Penny took the white button out of his pocket and gripped it in his fist. Taking a deep breath, he mounted the lip of the pool and stepped off, straight-legged, into the still water. At the last moment he reflexively held his nose with one hand. He dropped into the dark water and disappeared. It had swallowed him up.
There was a long hush. The only sound was Janet’s hoarse panting and the splashing of the fountain. A minute passed. Then Penny’s head broke the surface, sputtering and blowing.
“It worked!” he shouted. “It’s warm! It’s summer! It’s summer there!”
“Was it Fillory?” Josh asked.
“I don’t know!” He dog-paddled over to the lip of the pool, breathing hard. “It’s a forest. Rural. No signs of habitation.”
“Good enough,” Eliot said. “Let’s go.”
“I’m okay,” Janet said.
“No, you’re not. Let’s go, everybody.”
Richard was already going through the packs, tossing out the winter gear, the brand-new parkas and woolly hats and electric socks, in an expensive multicolored heap.
“Line up sitting along the edge,” he said over his shoulder. “Feet in the water, holding hands.”
Quentin wanted to say something sarcastic but couldn’t think of anything. There were heavy rusted iron rings set into the edge of the pool. They had stained the stone around them a dark ferrous brown. He lowered his feet into the inky water. The water felt slightly thinner than real water, more the consistency of rubbing alcohol. He stared down at his submerged shoes. He could barely make them out.
Some tiny sane part of him knew he was out of control, but that wasn’t the part of him that had its hands on the wheel. Everything anybody said sounded to him like a nasty double entendre calculated to remind him of Alice and Penny. Atlas appeared to be leering at him. He was dizzy from lack of sleep. He closed his eyes. His head felt huge and diffuse and empty, like a puff of cloud hanging above his shoulders. The cloud began to drift away. He wondered if he was going pass out. He would dearly love to pass out. There was a dead spot in his brain, and he wanted the dead spot to spread and metastasize over the whole of it and blot out all the painful thoughts.
“Body armor?” Eliot was saying. “Jesus, Anaïs, have you even
“Okay?” Penny called. “Everybody?”
They were all sitting, all eight of them, in an arc around the edge of the fountain, scooched forward so they could drop in without using their hands, which were tightly clasped. Janet lolled on Eliot’s shoulder, her white neck exposed. She was out cold; she looked terribly vulnerable. To Quentin’s right, Josh was studying him with concern. His huge hand squeezed Quentin’s.
“It’s okay, man,” he whispered. “Come on. You’re okay. You got this.”
Probably everybody took a last look around, locked eyes, felt a frisson. Eliot quoted Tennyson’s “Ulysses” about seeking new worlds and sailing beyond the sunset. Somebody whooped—maybe Anaïs, the whoop had a Francophone quality. But Quentin didn’t whoop, and he didn’t look. He just stared at his lap and waited for each successive second to impose itself on him in turn like an uninvited guest the way the previous one had. On Penny’s signal they dropped into the fountain together, not quite in sync but almost—it had a Busby Berkeley feel to it. Janet more or less face-planted forward into the water.
It was a falling down, a plunge: outbound from the Neitherlands meant descending. It was like they were parachuting, only it was too rapid for that, somewhere between parachuting and straight free-falling, but with no rushing wind. For a long silent moment they could see everything: a sea of flourishing leafy canopies extending all the way to the horizon, pre-industrially verdant, giving way to square meadows in one direction that Quentin tentatively tagged as north, as reckoned by a pallid sun in a white sky. He tried to keep an eye on it as they went in. The ground rushed up to slam them.
Then, just like that, they were down. Quentin flexed his knees instinctively, but there was no impact or sense of momentum absorbed. All at once they were just standing there.
But where was there? It wasn’t a clearing exactly. It was more like a shallow ditch, a trench running through a forest, the bottom clogged with dead leaves and loam and twiggy arboreal detritus. Quentin steadied himself with one hand on the sloping bank. Light trickled down thinly through the massed branches overhead. A bird chattered and then left off. The silence was deep and thick.
