Quentin had been wondering about the mystery of the Fourth Year ever since he got to Brakebills. Everybody did. The basic facts were common knowledge: every year in September half the Fourth Years swiftly and silently disappeared from the House overnight. No one discussed their absence. The vanished Fourth Years reappeared at the end of December looking thin and drawn and generally chewed over, to no particular comment—it was considered fatally bad form to say anything about it. They quietly mixed back into the general Brakebills population, and that was that. The rest of the Fourth Years vanished in January and came back at the end of April.
Now the first semester of Quentin’s Fourth Year was almost over, and he had acquired not one single new piece of information about what happened during that interval. The secret of where they went and what they did there, or what was done to them, was improbably well kept. Even students who took nothing else at Brakebills seriously were passionately serious on that one point: “Dude, I’m not even kidding, you so don’t want to be asking me about that . . .”
The disaster of the Beast had thrown off the previous year’s schedule. The regular contingent of Fourth Years had departed for the first semester—they were gone when it happened—but the second-semester group, which included Eliot, Janet, and Josh, had finished out the year at Brakebills as usual. To the extent that they speculated about it, they called themselves “the Spared.” Apparently whatever the faculty had in store for them was nasty enough as it was without the added threat of assault by an interdimensional carnivore.
But now it was back to business as usual. This year half the Fourth Years departed on schedule, along with a handful of the Fifth Years: the ten Spared had been split up between the two semesters, five and five. Whether by accident or by design, the Physical Kids would all be shipping out together in January.
It was a regular topic of conversation around the battered billiard table in the Cottage.
“You know what I bet?” Josh said, one Sunday afternoon in December. They were treating hangovers with glasses of Coke and huge quantities of bacon. “I bet they make us go to normal college. Just some random state school where we have to read
“Um, did that just turn into your total gay fantasy halfway through?” Janet asked.
“I have it on good authority”—Eliot attempted to jump the cue ball over the 8 and failed completely, pocketing both, which seemed not to bother him at all—“on the
“I don’t think they have ‘coolies’ in the Maldives,” Alice said quietly. “It’s been an independent republic since 1965.”
“So how come everybody comes back all skinny?” Quentin asked. Janet and Eliot were playing, the rest of them lay on two beat-up Victorian couches. The room was small enough that they occasionally had to lean to one side to avoid the butt end of a cue.
“That’s from all the skinny-dipping.”
“Hork hork hork,” said Janet.
“Quentin should be good at that,” Josh added.
“Your fat ass could use some skinny-dipping.”
“I don’t want to go,” Alice said. “Can’t I get a doctor’s note or something? Like when they let the Christian kids out of sex ed? Isn’t anybody else worried?”
“Oh, I’m terrified.” If he was joking, Eliot gave no sign of it. He handed Janet the cue ball. It was decorated with trompe-l’oeil lunar craters to look like the moon. “I’m not strong like the rest of you. I’m weak. I’m a delicate flower.”
“Don’t worry, delicate flower,” Janet said. She made her shot without dropping her gaze, no-look. “Suffering will make you strong.”
They came for Quentin one night in January.
He knew it would happen at night—it was always at breakfast that they noticed that the Fourth Years were gone. It must have been two or three in the morning, but he woke up instantly when Professor Van der Weghe knocked on his door. He knew what was going on. The sound of her husky European voice in the darkness reminded him of his first night at Brakebills, when she’d put him to bed after his Examination.
“It’s time, Quentin,” she called. “We are going up to the roof. Do not bring anything.”
He stepped into his slippers. Outside a file of silent, rumpled Brakebills students stood on the stairs.
