The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [50]
It was an experiment in saying what he wanted to be true, to see if that would make it any truer.
Julia was on all fours now. She heaved up something thin and bitter onto the grass. He went over and knelt beside her.
“You’re going to be all right,” he said.
“I don’t feel well.”
“We’re going to fix this. You’ll be all right.”
“Stop saying that.” She coughed, then spat on the lawn. “You do not understand. I cannot be here.” She paused to rummage for words. “I should not. I have to go.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I have to leave!”
Did the key think he wanted to go home? This wasn’t his home. Quentin looked up at the house. There were no signs of life. He was relieved; he wasn’t in the mood to talk to his parents right now. It was a fancy suburb, with big houses that could even afford to have some lawn around them.
A neighbor was peering out at them from her living room window. “Hi!” He waved. “How’s it going?”
The face disappeared. Its owner drew the curtain.
“Come on,” he said to Julia. He breathed out decisively. Let’s be brave. “Let’s go inside, get a shower. Maybe change clothes.”
They were in full Fillorian drag. Not inconspicuous. She didn’t answer.
He was fighting off panic. Jesus, it had taken him twenty-two years to get to Fillory the first time. How was he going to do it again now? He turned back to Julia, but she wasn’t there. She was up and walking unsteadily down the wide, empty suburban road away from him. She looked tiny in the middle of all that asphalt.
That was another weird thing. Asphalt really wasn’t like anything in nature.
“Hey. Come on.” He stood up and trotted after her. “There’s probably mini-Dove bars in the freezer.”
“I cannot stay here.”
“I can’t either. I just don’t know what to do about it.”
“I am going back.”
“How?”
She didn’t answer. He caught up, and they walked together in the fading light. It was quiet. Multicolored light from giant televisions flickered in the windows. When had TVs gotten that big?
“I only knew one way to get to Fillory, and that was the magic button. And Josh had that, last we saw. Maybe we can find him. Or maybe Ember could summon us back. Other than that I think we’re kind of screwed.”
Julia was sweating. Her walk had a slight stagger to it. Whatever was wrong with her, this wasn’t making it any better. He made a decision.
“We’ll go to Brakebills,” he said. “Somebody there will help us.”
She didn’t react.
“I know it’s a long shot—”
“I do not want to go to Brakebills.”
“I know,” Quentin said. “I don’t especially want to go there either. But it’s safe, they’ll feed us, and somebody there will have a line on some way to get us back.”
Privately he doubted any of the faculty had a clue about getting around the multiverse, but they might know how to find Josh. Or Lovelady, the junk dealer who’d found the button in the first place.
Julia stared fixedly ahead. For a minute Quentin didn’t think she was going to answer.
“I do not want to go,” she said.
But she stopped walking. A sparkly blue muscle car sat parked by itself at the curb, a snouty, low-slung vehicle with a turbo hood in front and a rear spoiler. Some rich douche bag’s sixteenth birthday present. Julia looked around for a minute, then stepped onto the lawn, where a landscaper had laid down a row of head-sized boulders. She picked one up like a medicine ball, hefting it surprisingly easily in her stick-thin arms, and half threw, half dropped it through the muscle car’s driver-side window.
Quentin didn’t even have time to offer advice or an opinion—something along the lines of, don’t throw the rock through the car window. It had already happened.
It took two tries to get it all the way through—the safety glass starred and stretched before it gave way. The alarm was deafening in the suburban stillness, but incredibly no lights came on in the house. Julia reached through the hole and deftly popped the door open, then heaved the rock back out onto the asphalt and slid herself into the black vinyl bucket seat.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.
She picked up a shard of