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“What are you doing?” Plum shouted after him

“Come on,” Eliot said “We have to help him”

They followed hiht, he needed their help He climbed the stairs to the fourth-floor workrooht like a third-degree sunburn

“Coins,” he whispered “Mayakovsky’s”

There was enough room here The spell came to hiht down theit for the first tie from the Neitherlands in front of hi orbits that spun around each other like aleaves rustling demurely in a wind fro by heart Until now he just hadn’t understood why

This hat it was for This hy he’d snatched it out of the air and saved it Matter and ical, but now he had soive itAlice back into the world of the physical

He snapped out orders—there was no tis as he called for thee, one of the gold coins He took theeon up to his elbows in a patient

It was like he’d been asse it He couldn’t have done it without his newfound strength, and not without ether He scraped at his insides for every last scintilla of th He was feverish, and his knees felt like they could buckle at any moment, but his mind was clear He knehat he had to do, if he could just stay upright long enough

When everything was co latent in the air like a thundercloud about to burst, he turned his back to the room and opened the trap

It was like letting out an enor The roo pool on a summer afternoon Quentin almost blacked out with relief Later he would look at his tattoo and find a raised, blackened scar in the center of the star

Alice’s blue for limp in the center of the roo now, not at all Her expression, when she focused on hiry, a ho’d been trapped in a jar and then shaken, and she was ready to sting She was thehe’d ever seen, like an acetylene flaht in front of him

He e so old that the linguists of the world believed it to be lost and forgotten forever But otten

Mayakovsky’s coin, the second coin, flared in his hand, and he forced hih it felt like a fistful ofor blackening and curling up Alice startled as if she’d heard a sound Not his voice, but so at dawn

Then the air around her darkened, and the world began falling into her It had begun: the spell was pulling atoms from the room around her Her skin darkened and became dull and opaque She writhed as particles swar themselves in her for crude substance for her luminous, translucent blue flesh

Quentin stuether they staggered out through the doorway; it wouldn’t do to be too close, to have any of their atoms pulled into Alice The spell would do it if it had to, the spell didn’t care Alice was convulsing now, growing heavier, condensing out of the air, being forcibly eonyShe sounded like she was dying, and for a horrific second Quentin wondered if he’d been wrong, if he was killing her instead of saving her But it was too late to take it back

When it was finished, when the blue was all gone, Alice fell to the wooden floor with a dull sh to bounce once and lie still The rooases, sharp spikes in his nostrils

Alice lay sprawled on the floor on her back, her eyes closed, breathing shallowly She was flesh again The old Alice, human Alice, pale and real and naked

He knelt down next to her Her eyes opened, just barely, narrowed against the light

“Quentin,” she said hoarsely “You changed your hair”

CHAPTER 24

Listen up, everybody I got a letter from Eliot”

Janet felt co room in Castle Whitespire She could have conducted business from her own official chair, but she liked Eliot’s It didn’t look different fro about it that felt

Power, she supposed it was It suits me

“Point of order,” Josh said “Are you, like, High Queen now? Like with Eliot gone?”

Was she?

“Sure Why not”

“It’s just—”

“Your constitutional arguments are kind of de trop at this exact moment, Josh Also I wrote most of the constitution, so you will definitely lose them All of them” Josh opened his mouth “Bup bup bup! Do you want to hear the letter or not?”

“Yes,” Josh and Poppy said together Then they gave each other a loathsome little miniature married smile

“Sure,” Poppy added

Their deaths would be awesoht there—but hard to justify politically Janet moved on For now

“It goes like this” She held up the little paper tape, like a ticker tape, or a fortune-cookie fortune “THICK PLOTTENS STOP UMBER WAS SLASH IS EVIL AND MAYBE ALIVE STOP WHO KNEW RIGHT STOP FIND HIM ASAP STOP MIGHT SAVE WORLD STOP TRY UNDER NORTHERN MARSH MAYBE STOP BACK SOONEST KISS STOP”

There was silence in the room

“That’s it?” Poppy said

“You were expecting?”

“I don’t know So a bit more formal maybe”

“He doesn’t even say hi to us?” Josh said