“I tried that. I lost.”
“It sounds to me like you tried hiding behind like ninety shields,” Plum said. “That shit probably just pissed her off even more, and from what I’ve seen she was already plenty pissed. You know what makes people angry? When they’re trying to tell you something, and you’re not hearing them. Then they feel like they have to get louder and louder and louder, and then you’re still not listening. You’re just getting all scared.”
“Because it’s fucking scary!”
“She wants you to stand and face her, Quentin. What I’m talking about is walking in there and dealing with her. You want her to be a person again? Try treating her like one.”
Quentin shook his head.
“That’s suicide.”
“Is it? It sounds to me like a relationship.”
“You’re being glib,” he said.
“Am I? Why hasn’t she killed you yet?”
A heavy silence fell in the room. The trouble was that she was right. However Alice got here, it wasn’t an accident. He’d tried to make a land, and it hadn’t worked. He’d wanted to create something, make something new, be somebody new, but it was becoming apparent that he couldn’t, not until he’d dealt with something old. Not until he’d cleared his debts and laid his ghosts to rest.
The way he really knew Plum was right was that it was what Alice would have done.
“I still think you should scrub it out,” Eliot said, obviously disappointed. “Fresh beginning. Start over.”
“I have a feeling,” Plum said, “that it’s a little bit late in the day to start over.”
—
Back in the fourth-floor workroom, Quentin opened the red door again. He was starting to hate the sight of his land. It was a stillborn thing: he’d meant to make something fresh and real, and instead he’d produced this cold, sterile photocopy. Something had gone wrong, and more and more he was starting to think that the problem was him.
He sat down at the worktable and stared at his notes, thinking about what Plum had said and waiting for some kind of signal to emerge out of the noise. Should he just walk in, stand there, look her in the eye? Maybe he should.
There she was, right there in the doorframe, watching him as if she knew what he was thinking.
“I’m here,” he said. “Alice. It’s time we talked. It’s time we figured this out.”
She floated there, free-falling in place, staring right through him. Something was missing: if they were going to talk, and if it was going to count, it should be here in the real world, not the copy. He wanted to bring her through, to force her out into the open, onto his ground. It would be a terrible risk. A niffin in lower Manhattan—if he lost control he could be looking at a magical September 11th. But you could talk yourself out of anything.
“Come here.” Could she? “Come out here. Let’s finish this.”
Faint smile, but nothing more. Alice couldn’t or wouldn’t come through on her own. That meant he had to help her.
He began with a series of erasures and banishments and antimagic attacks, each one more powerful and violent than the next, but the land was tougher than it looked. They didn’t scratch it. It wasn’t going that easily, not without a fight.
He changed tacks: he picked up his staff, his lovely black wood and silver staff. It took five tries, whacking it against the brick pillars in the workroom, but he broke it in the middle and then twisted apart the two halves.
And even then the land persisted. Alice looked like she was enjoying the show. Maybe this wasn’t a question of brute force.
He walked up to the threshold and stood six inches away. Closing his eyes, he willed the land to go away. He imagined it giving up, surrendering its existence, letting its cold substance dissolve as if it had never been. It never should have been. It didn’t want to be. Let go.
Yes. He opened his eyes.
“Out, brief candle,” he said, and blew softly, one puff.
The mirror-house collapsed from the outside in. There was a moment of silence—Quentin imagined the cold sandy outskirts dispersing outside, the raining streetlights ceasing to be. Then came a distant bang as the lower floors began contracting like an accordion. Quentin backed up as far as the doorway. Alice looked over her shoulder—if a niffin could disbelieve, there was disbelief on her face. Then the banging came closer, and finally the room behind her shut like a trash compactor and she was shoved rudely through the doorway into reality.
When she turned to face him again there was a new seriousness of purpose on her face. She wasn’t playing anymore either. Quentin called down the stairwell.
“Guys! Plum!”
Alice smiled at him as if to say: sure, go on and call your little girlfriend.
“It’s not like that.”
As she passed the table her fingers brushed it and it began to burn. He backed down the stairs gingerly, never taking his eyes off her, as if she were a wild animal.
“Plum?” he called. “Eliot? Alice is out. I collapsed the land and she came through.”
He heard Plum stir in her room.
“What?” She opened her door in a sweatshirt, hair loose, and saw Alice at the top of the stairs. She must have been taking a nap. “Oh. Was that a good idea?”
“Probably? Eliot!” Where was the High fucking King?
What was weird was, Quentin wasn’t afraid. Usually in moments of crisis he was lost in a swarm of choices, paralyzed by the possibility that he might do the wrong thing—there were so many wrong things to do, and so few right ones! But not this time. This time the throughline was clear to him. There was only one right option, and it could be fatal, but death would be preferable to a life spent doing either the wrong thing or nothing at all.
“Plum, get behind me.”
She did, for a wonder, and together they retreated downstairs to the living room, where he tried to stall Alice by blocking off the doorway. Kinetic magic: crude, but he had to try it. He threw together a barrier out of books, dishes from the kitchen, the pillows from the sofa, whatever he could get a magical grip on. But she passed right through them, and where she touched them they burned.
“Quentin!” Plum said. “This is my house! That I own! Don’t break it!”
She put the fires out, but the air smelled like burning insulation.
“Plum, you have to get out of here,” he said quietly. “Find Eliot and go.”
Whatever he was going to do, he couldn’t do it if he was worrying about Plum too. He couldn’t hold back, and his control wasn’t going to be good. In fact if he was lucky his control would be really, really bad. It was going to end here one way or the other: he was going to fix Alice or he was going to die trying. She’d died for him once already, he couldn’t do any less for her.
An experiment: he brought his hands together, laced his fingers, and all the electrical cords in the room made for Alice like striking snakes. It was a trick he couldn’t have pulled off before his father had died, but he carried that extra strength with him now. Current flowed, the lights browned out, and Alice’s blue aura flickered. Quentin smelled melting plastic. Alice slitted her eyes with pleasure.
What next. He’d already tried magic missiles. A magnetic cage maybe. No? Just force then: wards, shields, thick invisible layers of power, one after the other, like he’d done when he was working on the page, wrapping around her and then contracting and then having the next one wrapped around it. Light refracted and bent around Alice, producing incidental distortions and rainbows. The spells shed little orbital sparks and streamers. He felt her pushing, probably with a tiny fraction of her strength, but she hadn’t burst through yet. The mere fact that she felt resistance was progress.
Maybe it was love, or courage, or the plastic fumes, but Quentin felt strength building up in him, a rising, cresting flood of it. He’d felt this way once before in Fillory, on Benedict Island. And even farther back, that first night at Brakebills, when it had all come tearing out of him for the first time. But he was even stronger now.
It felt good.
Not much time left. Thank God the building was already warded up tight, because he could feel the energy in the room pressing at the walls, bulging them outward, threatening to blow out the windows. Alice shoved harder at the envelope of force, frowning. His eyes flicked around the room for anything metal, found the bare steel frame of the couch, jerked it to him with a magnetic spell. Amping up his strength, toughening his hands, he bent it into the shape of an arch with two feet: an omega.
He was almost too late. Like tearing tissue paper Alice was through her prison and on him. Her blue hands gripped the sigil just above his, but she couldn’t get past it. Their faces were close together now. She was smiling as usual, showing her perfect sapphire teeth, as if she could barely keep from laughing her head off. Quentin smiled back.
This, at last, was right. He was meeting her head-on, like Plum said. Strength to strength. He braced one leg behind him. No more skulking around in shadow worlds, this was real. He could feel the power of her, the buzz and snap of it. Could she feel him too? God, it was a relief to let go, to completely lose his shit and give it everything he had and find out once and for all if it was enough.
“Is that all, Alice?” he said. “Is that it? I want more. Give me everything.”
The metal glowed red and white around their hands now. Instead of shielding his own hands he made them metal too: he borrowed the steel of the couch frame and drew it into them. They started to glow as he dumped more and more of his precious energy into keeping the ward going and keeping himself from catching on fire. He was going to beat this thing, this magical abomination that had Alice trapped inside it, he was going to pry it open and pull her out like the jaws of fucking life.
His magician’s sixth sense warned him just as the balance shifted: this thing was going critical. His omega was steel, but at the end of the day it was only a couch frame, and he was asking more of it than it had to give. He managed one last shield, this one just around himself, then he let go. The metal glyph exploded into vapor in Alice’s hands.
The blast pushed them apart—he skidded backward a few feet across the living room floor. He let it all drop. His shield evaporated. His hands and arms were flesh again. It was just him and her, nothing between them, just empty air and silence and seven years of lost time.
All through the fight he’d kept expecting himself to panic, but the panic never came, and now he knew it wouldn’t. The old Quentin might have done it, but he wasn’t a creature of fear anymore, jumping at his own shadow, never knowing who he was or why. When he was younger it seemed like the only time he wasn’t afraid was when he was angry. He’d been so full of fear and self-doubt that the only way he could think of to be strong was to attack the world around him.
But that wasn’t real strength. He understood that now. They’d both come so far to be here. He was getting a second chance, and he wasn’t going to miss it.
“You,” she said.
“I’m not the boy you used to know, Alice,” he said. “Not anymore. That boy is gone. I know who I am now. But you don’t know me.”
A great, warm calm was in him, welling up out of the hidden reservoir where it had been waiting all this time, if only he’d known where to find it. Alice’s eyes narrowed. She hung back, suspicious, studying him. Quentin began pulling his shirt off, started unbuttoning it and then just tore it off. It was time to go all in.
He nearly missed his chance. Having decided, evidently, that Quentin was bluffing, Alice went for him, and this time she was coming to kill him. He turned away and shouted a word he hadn’t heard since he was twenty-two. He didn’t know if Alice was technically a demon or not, but either way he had an empty demon trap tattooed on his back, and he was going to use it. It was all he had left.
He didn’t see it happen, but there was a great inrush of air, like a giant gasping in surprise, and Alice cried out angrily—
“No. No!”
—and he heard the cry go up an octave and then cut off sharply.
Then the room was silent, and he was alone except for drifting motes of couch-fluff in the air. At the same moment his tattoo lit up with cold fire; it was like somebody had dumped liquid nitrogen on his back. When Fogg put a cacodemon in his back the night before graduation he’d felt nothing at all, but this wasn’t nothing. This hurt. And there was pressure inside him, massive pressure. He couldn’t breathe. He groaned like a woman in labor, trying to let some of it out, but it only got worse.
He could feel Alice in there. He felt her rage and her power and something like ecstasy. Quentin pressed his back against the coolness of the wall to try to ease the burning, but it did nothing. He felt like his rib cage was cracking. The veins were glowing in the backs of his hands.
The front door slammed open.
“What did you do? Where’s Alice?”
Plum and Eliot were staring at him. They’d burst in ready for the fight of their lives.
“And you took your shirt off,” Plum added.
“She’s in my back,” he whispered. He couldn’t speak any louder. “I know.”
He detached himself from the wall and began walking stiffly up the stairs. Sweat was starting out across his forehead, trickling down his chest.
“You should go,” he whispered.
“What are you doing?” Plum asked, but he couldn’t even answer her. He could feel Alice stirring inside him like a genie in her lamp. She wanted out by whatever exit she could find or make. In his mind he was putting things together, doing back-of-the-envelope calculations and then ignoring the answers when they weren’t reassuring.