handful of Brakebills-educated elite who resided there, but it existed on the city’s immigrant margins. The older Physical Kids — a name they had left behind at Brakebills and would never use again — gave Quentin and Alice the outer-borough subway tour. In a windowless second-story café on Queens Boulevard, they watched Kazakhs and Hasidim construe number theory. They ate dumplings with Korean mystics in Flushing and watched modern-day Isis worshippers rehearse Egyptian street hexes in the back of a bodega on Atlantic Avenue. Once they took the ferry across to Staten Island, where they stood around a dazzlingly blue swimming pool sipping gin and tonics at a conclave of Filipino shamans.

But after a few weeks the energy for those educational field trips had all but evaporated. There was just too much to distract them, and nothing particularly urgent to be distracted from. Magic would always be there, and it was hard work, and he’d been doing it for a long time. What Quentin needed to catch up on was life. New York’s magical underground may have been limited, but the number and variety of its drinking establishments was prodigious. And you could get drugs here — actual drugs! They had all the power in the world, and no work to do, and nobody to stop them. They ran riot through the city.

Alice didn’t find all this quite as exciting as Quentin did. She had put off the kind of civil service appointment or research apprenticeship that usually ensnared serious-minded Brakebills students so she could stay in New York with Quentin and the others, but inspite of that she showed signs of actual unfeigned academic curiosity, which caused her to spend a good part of every day studying magic instead of, for example, recovering from having gone out the night before. Quentin felt mildly ashamed for not following her example, enough that he even made noises about relaunching his failed lunar expedition, but not so much that he actually did anything about it. (Alice cycled through a sequence of space travel-related nicknames for him — Scotty, Major Tom, Laika — until his lack of progress began to make them more humiliating than funny.) He felt entitled to blow off steam and shake off the Brakebills pixie dust and generally “live.” And Eliot felt that way, too (“Ain’t that why we got livers?” he said in his exaggerated Oregoner accent). It wasn’t a problem. He and Alice were just different people. Isn’t that what made it interesting?

At any rate Quentin felt interesting. He felt fascinating. For the first year after graduation his financial needs were taken care of by an immense secret slush fund, amassed covertly over the centuries through magically augmented investing, that yielded a regular allowance for all newly minted magicians who needed it. After four cloistered years at Brakebills, cash was like a magic all its own: a way of turning one thing into another thing, producing something out of nothing, and he worked that magic all over town. Money people thought he was artsy, artsy people thought he was money, and everybody thought he was clever and good-looking, and he got invited everywhere: charity social events, underground poker clubs, dive bars, rooftop parties, mobile all-night in-limo narcotics binges. He and Eliot passed themselves off as brothers, and their double act was the hit of the season. It was the revenge of the nerds.

Night after night Quentin would return home toward dawn, alone, deposited in front of his building by a solemn solitary cab like a hearse painted yellow, the street awash with blue light — the delicate ultrasound radiance of the embryonic day. Coming down off coke or ecstasy, his body felt strange and heavy, like a golem fashioned from some ultra-dense star-metal that had fallen from the sky and cooled and congealed into human form. He felt so heavy that he could break through the brittle pavement any second, and plunge down into the sewers, unless he placed his feet gently and precisely in the center of each sidewalk square in turn.

Standing alone amid the still, stately mess of their apartment, his heart would brim over with regret. He felt like his life had gone terribly wrong. He shouldn’t have gone out. He should have stayed home with Alice. But he would have been so bored if he’d stayed home! And she would have been bored if she’d come out! What were they going to do? They couldn’t go on like this. He felt so grateful to her for not having seen the excesses he had so eagerly indulged in, the drugs he had ingested, the manic flirting and pawing in which he had engaged.

Then he would take off his clothes, which reeked of cigarette smoke, like a toad shedding its skin, and Alice would stir sleepily in the sheets and sit up, the white sheet slipping down off her heavy breasts. She would lean against him, their backs against the cool white wooden curl of their sleigh bed, not speaking, and they would watch as the dawn came up and a garbage truck moved haltingly down the block, its pneumatic biceps gleaming as it greedily consumed whatever its overalled attendants flung into it, ingesting what the city had expectorated. And Quentin would feel a lofty pity for the garbagemen, and for all the straights and civilians. He wondered what they could possibly have in their uncharmed lives that made them think they were worth living.

He heard Eliot try the door, find it locked, and fumble around for his key; Eliot shared an apartment with Janet in Soho, but he was over at Quentin and Alice’s so much that it was easier just to give him his own key. Quentin strolled around the open-plan apartment, half-heartedly straightening up, snapping up condom wrappers and underwear and decaying food and depositing them in the trash. It was a beautiful place in a converted factory, all wide-planked, thickly varnished wood floors and arched warehouse windows, but it had seen more considerate tenants. He’d been surprised to discover when they moved in together that while he was an indifferent housekeeper, Alice was the true slob of the relationship.

She retreated to the bedroom to get dressed. She was still in her nightgown.

“Morning,” Eliot said, although it wasn’t. He loitered just inside the rolling metal freight door, wearing a long overcoat and a sweater that had been expensive before moths got to it.

“Hey,” Quentin said. “Just let me grab my coat.”

“It’s freezing out there. Is Alice coming?”

“I didn’t get that impression. Alice?” He raised his voice. “Alice?”

There was no answer. Eliot had already faded back out into the hall. He didn’t seem to have much patience for Alice lately, as somebody who didn’t share his rigorous dedication to pleasure-seeking. Quentin supposed her unfussy diligence reminded him unpleasantly of the future he was ignoring. Quentin knew it had that effect on him.

He hesitated on the threshold, torn between conflicting loyalties. She would probably be grateful for some quiet time to study.

“I think she’s coming later,” Quentin said. He called in the direction of the bedroom: “Okay! Bye! I’ll see you there!”

There was no answer.

“Bye Mom!” Eliot yelled.

The door closed.

Like everything else, Eliot was different in New York. At Brakebills he had always been supremely aloof and self-sufficient. His personal charm and odd appearance and talent for magic had raised him up and set him apart. But since Quentin had joined him in Manhattan, the balance of power between them had shifted somehow. Eliot hadn’t survived transplantation unscathed; he no longer floated easily above the fray. His humor was more arch and bitter and childish than Quentin remembered. He seemed to be getting younger as Quentin got older. He needed Quentin more, and he resented Quentin for that. He hated to be left out of anything, and he hated to be included in anything. He spent more time than he should have on the roof of his apartment building smoking his Merits and God knows what else — there wasn’t much you couldn’t find if you had the money, and they had the money. He was getting too thin. He was depressed and turned nasty when Quentin tried to jolly him out of it. When annoyed he was fond of saying, “God, it’s amazing I’m not a dipsomaniac” and then correcting himself: “Oh, wait, that’s right…” It had been funny the first time. Sort of.

At Brakebills Eliot had started drinking at dinnertime, earlier on weekends, which was fine, because all the upperclassmen drank at dinner, though not all of them bartered their desserts for extra glasses of wine the way Eliot did. In Manhattan, with no professors watching over them, and no classes to be sober for, Eliot was rarely without a glass of something in his hand from one in the afternoon on. Usually it was something relatively innocuous, white wine or Campari or a big dilute tumbler of bourbon and soda clunking with ice. But still. Once when Eliot was nursing a stubborn cold, Quentin remarked lightly that maybe he should consider something more wholesome than a vodka tonic with which to chase his plastic jigger of DayQuil.

“I’m sick, I’m not dead,” Eliot snapped. And that was that.

At least one of Eliot’s talents had survived graduation: he was still a tireless seeker-out of obscure and wonderful bottles of wine. He was not yet such a lush that he’d abandoned his snobbishness. He went to tastings and chatted up importers and wine-store owners with a zeal that he mustered for nothing else. Once every few weeks, when he had accumulated a dozen or so bottles of which he was especially proud, Eliot would announce that they were having a dinner party. It was one such dinner party that he and Quentin were preparing for today.

They lavished a ridiculous amount of effort on these parties, all out of proportion to any actual fun they might get in return. The venue was always Eliot and Janet’s Soho apartment, a vast prewar warren with an implausible profusion of bedrooms, a set ripe for a French farce. Josh was head chef, with Quentin assisting as apprentice chef and kitchen runner. Eliot acted as sommelier, of course. Alice’s contribution was to stop reading long enough to eat.

Janet dressed the set: she formulated the night’s dress code, chose the music, and hand-wrote and illustrated amazingly beautiful one-off menus. She also confabulated various surreal and sometimes controversial centerpieces. The theme of tonight’s party was Miscegenation, and Janet had promised — over objections aesthetic, moral, and ornithological — to deliver Leda and the Swan staged as a pair of magically animated ice sculptures. They would copulate until they melted.

As with all such evenings, the cleverness of the conceit became annoying somewhere around the middle of the afternoon before the party actually started. Quentin had found a grass skirt at an antique store, which he planned to pair with a tuxedo shirt and jacket, but the skirt was so scratchy that he gave up on it. He couldn’t think of another idea, so he spent the rest of the afternoon brooding and dodging Josh, who had spent the past week researching recipes that included violently disparate ingredients wedded together — sweet and savory, black and white, frozen and molten, Eastern and Western — and was now frantically slamming oven and cabinet doors and making him taste things and sniping at him over the pastry island. Alice arrived at five thirty, and Quentin and Josh both dodged her as well. By the time the party started everybody was drunk and starving and irritable.

But then, as sometimes happens with dinner parties, everything became mysteriously, spontaneously perfect again. The fabric knitted itself back together. The day before, Josh, who by this time had shaved off his beard (“It’s like taking care of a damn pet”), announced that he was bringing a date, which put added pressure on everybody to get their shit together. As the sun set over the Hudson, and sunbeams tinted a delicate rose by their passage through the atmosphere over New Jersey lanced through the apartment’s huge common room, and Eliot handed around Lillet cocktails (Lillet and champagne layered over a velvet hammer of vodka) in chilled martini glasses, and Quentin served miniature sweet-and-sour lobster rolls, everybody suddenly seemed — or maybe they actually were? — wise and funny and good-looking.

Josh had refused to reveal the identity of his date in advance, so when the elevator doors opened — they had the entire floor — Quentin had no idea that he would recognize her: it was the girl from Luxembourg, the curly-haired captain of the European team that had administered the deathblow to his welters career. It turned out (they told the story collaboratively, a set piece they’d evidently been working on) that Josh had bumped into her in a subway station where she was trying to bewitch a vending machine into adding money to her Metrocard. Her name was Anaïs, and she wore a pair of snakeskin pants so ravishing that nobody asked her what if anything they had to do with the theme. She had blond ringlets and a tiny pointy nose, and Josh was obviously besotted with her. So was Quentin. He felt a wild pang of jealousy.

He barely talked to Alice all night anyway, what with ducking in and out of the kitchen warming and plating and serving things. By the time he emerged with the entrées — pork chops dusted with bitter chocolate — it was dark, and Richard was making a speech about magical theory. The wine and the food and the music and the candles were almost enough to make what he was saying seem interesting.

Richard, of course, was the mysterious stranger who turned up with the other former Physical Kids on graduation day. He was a one-time Physical Kid, too, of the generation that preceded Eliot and Josh and Janet, and of them all he was the only one who had actually entered the world of respectable professional wizardry. Richard was tall, with a big head, dark hair, square shoulders, and a big square chin, and he was handsome in a Frankensteinian way. He was friendly enough to Quentin — firm handshake, lots of eye contact with his big, dark eyes. In conversation he liked to address Quentin directly as “Quentin” a lot, which made him feel kind of like they were having a job interview. Richard was employed by the trust that managed the collective financial assets of the magical community, which were vast. He was, in a quiet way, an observant Christian. They were rare among magicians.

Quentin tried to like Richard, since everybody else did, and it would just be simpler. But he was so damn earnest. He wasn’t stupid, but he completely lacked any sense of humor — jokes derailed him, so that the whole conversation had to stop while somebody, usually Janet, explained what everybody else was laughing at, and Richard knitted his thick Vulcan eyebrows in consternation at his companions’ merely human foibles. And Janet, who could usually be counted on to ruthlessly flense anybody who made the mistake of taking anything seriously, Janet waited on Richard hand and foot! It annoyed Quentin to think that she might look up to Richard the same way he had once looked up to the older Physical Kids. He had the definite sense that Janet must have slept with Richard once or twice back at Brakebills. It was entirely possible that they slept together once in a while now.

“Magic,” Richard announced slowly, flushed, “is the tools. Of the Maker.” He almost never drank, and two glasses of viognier had put him well over his limit. He looked first left and then right to make sure the whole table was listening. What a fatuous ass. “There’s no other way of looking at it. We are dealing with a scenario where there is a Person who built the house, and then He left.” He rapped the table with one hand to celebrate this triumph of reason. “And when He left, He left His tools lying around in the garage. Then we found them, and we picked them up, and we started making guesses about how they work. Now we’re learning to use them. And that’s magic.”

“There are so many things wrong with that I don’t even know where to start,” Quentin distinctly heard himself say.

“So? Start.”

Quentin put down the food he was carrying. He had no idea what he was about to say, but he was happy to be publicly contradicting Richard.

“Okay, well, first of all, there’s a huge scale problem. Nobody’s building universes here. We’re not even building galaxies or solar systems or planets. You need cranes and bulldozers to build a house. If there is a ‘Maker,’ which I frankly don’t see much evidence for, that’s what He had. What we’ve got are hand tools. Black and Decker. I don’t see how you get from there to what you’re talking about.”

“If it’s a question of scale,” Richard said, “I don’t see that as insurmountable. Maybe we’re just not”—he searched in his wine glass for the right metaphor—“we’re not plugging our tools into the right socket. Maybe there’s a much bigger socket—”

“I think if you’re talking about electricity,” Alice put in, “you have to talk about where energy comes from.”

That’s what I should have said, Quentin thought. Alice relished theoretical arguments as much as Richard, and she was much better at them.

“Any heating spell, you’re demonstrably drawing energy from one place and putting it in another. If somebody created the universe, they actually created energy from somewhere. They didn’t just push it around.”

“Fine, but if—”

“Plus, magic just doesn’t feel like a tool,” Alice went on. “Can you imagine how boring it would be if casting a spell were like turning on an electric drill? But it’s not. It’s irregular and beautiful. It’s not an artifact, it’s something else, something organic. It feels like a grown thing, not a made thing.”

She looked radiant in a silky black sheath that she knew he liked. Where had she been all night? He seemed to keep forgetting what a treasure she was.

“I bet it’s alien tech,” Josh said. “Or fourth-dimensional, like, weather or something. From a direction we can’t even see. Or we’re in some kind of really high-tech multiplayer video game.” He snapped his fingers. “So that’s why Eliot’s always humping my corpse.”

“Not necessarily,” Richard finally broke in. He was still processing Alice’s argument. “It’s not necessarily irregular. Or I would argue that it partakes of a higher regularity, a higher order, that we haven’t been allowed to see.”

“Yeah, that’s the answer.” Eliot was visibly drunk. “That’s the answer to everything. God save us from Christian magicians. You sound just like my parents. That is just exactly what my ignorant Christian parents would say. Just, if it doesn’t fit with your theory, well, that’s just because, oh, it actually does, but God is mysterious, so we can’t see it. Because we’re so sinful. That’s so fucking easy.”

He fished around in the remnants of Janet’s centerpiece with a long serving fork. Leda and the Swan were indistinguishable from each other now, two rounded Brancusi forms still gamely humping away as a tide of slush rose up to drown them.

“Well, heck, we oughta call ourselves the Meta-Physical Kids,” Josh said.

“And who the fuck is this ‘Maker’ you’re talking about?” Eliot snarled. He was getting vehement and not listening. “Are you talking about God? Because if you’re talking about God, just say God.”

“All right,” Richard said placidly. “Let’s say God.”

“Is this a moral God? Is He going to punish us for using His holy magic? For being bad little magicians? Is He [“She!” Janet shouted] going to come back and give us a good spanking because we got into the garage and played with Daddy’s power tools?

“Because that is just stupid. It’s just stupid, and it’s ignorant. No one gets punished for anything. We do whatever we want, and that’s all we do, and nobody stops us, and nobody cares.”

“If He left us His tools, He left them for a reason,” Richard said.

“And I suppose you know what that is.”

“What’s the next wine, Eliot?” Janet asked brightly. She always kept a cool head in difficult moments, maybe because she tended to be so out of control so much of the rest of the time. She looked unusually ravishing tonight, too, in a slinky red tunic that made it to her midthigh, barely, before it gave out. The kind of thing Alice would never wear. Couldn’t, not with her figure.

Both Richard and Eliot seemed to want to extend the fight by another round, but Eliot, with an effort of will, allowed himself to be diverted.

“An excellent question.” Eliot pressed his hands to his temples. “I am receiving a divine vision from the Almighty Maker of… an exquisitely expensive small-batch bourbon… which God — or I’m sorry, the Makeress—has commanded me to render unto you forthwith.”

He stood up unsteadily and lurched in the direction of the kitchen.

Quentin found him sitting red-faced and sweating on a stool by an open window. Icy air was pouring in, but Eliot didn’t seem to notice. He stared out unblinking at the city, which receded in perspectival lines of lights fanning out into the blackness. He said nothing. He didn’t move as Quentin helped Richard manage the individual baked Alaskas — the trick, Richard explained, in his well-practiced explaining tone, was to make sure the meringue, an excellent heat insulator, formed a complete seal over the ice-cream core — and Quentin wondered if they’d lost Eliot for the evening. It wouldn’t be the first time he drank himself out of contention. But a few minutes later he rallied and trailed them back into the dining room with a slender, oddly shaped bottle sloshing with amber-colored whiskey.

Things were winding down. Everyone was treading carefully so as not to trigger another outburst from Eliot or another sermon from Richard. Not long afterward Josh left to take Anaïs home, and Richard retired of his own accord, leaving Quentin, Janet, and Eliot to preside woozily over the empty bottles and crumpled napkins. One of the candles had charred a hole in the tablecloth. Where was Alice? Had she gone home? Or crashed in one of the spare rooms? He tried her cell. No answer.

Eliot had dragged a pair of ottomans over to the table. He reclined on them Roman-style, though they were too low, so he had to reach up to get his drink, and all Quentin could see of him was his groping hand. Janet lay down, too, spooned up contentedly behind him.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“Cheese,” Eliot said. “Do we have cheese? I need cheese.”

On cue Peggy Lee wandered through the opening verse of “Is That All There Is?” on the stereo. Which would be worse, Quentin wondered. If Richard was right, and there was an angry moral God, or if Eliot was right, and there was no point at all? If magic was created for a purpose, or if they could do whatever they wanted with it? Something like a panic attack came over him. They were really in trouble out here. There was nothing to hang on to. They couldn’t go on like this forever.

“There’s a Morbière in the kitchen,” he said. “It was supposed go with the theme — you know, the two layers, the morning milking, the night milking…”

“Yeah, yeah, we get it,” Janet said. “Fetch, Q. Go on.”

“I’ll go,” Eliot said, but instead of standing up he just rolled weakly off the couch and fell on the floor. His head made an ominously loud bonk as it hit the parquet.

But he was laughing as Quentin and Janet picked him up, Quentin getting his shoulders and Janet taking his feet, all thoughts of cheese extinguished, and maneuvered him out of the dining room and in the direction of his bedroom. On their way out the door Eliot’s head hit the door frame with another loud bonk, and then it was just too absolutely hilarious, and they all started laughing, and they laughed until they were completely useless, and Janet dropped his feet, and Quentin dropped his shoulders, and his head bonked on the floor again, and by this time it was a thousand times more funny than the first two times.

It took Quentin and Janet twenty minutes to get Eliot down the hall to his bedroom, lurching heavily against the walls with their arms around each other as if they were struggling down a flooded steerage-level corridor on the Titanic. The world had become smaller and somehow lighter — nothing meant anything, but what was meaning anyway but a burden that weighed them down? Eliot kept saying he was fine, and Quentin and Janet kept insisting they had to pick him up. Janet announced that she had peed herself, actually literally peed herself, she was laughing so hard. As they passed Richard’s door Eliot began a loud speech on the order of, “I am the mighty Maker, and I now bequeath to you My Holy Power Tools, because I am too fucking drunk to use them anymore, and good luck to you, because when I get up tomorrow they had better be exactly where I left them, exactly, even My… no, especially My belt sander, because I am going to be so fucking hungover tomorrow, anybody who fucks with My belt sander is going to get a taste of My belt. And it won’t taste good. At all.”

Finally they heaved him onto his bed and tried to make him drink water and pulled up the covers over his chest. It could have been the sheer domesticity of it — it was as if Eliot were their beloved son, whom they were lovingly tucking in for the night — or maybe it was just boredom, that powerful aphrodisiac, which had never been entirely out of sight even during the party’s best moments, but if he was honest with himself Quentin had known for at least twenty minutes, even as they were wrestling Eliot down the hall, that he was going to take Janet’s dress off as soon as he had half a chance.

Quentin woke up slowly the next morning. So slowly, over such a long time, that he was never really sure he’d been asleep at all. The bed felt unstable and disconcertingly floaty, and it was weird with two other naked people there. They kept bumping into each other and inadvertently touching and pulling away and then feeling self-conscious about having pulled away.

At first, in the first flush of it, he felt no regret about what happened. It was what you were supposed to do. He was living life to the fullest. Getting drunk and giving in to forbidden passions. That was the stuff of life. Wasn’t that the lesson of the foxes? If Alice had any blood in her veins she would have joined them! But no. She had to go to bed early. She was just like Richard. Well, welcome to life in the grown-up magical world, Alice. Magic wasn’t going to solve everything. Couldn’t she see that? Couldn’t she see that they were all dying, that everything was futile, that the only thing to do was to live and drink and fuck whatever and whomever while you still could? She herself had warned him of that, right there in her parents’ house in Illinois. And she’d been right!

And then after a while it seemed like a debatable thing — you could really make the case both ways, it was a coin-flip. And then it was an unfortunate lapse, an indiscretion, still within the bounds of the forgivable, but definitely a low point. Not a personal best. And then it was a major indiscretion, a bad mistake, and then, in the last act of the strip tease, it revealed itself to be what it truly was: a terrible, really awful, hurtful betrayal. At some point during this slow, incremental fall from grace Quentin became aware of Alice sitting at the foot of the bed, just her back, facing away from where he and Janet and Eliot lay, resting her chin in her hands. Periodically he imagined that it was just a dream, that she hadn’t been there at all. But to be honest he was pretty sure she had. She hadn’t looked like a figment. She’d been fully dressed. She must have been up for a while.

Around nine o’clock the room was full of morning light and Quentin couldn’t pretend to be asleep anymore. He sat up. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and he couldn’t remember where his shirt was. He wasn’t wearing anything else either. He would have given anything right then just to have a shirt and some underwear.

With his bare feet on the hardwood floor he felt strangely insubstantial. He couldn’t understand, couldn’t quite believe what he’d done. It just didn’t seem like him. Maybe Fogg was right, maybe magic had inhibited his moral development. Something must have. Maybe that was why he was such a shit. But there had to be a way he could make Alice understand how sorry he was. He dragged a blanket off Eliot’s bed — Janet stirred and complained sleepily, then went back to her dreamless, guiltless sleep — and wrapped it around himself and padded out into the silent apartment. The dinner table was like a shipwreck. The kitchen looked like a crime scene. Their little planet was ruined, and there was nowhere left for him to stand. Quentin thought about Professor Mayakovsky, how he’d reversed time, fixed the glass globe, brought the spider back to life. That would be a pretty nice thing to be able to do right about now.

When the elevator doors pinged open, Quentin thought it must be Josh coming back from a successful night with Anaïs. Instead it was Penny, pale and breathing hard from running and so excited he could barely contain himself.

PENNY’S STORY

He had a new mohawk, a proud iridescent green ruff an inch wide and three inches high, like the crest of a centurion’s helmet. He had also gained weight — he looked, oddly, younger and softer than he had at Brakebills: less like a lone Iroquois warrior and more like an overfed white suburban gangsta. But it was still Penny who was catching his breath on the Oriental rug and looking around at everything like a curious, judgmental rabbit. He wore a black leather jacket with chrome spikes on it, faded black jeans, and a grubby white T-shirt. Jesus, Quentin thought. Do they even have punks anymore? He must be the last one in New York.

Penny sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. Neither of them spoke. Quentin knew enough to know that Penny would never stoop to petty social pleasantries like saying hello and asking how he’d been and explaining what the hell he was doing here. Just this once Quentin was grateful. He didn’t know if he could face it.

“How’d you get in here?” Quentin croaked. His mouth was parched.

“Your doorman was asleep. You should really fire him.”

“It’s not my doorman.” He cleared his throat laboriously. “You must have cast something.”

“Just Cholmondeley’s Stealth.” Penny gave it the correct English pronunciation: Chumley’s.

“Eliot has a ward on this whole floor. I helped him set it up. Plus you need a key for the elevator.”

“We’ll need to set a new ward. I unpicked it on the way up.”

“Fucking — Okay, first, who’s we? We who?” Quentin said. At this moment his dearest wish would have been just a moment’s grace to immerse his face in a sinkful of warm water. And maybe to have somebody hold him under till he drowned. “And second, Penny, Jesus, it took us a whole weekend to put up that ward.”

He did a quick check: Penny was right, the defensive spells around the apartment were gone, so gone that they hadn’t even alerted him when they were going. Quentin couldn’t quite believe it. Penny must have taken down their ward from the outside, on the fly, from a standing start, in no more time than it took him to ride up ten floors in an elevator. Quentin kept his face blank — he didn’t want to give Penny the satisfaction of seeing how impressed he was.

“What about the key?”

Penny dug it out of his jacket pocket and tossed it to Quentin.

“Took it off your doorman.” He shrugged. “Kind of thing you learn on the street.”

Quentin was going to say something about how the “street” in question was probably not a street at all but a way or a lane located in some gated community, and anyway it wasn’t that hard to steal a key from a sleeping doorman when you were rocking Cholmondeley’s Stealth, but it just seemed so unimportant, and the words were just too heavy to get out of his mouth, like they were stone blocks in his stomach that he would have had to physically cough up and regurgitate. Fuck Penny, he was wasting time. He had to talk to Alice.

But by then people had heard Penny’s voice. Richard came shambling in from the kitchen where he’d been cleaning up, already awake and irritatingly showered and coiffed and groomed and pressed. Soon Janet came out of Eliot’s room, regally swathed in a comforter as if nothing whatsoever unusual had happened the night before. She squeaked when she saw Penny and disappeared into a bathroom.

Quentin realized he would have to get dressed and deal with this. Daylight was here, and with it had come the world of appearances and lies and acting like everything was fine. They were all going to make scrambled eggs and talk about how hungover they were and drink mimosas and Bloody Marys with extra Tabasco and black pepper and act like nothing was wrong, as if Quentin hadn’t just broken Alice’s heart for no better reason than that he was drunk and felt like it. And as unbelievable, as unthinkable as it seemed, they were going to listen to what Penny had to say.

He was a year behind Quentin and Alice, but by the end of his Fourth Year Penny had decided — he explained, once his audience was assembled and dressed and arranged around him in the living room with drinks and plates, standing or lying full length on couches or sitting cross-legged on the floor as their physical and emotional conditions permitted — that Brakebills had taught him everything it was going to teach him, so he dropped out and moved to a small town in Maine, a few miles north of Bar Harbor. The town was called Oslo, a seedy little resort village with a population that shrank by 80 percent in the off-season.

Penny chose Oslo — not even New Oslo, just Oslo, as if they thought they came up with it first — for its total lack of anything that might distract him. He arrived in mid-September and had no trouble renting a small farmhouse on the outskirts of town on a one-lane rural route. His land-lord was a retired schoolteacher who handed him the keys and then fled to his winter home in South Carolina. Penny’s nearest neighbors on either side were a congregationless one-shack Pentecostal church and an out-of-session summer camp for disturbed children. It was perfect. He had found his Walden.

He had everything he needed: silence; solitude; a U-haul trailer packed with an enviable library of magical codices, monographs, chapbooks, reference books, and broadsheets. He had a sturdy desk, a well-lit room, and a window with an unscenic view of an unmown backyard that offered no particular temptation to gaze out at it. He had a manageable, intriguingly dangerous research project that showed every sign of maturing into a genuinely interesting line of inquiry. He was in heaven.

But one afternoon a few weeks after he arrived, as he sat at his desk, his watery blue eyes trailing over words of consummate power written centuries ago with a pen made out of a hippogriff feather, Penny found his mind wandering. His large, usually lineless brow crinkled. Something was sapping his powers of concentration. Was he under attack, maybe by a rival researcher? Who would dare! He rubbed his eyes and shook his head and focused harder. But his attention continued to drift.

It turned out that Penny had discovered in himself a weakness, a flaw he never would have suspected himself of in a thousand years, an age to which, with a few careful modifications that he would look into when he had the time, he had every intention of living. The flaw was this: he was lonely.

The idea was outrageous. It was humiliating. He, Penny, was a stone-cold loner, a desperado. He was the Han Solo of Oslo. He knew and loved this about himself. He had spent four interminable years at Brakebills surrounded by idiots — except for Melanie, as he privately referred to Professor Van der Weghe — and now he was finally free of their incessant bullshit.

But now Penny found himself doing things for no reason. Unproductive things. He stood on a concrete dam near his farmhouse and threw down rocks to break up the thin crust of ice that formed on the outflow pond. He walked the mile and a half to the center of town and played video games in the windowless video arcade back behind the pharmacy, stuffing his mouth with stale gumballs from the gumball machine, alongside the no-hope, dead-eyed teenagers who hung out there and did the exact same thing. He made awkward, inexperienced eyes at the underage clerk at the Book Bin, which actually sold mostly stationery and greeting cards, not books. He confided his troubles to the miserable pod of four buffalo who lived on the buffalo farm out on the Bar Harbor road. He thought about climbing over the fence and petting one of their huge, wedge-shaped heads, but he didn’t quite have the nerve. They were big buffalo, and you never knew what they were thinking.

That was September. By October he had bought an herb-green Subaru Impreza and was making regular trips to a dance club in Bangor, swigging from a fifth of vodka on the passenger seat (since the club was all ages and didn’t serve alcohol) as he drove the forty-five minutes through trackless pine forests. Progress on his research project had dwindled to almost nothing, a couple of hours a day of listless leafing through old notes punctuated by generous breaks for online porn. It was humiliating.

The dance club in Bangor was open only on Friday and Saturday nights, and all he did there was shoot pool in a half-lit lounge area off the main dance floor with other creepy male loners like himself. But it was in that half-lit lounge on one of those Saturday nights that he spotted, to his secret consternation and even more secret relief and gratitude, a familiar face. It was a hard face to like, the face of an emaciated corpse that hadn’t been particularly attractive even in life, with a horrible pencil mustache on its upper lip. It belonged to the itinerant salesman Lovelady.

Lovelady was in the dance club in Bangor for approximately the same reason that Penny was there: he had run as far away as he could from the world of Brakebills and magic and then gotten lonely. Over a pitcher of Coors Light and a few games of pool, all of which Lovelady won handily — you don’t spend a lifetime trafficking in fake magical items without picking up a few real skills — they exchanged stories.

Lovelady depended heavily for his livelihood on luck and the gullibility of strangers. He spent most of his time trolling the world’s junk shops and estate sales the way longline fishermen troll the ocean. He accosted the emotionally vulnerable widows of recently deceased magicians and loitered on the outskirts of the conversations of his wisers and betters, keeping his eye out for anything that had value or that might plausibly be made to appear to have value. He had spent the past few months in northern England, in a studio apartment over a garage in a dreary suburb of Hull, trying his luck in antique stores and secondhand bookshops. His days were spent on buses and, when he was really down on his luck, on an ancient one-speed bicycle he borrowed without permission from the garage, which he wasn’t supposed to have access to.

At some point during his stay Lovelady began to receive unwanted attention. Normally he was desperate for anybody to pay attention to him, anybody at all, but this was very different. Strangers on buses stared fixedly at him for no reason. Pay phones rang when he walked by them. When he counted his change, he found only coins from the year he was born. When he watched TV, all he saw was an image of his own face, with a mysterious empty city in the background. Lovelady was neither learned nor particularly intelligent, but he survived on his instincts, and all his instincts told him that something was gravely amiss.

Alone in his apartment, sitting on his pea-soup-colored foam couch, Lovelady took stock. His best guess was this: he had inadvertently acquired an object of genuine power, and something out there coveted it. He was being hunted.

That same night he pulled up stakes. He abandoned his security deposit, donned a rattling array of charms and fetishes, took a bus to London and the Chunnel train to Paris, and from there crossed the Atlantic to throw himself on the already overtaxed mercy of Brakebills. He spent an exhausting afternoon combing the woods north of New York for the school’s familiar, comforting compound.

As the sun set through the trees, and the early winter chill gnawed at the tips of his ears, the horrifying truth sank in. He was in the right place, but Brakebills would no longer appear to him. Something, either him or his wares, was objectionable to the school’s defensive spells. Whatever he was carrying had rendered him untouchable.

That was when he cut and ran to Maine. It was ironic: for once in his life Lovelady had lucked into something genuinely powerful, a big score. But it was too much luck all at once. He was out of his league. He could have dumped his stock, all of it, right there in the middle of the frozen woods, but after a lifetime of greedy scrimping he didn’t quite have the gumption. It would have broken his avaricious heart. Instead he rented a Kozy Kabin in the woods at the off-season rate and conducted a thorough inventory.

He recognized it right away, mixed in with a jumbled consignment of grubby costume jewelry, in a plastic bag tied with a twisty. He didn’t know what it was, but its power was obvious even to his untrained eye.

He motioned Penny over to a corner, reached into the pocket of his seedy overcoat, which he hadn’t taken off all night, and laid the Baggie on a round particleboard bar table. He grinned his livid, discolored grin at Penny. The buttons were ordinary surplus vintage buttons: two holes, four holes, fake leather, fake tortoiseshell, big angular novelty knobs, and tiny bakelite pin-pricks. A few of them were just leftover beads. Penny’s eye immediately went to one of them, a flat, otherwise unremarkable pearlescent-white overcoat button about an inch across. It was heavier than it should have been. It practically vibrated with barely contained magical force.

He knew what it was. He knew better than to touch it.

“A magic button?” Janet said. “How weird. What was it?”

Her hair was a disaster, but she was obscenely relaxed, sipping coffee in an armchair, showing off her legs in a short silk bathrobe. She obviously felt triumphant, relishing her conquest, and by extension her victory over Alice. Quentin hated her at that moment.

“You really don’t know?” Penny said.

Quentin thought he had a guess, but he wasn’t going to say it out loud.

“What did you do?” he said instead.

“I made him come back with me to my house. That night. He wasn’t safe where he was, and at least I had a basic security setup. We called the woman who sold him the consignment, but she insisted the buttons weren’t in her records. The next day we went and got his stuff and drove to Boston, and I gave him eighty thousand dollars for it. He wouldn’t take cash, just gold and diamonds. I practically cleaned out a Harry Winston, but it was worth it. Then I told him to fuck off, and he did.”

“Eighty thousand dollars,” Eliot said, “wouldn’t clear out a display case at a Zales, let alone a Harry Winston.”

Penny ignored him.

“That was two days ago. That button attracts attention. I was staying at a hotel in Boston, but last night a fire two floors above me killed a cleaning lady. I never went back to my room. I took the Fung Wah bus from South Station. I had to walk here from Chinatown; whenever I got in a cab the engine would die.

“But what matters is that it’s real, and it’s ours.”

“Ours? Who are ‘we’?” Richard asked.

“You,” Quentin said coldly, “are a fucking nutjob.”

“Quentin gets it,” Penny said. “Anybody else?”

“Q, what is he talking about?”

A silent spear of pure, glittering ice entered Quentin’s heart. He hadn’t heard Alice come in. She stood at the edge of the circle, her hair unwashed and adrift, like a sleepy child who wakes in the middle of the night and appears like an uncertain spirit at the edge of a grown-up party.

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Quentin muttered. He couldn’t look at her. He was drowning in remorse. It almost made him angry at her, how much it hurt to look at her.

“Do you want to explain it or should I?” Penny said.

“You do it. I’m not going to be able to say it without laughing my head off.”

“Well, somebody say something, or I’m going back to bed,” Eliot said.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Penny said, gravely and grandly, “we are all going to Fillory.”

At the end of The Wandering Dune—Penny began; it was a lecture he had obviously rehearsed — Helen and Jane Chatwin receive a gift from High-bound, the captain of the rabbit-crewed clipper ship that the girls encounter in the desert. The gift is a little brass-bound oak chest containing five magical buttons, all different shapes and colors, one for each of the Chatwins, each with the power to take the wearer from Earth to Fillory and back again at will.

Everybody in the room had read the Fillory books, in Quentin’s case multiple times, but Penny rehearsed the rules anyway. The buttons don’t take you directly there: first they move you to a kind of in-between nether-world, an interdimensional layover, and from there you can make the leap to Fillory.

No one knows where this transitional world is. It may be an alternate plane of existence, or a place between planes, interleaved between them like a flower pressed between pages, or a master plane that contains all planes — the spine that gathers the pages and binds them together. To the naked eye it looks like a deserted city, an endless series of empty stone squares, but it serves as a kind of multidimensional switchboard. In the center of each square is a fountain. Step into one of them, the story goes, and you’ll be transported to another universe. There are hundreds of different squares, possibly an infinite number, and a corresponding number of alternate universes. The bunnies call this place the Neitherlands — because it’s neither here nor there — or sometimes just the City.

But the most important point, Penny said, is that at the end of The Wandering Dune Helen hid all the buttons somewhere in her aunt’s house in Cornwall. She felt they were too mechanical, they made the journey too easy. Their power was wrong. You shouldn’t be able to just go to Fillory whenever you wanted, like catching a bus, she argued. A trip to Fillory had to be earned, that had always been the way. It was a reward for the worthy, bestowed by the ram-gods Ember and Umber. The buttons were a perversion of this divine grace, a usurping of it. They broke the rules. Ember and Umber couldn’t control them. Fillory was fundamentally a religious fantasy, but the buttons weren’t religious at all, they were magical — they were just tools, with no values attached. You could use them for anything you wanted, good or evil. They were so magical they were practically technological.

So she hid them. Jane was inconsolable, understandably enough, and tore up half the property looking for them, but according to The Wandering Dune she never found them, and Plover never wrote any more books.

The Wandering Dune ends in the summer of 1917, or possibly 1918; because of the lack of real-world detail it’s impossible to date it precisely. After that the whereabouts of the buttons is unknown. But try a thought experiment, Penny suggested: How long could a box of buttons hidden by a twelve-year-old girl plausibly have stayed hidden? Ten years? Fifty? Nothing stays hidden forever. Wasn’t it possible — even inevitable — that in the decades that followed a maid or a real estate agent or another little girl would have found them again? And that from there they would have made their way onto the magical gray market?

“I always thought they were supposed to be lapel buttons,” Richard said. “Like a pin. Like ‘I Like Ike.’ ”

“Um, okay, so let’s back up for a second?” Quentin said cheerily. He was in the perfect mood for somebody, anybody besides himself, to make an ass of himself, and if that person could be Penny, and if Quentin could help him do it, then ever so much the better. “The Fillory books are fiction? Nothing you’re talking about actually happened?”

“Yes and no,” Penny said, surprisingly reasonably. “I’ll allow that much of Plover’s narrative might be fictional. Or fictionalized. But I’ve come to believe that the basic mechanics of interdimensional travel that Plover describes are quite real.”

“Really.” Quentin knew Penny well enough to know that he never bluffed, but he kept going anyway out of pigheadedness, urged on by his own inner vileness. “And what makes you think that?”

Penny regarded him with benevolent pity as he prepared the hammer blow.

“Well, I can certainly tell you that the Neitherlands are very real. I’ve spent most of the past three years there.”

No one had an answer to this. The room was silent. Quentin finally dared to glance over at Alice, but her face was a mask. It would almost have been better if she looked angry.

“I don’t know if you know this,” Penny said, “in fact I’m pretty sure you don’t, but I did most of my work at Brakebills on travel between alternate worlds. Or between planes, as we called them. Melanie and I.

“As far as we could determine it was an entirely new Discipline. Not that I was the first person ever to study the subject, but I was the first to have a special aptitude for it. My talents were so unusual that Melanie — Professor Van der Weghe — decided to pull me out of regular classes and give me my own course of study.

“The spellcraft was extremely involved, and I had to improvise a lot of it. I can tell you, a lot of what’s in the canon on this stuff is way off base. Way off base. They’re not seeing the whole picture, and the part of it they are seeing is by far the least important part. You’d think your friend Bigby would have some grasp of this stuff, but he has no idea. I was surprised, I really was. But there were still some issues I couldn’t resolve.”

“Such as,” Eliot said.

“Well, so far I’ve only been able to travel alone. I can transport my body and clothes and some small supplies, but nothing else and nobody else. Second, I can cross to the Neitherlands, but that’s it. I’m stuck there. The wider multiverse is closed to me.”

“You mean—?” said Janet. “Wait, so you’ve been to this amazing magical Interville but that’s it?” She actually looked underwhelmed. “I thought you were coming in here this badass multidimensional desperado and all.”

“No.” Penny could be defensive when he felt like he was under attack, but he was so autistically focused right now that even direct mockery bounced right off him. “My explorations have been limited to the City. It’s quite a rich environment in itself, an amazingly complex artifact, to a magically trained eye. There’s so little information in the books—The Wandering Dune is told through the eyes of a child, and it’s not clear to me that either Plover or the Chatwins had any particular command of the techniques they describe. I thought at first that the entire place was a kludge, a virtual environment that functioned as a kind of three-dimensional interface hacked onto a master interdimensional switchboard. Not that it’s much of an interface. A maze of identical unlabeled squares? How much help is that? But it was all I could think of.

“The thing is, the more I study it, the more I think it’s exactly the opposite — that our world has much less substance than the City, and what we experience as reality is really just a footnote to what goes on there. An epiphenomenon.

“But now that we have the button”—he patted his jeans pocket—“we’ll learn so much more. We’ll go so much further.”

“Have you tried it?” Richard asked.

Penny hesitated. For somebody who so obviously wanted to be hardcore, he was painfully transparent.

“Of course he hasn’t,” Quentin said, smelling blood. “He’s scared shit-less. He has no idea what that thing is, only that it’s dangerous as hell, and he wants one of us to be a guinea pig.”

“That’s absolutely not true!” Penny said. His ears were getting red. “An artifact on this level is best faced in the company of allies and observers! With the proper controls and safeguards! No reasonable magician—”

“Look. Penny.” Now Quentin could play the reasonable one, and he did it with maximum nastiness. “Slow down. You’ve gotten so far ahead of yourself, you can’t even see how you got there. You’ve seen an old city, and a bunch of pools and fountains, and you’ve got a button with some heavy-duty enchantments on it, and you’re looking for some framework to fit them all together, and you’ve latched on to this Fillory thing. But you’re grasping at straws. It’s crazy. You’re cramming a few chance data points into a story that has nothing to do with reality. You need to take a giant step back. Take a deep breath. You’re way off the reservation.”

Nobody spoke. The skepticism in the room was palpable. Quentin was winning, and he knew it. Penny looked around at his audience beseechingly, unable to believe that he was losing them.

Alice stepped forward into the empty circle around Penny.

“Quentin,” she said, “you have always been the most unbelievable pussy.”

Her voice broke only a little as she said it. She grabbed Quentin’s wrist with one hand and shoved the other one into the left-hand pocket of Penny’s baggy black jeans. She fumbled for an instant.

Then they vanished together.

THE NEITHERLANDS

Quentin was swimming. Or he could have been swimming, but in fact he was just floating. It was dark, and his body was weightless, suspended in chilly water. His testicles shrank in on themselves away from the cold. Wavering, heatless sunbeams lanced down through the darkness.

After the first shock the coolness of the water, combined with the weightlessness, felt indescribably good to his dried-out, feverish, unshowered, hungover body. He could have thrashed and panicked, but instead he just let himself hang there, arms out in a dead man’s float. Whatever was coming next would come. He opened his eyes, and the water bathed them in moist healing chill. He closed them again. There was nothing to see.

It was a glorious relief. The numbness of it was just magnificent. At the moment when it had been at its most intolerably painful, the world, normally so unreliable and insensitive in these matters, had done him the favor of vanishing completely.

Granted, he would need air at some point. He would look into that in due course. As bad as things were, drowning would still be a hasty course of action. For now all he wanted was to stay here forever, hanging neutrally buoyant in the amniotic void, neither in the world nor out of it, neither dead nor alive.

But an iron manacle was clamped around his wrist. It was Alice’s hand, and it was pulling him upward ruthlessly. She wouldn’t let him be. Reluctantly, he joined her in kicking toward the surface. Their heads broke water at the same moment.

They were in the center of a still, hushed, empty city square, treading water in the round pool of a fountain. It was absolutely silent: no wind, no birds, no insects. Broad paving stones stretched away in all directions, clean and bare as if they’d just been swept. On all four sides of the square stood a row of stone buildings. They gave off an impression of indescribable age — they weren’t decrepit, but they’d been lived in. They looked vaguely Italianate; they could have been in Rome, or Venice. But they weren’t.

The sky was low and overcast, and a light rain was falling, almost mist. The droplets dimpled the still surface of the water, which made its way into the pool from the overflowing bowl of a giant bronze lotus flower. The square had the air of a place that had been hastily abandoned, five minutes ago or five centuries, it was impossible to tell.

Quentin treaded water for a minute, then took one long breaststroke over to the stone lip. The pool was only about fifteen feet across, and the rim was scarred and pocked: old limestone. Bracing himself with both hands, he heaved himself up and and flopped out of the water onto dry land.

“Jesus,” he whispered, panting. “Fucking Penny. It is real.”

It wasn’t just because he hated Penny. He really hadn’t thought it was true. But now here they were in the City. This was it, the actual Neitherlands, or something that looked uncannily like them. It was unbelievable. The most naïve, most blissfully happy-sappy dream of his childhood was true. God, he’d been so wrong about everything.

He took a deep breath, then another. It was like white light flooding through him. He didn’t know he could be this happy. Everything that was weighing him down — Janet, Alice, Penny, everything — was suddenly insubstantial by comparison. If the City was real, then Fillory could be real, too. Last night had been a disaster, an apocalypse, but this was so much more important. It was almost funny now. There was so much joy ahead of them.

He turned to Alice. “This is exactly—”

Her fist caught him smack in his left eye. She hit like a girl, without any weight behind it, but he hadn’t seen it coming to roll with it. The left half of the world flashed white.

He bent over, half blind, the heel of his hand over his eye. She kicked him in the shins, one and then the other, with dismaying accuracy.

“Asshole! You asshole!”

Alice’s face was pale. Her teeth were chattering.

“You bastard. You fucking coward.”

“Alice,” he managed. “Alice, I’m sorry. But listen… look—” He tried to point at the world around them while also verifying that his cornea was still intact.

“Don’t you fucking speak to me!” She slapped wildly at his head and shoulders with both hands so that he ducked and put up his arms. “Don’t you even dare talk to me, you whore! You fucking whore!”

He staggered a few steps away across the stone, trying to escape, his sopping wet clothes flapping, but she followed him like a swarm of bees. Their voices sounded small and empty in the echoless square.

“Alice! Alice!” His orbital ridge was a ring of fire. “Forget about all that for a second! Just for a second!” She’d still been holding the button in her fist when she clocked him. It must be a lot heavier than it looked. “You don’t understand. It was just… everything—” There was a right way to say this. “I got confused. Life just seemed so empty — I mean out there — it’s like what you said, we have to live while we can. Or that’s what I thought. But it got out of control. It just got out of control.” Why was he talking in clichés? Get to the point. He definitely had one. “We were all just so drunk—”

“Really. Too drunk to fuck?” She had him there. “I could kill you. Do you understand that?” Her face was terrible. There were two white-hot points on her flushed cheeks. “I could burn you to nothing right where you stand. I’m stronger than you. Nothing you could do would stop me.”

“Listen, Alice.” He had to stop her from talking. “I know it’s bad. It’s very, very bad. And I’m so sorry. You’ll never know how sorry. You have to believe me. But it’s so important that you understand!”

“What are you, a child? You got confused? Why didn’t you just end it, Quentin? You obviously lost interest a long time ago. You really are a child, aren’t you? You’re obviously not enough of a man to have a real relationship. You’re not even enough of a man to end a real relationship. Do I have to do absolutely everything for you?

“Or you know what it is? You hate yourself so much, you’ll hurt anybody who loves you. That’s it, isn’t it? Just to get even with them for loving you. I never saw that before now.”

She stopped at this, shaking her head, lost in a dream of disbelief. Her own words had brought her up short. In the silence the fact that he had cheated on her, and with Janet of all people, hit her all over again, as fully as it had the first time, two hours ago. Quentin could see it: it was like she’d been shot in the stomach.

She held up her hand, palm out, like she was shielding her eyes from his monstrous face. A lock of wet hair was plastered to her cheek. She was gasping for breath. Her lips had gone pale. But they kept moving.

“Was it worth it?” she said. “You always wanted her, you think I didn’t see that? You think I’m stupid? Answer me: Do you think I’m stupid? Just tell me! I really want to know if you think I’m stupid!”

She ran at him and slapped his face. He took the full force of the blow.

“No, I don’t think you’re stupid, Alice.” Quentin felt like a boxer who was knocked out standing, out on his feet, crosses for eyes, just wishing to God that he could fall down. She was right, a thousand times right, but if he could just make her see what he saw — if she could only put things in proper perspective. Fucking women. She was walking away now, toward one of the alleys that led to another square, leaving a trail of damp squashing foot prints behind her. “But will you please look around you?” He was begging, trailing after her, his voice ragged with exhaustion. “Will you please acknowledge for a second that something more important than who stuck what body part where is going on around you?”

She wasn’t listening, or maybe she was just determined to say what she was going to say.

“You know,” she said, almost conversationally, crossing into the next square, “I bet you actually thought fucking her was going to make you happy. You just go from one thing to the next, don’t you, and you think it’s going to make you happy. Brakebills didn’t. I didn’t. Did you really think Janet would? It’s just another fantasy, Quentin.”

She stopped and hugged her arms over her midsection, like the pain was a gastric ulcer, and sobbed bitterly. Her wet clothes clung to her; a little pool was forming around her. He wanted to comfort her, but he didn’t dare touch her. The stillness of the square was almost tangible around them. The Fillory books had described them as all exactly identical, but he could see they weren’t, far from it. They shared the same crypto-Italian style, but this one had a colonnade on one side, and the fountain in the center was rectangular, not round like the one they’d come in through. At one end a white marble face vomited water into it.

Footsteps on stone. Quentin thought he would have welcomed any interruption, anything, especially if it was carnivorous and would eat him alive.

“Kind of a reunion, isn’t it?”

Penny came stepping briskly across the flagstones toward them. The gray facade of a stone piazza loomed above them, with heraldic inlays: an anchor and three flames. Penny looked as happy and relaxed as Quentin had ever seen him. He was in his element and glowing with pride. His clothes were dry.

“Sorry. I’ve spent so much time here, but I’ve never had anybody to show it to. You wouldn’t think that would matter, but it does. When I first came through there was a corpse lying right there on the ground. Right over there.”

He pointed like a campus tour guide.

“Human, or close to it, anyway. Maybe Maori, he had a tattoo on his face. He could only have been dead a few days. He must have gotten trapped here — came in, but the pools wouldn’t let him out somehow. I think he died of starvation. The next time I came the body was gone.”

Penny studied their two faces and took in the situation for the first time: Alice’s tears, Quentin’s rapidly darkening black eye, their toxic body language.

“Oh.” His face softened slightly. He made a gesture, and suddenly their clothes were warm and dry and pressed, too. “Look, you have to forget about all that stuff here. This place can be dangerous if you’re not paying attention. I’ll give you an example: Which way would you go to get back to our home square?”

Alice and Quentin looked around obediently, Penny’s reluctant students. In their running fight they had cut an angle through the second square into a third. Or a fourth? Their footprints had already faded. There was an alley on each side of the square, and through each alley you could catch a glimpse of other irregular alleys and fountains and squares, more and more, diminishing to infinity. It was like a trick with mirrors. The sun was hidden, if there even was a sun. Penny was right: they had no idea which one led back to Earth, or even which general direction they’d come from.

“Don’t worry, I marked it. You only came about a quarter mile. One up and one over.” Penny pointed in exactly the opposite direction Quentin would have guessed. “In the book they just wander at random, and it always comes out all right, but we have to be more careful. I use orange spray paint to mark a path. I have to do it fresh every time I come here. The paint disappears.”

Penny headed back in the direction he’d pointed. Tentatively, without looking at each other, Quentin and Alice fell in behind him. Their clothes were getting damp all over again from the rain.

“I have strict operating procedures when I’m here. There are no directions, so I’ve had to invent new ones. I named them after the buildings in the Earth square, one for each side: palace, villa, tower, church. Can’t be a real church, but that’s what it looks like. This is churchward, the way we’re going now.”

They were back at the fountain, which Penny had circled with big sloppy X’s of fluorescent orange paint. A little way off there was a crude shelter, a tarp with a cot and a table underneath. Quentin wondered how he’d missed it before.

“I set up a base camp here for a while, with food and water and books.” He was so excited, like a rich, unpopular kid the first time he brings home friends to see his fancy toys. He didn’t even notice that Quentin and Alice weren’t saying anything. “I always thought it would be Melanie who came here the first time, but she could never quite work the spells. I tried to teach her, but she’s not quite strong enough. Almost, though. In a way I’m happy it’s you guys. You know you were the only friends I ever had at Brakebills?”

Penny shook his head as if there was something amazing about the fact that more people didn’t like him. Only twelve hours ago, Quentin thought, he and Alice would have barely been able to keep from cracking up with conspiratorial laughter at the suggestion that they had ever been friends with Penny.

“Oh, I almost forgot: no light spells here. They go crazy. When I first came here, I tried to do a basic illumination. I couldn’t see for two hours afterward. It’s like the air here is hyperoxygenated, only with magic. One spark and everything goes up.”

There were two stone steps leading up to the fountain. Quentin sat down on the top one and leaned his back against the rim. The water looked unnaturally black, like ink. There was no point in fighting anymore. He would just sit here and listen to Penny talk.

“You wouldn’t believe how far I’ve walked in this place. Hundreds of miles! Way farther than the Chatwins ever went. Once I saw a fountain that had overflowed like a plugged-up toilet and flooded its square a foot deep, and half the squares around it. Twice I’ve seen ones that were capped. Sealed over with a bronze cover like a well, like they were keeping people out. Or in. Once I found fragments of white marble on the pavement. I think it was a broken sculpture. I tried to piece it back together, to see what it was a statue of, but I never could.

“You can’t get into the buildings. I’ve tried every way you can think of. Lock picks. Sledgehammers. Once I brought an acetylene cutting torch. And the windows are too dark to see in, but once I brought a flashlight — you know, one of those high-intensity rescue flashlights, that the Coast Guard uses? When I turned it all the way up I could see inside, just a little bit.

“I’ll tell you something: they’re full of books. Whatever they look like on the outside, on the inside every one of these buildings is really a library.”

Quentin had no idea how long they’d been there, but it was a while. Hours maybe. They’d walked through square after square, like lost tourists, the three of them. Everything they saw shared a common style, and the same weathered, ancient look, but nothing ever quite repeated. Quentin and Alice couldn’t look at each other, but they couldn’t resist the seductions of this grand, melancholy place either. At least the rain had let up.

They passed through a tiny square, a quarter the size of the others and paved in cobblestones, where if they stood in the center it seemed like they could hear the ocean, the breaking and withdrawing of waves. In another square Penny pointed out a window with ghostly scorch marks above it, as if it had been the scene of a fire. Quentin wondered who had built this place, and where they’d gone. What had happened here?

Penny described in great technical detail his elaborate but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to rappel up the side of one of the buildings to get a view above the rooftops. The one time he’d managed to secure a line, on a piece of decorative masonry, he’d been overcome by dizziness halfway up, and when he recovered he found himself turned around, rappeling down the same wall he’d been trying to ascend.

At different times all three of them saw, in the farthest possible distance, a verdant square that seemed to contain a garden, with rows of what might have been lime trees in it. But they could never reach it — as they approached it always lost itself in the shifting perspectives of the alleyways, which were slightly out of alignment with one another.

“We should get back,” Alice said finally. Her voice sounded dead. It was the first time she’d spoken since she screamed at him.

“Why?” Penny asked. He was having the time of his life. He must have been terribly lonely here, Quentin thought. “It doesn’t matter how much time we spend here, you know. No time passes on Earth. To the others it’ll be like we popped out and popped right back, just like that, bing-bang. They won’t even have time to be surprised. I spent a whole semester here once and nobody noticed.”

“I’m sure we wouldn’t have noticed anyway,” Quentin said, because he knew Penny would ignore him.

“I’m actually probably a year or so older than you guys, subjectively, because of all the time I spent here. I should have kept closer track.”

“Penny, what are we doing here?”

Penny looked puzzled.

“Isn’t it obvious? Quentin, we’re going to Fillory. We have to. This is going to change everything.”

“Okay. Okay.” Something nagged at him about this, and he was going to put it into words. He had to force his weary brain to grind out thoughts. “Penny, we have to slow down. Look at the big picture. The Chatwins got to go to Fillory because they were chosen. By Ember and Umber, the magic sheep. Rams. They were there to do good, to fight the Watcherwoman, or whatever.”

Alice was nodding.

“They only got to go when something was going on,” she said. “The Watcherwoman, or the wandering dune, or that ticking watch thing in The Flying Forest. Or to find Martin. That was what Helen Chatwin was saying. We can’t just go barging in without an invitation. That’s why she hid the buttons in the first place — they were a mistake. Fillory wasn’t like the real world, it was a perfect universe where everything was organized for good. Ember and Umber are supposed to control the borders.

“But with the buttons anybody could get in. Random people who weren’t part of the story. Bad people. The buttons weren’t part of the logic of Fillory. They were a hole in the border, a loophole.”

The mere fact that Alice knew her Fillory lore cold, no hesitation, added another high-powered exponent to Quentin’s guilty, bankrupt longing for her. How could he have gotten so confused that he thought he wanted Janet instead of her?

Penny was nodding and rocking his whole body forward and backward semi-autistically.

“But you’re forgetting something, Alice. We’re not bad people.” The zeal light came on behind Penny’s eyes. “We’re the good guys. Has it occurred to you that maybe that’s why we found the button in the first place? Maybe this is it, we’re getting the call. Maybe Fillory needs us.”

He waited expectantly for a reaction.

“It’s thin, Penny,” Quentin said finally, weakly. “This is all really thin.”

“So what?” Penny stood up. “So. What. So what if Fillory doesn’t work out? Which it will? So we end up somewhere else. It’s another world, Quentin. It’s a million other worlds. The Neitherlands are the place where all worlds meet! Who knows what other imaginary universes might turn out to be real? All of human literature could just be a user’s guide to the multiverse! Once I marked off a hundred squares straight in one direction and never saw the edge of this place. We could explore for the rest of our lives and never begin to map it all. This is it, Quentin! It’s the new frontier, the challenge of our generation and the next fifty generations after that!

“It all starts here, Quentin. With us. You just have to want it.

“What do you say?”

He actually stuck out his hand, as if he expected Quentin and Alice to put theirs on top of his, and they would all do a football cheer. Go team! Quentin was sorely tempted to leave him hanging, but finally he let Penny give him a limp low-five. His eye still throbbed.

“We should get back,” Alice said again. She looked exhausted. She couldn’t have slept much last night.

Alice produced the oddly weighty pearl button from her pocket. It looked ridiculous — it had sounded reasonable enough in the books, but that was the books, and the Chatwins had used the buttons only the one time. In real life it was like they were playing some children’s game. It was a little kid’s idea of a magical object. Though what did you expect from a bunch of talking bunnies?

Back in their home square they lined up on the edge of the fountain, holding hands, balancing precariously on the rim. The prospect of getting wet again was unspeakably depressing. In a corner of the square Quentin saw that a sapling had broken its way up through one of the paving stones from below. It was gnarled and bent, twisted almost into the shape of a helix, but it was alive. It made him wonder what had been paved over to build the City, and what would be there if it should ever fall. Had there been woods here? Would there be again? This too shall pass.

Alice stood on Penny’s other side so she wouldn’t have to touch Quentin. They stepped off the edge together, right foot first, in sync.

The crossing was different this time. They fell down through the water like it was air, then through darkness, then it was like they were falling out of the sky, down toward Manhattan on a gray Friday morning in winter — brown parks, gray buildings, yellow taxis waiting on stripy white cross-walks, black rivers studded with tugboats and barges — down through the gray roof and into the living room where Janet and Eliot and Richard were still caught in mid-double take, as if Alice had just now grabbed the button in Penny’s pocket, as if the past three hours hadn’t even happened.

“Alice!” Janet said gleefully. “Get your hand out of Penny’s pants!”

UPSTATE

Of course after that everybody had to go. They barely even said anything about Quentin’s swollen eye. (“The natives were restless,” he ad-libbed dryly.) Moments after he and Alice returned Josh came in — he’d spent the night with Anaïs after all — and they had to tell him the whole story all over again. Then they went through in threes. Josh went through with Penny and Richard. Penny took Janet and Eliot through. Josh called Anaïs and made her come over, and she went through with him and Penny.

Of them all only Janet had a bad reaction. The moment they surfaced, apparently, she heaved and threw up her breakfast right into the cold, clear magical water. Then she panicked. Eliot came back with a dead-on impression of the frantic way she’d clutched Penny’s arm and said:

“Button! Button now!”

Quentin was unmoved by her discomfort. She was a vampire, he thought. She preyed on other people’s healthy love and made it sick and crippled.

The mood in the room was serious and sober. Everybody gave each other long, searching looks heavy with significance. Nobody could seem to put into words how important it was, but they all agreed that this was a major thing. Major. And it had to be their thing, for now at least, they had to contain it. Nobody else could know. At Penny’s insistence they sat down in a big circle on the rug in the living room and rewove the wards on the apartment, right then and there, working together. Richard’s taste for authority, which so often made his presence all but unendurable, turned out to come in handy now. He directed the group casting in an efficient, businesslike fashion, like a seasoned conductor leading a chamber orchestra through a difficult passage of Bartók.

It took twenty minutes to finish the spell, and then ten more to add some fancy extra defensive and concealment layers — prudent, given the level of interest the button was evidently attracting in the at-large magical ecosystem. When they were done, when everything was checked out and double-checked, a hush settled over the room. They all sat still and just let the magnitude of what was happening here marinate in their minds. Josh rose quietly and went to the kitchen to make sandwiches for lunch. Eliot threw open a window and lit a cigarette. Janet regarded Quentin with cool amusement.

Quentin lay back on the rug and stared up at the ceiling. He needed sleep, but this was no time for sleep. Wild emotions competed for possession of his brain, like rival armies taking and retaking the same hill: excitement, remorse, anticipation, foreboding, grief, anger. He tried to focus on Fillory, to make the good feeling come back. This would change everything. Yes, his universe had just expanded times a million, but Fillory was the key to it all. That creeping, infectious sense of futility that had been incubating in his brain even since before graduation had met its magic bullet. Alice didn’t see it yet, but she would. This was what they’d been waiting for. This is what her parents had never found. A bleary grin kept smearing itself across his face, and the years fell away from him like layers of dead skin. They weren’t wasted years exactly, he could never say that, but they were years in which, in spite of all his amazing gifts, he’d been conscious of somehow not quite getting the gift he wanted. Enough to get by on, maybe. Sure. But this, this was everything. Now the present had a purpose, and the future had a purpose, and even the past, their whole lives, retroactively, had meaning. Now they knew what it was for.

If only it hadn’t happened now. If Penny could just have shown up a day earlier. Fucking Penny. Everything had been completely ruined and then completely redeemed in such rapid succession that he couldn’t tell which state ultimately applied. But if you looked at it a certain way, what happened between him and Janet wasn’t about him and Janet at all, or even him and Alice. It was a symptom of the sick, empty world they were all in together. And now they had the medicine. The sick world was about to be healed.

The others stayed sitting on the floor, leaning back on their elbows, lounging with their backs against the couch, glancing at one another every once in a while and breaking out in incredulous giggles. It was like they were stoned. Quentin wondered if they were feeling what he was feeling. This was what they’d been waiting for, too, without knowing it, he thought. The thing that was going to save them from the ennui and depression and meaningless busywork that had been stalking them ever since graduation, with its stale, alcoholic breath. It was finally here, and not a moment too soon. They couldn’t go on like this, and now they wouldn’t have to.

It was Eliot who finally took control of the situation. He almost seemed like his old self again. Calendars were cleared. Nobody had any serious obligations pending, not compared to this, nothing that couldn’t be delayed or sicked out of or blatantly welched on. He clapped his hands and gave orders, and everybody seemed to enjoy being serious and efficient for a change.

Nobody knew Anaïs especially well — not even Josh, really — but she turned out to be a highly useful individual. Her circle of acquaintance included somebody who knew somebody who owned a place upstate, a comfortable old farmhouse on a hundred acres, somewhere private enough and defensible enough to use as a staging area for whatever it was they were going to do next. And that first somebody was also a magician senior enough to open a portal to get them there. She would come by later that afternoon, as soon as the Nets game was over.

They had to do it on the roof, because the very effective and thorough triple-triple wards they’d just that morning set up (and were now about to abandon) prevented any magical transport directly in or out of the apartment. By five thirty that afternoon they were looking out over the crowded cocktail-tray skyline of lower Manhattan. No one else was up there in winter. The roof was littered with windblown, overturned plastic lawn furniture and char-encrusted barbecue implements. A lonely wind chime burbled to itself from the eaves of a utility shed.

They hugged themselves against the cold and scuffed the gravel with their feet as they watched a hale, gray-haired Belgian sorceress with nicotine-stained fingers and a rather sinister wicker fetish on a string around her neck pull open the portal. It was a five-sided portal, the bottom edge running parallel to the ground, and its vertices shed tiny sputtering actinic blue-white sparks — a purely cosmetic touch, Quentin suspected, but they gave the scene an air that was both melancholy and festive at the same time.

There was a sense of momentous occasion. They were embarking on a grand adventure on the spur of the moment. Isn’t that what it means to be alive, Goddamn it? When the portal was finished and stable, the gray-haired witch kissed Anaïs on both cheeks, said something in French, and left hurriedly, but not before Janet made her take a picture of all of them together with their trunks and bundles and bags full of groceries piled up behind them, using a disposable camera.

The group, all eight of them now, stepped through together onto a vast, frost-burnt front lawn. The serious mood on the roof was instantly broken as Janet and Anaïs and Josh raced one another inside and squealed and bounced on the sofas and ran around arguing over the bedrooms. Anaïs had been mostly right about the house: it was certainly large and comfortable, and at least a few bits of it were old. Apparently it was once a generously proportioned Colonial farmhouse, but somebody with progressive architectural ideas had gotten hold of it and remixed its old timber and fieldstone with glass and titanium and poured cement and added flat-screen TVs and a high-end audio system and an Aga range.

Alice went directly and silently up to the master bedroom, which took up almost half the third floor, and closed the door, glaring away any rival claimants with burning, red-rimmed eyes. Suddenly exhausted after his mostly sleepless night, followed by his magically extended day, Quentin found a small guest bedroom at the back of the house. Its hard, antiseptic twin bed felt like all he deserved.

It was dark when he woke up. The cool blue digits of the clock radio said 10:27. In the darkness they could have been phosphorescent squiggles on the side of a deep-sea fish. He couldn’t find the light switch, but his groping hands encountered the door to a small half bath and managed to turn on the light over the mirror. Quentin splashed water on his face and wandered out into the strange house.

He found the others, except for Alice and Penny, in the dining room, where they had already made and demolished a meal of heroic proportions, the remains of which lay spread out on a stupendous table that looked like it was built from the beams of the True Cross, handsomely varnished and nailed together with authentic iron spikes. Large pieces of modern art the color and texture of dried, crusted blood hung on the walls.

“Q!” they shouted.

“Where’s Alice?”

“Came and went,” Josh said. “What’s going on? You guys fighting or what?”

He shadowboxed a jab or two. He obviously didn’t know what had happened. Anaïs, sitting next to him, delivered a mock knockout punch to his stubbly chin. They were all drunk again, same as last night, same as every night. Nothing had changed.

“Seriously,” Janet said. “Did she give you that shiner? Seems like somebody’s always punching you in the face, Q.”

Her manner was as bright and toxic as ever, but her eyes were rimmed with red. Quentin wondered if she’d come out of last night’s holocaust quite as unscathed as he’d thought.

“It was Ember and Umber,” he said. “The magic rams. Didn’t Alice tell you? They punished me for being sinful.”

“Yeah?” Josh said. “Did you kick their woolly asses?”

“I turned the other cheek.” Quentin didn’t feel like talking, but he was hungry. He got a plate from the kitchen and sat down at the far end of the table and served himself leftovers.

“We were talking about what to do next,” Richard said. “Making up an actions list.”

“Right.” Josh pounded authoritatively on the heavy table. “Who’s got some action items for me? We need to enumerate our deliverables!”

“Food,” Richard said, straight-faced. “And if we’re really going to Fillory, we all need to reread all the books.”

“Gold,” Anaïs chipped in gamely. “And trade items. What do Fillorians want? Cigarettes?”

“We’re not going to Brezhnev-era Russia, Anaïs. Steel?”

“Gunpowder?”

“My God,” Eliot said. “Listen to you people. I am not going to be the man who brought the gun to Fillory.”

“We should bring overcoats,” Richard said. “Tents. Cold-weather gear. We have no idea what season it is there. We could be walking into deep winter.”

Yesterday — meaning before his nap — Fillory was going to make everything all right. Now it was hard to focus on it: it seemed like a dream again. Now the mess with Janet and Alice was the real thing. It would drag everything else down with it.

He pulled himself together with an effort.

“How long are we talking about going for?”

“A couple of days? Look, we can just come back if we forget something,” Eliot said. “With the button it’s a snap. We’ll just stay till it gets boring.”

“What should we do when we get there?”

“I think they’ll probably give us a quest,” Penny said. “That’s what always happened to the Chatwins.”

Heads turned. Penny was standing in the doorway in a T-shirt and sweatpants, blinking like an owl, looking like he’d just woken up, too.

“I don’t know if we can count on that, Penny.” For some reason it annoyed Quentin, how starry-eyed and optimistic Penny was being about this. “It’s not like the rams summoned us. It might not even be like the books. Maybe there never were any quests. Plover probably just put that stuff in so there would be a good story. Maybe we’ll just suck around Fillory like we’re sucking around here.”

“Don’t be a killjoy,” Josh said, “just because your girlfriend beats you up.”

Penny was shaking his head. “I just don’t see Plover coming up with all that stuff on his own. It’s not rational. He was a gay dry-cleaning magnate with a background in practical chemistry. He didn’t have a creative bone in his body. No way. It’s Occam’s razor. It’s much more likely that he was writing it as it happened.”

“So what do you think,” Eliot said, “we’re going to meet a damsel in distress?”

“We might. Not necessarily a damsel, but… you know, a nymph maybe. Or a dwarf, or a pegasus. You know, that needs help with something.” Everybody was laughing, but Penny kept on going. It was almost touching. “Seriously, it happens in the books, every time.”

Josh pushed a tiny doll glass of something clear and alcoholic in front of Quentin, and he took a sip. It was some kind of fiery fruit eau-de-vie, and it tasted like a vital nutrient that his body had been chronically deprived of his entire life.

“Sure, but real life’s not actually like that,” Quentin went on, fumbling after what he was sure was an important insight. “You don’t just go on fun adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You’re not going to be a character in a story, there’s nobody arranging everything for you. The real world just doesn’t work like that.”

“Maybe your world doesn’t, Earth man,” Josh said. He winked. “We’re not in your world anymore.”

“And I don’t want to turn this into a theological discussion,” Richard added, with towering dignity, “but there is room for disagreement on that score.”

“And even if you don’t believe that this world has a god,” Penny finished up, “you must admit that Fillory has one. Two even.”

“This does bring us back, albeit in an insane way, to what is actually a pretty reasonable question,” Eliot said. “Which is what do we do when we get there?”

“We should go after that magic flower,” Josh suggested. “You know, the one that when you smell it it automatically makes you happy? Remember that? That thing would be worth bank here.”

While nobody was watching, Janet caught Quentin’s eye and waggled her eyebrows and did something lewd with her tongue. Quentin eyed her back, unblinking. She was actually enjoying this, he thought. She’d sabotaged him and Alice, and she was loving it. Little montage flashes of last night — it couldn’t possibly have just been last night — cycled through his brain, snapshots that had stubbornly survived the merciful angel of alcoholic erasure. Everything about sex with Janet had been so different from Alice. The smell, the feel of her skin, her businesslike know-how. The shame and the fear had caught up with him even before it was over, before he came, but he hadn’t stopped.

And had Eliot really been awake for the whole thing? His brain dealt out a sloppy fan of mental Polaroids, out of sequence: an image of Janet kissing Eliot, of her hand working diligently between Eliot’s legs. Had she really been weeping? Had he kissed Eliot? A vivid sense memory of somebody else’s stubble, surprisingly scratchy, chafing his cheek and upper lip.

Good God, he thought wearily. What goes on.

He had reached the outer limits of what Fun, capital F, could do for him. The cost was way too high, the returns pitifully inadequate. His mind was dimly awakening, too late, to other things that were as important, or even more so. Poor Alice. He needed a hair shirt, or ashes, or a scourge — there should be some ritual that he could perform to show her how desperately sorry he was. He would do anything, if she would just tell him what to do.

He shoved the pictures back down wherever they came from, back into the mental shuffle, speeding them on their way with some more of that yummy eau-de-vie. An idea was germinating in his tired, bruised brain.

“We could find Martin Chatwin,” Richard volunteered. “The way the other children were always trying to.”

“I’d like to bring something back for Fogg,” Eliot said. “Something for the school. An artifact or something.”

“That’s it?” Josh said. “You’re going to Fillory to bring back an apple for teacher? God, you’re so unbelievably lame sometimes.”

Oddly, Eliot didn’t take the bait. This was affecting them all in different ways.

“Maybe we could find the Questing Beast,” Quentin said quietly.

“The what?” Josh wrinkled his forehead. No Fillory scholar he.

“From The Girl Who Told Time. Remember? The beast that can’t be caught. Helen chases it.”

“What do you do with it if you do catch it? Eat it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it leads you to treasure? Or gives you some secret wisdom? Or something?” He hadn’t thought this through completely. It had seemed important to the Chatwins, but now he couldn’t remember why.

“You never find out,” Penny said. “Not in the books. They never catch it, and Plover never mentions it again. It’s a good idea. But I was thinking, you know, maybe they’ll make us kings. Kings and queens. The way the Chatwins were.”

As soon as Penny said it, Quentin wondered why he hadn’t thought of it himself. It was so obvious. They’d be kings and queens. Of course they would. If the City was real, why not all the rest of it, even that? They could live in Castle Whitespire. Alice could be his queen.

God, he was agreeing with Penny. That was a danger sign if there ever was one.

“Huh.” Janet mulled this over, her ever-alert brain ticking over. She was actually taking it seriously, too. “Would we have to marry each other?”

“Not necessarily. The Chatwins didn’t. Then again, they were all siblings.”

“I don’t know,” said Anaïs. “It sounds like a big job, being queen. There is probably bureaucracy. Administration.”

“Lucrative though. Think of the perks.”

“If the books are even accurate,” Eliot said. “And if the thrones are vacant. That’s two big ifs. Plus there’s seven of us and only four thrones. Three people get left out.”

“I’ll tell you what we need,” Anaïs said. “We need war magic. Battle magic. Offense, defense. We need to be able to hurt people if we have to.”

Janet looked amused.

“Shit’s illegal, babe,” she said, obviously impressed despite herself. “You know that.”

“I don’t care if it is.” Anaïs shook her precious blond curls. “We need it. We have no idea what we will be seeing when we cross over. We have to be ready. Unless any of you big strong men knows how to use a sword?” There was silence, and she smirked. “Alors.”

“Did they teach you that stuff where you went?” Josh asked. He looked a little afraid of her.

“We are not so pure in Europe as you Americans, I guess.”

Penny was nodding. “Battle magic isn’t illegal in Fillory.”

“Out of the question,” Richard said crisply. “Do you realize the kind of heat you’d bring down on us? Who here besides me has dealt with the Magicians’ Court? Anybody?”

“We’re already in the shit, Richard,” Eliot said. “You think that button would be legal if the court knew about it? If you want out, get out now, but Anaïs is right. I’m not going over there with just my dick in my hand.”

“We can get a dispensation for small arms,” Richard went on primly. “There are precedents for that. I know the forms.”

“Guns?” Eliot made a sour face. “What is wrong with you? Fillory is a pristine society. Have you ever even watched Star Trek? This is basic Prime Directive stuff. We have a chance to experience a world that has not yet been fucked up by assholes. Do any of you get how important that is? Any of you?”

Quentin kept expecting Eliot to declare himself too cool for the whole Fillory project and start making snarky jokes about it, but he was turning out to be surprisingly focused and unironic about it. Quentin couldn’t remember the last time Eliot had been openly enthusiastic about anything. It was a relief to see that he could still admit that he cared about something.

“I do not want to be around Penny with a gun,” Janet said firmly.

“Look, Anaïs is right,” Eliot said. “We’ll work up some basic attack spells, just in case. Nothing too insane. We’ll just have a couple of aces in the hole. And we have those cacodemons in our backs, don’t forget. And the button.”

“And our dicks in our hands.” Anaïs giggled.

The next day Richard, Eliot, Janet, and Anaïs drove into Buffalo to shop for supplies; Janet, being from L.A., was the only one who had a driver’s license. Quentin, Josh, Alice, and Penny were supposed to be researching battle magic, but Alice wouldn’t speak to Quentin — he had knocked on her door that morning, but she wouldn’t come out — and the technicalities were beyond Josh, so it came down to Alice and Penny working together.

Soon the big dining room table was covered with books from Penny’s U-haul stash and sheets of butcher paper crawling with flow charts. They were deep into it. As the two biggest magic nerds of the group, Alice and Penny were completely absorbed in each other, speaking some ad hoc technical jargon they came up with on the fly, Penny scribbling reams of archaic notations and Alice nodding seriously over his shoulder and pointing. They were doing original work, building spells from scratch; it wasn’t fantastically difficult stuff, but any prior art in the area had been thoroughly suppressed.

Watching them work, Quentin was consumed with jealousy. Thank God it was Penny — anybody else and he would have been seriously suspicious. He and Josh spent the afternoon in the den with some beer and Smart Food watching cable on a flat-screen TV the size of a billboard. There had been no TV at Brakebills, or in their Manhattan apartment, and it felt exotic and forbidden.

Around five o’clock Eliot came and roused them.

“Come on,” he said. “You’re missing Penny’s big show.”

“How was Buffalo?”

“Like a vision of the apocalypse. We bought parkas and hunting knives.”

They trailed Eliot out to the backyard. Seeing him happy and excited and reasonably sober restored Quentin’s faith in the possibility that they were on the right track, that everything broken was fixable. He grabbed a scarf and a bizarre Russian hat with earflaps that he found in a closet.

The sun was setting behind the Adirondacks in the distance, cold and red and desolate through the haze. The others were grouped at the bottom of the lawn, which sloped down to a row of bare, decorative lindens. Penny was sighting down his arm at one of the trees while Alice paced off distance in long, even steps. She jogged over to Penny and they whispered, then she paced off the distance again. Janet stood to one side with Richard, looking adorable in a pink parka and a woolly watch cap.

“All right!” Penny called. “Stand back, everybody.”

“How much farther back can we stand?” Josh asked. Sitting on a broken white marble balustrade, a random architectural element dropped in by the landscaper, he took a nip from a bottle of schnapps and passed it to Eliot.

“Just so you’re standing back. Okay, fire in the hole.”

Like a sequined assistant, Alice stepped up to an end table on the green, placed an empty wine bottle on it, and stepped away.

Facing the bottle, Penny took a quick breath and spoke a rapid sequence of clipped syllables under his breath, ending with a one-handed flicking gesture. Something — a spray of three somethings, steely gray and tightly grouped — shot out of his fingertips, too fast to follow, and flickered across the lawn. Two of them missed, but one of them snapped the bottle’s neck off cleanly, leaving the base standing headlessly upright.

Penny grinned. There was scattered applause.

“We call it ‘Magic Missile,’ ” he said.

“Magic Missile, baby!” Josh’s breath steamed in the cold air. His face was radiant with excitement. “That’s straight up Dungeons & Dragons shit!”

Penny nodded.

“We actually based some of this on old D & D spells. There’s a lot of practical thinking in those books.”

Quentin wasn’t smiling. Wasn’t anybody going to say anything? This was dark magic. God knows he wasn’t a prude, but this was a spell meant to break up flesh, to physically wound. They were crossing so many lines it was hard to figure out where they were anymore. If they ever actually had to cast this stuff, it would already be too late.

“God, I hope we don’t have to use that,” was all he said out loud.

“Oh, come on, Quentina. We’re not looking for trouble. We just want to be ready if it comes.” Josh could hardly contain himself. “Dungeons & Dragons, motherfucker!”

Next Alice whisked the card table away so that Penny stood alone, facing the dark line of lindens. The others stood and sat scattered behind him, under the empty sunset sky. The sun was almost down now. Their noses were running and their ears were red, but the cold didn’t seem to bother Penny, who was still wearing only a T-shirt and sweatpants. They were really in the middle of nowhere. Quentin was used to the background blare and hum of Manhattan, and even at Brakebills there were so many people around, there had always been someone somewhere yelling or knocking something over or blowing something up. Here, when the wind wasn’t sighing moodily in the trees, there was nothing. The whole world was on mute.

He tied down the earflaps of his Russian hat with a string.

“If this doesn’t work—” Penny began.

“Just do it already!” Janet said. “It’s cold out here!”

Penny did a deep knee-bend and spat on the gray-brown grass. Then he executed a grotesque, wild-armed flailing movement, at odds with what Quentin had seen of his otherwise highly disciplined style. Violet light sputtered in his cupped hands in the darkness so that the bones in his fingers were visible through the skin. He shouted something and finished with an overarm pitching motion.

A small, dense, orange spark left Penny’s palm and flew across the grass, dead level. At first it looked absurdly inoffensive, silly, like a toy, or an insect. But as it sailed toward the trees it grew, blooming into a fiery sparking comet the size of a beach ball, veined and roiling and snapping. It was almost stately, spinning slowly backward as it moved through the cold dusk air. Shadows wound across the lawn, shifting with the fast-moving light source. The heat was intense; Quentin felt it on his face. When it hit a linden, the whole tree went up at once with a single loud crackling woof. A gout of flame ascended into the sky and vanished.

“Fireball!” Penny called out unnecessarily.

It was an instant bonfire. The tree burned fast and merrily. Sparks flew up impossibly high into the twilight sky. Janet whooped and jumped up and down and clapped her hands like a cheerleader. Penny smiled thinly and took a theatrical bow.

They stayed at the house upstate for a few more days, lounging around, grilling on the back patio, drinking up all the good wine, going through the DVD collection, all cramming into the hot tub and then not cleaning it afterward. The fact was, Quentin realized, after all the buildup, all the hasty preparation and rush-rush-rush, they were stalling, vamping, waiting for something to push them into pulling the trigger. They were so excited they didn’t see how terrified they were. And when he thought about all the happiness waiting for him in Fillory, Quentin almost felt like he didn’t deserve it. He wasn’t ready. Ember and Umber would never have summoned someone like him.

In the meantime Alice had somehow figured out a way of never being in the same room as Quentin at the same time. She’d developed a sixth sense about him — he’d catch a glimpse of her out a window, or a flash of her feet as she vanished upstairs, but that was as close as they came. It was almost like a game; the others played it, too. When he did spot her in the open — sitting up on the kitchen counter, kicking her legs and chatting with Josh, or hunched over the dining room table with Penny and his books, like everything was fine — he didn’t dare intrude. That would be against the rules of the game. Seeing her there, so close and at the same time so infinitely removed, was like looking through a doorway into another universe, a warm, sunny, tropical dimension that he had once inhabited, but from which he was now banished. Every night he left flowers outside her bedroom door.

It was a shame: he probably never even had to know what happened. He could easily have missed it. Though maybe they would have stayed there forever if he had. He stayed up late one night, playing cards with Josh and Eliot. Playing cards with magicians always degenerated into a meta-contest over who was better at warping the odds, so that practically every hand came up four aces against a couple of straight flushes. Quentin was, tentatively, feeling better. They were drinking grappa. The twisted knot of shame and regret in his chest that had been there since the night with Janet was gradually coming undone, or at least scarring over. It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t everything either. There was so much right between him and Alice. They could get past this.

Maybe it was time he helped her see that. He knew she wanted to. He’d screwed up, he was sorry, they would get past it. QED. They just needed to get it into perspective. She was probably just waiting for him to say it. He excused himself and headed up the stairs to the third floor, where the master bedroom was. Josh and Eliot gamely rooted him on his way:

“Q! Q! Q! Q!”

When he was almost at the top of the stairs, he stopped. Quentin would have known it anywhere, the sound that Alice made when she was having sex. Now here was a conundrum for his drunken mind to reflect on: she was making it now, but it wasn’t Quentin who was making her make it. He stared down at the burnt-orange natural-weave fibers of the runner that ran down the middle of the stairs. He could not be hearing that sound. It came in through his ears and made spots appear in his vision. His blood fizzed like a science experiment and turned to acid. The acid propagated through his body and made his arms and legs and brain burn. Then it made its way to his heart, like a deadly blood clot that had broken loose and was drifting free, bringing death with it. When it reached his heart, his heart turned white hot.

She was with Penny or Richard, obviously. He had just left Josh and Eliot, and they would never do that to him anyway. He walked stiff-legged back down the stairs and down the hall to Richard’s room and kicked open the door and slapped the light on. Richard was there in bed, alone. He sat bolt upright, blinking in an asinine Victorian nightshirt. Quentin turned off the light and slammed the door shut again.

Janet came out into the hall in pajamas, frowning.

“What’s going on?”

He shouldered roughly past her.

“Hey!” she yelled after him. “That hurt!”

Hurt? What did she know about hurt? He snapped on the lamp in Penny’s room. Penny’s bed was empty. He picked up the lamp and threw it on the floor. It flashed and died. Quentin had never felt like this before. It was kind of amazing: his anger was making him superpowered. He could do anything. There was literally nothing he could not do. Or almost. He tried to rip down Penny’s curtains, but they wouldn’t come, even when he hung on them with all his weight. Instead he opened the window and ripped the clothes off the bed and stuffed them out through it. Not bad, but not enough. He spiked the alarm clock, then started pulling books off the shelves.

Penny had a lot of books. It was going to take a while to get them all off the shelves. But that was okay, he had all night, and he had all the energy in the world. Wasn’t even sleepy. It was like he was on speed. Except that after a while it got harder to pull the books off the shelves because Josh and Richard were holding his arms. Quentin thrashed insanely, like a toddler having a tantrum. They dragged him out into the hall.

It was so stupid, really. So obvious. Certainly you couldn’t call it clever. He fucked Janet; she fucks Penny. They should be even now. But he’d been drunk! How did that make them even? He barely knew what he was doing! How did that make them even? And Penny — Jesus. He wished it had been Josh.

They confined him to the den, gave him the bottle of grappa and a stack of DVDs and figured he’d knock himself out. Josh stayed there to make sure Quentin didn’t try any magic, as worked up as he was, but he nodded off right away, his round cheek on the hard arm of the couch, like a sleepy apostle.

As for Quentin, sleep didn’t interest him right now. The pain was a falling feeling. It was a little like coming off the ecstasy, that long descent. He was like a cartoon character who falls off a building. Pow, he hits an awning, but he punches straight through it. Pow, he hits another one. And another one. Surely one of them will catch him and sproing him back up, or just fold up and embrace him like a canvas cradle, but it doesn’t, it’s just one flimsy busted awning after another. Down and down and down. After a while he longs to stop, even if it means hitting the sidewalk, but he doesn’t, he just keeps falling, down through awning after awning, deeper and deeper into the pain. Turtles all the way down.

Quentin didn’t bother with the DVDs, just flipped channels on the huge TV and slugged straight from the bottle until sunlight came bleeding up over the horizon, like more acid blood oozing out of his sick ruptured heart, which felt — not that anybody cared — like a rotten drum of biohazardous waste at the very bottom of a landfill, leaching poison into the groundwater, enough poison to kill an entire suburb full of innocent and unsuspecting children.

He never did fall asleep. The idea came over him around dawn, and he waited as long as he could, but it was just too damn good to keep to himself. He was like a kid on Christmas morning who couldn’t wait for the grown-ups to waken. Santa was here, and he was going to fix everything. At seven thirty, still half drunk, he busted out of the den and went down the hallways banging on doors. What the hell, he even climbed the stairs and kicked open Alice’s door, caught a glimpse of Penny’s bare white plump rump, which he didn’t really need to see. It made him wince and turn away. But it didn’t shut him up.

“Okay!” he was shouting. “People! Get up, get up, get up! It’s time! Today’s the day! People, people, people!”

He sang a verse of James’s stupid middle school song:

He was a cheerleader now, waving his pom-poms, jumping up and down, doing splits on the parquet, shouting as loud as he could.

“We! Are! Going! To!

“Fill!

“O!

“Reeeeeee!”