They had spent the morning gathering up and packing the gear and the supplies that were already basically gathered up and packed anyway, and rounding up whoever was in the bathroom or dithering over which shoes or had just wandered off out onto the lawn for no obvious reason. Finally they were all together in the living room in a circle, shifting their weight from foot to foot and looking at each other and saying:
“Okay?”
“Okay?”
“Everybody okay?”
“Let’s do it.”
“Let’s do this!”
“Okay!”
“Okay!”
“Let’s—”
And then Penny must have touched the button, because they were all rising up together through clear, cold water.
Quentin was first out of the pool, his pack weighing him down. He was sober now, he was pretty sure, but still angry, angry, angry, and brimming over with self-pity. Let it flow. He didn’t want to touch anybody or have anybody touch him. He liked being in the Neitherlands though. The Neitherlands had a calming effect. Quiet and still. If he could just lie down for a minute, just right here on the old worn stones, just for a minute, maybe he could sleep.
The expensive Persian rug they’d been standing on floated up after them in the water. Somehow it had come through by accident. Had the button mistaken it for their clothing? Funny how these things worked.
Quentin waited while the others straggled out of the fountain one by one. They bunched up at the edge, treading water and hanging on to each other, then heaving their backpacks out and crawling up after them over the stone rim. Janet looked pale. She was stuck in the water, with Josh and Eliot on either side helping her stay afloat. She couldn’t get over the lip of the fountain. Her eyes were unfocused, and her face was chalk.
“I don’t know, I just—” She kept shaking her head and repeating it over and over again: “I don’t know what’s wrong—”
Together they dragged her up out of the water, but there was no strength in her limbs. Her knees buckled and she dropped to all fours, and the weight of her pack tugged her over onto her side on the paving stones. She lay there wet and blinking. It’s not like Quentin had never seen Janet incapacitated before, but this was different.
“I don’t know if I wanna throw up or if I don’t,” she said slowly.
“Something’s wrong,” Alice said. “The City. She’s having an allergic reaction, something like that.”
Her voice was not overburdened with sympathy.
“Is anybody else getting it?” Eliot looked around quickly, assuming command of the operation. “Nobody else, okay. Let’s go to phase two. Let’s hurry.”
“I’m okay, just let me rest. I just—Jesus, don’t you feel it?” Janet looked up helplessly at the others, gulping air. “Doesn’t anybody else feel it?”
Anaïs kneeled down next to her in sisterly solidarity. Alice regarded her inscrutably. Nobody else was affected.
“This is interesting,” Penny said. “Now why doesn’t anybody else—?”
“Hey. Asshole.” Quentin snapped his fingers in Penny’s face. He had no problem with naked hostility right now. He was feeling very uninhibited. “Can’t you see she’s in pain? Phase two, asshole, let’s go.”
He hoped Penny would come after him, maybe they could have a rematch of their little fight club. But Penny just gave Quentin a calm assessing look and turned away. He was taking full advantage of the opportunity to rise above, to be the bigger man, the gracious winner. He rattled a spray can of industrial-orange paint and circled the fountain with it, marking the ground with crosses, then set off in the direction he called palaceward, after the lavish white palazzo on that side of the square. It was no mystery where they were going: the scene in the book was written in Plover’s characteristically clear, unambiguous prose. It had the Chatwins walking three more squares palaceward and then one to the left to get to the fountain that led to Fillory. The rest of the group straggled after him, squelching in their wet clothes. Janet had her arms around Quentin’s and Eliot’s shoulders.
The last jog took them across a stone bridge over a narrow canal. The layout of the city reminded Quentin of a welters board, but writ large. Maybe the game reflected some distant, barely legible rumor of the Neitherlands that had filtered down to Earth.
They halted in a tidy square that was smaller than the one they’d started in, and dominated by a large, dignified stone hall that might have been the mayoral seat of a medieval French village. The clock set at the peak of its facade was frozen at noon, or midnight. The rain was getting heavier. In the center of the square was a round fountain, a figure of Atlas half crushed beneath a bronze globe.
“Okay!” Penny spoke unnecessarily loudly. The big ringmaster. He was nervous, Quentin could see. Not so tough now, loverman. “This is the one they use in the books. So I’m going through to check weather conditions.”
“What do you want, a drum roll?” Janet snapped through clenched teeth. “Go!”
