Lev Grossman - The Magicians

“Okay?”

“Okay?”

“Everybody okay?”

“Let’s do it.”

“Let’s do this!”

“Okay!”

“Okay!”

“Let’s—”

And then Penny must have touched the button, because they were all rising up together through clear, cold water.

Quentin was first out of the pool, his pack weighing him down. He was sober now, he was pretty sure, but still angry, angry, angry, and brimming over with self-pity. Let it flow. He didn’t want to touch anybody or have anybody touch him. He liked being in the Neitherlands though. The Neitherlands had a calming effect. Quiet and still. If he could just lie down for a minute, just right here on the old worn stones, just for a minute, maybe he could sleep.

The expensive Persian rug they’d been standing on floated up after them in the water. Somehow it had come through by accident. Had the button mistaken it for their clothing? Funny how these things worked.

Quentin waited while the others straggled out of the fountain one by one. They bunched up at the edge, treading water and hanging on to each other, then heaving their backpacks out and crawling up after them over the stone rim. Janet looked pale. She was stuck in the water, with Josh and Eliot on either side helping her stay afloat. She couldn’t get over the lip of the fountain. Her eyes were unfocused, and her face was chalk.

“I don’t know, I just—” She kept shaking her head and repeating it over and over again: “I don’t know what’s wrong—”

Together they dragged her up out of the water, but there was no strength in her limbs. Her knees buckled and she dropped to all fours, and the weight of her pack tugged her over onto her side on the paving stones. She lay there wet and blinking. It’s not like Quentin had never seen Janet incapacitated before, but this was different.

“I don’t know if I wanna throw up or if I don’t,” she said slowly.

“Something’s wrong,” Alice said. “The City. She’s having an allergic reaction, something like that.”

Her voice was not overburdened with sympathy.

“Is anybody else getting it?” Eliot looked around quickly, assuming command of the operation. “Nobody else, okay. Let’s go to phase two. Let’s hurry.”

“I’m okay, just let me rest. I just — Jesus, don’t you feel it?” Janet looked up helplessly at the others, gulping air. “Doesn’t anybody else feel it?”

Anaïs kneeled down next to her in sisterly solidarity. Alice regarded her inscrutably. Nobody else was affected.

“This is interesting,” Penny said. “Now why doesn’t anybody else—?”

“Hey. Asshole.” Quentin snapped his fingers in Penny’s face. He had no problem with naked hostility right now. He was feeling very uninhibited. “Can’t you see she’s in pain? Phase two, asshole, let’s go.”

He hoped Penny would come after him, maybe they could have a rematch of their little fight club. But Penny just gave Quentin a calm assessing look and turned away. He was taking full advantage of the opportunity to rise above, to be the bigger man, the gracious winner. He rattled a spray can of industrial-orange paint and circled the fountain with it, marking the ground with crosses, then set off in the direction he called palaceward, after the lavish white palazzo on that side of the square. It was no mystery where they were going: the scene in the book was written in Plover’s characteristically clear, unambiguous prose. It had the Chatwins walking three more squares palaceward and then one to the left to get to the fountain that led to Fillory. The rest of the group straggled after him, squelching in their wet clothes. Janet had her arms around Quentin’s and Eliot’s shoulders.

The last jog took them across a stone bridge over a narrow canal. The layout of the city reminded Quentin of a welters board, but writ large. Maybe the game reflected some distant, barely legible rumor of the Neitherlands that had filtered down to Earth.

They halted in a tidy square that was smaller than the one they’d started in, and dominated by a large, dignified stone hall that might have been the mayoral seat of a medieval French village. The clock set at the peak of its facade was frozen at noon, or midnight. The rain was getting heavier. In the center of the square was a round fountain, a figure of Atlas half crushed beneath a bronze globe.

“Okay!” Penny spoke unnecessarily loudly. The big ringmaster. He was nervous, Quentin could see. Not so tough now, loverman. “This is the one they use in the books. So I’m going through to check weather conditions.”

“What do you want, a drum roll?” Janet snapped through clenched teeth. “Go!”

Penny took the white button out of his pocket and gripped it in his fist. Taking a deep breath, he mounted the lip of the pool and stepped off, straight-legged, into the still water. At the last moment he reflexively held his nose with one hand. He dropped into the dark water and disappeared. It had swallowed him up.

There was a long hush. The only sound was Janet’s hoarse panting and the splashing of the fountain. A minute passed. Then Penny’s head broke the surface, sputtering and blowing.

“It worked!” he shouted. “It’s warm! It’s summer! It’s summer there!”

“Was it Fillory?” Josh asked.

“I don’t know!” He dog-paddled over to the lip of the pool, breathing hard. “It’s a forest. Rural. No signs of habitation.”

“Good enough,” Eliot said. “Let’s go.”

“I’m okay,” Janet said.

“No, you’re not. Let’s go, everybody.”

Richard was already going through the packs, tossing out the winter gear, the brand-new parkas and woolly hats and electric socks, in an expensive multicolored heap.

“Line up sitting along the edge,” he said over his shoulder. “Feet in the water, holding hands.”

Quentin wanted to say something sarcastic but couldn’t think of anything. There were heavy rusted iron rings set into the edge of the pool. They had stained the stone around them a dark ferrous brown. He lowered his feet into the inky water. The water felt slightly thinner than real water, more the consistency of rubbing alcohol. He stared down at his submerged shoes. He could barely make them out.

Some tiny sane part of him knew he was out of control, but that wasn’t the part of him that had its hands on the wheel. Everything anybody said sounded to him like a nasty double entendre calculated to remind him of Alice and Penny. Atlas appeared to be leering at him. He was dizzy from lack of sleep. He closed his eyes. His head felt huge and diffuse and empty, like a puff of cloud hanging above his shoulders. The cloud began to drift away. He wondered if he was going pass out. He would dearly love to pass out. There was a dead spot in his brain, and he wanted the dead spot to spread and metastasize over the whole of it and blot out all the painful thoughts.

“Body armor?” Eliot was saying. “Jesus, Anaïs, have you even read the books? We’re not walking into a firefight. We’re probably going to be eating scones with a talking bunny.”

“Okay?” Penny called. “Everybody?”

They were all sitting, all eight of them, in an arc around the edge of the fountain, scooched forward so they could drop in without using their hands, which were tightly clasped. Janet lolled on Eliot’s shoulder, her white neck exposed. She was out cold; she looked terribly vulnerable. To Quentin’s right, Josh was studying him with concern. His huge hand squeezed Quentin’s.

“It’s okay, man,” he whispered. “Come on. You’re okay. You got this.”

Probably everybody took a last look around, locked eyes, felt a frisson. Eliot quoted Tennyson’s “Ulysses” about seeking new worlds and sailing beyond the sunset. Somebody whooped — maybe Anaïs, the whoop had a Francophone quality. But Quentin didn’t whoop, and he didn’t look. He just stared at his lap and waited for each successive second to impose itself on him in turn like an uninvited guest the way the previous one had. On Penny’s signal they dropped into the fountain together, not quite in sync but almost — it had a Busby Berkeley feel to it. Janet more or less face-planted forward into the water.