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Julia typed as she walked; she had developed a great facility in doing this, using her peripheral vision to weave around fire hydrants and dogshit landJulia, it see a shit if you looked weird Today she halflistened via the app’s text-to-speech feature while Pouncy and Asmodeus went back and forth on the validity of Hofstadter’s strange-loop theory of consciousness as derived fro like that

The other half of her consciousness, Hofstadterian or no, was deployed in looking at the front doors of the houses she passed Specifically she was looking at the way they were divided up into square and rectangular panels of different sizes Most of thely interesting activity; in fact she would have been hard-pressed to explain to anybody exactly why she was doing it It was just that the doors had begun to reame of Series they’d played the other day

Pouncy had offered up a geoly executed in ASCII characters, consisting of sirid It had turned out--Failstaff nailed it--that the patterns could be understood as successive states of a very simple cellular automaton, so simple that they could nut out the rules in their heads once they had the general idea Or Failstaff could anyway

The funny thing was, Julia fancied that as she walked she could spot sequences frourations of the doors she was passing It seeh she could always find the next teroofy mental exercise Solass, or a wrought-iron gate Once it was in cinder blocks in a blocked-up hich was cheating, but it eird how often she found it She started setting rules for herself--she would stop walking if it took her more than a block to find the next term in the series, then it had to be within a block and on the saht pattern always turned up just in tinificant discovery or not, but she felt a co She could iine the acidity of the sarcasm Pouncy would slather all over her if she told the others what she was doing It would be seriously corrosive, pH 0 sarcash The only difference between her and Pouncy’s cellular auto applied in reverse, so it inding back down to its initial state That was another reason she kept walking: the series was finite It would be over soon, whatever happened Once she got lost for a block, but then she realized she’d ed the transforh, there it was, an old wooden door with inset panels, three of theuration It was a will-o’-the-wisp leading her onward, farther into the perilous ic state

A silant sector of Julia’s brain wasn’t that stoked about how far into Bed-Stuy she was getting Row houses were giving way to vacant lots and chop shops and half-built apartment houses that the recession had killed off before they were finished She had about an hour before dark, and it was no longer possible to tell herself that so very a renovated, they were crack houses But it wouldn’t be long before she found the door that corresponded to Pouncy’s starting configuration, and then the series would be at an end--which is to say, at its beginning--and she could turn around and head back to Park Slope

And sure enough, just past Throop (pronounced "troop") Avenue, there it was It was not a pretty house, but it wasn’t a crack house, either It was a two-story lireen clapboard house with an antique rabbit-ears antenna on top and a surly gang of alue cans in the cracked celass affair One pane, the top left corner, had been punched out and plastic-wrapped, thereby co the series

And that was that It was finished The sight of that final pattern, the initial state, released Julia froic had iterated itself out She looked around like a sleepwalker awakened, wondering where the hell she was, exactly Soenerated voice about Hofstadter Exhaustion broke over her in a wave SheShe sat down on the stoop

She needed a ride hoed and/or assaulted would be even more expensive Plus she felt like she would literally drop in her tracks if she had to take another step She killed the FTB app and took out her earbuds, and the voices died away Silence Reality

Behind her she heard the door open She got up again and held up a hand--okay, okay, she was going She didn’t suppose that a lecture on cellular auto with the residents of soreen shitbox house on Throop Avenue

But the guy in the door wasn’t shooing her away He was a white guy, owlish-looking, e blazer and jeans and an insta-annoying porkpie hat

He just looked at her, assessing Behind hi and standing, chatting and s with their hands Only they didn’t have anything in their hands A weird acid-green light flared for a second in the doorway, fro on in there Soic You could barely breathe, it was so thick

Julia squatted down on her haunches on the sidewalk, like a toddler, and put her head in her hands and laughed and cried at the sa to pass out or throw up or go insane She had tried to walk away from the disaster, to run away from it, she really, truly had She’d broken her staff and drowned her book and sworn offaddress But it hadn’t been enough Magic had coh, or hid herself well enough, and the disaster had tracked her down and it had found her It wasn’t going to let her go

It was about to start all over again

CHAPTER 16

During everything that followed, all the tiot creaed himself up some ancient stone steps out of the water (the Grand Canal ell-appointed withtheed back to Josh’s palazzo alone--Josh having had his hands full keeping Poppy out of the clutches of the carabinieri, who showed up shortly after Quentin went under--Quentin’s mind was on fire with the only piece of useful inforiven hioing to get the button, but he could let go of that now, because there was a way back If they could just figure out what the dragon ht about it while he rinsed off salt and oil and heavy-h teh pressure and washed his hair three times and dried off and finally tossed his ruined clothes, his beloved Fillorian clothes, his royal clothes, into the trash and crawled into bed The first door, the dragon had said The first door The first door What did it mean?

Of course there were other words in there to think about There was a lot to take away fro So a hero All definitely important Of paramount importance But the first door: that was the action ite to follow the clues, and get the to be a hero, daon said He would lose whatever he had to lose, if that’s what it took to win

Poppy woke hi for her She was just so excited, and she’d waited as long as she could She wasn’t even jealous She’d already had three cappuccinos, and she’d brought hi on his bed

They all worked through the possibilities together over breakfast

"The first door," Josh said "So it’s soe is a calendar," Poppy said "It’s not a door"

In the course of general orientation Poppy had alht up to speed on the existence of Fillory Irritatingly, she took it in stride, the way she did everything else She was interested in it from an intellectual point of view She assiination burning the way it had Quentin’s

"Maybe it’s like a tiet Stonehenge! It "

"Venice is a port That’s a kind of door A portal The whole city is a door"

"Yeah, but the first?"

"Or it’s aLike in Dan Brown"

"You know, I bet it’s so about the pyramids," Josh said

"It means the Chatwins’ house," Julia said