volumes, but the notes were whipped away by the wind the second they left the instruments. With half an hour to spare Benedict Fenwick had turned up with the clothes on his back and an overnight bag stuffed full of clinking mapmaking equipment. The captain—once again, the unflappable Admiral Lacker—assigned him the last available quarters.
Eliot walked out onto the dock with Quentin to see him off.
“So,” he said.
“So.”
They stood together at the foot of the gangplank.
“You’re really doing this.”
“Did you think I was bluffing?”
“A little bit, yes,” Eliot said. “Say good-bye to Julia for me. Don’t forget what I told you about her.”
Julia had already stowed herself in her cabin with the air of someone who wasn’t planning to reemerge till they’d made landfall.
“I will. You’ll be all right without us?”
“Better off.”
“If you figure out what happened to Jollyby,” Quentin said, “go ahead and kick the ass of whoever’s responsible. Don’t wait up for me.”
“Thanks. For what it’s worth I don’t think it was the Fenwicks. I think they just think we’re dicks.”
Quentin remembered the first time they’d met, how odd Eliot’s twisted jaw had looked. Now it was so familiar he didn’t notice it. It looked like something natural, like a humpback whale’s jaw.
“I suppose I could make a speech,” Eliot said, “but nobody would hear it.”
“I’ll just act like you’re exhorting me to further the interests of the Fillorian people and show these renegade Outer Islanders, who probably just forgot to pay their taxes, if they even have anything to pay taxes on, or with, that we stand for everything that is just and true, and they’d do well to remember it.”
“You’re actually looking forward to this, aren’t you?”
“If you want the truth, it’s taking all my self-control just to stay standing here on the dock.”
“All right,” Eliot said. “Go. Oh, you’ve got an extra crew member. I forgot to tell you. The talking animals sent someone.”
“What? Who?”
“Exactly. Who or what, I never know which. It’s already on board. Sorry, it was politically expedient.”
“You could have asked me.”
“I would have, but I thought you might say no.”
“I miss you already. See you in a week.”
Light on his feet, Quentin jogged up the plank, which was hastily withdrawn behind him as soon as he was on deck. Incomprehensible naval yells issued from all quarters. Quentin did his best to stay out of people’s way as he picked his way back to the poop deck. The ship creaked and shifted slowly, ponderously, as it leaned and bore away from the wharf. The world around them, which had been fixed in place, became loose and mobile.
As they cleared the harbor the world changed again. The air cooled and the wind picked up and the water abruptly became gunmetal gray and ruffled. Massive swells came booming through underneath them. The
Quentin walked to the very stern and looked out over the wake, swept clean and crushed into foam by the weight of their passage. He felt good and right here. He patted the
When he turned around to go below, Julia was standing right behind him. He hadn’t heard her. The wind had caught her black hair and was whipping it wildly around her face. She looked outrageously beautiful. It might have been a trick of the light, but her skin had a silvery, unearthly quality, as if it would shock him if he touched it. If they were ever going to fall in love with each other, it was going to happen on this ship.
They watched together as Whitespire grew smaller behind them and was finally obscured by the point. She’d come here all the way from Brooklyn, just like him, he thought. She was probably the only person in the world, in any world, who understood exactly what all this felt like to him.
“Not bad, right Jules?” he said. He breathed in the cold sea air. “I mean, this whole trip is ridiculous, basically, but look!” He gestured at everything—the ship, the wind, the sky, the seascape, the two of them. “We should have done this ages ago.”
Julia’s expression didn’t change. Her eyes had never gone back to normal after the incident in the forest. They were still black, and they looked strange and ancient with her girlish freckles.
“I did not even notice we were moving,” she said.
CHAPTER 4
You have to go back to the beginning, to that freezing miserable afternoon in Brooklyn when Quentin took the Brakebills exam, to understand what happened to Julia. Because Julia took the Brakebills exam that day too. And after she took it, she lost three years of her life.
Her story started the same day Quentin’s did, but it was a very different kind of story. On that day, the day he and James and Julia walked along Fifth Avenue together on the way to the boys’ Princeton interviews, Quentin’s life had split wide open. Julia’s life hadn’t. But it did develop a crack.
It was a hairline crack at first. Nothing much to look at it. It was cracked, but you could still use it. It was still good. No point in throwing her life away. It was a perfectly fine life.
Or no, it wasn’t fine, but it worked for a while. She’d said good-bye to James and Quentin in front of the brick house. They’d gone in. She’d walked away. It had started to rain. She’d gone to the library. This much she was pretty sure was true. This much had probably actually happened.
Then something happened that didn’t happen: she’d sat in the library with her laptop and a stack of books and written her paper for Mr. Karras. It was a damn good paper. It was about an experimental utopian socialist community in New York State in the nineteenth century. The community had some praiseworthy ideals but also some creepy sexual practices, and eventually it lost its mojo and morphed into a successful silverware company instead. She had some ideas about why the whole arrangement worked better as a silverware company than it had as an attempt to realize Christ’s kingdom on Earth. She was pretty sure she was right. She’d gone into the numbers, and in her experience when you went into the numbers you usually came out with pretty good answers.
James met her at the library. He told her what had happened with the interview, which was weird enough as it was, what with the interviewer turning up dead and all. Then she’d gone home, had dinner, gone up to her room, written the rest of the paper, which took until four in the morning, grabbed three hours of sleep, got up, blew off the first two classes while she fixed her endnotes, and went to school in time for social studies. Mischief managed.
When she looked back the whole thing had a queer, unreal feeling to it, but then again you often get a queer, unreal feeling when you stay up till four and get up at seven. Things didn’t start to fall apart till a week later, when she got her paper back.
The problem wasn’t the grade. It was a good grade. It was an A minus, and Mr. K didn’t give out a lot of those. The problem was—what was the problem? She read the paper again, and though it read all right, she didn’t recognize everything in it. But she’d been writing fast. The thing she snagged on was the same thing Mr. K snagged on: she’d gotten a date wrong.
See, the utopian community she was writing about had run afoul of a change in federal statutory rape laws
