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She was playing her part in the Chatwin story now No e, in the thick of it She’d done what she could: she had brought Rupert hoet

“Hey—Penny, is it?” Pluht to pay for Quentin’s library fines, don’t you think? Or Alice could just punch you again, it’s all good”

But Penny’s attention was co up to it—half running across the shiny ballroo only the upper edges of its pages in order to spare the spine He let it fall open and sniffed the paper

“How did you get this?”

“Stole it”

“We tried to steal it too”

“I know,” Plum said “From us Next time try harder”

The failure didn’t appear to sting Penny He looked like a little boy with a new puppy It eird: he was obviously an asshole, but he wasn’t a sociopath He had feelings—in fact from the way he held the book it looked like he had an enor people, apart from himself

Only Eliot looked grave

“I just thought of so,” he said “That was the last book The wall’s full The map is finished That must mean the story’s over, Fillory’s history has been written The apocalypse must have already come”

“You don’t know that,” Quentin said

“Yes, I do,” Eliot snapped “And don’t try to make me feel better”

Could it be true? The idea h Plum in a cold ripple All this ti about Fillory, dithering about it, hiding fros they represented had been her dark side, and she’d tried to pretend they didn’t exist She’d wanted to have one side only, like a Möbius strip A Möbius person

But that was a htives you the power to build your future She was ready to face it, thought perhaps she ht be not just danger but joy and love in facing it—and just like that she’d lost it forever She should have done what she’d told Quentin to do with Alice (totally correctly by the way): she should have met it head-on and made her peace with it when she could Now she’d never have the chance The books in front of her looked subtly different now They’d gone fro about the past

Or had they? Maybe they had Butup too easily Fillory didn’t feel dead to her, that was the thing She could still sense it out there, just the other side of the thin partition that stood between this reality and the next If she pressed her ear to it she could still hear Fillory singing to her, however faintly

“The wall isn’t actually full, you know” She cleared her throat—it was dusty in this damn library “Not necessarily You could run another row of books under there, along the floor”

She pointed There was still space under the lowermost shelf

“You certainly could not,” Penny said

“Well, you actually could, if you wanted to”

Fillory! she thought We’re coer! It was as if just by convincing Penny she could keep Fillory alive

“I think you’re looking at this too literally,” Eliot said

“Maybe you’re not looking at it literally enough,” Alice said, startling everybody, possibly including herself “Those talls are empty And there’s space between the s too”

“It would be very irregular” Penny folded his arnation “But more to the point it makes no sense The map is complete There is no more Fillory”

“That’s not completely true,” Quentin said “There’s a whole bunch of outlying islands Like Outer Island would be over there”—he pointed—“if you wrapped it around the corner of the room”

“And Benedict Island, I suppose,” Eliot said, reluctantly picking up the thread “That’s way the hell over there And who knohat there is on the other side, the west side”

“There’s a whole other continent,” said Quentin

Plu or if she had a real point, but Penny was looking around the roo with insects She even felt a little bad for him

But not so bad that she shut up Never let it be said Plum ithout a plan She wouldn’t let Fillory be dead It wasn’t getting off that easily NoThe two halves of her life would become one

“You could do the night sky!” she said “The stars! You could have a bunch of navy books with silver dots on the the bea!”

Penny was not abeamed at It had an effect

“It’s not complete,” he said, half to hi to need more books, a lot more Quentin, you have to save Fillory”

“That’s what I keep saying,” Quentin said “And I think I’ve figured out how I think I finally kno to fix everything”

CHAPTER 29

Historically speaking,” Alice said, “when people have said that they’ve al”

Quentin loved having Alice alive again It was absolutely the greatest thing ever Whether or not she loved hiht of him, the world, any world, was just so much better with her in it

“What are you going to do?” Eliot said

“So stupid Penny, where’s the Fillory fountain from here?”

It had come over him slowly, but he’d been pretty sure for a while now It was so to picture its dying agonies, what it would look like—but of course he knehat a dying Fillory would look like Alice had told the, and the end of the world that caod Even if he wasn’t completely sure how to do it, he knehat to do

Of course it was also true what Alice said about people who thought they could fix everything, and it was quite possible that he was about to get hi to try, and noas the time It was six Neitherlandish blocks from the library to the Fillory fountain and they took it at a run The Neitherlandish ely squarish, like an old-fashioned TV screen, was low in the sky ahead of them As he ran Quentin felt that he was at the heart of a vast cosmic drama, as if the universe had chosen very briefly to turn around just hi at once but very slowly, as if ti down at the sas, the texture of the stones, gli depended on his doing this right

The Fillory fountain was in the shape of the titan Atlas struggling under the weight of a globe, which was a bit of poetic license since Fillory wasn’t a globe at all, it was flat Quentin had planned to hurdle the ri stride and hope Fillory’s security was completely shot by now, but instead he pulled up short, because as he got closer to the fountain he saw that so out of it

It was Janet, and she had Josh and Poppy right behind her Janet and Poppy pushed themselves briskly up and over the side, as if they’d just co over and sort of rolled out onto the pavement Their clothes dried instantly, but their faces stayed shocked and haggard

“It’s over,” Janet said “Fillory’s dead”