They passed through a tiny square, a quarter the size of the others and paved in cobblestones, where if they stood in the center it seemed like they could hear the ocean, the breaking and withdrawing of waves. In another square Penny pointed out a window with ghostly scorch marks above it, as if it had been the scene of a fire. Quentin wondered who had built this place, and where they’d gone. What had happened here?
Penny described in great technical detail his elaborate but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to rappel up the side of one of the buildings to get a view above the rooftops. The one time he’d managed to secure a line, on a piece of decorative masonry, he’d been overcome by dizziness halfway up, and when he recovered he found himself turned around, rappeling down the same wall he’d been trying to ascend.
At different times all three of them saw, in the farthest possible distance, a verdant square that seemed to contain a garden, with rows of what might have been lime trees in it. But they could never reach it—as they approached it always lost itself in the shifting perspectives of the alleyways, which were slightly out of alignment with one another.
“We should get back,” Alice said finally. Her voice sounded dead. It was the first time she’d spoken since she screamed at him.
“Why?” Penny asked. He was having the time of his life. He must have been terribly lonely here, Quentin thought. “It doesn’t matter how much time we spend here, you know. No time passes on Earth. To the others it’ll be like we popped out and popped right back, just like that, bing-bang. They won’t even have time to be surprised. I spent a whole semester here once and nobody noticed.”
“I’m sure we wouldn’t have noticed anyway,” Quentin said, because he knew Penny would ignore him.
“I’m actually probably a year or so older than you guys, subjectively, because of all the time I spent here. I should have kept closer track.”
“Penny, what are we doing here?”
Penny looked puzzled.
“Isn’t it obvious? Quentin, we’re going to Fillory. We have to. This is going to change everything.”
“Okay. Okay.” Something nagged at him about this, and he was going to put it into words. He had to force his weary brain to grind out thoughts. “Penny, we have to slow down. Look at the big picture. The Chatwins got to go to Fillory because they were chosen. By Ember and Umber, the magic sheep. Rams. They were there to do good, to fight the Watcherwoman, or whatever.”
Alice was nodding.
“They only got to go when something was going on,” she said. “The Watcherwoman, or the wandering dune, or that ticking watch thing in
“But with the buttons anybody could get in. Random people who weren’t part of the story. Bad people. The buttons weren’t part of the logic of Fillory. They were a hole in the border, a loophole.”
The mere fact that Alice knew her Fillory lore cold, no hesitation, added another high-powered exponent to Quentin’s guilty, bankrupt longing for her. How could he have gotten so confused that he thought he wanted Janet instead of her?
Penny was nodding and rocking his whole body forward and backward semi-autistically.
“But you’re forgetting something, Alice. We’re not bad people.” The zeal light came on behind Penny’s eyes. “We’re the good guys. Has it occurred to you that maybe that’s why we found the button in the first place? Maybe this is it, we’re getting the call. Maybe Fillory needs us.”
He waited expectantly for a reaction.
“It’s thin, Penny,” Quentin said finally, weakly. “This is all really thin.”
“So what?” Penny stood up. “
“It all starts here, Quentin. With us. You just have to want it.
“What do you say?”
He actually stuck out his hand, as if he expected Quentin and Alice to put theirs on top of his, and they would all do a football cheer. Go team! Quentin was sorely tempted to leave him hanging, but finally he let Penny give him a limp low-five. His eye still throbbed.
