“So you can’t . . .” Josh said, but he trailed off.
“But then—” Janet said. She couldn’t finish her sentence either. She’d been sure this was it. The answer, the end of the quest, at last. She’d been so sure.
The impulse came over Janet out of nowhere; nowhere was where she got a lot of her best impulses these days. It suddenly all linked up in her head: Umber had taken Martin’s humanity, and He made it all sound like a lark, like what else could He do? But Martin had become the Beast, the Beast had bitten off Penny’s hands and crushed Quentin’s collarbone and made Alice turn herself into a niffin. And he’d eaten that girl back in school, what was her name. That all went back to Umber.
She ripped one of her axes from its strap on her back and in the same motion clouted Umber in the head with it. She didn’t even have time to put an ice blade on it, it was just a cold steel spanner straight to the ram-jowls.
“Yah!”
Umber’s eyes went wide. She did it again, a lot harder this time, and His front knees buckled.
These crazy axes. She’d give the Foremost that, he hadn’t oversold them. They were everything he’d said they were and more. You could hit a god with them, and He would feel it.
Umber started to rise, shaking His long muzzle, befuddled more than anything else, and Janet hammered Him again, and again, and again, and His legs folded under Him and He sank down and lost consciousness. Then she hit Him once more, cracked Him right on His ear, knocked a tiny chip out of one of those big horns. Blue sparks flew.
“That’s for everything You did! And everything You didn’t do! You fucking jerk!”
“Janet!” Poppy said, losing her cool a bit for once. “Jesus!”
“Who cares? It’s not Him. He can’t help us. He doesn’t know anything.” Plus who knows when was the next time she’d get to beat down a god? Especially one who so obviously deserved it? Umber sprawled on His side, unconscious, the tip of His thick tongue poking out of His slack mouth.
“Loser.” She spat on Him. “You could never have been a king anyway. You’re too much of a pussy.”
The others just stared at her, and at the slumbering god, laid out on the putting-green grass under a tree on top of a hill in the Chankly Bore.
“That was for Alice,” she said. “And, you know, Penny’s hands. All that stuff.”
“No, we got it,” Josh said. “Message received.”
“We should go,” Poppy said.
But they didn’t, or not yet. In the distance, through a gap in the Nameless Mountains, they could see that the sun had almost reached the rim of the world. They watched it setting.
But then it didn’t quite set. It didn’t quite make it. Instead of dipping below the horizon, the sun seemed to come to rest on it. Bit by bit, increment by increment, its lower edge flattened, and distant flares and gouts of flame began to rise up around it, complicating the sunset. There was a flash of light, then another, a distant bombardment. The sound reached them a few seconds later, a crackling boom, and the tremor a few seconds after that, a heavy industrial vibration passing through the earth, like someone was applying a belt sander to the rim of the world. A few leaves shook down from the tree behind them.
“What,” Josh said, “the fuck is that.”
Janet wished she didn’t get it, but she did.
“It’s the end.” She sat down on the crown of a hill in the Chankly Bore and hugged her knees. “It’s starting. We’re too late. The apocalypse has begun.”
CHAPTER 25
Alice slept. She slept for twenty hours give or take, in Quentin’s bed, flat on her back, mouth propped open, perfectly still under a thin sheet, not once stirring or rolling over. Quentin stayed awake as long as he could watching her, listening to her faint wheezing. Her hair was long and lank and matted. Her skin was pale. Her fingernails needed cutting, and she was bruised on one arm from when she’d fallen to the floor. But she was healthy and whole. She was her.
Quentin looked at her and looked at her: she was finally back. He felt like the rest of his life could begin now. He didn’t know if he was still in love with Alice, but he knew that being in the same room with her made him feel real and whole and alive in a way that he’d forgotten he could. When he couldn’t stay awake any longer the others took over.
He was downstairs eating breakfast at noon, getting ready for another shift, when she woke up.
“She said she was hungry,” Plum said.
Quentin looked up from his Cheerios to see her in the doorway, wrapped in Plum’s pale blue bathrobe, looking like the palest, most wan, most precious, most vulnerable creature he’d ever seen. There were purple shadows under her eyes.
He stood up, but he didn’t go to her. He didn’t want to crowd her. He wanted to take things at her pace. He’d had a lot of time to think about this moment, and his one resolution was that he wasn’t going to get too excited. Calm was what she needed. He was going to pretend he was greeting her at the arrivals gate after she’d been away on a long, disastrous journey.
It was easier than he thought. He was just happy to see her. There were no road maps for this, but they would figure it out. They had all the time in the world now.
“Alice,” he said. “You’re probably hungry. I’ll get you something to eat.”
Alice didn’t answer, just shuffled over to the table, then stared down at it as if she were uncertain as to how precisely this apparatus worked. He put out a hand, to guide her maybe, but she shied away. She didn’t want to be touched.
She lowered herself cautiously into a chair. He got her some Cheerios. Did she like those? He couldn’t remember. It was all they had. He placed the bowl in front of her, and Alice regarded it like it was a bowl of fresh vomit.
Probably niffins didn’t eat. Probably this was her first meal in seven years, because this was her first time having a body in seven years. After another minute she clumsily dipped a spoon in it. There was a sense of everybody trying not to stare at her. She chewed for a few seconds, robotically, like somebody who’d seen some crude diagrams of what chewing food looked like but had never actually tried it before. Then she spat it out.
“Told you we should’ve got Honey Nut,” Plum said.
“Give her time,” he said. “I’ll run out for some fresh fruit. Fresh bread. Maybe that would go down easier.”
“She might be thirsty.”
Right. Quentin got her a pint glass of water. She drank it in one long swallow, then she drank another, gave a colossal belch and stood up.
“Are you all right?” Plum said. “Quentin, why isn’t she talking?”
“Because fuck yourself,” Alice said in a hoarse whisper. She went back upstairs and back to bed.
—
Quentin and Eliot and Plum sat around the kitchen table. The fridge had developed an annoying fault whereby it hummed loudly until somebody got up and gave it a shove, the way one would get a sleeper to stop snoring, whereupon it fell silent for half an hour and then started humming again.
“She should be eating,” Quentin said. He got up. He couldn’t stay sitting down; as soon as he sat he bounced back up. He’d sit down when Alice was better. “She should at least be hungry. Maybe she’s sick, maybe we put her body back together wrong. Maybe she has a perforated liver.”
“She’s probably just full,” Eliot said. “Probably she ate a bunch of people right before we turned her back and she just has to sleep it off.”
Quentin couldn’t even tell if it was funny or not. He didn’t know where the line was anymore. And whatever Eliot said, he’d spent almost as much time at Alice’s bedside as Quentin had.
“She’ll be fine,” Plum said. “Stop fussing. I mean, I was sort of expecting her to be grateful for us having saved her from being a monster, but that’s OK. I don’t need to be thanked.”
“She looks good, anyway. Hasn’t aged a day.”
“I keep wondering what it was like, being a niffin,” Quentin said.
“Probably she doesn’t even remember.”
“I remember everything.”
Alice stood at the foot of the stairs. Her face was puffy from all the sleep. She came in and sat down at the table again, moving more confidently now but still like an alien unaccustomed to Earth’s gravity. She seemed to be waiting for something.
“We got some fruit,” Quentin said. “Apples. Grapes. Some prosciutto.” He’d grabbed whatever looked yummy and reasonably fresh at the fancy market around the corner.
“I would like a double scotch with one large ice cube in it,” Alice said.
Oh.
“Sure. Coming right up.”
She still wasn’t making eye contact with anyone, but it seemed like progress. Maybe it would relax her—help her get past the shock. So long as her liver wasn’t actually perforated.
Quentin took down the bottle, feeling very conscious that he was making things up as he went along. He clunked an ice cube into the glass and poured whiskey over it. The thing was not to be afraid of her. He wanted her to feel loved. Or maybe that was too much, but he wanted her to feel safe.
“Anybody else?” he called from the kitchen.
The silence in the room was stony.
“Right then.”
He poured one for himself too, neat. He was damned if he was going to let his newly resurrected ex-girlfriend have her first drink in seven years alone. Plum and Eliot were both for once at a loss for anything to say. He poured them scotches too, just in case they changed their minds.
Alice slurped her whiskey down thirstily, then she took Plum’s and drank that too. When she was done she stared into the empty tumbler, looking disappointed. Eliot discreetly moved his glass out of her reach. Quentin thought of getting her the bottle, then thought maybe he shouldn’t. She should have more water.
“Do you want—?” he began.
“It hurt,” Alice said. She let out a shuddering breath. “If you want to know. Have you ever wondered, Quentin? Did you ever really try to imagine what it felt like—really try? I remember thinking, maybe it won’t hurt, maybe I’ll get off easy. You never know, maybe magic fire is different. I’ll tell you something: it’s not different. It hurt like a bastard. It hurt approximately as much, I would guess, as being on fire with regular fire would. It’s funny, the worst pain I ever felt till then was getting my finger caught in a folding chair. I guess I’d been lucky.”
At the memory she stopped and looked into her glass again, to make absolutely sure she hadn’t missed anything.
“You’d think your nerves wouldn’t go up that high, but they do. You’d think they’d have an upper limit. Why would it be possible for people to feel so much pain? It’s maladaptive.”
No one had an answer.
“And then it didn’t hurt at all. I can remember when the last bits of me went—it was my toes and the top of my head at the same time—and then the pain was completely gone, and I wanted to cry with relief because it was over. I was just so relieved that my body was gone. It couldn’t hurt me anymore.
“But I didn’t cry, did I? I laughed. And I kept on laughing for seven years. That’s what you’ll never get. You’ll never, never, never get it.” She stared down at the tabletop. “It was all a joke and the joke never got old.”
“But it wasn’t a joke,” Quentin said quietly. “It was the most terrible thing any of us had ever seen. Penny had just gotten his hands bit off, and I lost half my collarbone, and Fen got killed. And then we lost you. It wasn’t a joke.”
“Shutthefuckup!” Alice barked. “You whining little shit! You’ll never understand anything!”
Quentin studied her. The thing was not to be afraid. Or failing that not to look afraid.
“I’m sorry, Alice. We’re all so very, very sorry. But it’s over now, and we want to understand. Try. See if you can explain it to me.”
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.
“You don’t understand, and you will never understand. You never even understood me when I was human, Quentin, because somebody as selfish as you are could never understand anybody. You don’t even understand yourself. So don’t think you can understand me now.”
Eliot opened his mouth to say something but Alice cut him off.
“Don’t defend him! You never had the guts to have a real feeling in your life, you’re so drunk all the time. So shut up and listen to somebody tell you the truth for a change.”
They listened. She looked like Alice—she was Alice—but something wasn’t right.
“Once my body was gone, once I was completely a niffin . . . do you know, I kept thinking of this old toothpaste commercial. I don’t know why I thought of it, but the slogan was ‘that fresh-from-the-dentist feeling.’ And that’s what it felt like, exactly that. All the scum had been scrubbed away. I felt fresh and light and icy-clean. I was pure. I was perfect.
“And all of you were standing around looking so horrified! Do you see what’s funny yet? I remember what I thought then. I didn’t think about Martin or Penny or you or anything. The only thought in my head was at last. At last. I’d been waiting for this moment my whole life without knowing it.
“When I did it, when I cast the spell, I thought maybe I could control the power long enough that I could use it to kill Martin. But once I had the power, once I was a niffin, I didn’t want to control it anymore. I didn’t care, not in the slightest. You’re just lucky I did kill him, very lucky. I never would have lifted a finger to save people like you.