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Chelsea gave the double V-for-victory sign

“Those are your paths, and they’re awesome I’m just on a different one, and it’s definitely a path, but it’s different because I don’t knohere it’s going What Quentin is doing—look, I don’t want to get into details, but it’s pretty brilliant, and he’s after so risk I like that I think one day Ilike that too”

She finished her beer in silence Everybody was a little embarrassed that Plu or funny Well, so be it, she thought

“So” Darcy broke the silence

“So you want to knoe’re doing? We’re doingmasterpiece”

That was ic, the real kind: it didn’t make excuses, and it was never funny

—

It wasn’t coic yet But they would soon The elaborate preparations in the fourth-floor roo Plu funny about one of the s, a little square one set in the back wall It looked dark, like so it from the outside, whereas the others were full of Manhattan sunlight The asn’t blocked, but the view had changed It looked out at soray rass, in fading light, stretching out to the horizon

Plulass Where the other ere cool, it was unseasonably warm

“Weird Where the hell is that?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” Quentin said

Plu her stint as a sorcerer’s apprentice h Once she’d learned that Fillory really was real, she’d braced herself for an assault from her depressive streak The revelation seeive her depression a scary power and substance But instead she’d found the news left her unexpectedly light, and free, as if -against-it that had caused her so much trouble over the years

They spent a long cold day up on the house’s flat, sticky tarpaper roof finishing out thesatellite happened to snap a picture, sole Earth

“So tell ils, black paint on black roof “I mean, more about her”

This kicked off a long pause from Quentin, and Plum wondered if she’d crossed a line She knew the basic facts, but he hadn’t been forthco with a lot of details, probably because he didn’t want to talk about theured since Alice alht to subject Quentin to a little exploratory interrogation He obviously hadn’t given up on his whole Alice project It was lying fallow for the moment, but Plum wasn’t fooled

“What do you want to know?”

“What was she like, what kind of stuff was she into, that kind of thing I et a good sense of her day-to-day interests”

Quentin stopped working and stood up and ed the small of his back

“Alice was great She was kind, she was funny, she eird She was ss I still don’t understand It was sort of part of who she was—there was a force to her, a power, that I’ve never seen in anybody else”

“Were you in love with her? I irlfriend, but”

“Totally” He smiled “Totally in love But I wasn’t ready for her She was rown-up than me, and I had a lot of stuff left to work out I s were important that really weren’t”

Plum stood up too She indburned and tired, and the fabric of the seat of her pants disengaged froest that the tarpaper had probably wrecked them

“I feel like you’re talking around so here”

“Yeah Probably it’s that I slept with somebody else” Ah Kind of sorry she asked there, but Quentin kept going “Then she slept with so Then just when I was starting to really figure things out, that hen she died”

“That sucks I’m really sorry”

“It took et over it”

Plum’s own romantic history so far had been pretty limited, with ing behind her peers But she prided herself on her powerful philosophical insights into other people’s relationships

“So if you do end up soether? I mean are you still in love with her?”

“I don’t really know her anyo I’m a different person now, or at least I hope I am We’d have to see”

“So you’d start over”

“If she wanted to Though I feel like ere only just about to get started We wouldn’t start over, we’d just start”

Deep orange rays of sunlight meandered past, slowed by the viscous urban air they were passing through, full of floating particulates and toxic emissions Bubbles popped in Plum’s knees

“Here’s what I don’t get If you were so unready, if you had all that stuff left to work out, why do you think she loved you?”

Quentin went back toon before

“I don’t know,” he said “I never did know”

“That would be a good one to figure out Maybe before you bring her back?”

—

The nextwas the dress rehearsal They broke the enchanth each of the careful all the while not to let the that was actually live and volatile In cases where the spell involved some exceptionally expensive coerous, they just h it