A neighbor was peering out at them from her living room window. “Hi!” He waved. “How’s it going?”
The face disappeared. Its owner drew the curtain.
“Come on,” he said to Julia. He breathed out decisively. Let’s be brave. “Let’s go inside, get a shower. Maybe change clothes.”
They were in full Fillorian drag. Not inconspicuous. She didn’t answer.
He was fighting off panic. Jesus, it had taken him twenty-two years to get to Fillory the first time. How was he going to do it again now? He turned back to Julia, but she wasn’t there. She was up and walking unsteadily down the wide, empty suburban road away from him. She looked tiny in the middle of all that asphalt.
That was another weird thing. Asphalt really wasn’t like anything in nature.
“Hey. Come on.” He stood up and trotted after her. “There’s probably mini-Dove bars in the freezer.”
“I cannot stay here.”
“I can’t either. I just don’t know what to do about it.”
“I am going back.”
“How?”
She didn’t answer. He caught up, and they walked together in the fading light. It was quiet. Multicolored light from giant televisions flickered in the windows. When had TVs gotten that big?
“I only knew one way to get to Fillory, and that was the magic button. And Josh had that, last we saw. Maybe we can find him. Or maybe Ember could summon us back. Other than that I think we’re kind of screwed.”
Julia was sweating. Her walk had a slight stagger to it. Whatever was wrong with her, this wasn’t making it any better. He made a decision.
“We’ll go to Brakebills,” he said. “Somebody there will help us.”
She didn’t react.
“I know it’s a long shot—”
“I do not want to go to Brakebills.”
“I know,” Quentin said. “I don’t especially want to go there either. But it’s safe, they’ll feed us, and somebody there will have a line on some way to get us back.”
Privately he doubted any of the faculty had a clue about getting around the multiverse, but they might know how to find Josh. Or Lovelady, the junk dealer who’d found the button in the first place.
Julia stared fixedly ahead. For a minute Quentin didn’t think she was going to answer.
“I do not want to go,” she said.
But she stopped walking. A sparkly blue muscle car sat parked by itself at the curb, a snouty, low-slung vehicle with a turbo hood in front and a rear spoiler. Some rich douche bag’s sixteenth birthday present. Julia looked around for a minute, then stepped onto the lawn, where a landscaper had laid down a row of head-sized boulders. She picked one up like a medicine ball, hefting it surprisingly easily in her stick-thin arms, and half threw, half dropped it through the muscle car’s driver-side window.
Quentin didn’t even have time to offer advice or an opinion—something along the lines of, don’t throw the rock through the car window. It had already happened.
It took two tries to get it all the way through—the safety glass starred and stretched before it gave way. The alarm was deafening in the suburban stillness, but incredibly no lights came on in the house. Julia reached through the hole and deftly popped the door open, then heaved the rock back out onto the asphalt and slid herself into the black vinyl bucket seat.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.
She picked up a shard of glass and nicked the pad of her thumb with it. Whispering something under her breath, she jammed her bloody thumb-tip up against the ignition.
The alarm stopped. The car rumbled into life, and the radio came on: Van Halen, “Poundcake.” She lifted up her ass and brushed the rest of the glass off the seat underneath her.
“Get in,” she said.
Sometimes you just have to do things. Quentin walked around to the other side—for form’s sake he really should have slid across the hood—and she peeled out before he even had the door closed. They drove away from his parents’ block at speed. He couldn’t believe nobody had called the police, but he didn’t hear any sirens; it was either really good magic or very dumb luck. She didn’t turn the Van Halen off, or even down. The gray street poured along underneath them. It beat a carriage, anyway.
Julia rolled down what was left of the broken window so that it didn’t look so broken.
“How the hell did you do that?” he said.
“You know about hot-wiring?” she said. “That is ‘not-wiring.’ That is what we used to call it, in the old days.”
“In what old days did you go around stealing cars? And who is ‘we’?”
She didn’t answer, just took a corner too fast, so that the car heeled over on its ridiculously too-bouncy suspension.
“That was a stop sign,” Quentin said. “I still think we should go to Brakebills.”
“We are going to Brakebills.”
“You changed your mind.”
“It happens.” Her thumb was still bleeding. She sucked it and wiped it on her pants. “Can you drive?”
“No. I never learned.”
Julia swore. She turned up the radio.
It was four hours from Chesterton to Brakebills, or as close as you could get to Brakebills by car. Julia did it in three. They shot west across Massachusetts the long way, whipping along old New England interstates that had been cut through pine forests and blasted through low green hills, the sides of which showed bare red rock. The rock faces were slick with water from underground springs exposed by the blasting.
The sun set. The car smelled of its owner’s cigarette smoke. Everything was toxic and chemical and unnatural: the plastic walnut trim, the electric lights, the burning gasoline that was shoving them forward. This whole world was a processed petroleum product. Julia kept the radio on classic rock the whole way. It would be an exaggeration to say that she knew every single lyric of every single song that came on, but not by much.
They crossed the Hudson River at Beacon, New York, and turned off the interstate onto a two-lane local highway, winding and humped up with old frost heaves. Apart from Julia’s singing they didn’t speak. Quentin was still trying to make sense of what had just happened to them. It was too dark to make the trek to Brakebills tonight, so Julia showed him how to extract cash without a card from an ATM at a bug-swarmed gas station. They bought sunglasses for her, to hide her weird eyes, and they spent the night—separate rooms—at a motel. Quentin mentally dared the clerk to say something about their clothes, but no dice.
In the morning Quentin took a genuine hot shower in an actual Western-style bathroom. Score one for reality. He stayed there till all the sea salt was finally out of his hair, even though the tub was made of plastic and there were spiders in the corners and it reeked of detergents and “fresheners.” By the time he cleaned up, checked out, and harvested a bona fide actual sixteen-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola from the vending machine, Julia was waiting for him, sitting on the hood of their car.
She’d skipped the shower, but she’d doubled up on the Coke. The car spit gravel on its way out of the parking lot.
“I thought you did not know where it was,” Julia said. “That was what you told me when I asked you.”
“I told you that,” Quentin said, “because it’s true. I don’t know where it is. But I think there’s a way to find it. At least I know someone who did it once.”
He meant Alice. She’d done it as a high school senior, so they ought to be able to manage it. Strange to think of it now. He was going to follow in her footsteps.
“We’ll have to walk a couple of miles through the woods,” he said.
“That does not bother me.”
“A vision spell should reveal it. It’s veiled, but just to keep civilians out. There’s an Anasazi spell. Or Mann. Maybe just a Mann reveal.”
“I know the Anasazi.”
“Okay. Great. Then I’ll let you know when.”
