“We should get back,” Alice said again. She looked exhausted. She couldn’t have slept much last night.
Alice produced the oddly weighty pearl button from her pocket. It looked ridiculous—it had sounded reasonable enough in the books, but that was the books, and the Chatwins had used the buttons only the one time. In real life it was like they were playing some children’s game. It was a little kid’s idea of a magical object. Though what did you expect from a bunch of talking bunnies?
Back in their home square they lined up on the edge of the fountain, holding hands, balancing precariously on the rim. The prospect of getting wet again was unspeakably depressing. In a corner of the square Quentin saw that a sapling had broken its way up through one of the paving stones from below. It was gnarled and bent, twisted almost into the shape of a helix, but it was alive. It made him wonder what had been paved over to build the City, and what would be there if it should ever fall. Had there been woods here? Would there be again? This too shall pass.
Alice stood on Penny’s other side so she wouldn’t have to touch Quentin. They stepped off the edge together, right foot first, in sync.
The crossing was different this time. They fell down through the water like it was air, then through darkness, then it was like they were falling out of the sky, down toward Manhattan on a gray Friday morning in winter—brown parks, gray buildings, yellow taxis waiting on stripy white cross-walks, black rivers studded with tugboats and barges—down through the gray roof and into the living room where Janet and Eliot and Richard were still caught in mid-double take, as if Alice had just now grabbed the button in Penny’s pocket, as if the past three hours hadn’t even happened.
“Alice!” Janet said gleefully. “Get your hand out of Penny’s pants!”
Of course after that everybody had to go. They barely even said anything about Quentin’s swollen eye. (“The natives were restless,” he ad-libbed dryly.) Moments after he and Alice returned Josh came in—he’d spent the night with Anaïs after all—and they had to tell him the whole story all over again. Then they went through in threes. Josh went through with Penny and Richard. Penny took Janet and Eliot through. Josh called Anaïs and made her come over, and she went through with him and Penny.
Of them all only Janet had a bad reaction. The moment they surfaced, apparently, she heaved and threw up her breakfast right into the cold, clear magical water. Then she panicked. Eliot came back with a dead-on impression of the frantic way she’d clutched Penny’s arm and said:
“Button! Button now!”
Quentin was unmoved by her discomfort. She was a vampire, he thought. She preyed on other people’s healthy love and made it sick and crippled.
The mood in the room was serious and sober. Everybody gave each other long, searching looks heavy with significance. Nobody could seem to put into words how important it was, but they all agreed that this was a major thing.
It took twenty minutes to finish the spell, and then ten more to add some fancy extra defensive and concealment layers—prudent, given the level of interest the button was evidently attracting in the at-large magical ecosystem. When they were done, when everything was checked out and double-checked, a hush settled over the room. They all sat still and just let the magnitude of what was happening here marinate in their minds. Josh rose quietly and went to the kitchen to make sandwiches for lunch. Eliot threw open a window and lit a cigarette. Janet regarded Quentin with cool amusement.
