residence, namely Venice. It made sense. She could crash at Josh’s for a bit. She would know people. She would be safe there.
Or no, she wouldn’t. That wasn’t Venice, and she was all alone. Quentin lunged forward through the closing door after her.
“Poppy!”
She’d stopped just over the threshold, and he barreled into her from behind. She squeaked, and he grabbed her around the shoulders to keep them both from falling over. Then he reached back to keep the door from closing, but it was already gone. The air was freezing. The sky was full of strange stars. It was night, and they were not on Earth. They were in the Neitherlands.
For a second Quentin was almost glad to see them. He hadn’t been to the Neitherlands for two years, not since he and the others had traveled to Fillory. They made him feel nostalgic. The first time he’d seen the Neitherlands he’d felt, maybe for the last time in his life, pure joy: the kind of uncut, pharmacy-grade, white-hot joy that comes with believing, or not just believing but knowing, that everything was going to be all right, not just then or for the next two weeks, but forever.
He’d been wrong, of course. In actuality that knowledge had lasted about five seconds—just up until Alice had punched him in the face for cheating on her with Janet. It turned out that everything was not going to be all right. Everything was chance and nothing was perfect and magic didn’t make you happy, and Quentin had learned to live with it, which it turned out that most people he knew were already doing anyway, and it was time he caught up with them. But you didn’t forget that kind of happiness. Something that bright leaves a permanent afterimage on your brain.
But the Neitherlands he knew had always been warm and peaceful and twilit. This Neitherlands was pitch- dark, and bitter cold, and it was snowing here. More snow had drifted in the corners of the square, huge creamy swaths of it.
And the skyline was different. Of the buildings around the square, the ones on one side looked exactly the way they always had, but the ones on the other side were half-gone. Their black silhouettes stood out jagged against the deep-blue sky, and the snow in front of them was mixed with big blocks of fallen stone. You could see all the way through to the next square over, and through that into the next.
“Quentin,” Poppy said. She looked back for the door too, trying to account for both his presence and her surroundings. “I don’t understand. What are you—where are we?”
She hugged herself against the cold. They really weren’t dressed for this. She wasn’t panicking though.
“This isn’t Earth,” Quentin said. “This is the Neitherlands. Or these are the Neitherlands, I’ve never really made up my mind which it is. This is the world in between Earth and Fillory and all the other worlds.”
“Right.” He’d told her about the Neitherlands. “Okay. Well, it’s nice and all, but it’s cold as hell. Let’s get out of here.”
“I’m not actually sure how we’re going to do that. You’re supposed to come in through the fountains, but you need a button to do that.”
“Okay.” Their voices vanished in the frozen air as soon as they spoke. “Well, but do a spell or something. Why did it take us here?”
“I don’t know. They’ve got a sense of humor, those keys.” It was hard to think in the bitter cold. He studied the empty air they’d just appeared out of, his breath smoking. There was really nothing left of the portal back to Fillory. Poppy walked stiff-legged over to the fountain. They were in the Fillory square; the fountain had a statue of Atlas in it, coiled and braced under the crushing weight of a marble globe.
The water in the fountain was frozen. The level of the ice was actually above the stone rim. She felt it with her hand.
“What the shit,” she said quietly. She didn’t sound like herself.
It was dawning on Quentin how much trouble they were in. It was cold here, really cold. It couldn’t have been more than 15 or 20 degrees. There was no wood, nothing to make a fire with, nothing but stone. Quentin remembered Penny’s warning not to do magic here. They might have to test that.
“Let’s go over to the Earth fountain,” he said. “It’s a couple of squares from here.”
“Why? What good would it do if we don’t have a button?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there’s somebody there. I don’t know what else to do, and we have to start moving or we’re going to freeze to death.”
Poppy nodded and sniffed. Her nose was running. She looked more frightened now than she had back on the island, when they were fighting for the key.
They started to walk but immediately broke into a jog instead, to warm up. Apart from their footsteps the silence was absolute. The only light was starlight, but their eyes were adjusting rapidly. All Quentin could think was that this wasn’t going to work, and after it didn’t work things would get very bad. He tried to do mental calculations about thermodynamics. There were too many variables, but hypothermia wasn’t far in their future. A few hours at most, maybe not even that.
They trotted through the broken cityscape. Nothing moved. They crossed a bridge over a frozen canal. The air smelled like snow. A stupid mistake, and now they were both dead, he thought giddily.
The Earth square was bigger than the Fillory one, but it was in no better shape. One of the buildings showed a row of empty windows through which the stars were visible. The facade had survived the catastrophe, but the building behind it was gone.
This fountain was frozen too. The ice had plugged the great bronze lotus flower and cracked it all down one side. They stopped in front of it, and Poppy slipped on black ice under the snow and just managed to catch herself. She popped back up, slapping the wet off her hands.
“Same,” she said. “All right. We need a way out of here. Or we need shelter and something to burn.”
She was rattled, but she was hanging on to her nerve. Good old Poppy. She set a good example, and it woke him up a little.
“The doors on some of these buildings look like wood,” he said. “And there are books inside the buildings. I think. Maybe we could get some and burn them.”
Together they walked the square till they found a broken door, a Gothic-arched monster that had been knocked askew. Quentin touched it. He broke off a splinter. It felt like ordinary wood. They would have to try a fire spell. He explained about how magic acted in the Neitherlands: it was supercharged, explosive. Penny had said never to use it at all. Desperate times.
“How far away can you cast a fire spell from?” he said. “Because we’d better be as far away as we can get when it goes up.”
“It goes up” came out of his numb lips sounding like “id go dup.” He said it again, enunciating a little more clearly, but only a little. This was going downhill faster than he’d thought. They didn’t have long at all. Maybe fifteen minutes more in which they could plausibly get a spell off.
“Let’s find out,” she said.
She began pacing backward away from the door, back toward the center of the square. He couldn’t help thinking that this was just a stopgap, a way station on the road to the inevitable. After they’d figured out how to light a fire, they’d have to find shelter. After they found shelter they’d need food, and there wasn’t any food. His mind churned uncontrollably. They could melt snow to drink, but they couldn’t eat it. Maybe they could find some leather bookbindings to chew on. Maybe there were fish under the ice in the canals. And even if they could survive indefinitely—which they couldn’t—how long till whatever broke the Neitherlands came along and broke them?
“All right!” Poppy called. “Quentin, move!”
He pressed his palm against the wood, if that’s what it was. If this didn’t work, could they make a magic button from scratch? Not in fifteen minutes. Not in fifteen years.
There was a crack between the two doors. Thin blue light shone faintly through it. Starlight. But it wasn’t starlight. It flickered.
“Hang on!” he said.
“Quentin!” He caught a note of desperation in her voice. She had her hands jammed in her armpits. “We don’t have much time!”
“I thought I saw something. There’s something in here.”
He pressed his face up against the frozen wood, but he couldn’t see anything more. He went from window to window, but they were all dark. Maybe from the other side. He yelled at Poppy to come on and ran through an
