It was frustrating having to pound levels while the others were off doing God knew what. She was running through new fields of power, frisking through them, but she was already eager to get on to whatever it was the rest of them were up to. She kept trying to run ahead, and Iris had to drag her back and make her trudge through the levels in order. I mean, it was so blindingly obvious that if you took the kinetic elements from level 112, and borrowed the reflexive bits from the self-warming spell at level 44, then you had a basic working model for how to make yourself hover a few feet off the ground. But that wasn’t till 166, and level 166 was 54 more levels away.

And meanwhile she was being treated like a little kid around whom everybody had to watch their language. Whenever she looked out the window of the Long Study it seemed like Pouncy and Asmodeus were walking by, heatedly engaged in what was obviously the most interesting conversation in the history of spoken communication. Either they were sleeping together—though even in France Asmodeus was practically jailbait, so whatever—or there was some deal going on here that Julia was not yet senior enough to be cut in on. Conversations went quiet whenever she walked into the dining room. It’s not that they weren’t glad to see her, it’s just that she had apparently developed the ability to instantly make people forget what they’d been about to say, causing them instead to make some remark about the weather or the coffee or Asmo’s eyebrows.

One night she woke up from a dead sleep at two in the morning—she was so tired from running levels with Iris that she’d gone straight up to her room and slept through dinner. At first she thought there was a phone ringing in her room on vibrate, except that she didn’t have a phone. Then the vibrations got stronger than that, stronger and stronger to the point where the whole house was throbbing every five seconds or so. It sounded like when cars rolled down her street in Brooklyn with the bass cranked up and too much funk in the trunk. Things were starting to rattle. It was like giant footsteps were approaching the house, over the sleeping fields of Murs.

The whole thing took maybe two minutes. The pulses got bigger and bigger until whatever it was was right on top of her. The windows rattled till she thought the old glass would crack. On the final beat her bed vibrated a foot to the left, and she could feel three-hundred-year-old plaster dust sift down from the ceiling onto her face. Somewhere in the house something did shatter, a window or a plate. Light burst soundlessly out of the lower floors of the house, illuminating the row of cypresses across the lawn.

And then it was gone, just like that, leaving behind it only a ringing, burnt-out silence. Later, it might have been an hour later, she heard the others coming up to bed. Asmo said something in a furious whisper, something about how they were wasting their time, and somebody else shushed her.

The next morning everything was as it had been. Nobody copped to anything having happened at all. Though Fiberpunk was now sporting a ripe purple bruise on his temple. Hmmmmmmmm.

When Julia hit level 200 they baked her a cake. Two weeks later, six weeks after she’d driven into Murs, she went to bed having hit level 248, and she knew that tomorrow would be it. And it was: at three in the afternoon Iris walked her through a complex casting that, when properly done, rolled back entropy in a local area by five seconds. The effect was very local, a circle a yard across, but no less spectacular for that.

The theory behind it was a rat’s nest of interwoven effects. She could hardly believe something that kludgy even worked, but Iris could do it, and after a few hours so could Julia. She knocked down a pile of blocks. She cast the spell. The blocks knocked themselves back up again.

And that was level 250. When she dropped her hands Iris kissed her on both cheeks—zo Fransh—and told her they were finished. She could hardly believe it. Just to be sure she offered to run the full set, 1 through 250, to Iris’s satisfaction, but Iris declined. She’d seen enough.

Julia spent the rest of the afternoon just walking the shady lanes that ran in comforting right angles between the sun-baked fields that surrounded the farmhouse. Her brain felt bloated and replete, like after a big meal—it was the first time she could ever remember it not being hungry. She spent an hour playing computer games, then that night Fiberpunk cooked them an elaborate bouillabaisse, with monkfish and saffron, and they opened a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape with dust on its shoulders and a really boring-looking label that didn’t even have a little line drawing on it, which meant it must have been hair-raisingly expensive. Before they went to bed Pouncy told her to come to the Library the next morning. Not the Long Study, the Library.

She woke up early. It was midsummer, but the heat hadn’t come up yet. She haunted the lumpy, un-landscaped grounds for an hour, startling weird French bugs out of her way, studying the tiny white snails that were everywhere, getting her shoes soaked with dew, waiting for everybody else to wake up. It was like morning on her birthday. Superstitiously Julia avoided the dining room while the others ate breakfast. At 7:55 she snatched a roll out of the kitchen and gnawed it nervously on her way over to the Library.

The day she’d stepped into that elevator in the library in Brooklyn, she’d dropped into the void. It might as well have been an empty shaft. She’d been falling ever since. But it was almost over. She was about to touch solid ground again. She could barely even remember what it felt like to be where she belonged, on the same side of the glass as everybody else.

She’d tried the door to the Library once before but it hadn’t opened for her, and she hadn’t bothered trying to hack the locking charm. She was tired of picking locks. She stood in front of the door for a minute, plucking at the fabric of her summer dress, watching the second hand of the clock in the hall.

At the appointed hour the door opened by itself. Julia lowered her chin and went inside.

They were all there, sitting around a long worktable. The Library was clearly the crowning achievement of whoever had renovated the Murs farmhouse. They’d hollowed out the space completely, cut away three floors and exposed the roof beams thirty feet up. Morning sunlight lasered in through tall thin windows. Bookshelves soared along the walls, all the way up, which would have been totally impractical except for some tasteful oak platforms that floated magically alongside them, ready to hoist the browser up to whatever level he or she wanted to be at.

They stopped talking when she came in. Nine faces turned to look up at her. Some of them had books and folders of notes in front of them. They could have been a corporate board meeting, if the corporation were Random Genius Freaks LLC. Pouncy sat at the head of the table. There was an open seat at the foot.

She pulled out the chair and sat down, almost demurely. Why weren’t they talking? They just looked at her calmly, like a parole board.

So. She’d met their expectations. It was time they met hers. Cards on the table. Show me whatcha got. Read ’em and weep.

“All right,” she said. “So what are we doing?”

“What would you like to do?”

It wasn’t Pouncy who spoke, it was Gummidgy. You tell me, Julia wanted to say. You’re the pyschic. She was built like a model, tall and skinny, though her face was too long and severe to be really beautiful. Julia couldn’t place her ethnicity. Persian?

“Whatever comes next. Whatever comes after level two hundred fifty. Two hundred fifty-one. I’m ready.”

“What makes you think there is a level two hundred fifty-one?”

Her eyes narrowed. “The fact that there were levels one through two hundred fifty?”

“There is no level two hundred fifty-one.”

Julia looked at Pouncy, Failstaff, Asmodeus. They looked back at her patiently. Asmo nodded.

“How can there be no level two hundred fifty-one?”

“There’s nothing after two hundred fifty,” Pouncy said. “Oh, you can craft more spells. We do it all the time. But at this point you have all the building blocks, all the basic components, that you’re going to have. The rest is just permutations. After two hundred fifty you’re just rearranging base pairs on the double helix. The power levels plateau.”

Julia had a weightless, floating feeling. Not a bad feeling, but like she’d been cut adrift. So this was it. As mysteries went it wasn’t exactly a showstopper.

“That’s it? That’s all there is?”

“That’s it. You’re done leveling.”

Well. You could do a lot with what she had. She already had some ideas about spells involving extreme temperatures, extreme states of matter. Plasmas, Bose-Einstein condensates, that sort of thing. She didn’t think they’d ever been tried. Maybe Pouncy would front her some money for equipment.

“So that’s what you’re doing here. Running the permutations.”

“No. That’s not what we’re doing.”

“Though we have run a hell of a lot of permutations,” Asmo put in.

She took over the narrating.

“Once we realized that the way forward consisted of an indefinite series of incremental advances, we began to wonder if there was an alternative to that. A way to break the cycle. To take the power curve nonlinear.”

“Nonlinear,” Julia said slowly. “You want to find a magical singularity, kind of thing.”

“Exactly!” Asmodeus grinned her wide Cheshire grin at Pouncy, as if to say, see? I told you she’d get it. “A singularity. An advance so radical that it takes us into another league, power-wise. Exponentially bigger energies.”

“We think there’s more to magic than what we’ve seen so far,” Pouncy said. “A lot more. We think we’re just dicking around in the minors while there’s power sources out there that could put us in the bigs. If we could just access the right power grid.”

“So that’s what you’re doing here. Trying to get on the big power grid.”

She realized she was repeating their words while her mind tried to take in what they meant. So there was more to it. Funny, she had almost been relieved for a minute there, when she thought that that was it, that was all there was.

She’d crammed a lifetime’s worth of magical study into the last four years, and the rest of her, the non-magical parts, was feeling somewhat neglected. Empty. She wouldn’t have minded spending some time filling in those blanks in a big French farmhouse with some close friends. The big energies could wait. Or they could have. But her close friends didn’t want to wait. And Julia would go with them, because—and it was so painfully tender to say it, even to herself, that she didn’t say it, even to herself—she loved them. They were what she had instead of a family. So excelsior. Onward and upward.

“That’s what we’re doing here.” Pouncy sat back and laced his hands behind his head. It was early, but there were already dark patches of sweat under his arms. “Unless you have any better ideas.”

Julia shook her head. Everybody was watching her.

“All right,” she said. “Well, show me what you’ve got so far.”

Read ’em and weep.

CHAPTER 21

They carried Benedict’s body up the gangplank, all together, Quentin and Josh and Eliot, struggling awkwardly with his heavy ragdoll limbs. Death seemed to have made his lanky adolescent body strangely dense. Slipping on the wet wood, they had none of the gravitas that would have been appropriate for pallbearers. Nobody had worked up the courage to take the arrow out of his throat, and it pointed crazily in all directions.

Once Benedict was laid out on the deck Quentin went and got a blanket from his cabin and spread it over the body. His side was throbbing hotly, in sync with his pulse. Good. That’s what he wanted. He wanted to feel pain.

It was Bingle who drew the arrow expertly out of Benedict’s throat; he had to snap it in half to get it out, because one end was barbed and the other feathered. It began to rain steadily, the drops tapping and splashing on the deck and on Benedict’s pale unflinching face. They moved the body inside, into the surgery, although there was no surgery to be done.

“We’re going,” Quentin said aloud, to nobody and everybody.

“Quentin,” Eliot said. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“I don’t want to stay here. We’ve got a good wind. We should go.”

Eliot was officially in charge, but Quentin didn’t care. This was his ship first and he didn’t want to spend another night on this island. It’s all fun and games till somebody gets an arrow through the throat.

“What about the prisoners?” somebody said.

“Who cares? Leave them here.”

“But where are we going to go?” Eliot said, reasonably.

“I don’t know! I just don’t want to stay here! Do you?”

Eliot had to admit he didn’t especially want to stay either.

There was no way Quentin was going to bed. Benedict wasn’t going to get warm tonight, so how could he? He was going to get the ship ready. Looking down at Benedict’s blank, unfeeling face, Quentin was almost angry at him for dying. Things had been going so well. But that was being a hero, wasn’t it? For every hero, don’t legions of foot soldiers have to die in the background? It was a matter of numbers, like the corpse in the castle said. Just work out the sums.

So Quentin, the Magician King, leader of men, helped corral the rest of the defeated soldiers and got the crew watering and provisioning the Muntjac, even if it was the middle of the night and pissing rain. Somebody else would have to plot the course, since Benedict was dead, but that wasn’t a problem because they didn’t know where they were going. It didn’t matter. He didn’t understand what they were doing anymore. It was obviously a very effective way to procure magic keys, but how was that going to help Julia? Or rebuild the Neitherlands? Or calm the clock-trees? What could the keys possibly be good for that was worth this—Benedict curled up on the dock like a little boy trying to get warm?