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 Quen tin. 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, retroac tively, 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.