The Magicians - Lev Grossman [129]
“The thing is, the more I study it, the more I think it’s exactly the opposite—that our world has much less substance than the City, and what we experience as reality is really just a footnote to what goes on there. An epiphenomenon.
“But now that we have the button”—he patted his jeans pocket—“we’ll learn so much more. We’ll go so much further.”
“Have you tried it?” Richard asked.
Penny hesitated. For somebody who so obviously wanted to be hardcore, he was painfully transparent.
“Of course he hasn’t,” Quentin said, smelling blood. “He’s scared shitless. He has no idea what that thing is, only that it’s dangerous as hell, and he wants one of us to be a guinea pig.”
“That’s absolutely not true!” Penny said. His ears were getting red. “An artifact on this level is best faced in the company of allies and observers! With the proper controls and safeguards! No reasonable magician—”
“Look. Penny.” Now Quentin could play the reasonable one, and he did it with maximum nastiness. “Slow down. You’ve gotten so far ahead of yourself, you can’t even see how you got there. You’ve seen an old city, and a bunch of pools and fountains, and you’ve got a button with some heavy-duty enchantments on it, and you’re looking for some framework to fit them all together, and you’ve latched on to this Fillory thing. But you’re grasping at straws. It’s crazy. You’re cramming a few chance data points into a story that has nothing to do with reality. You need to take a giant step back. Take a deep breath. You’re way off the reservation.”
Nobody spoke. The skepticism in the room was palpable. Quentin was winning, and he knew it. Penny looked around at his audience beseechingly, unable to believe that he was losing them.
Alice stepped forward into the empty circle around Penny.
“Quentin,” she said, “you have always been the most unbelievable pussy.”
Her voice broke only a little as she said it. She grabbed Quentin’s wrist with one hand and shoved the other one into the left-hand pocket of Penny’s baggy black jeans. She fumbled for an instant.
Then they vanished together.
THE NEITHERLANDS
Quentin was swimming. Or he could have been swimming, but in fact he was just floating. It was dark, and his body was weightless, suspended in chilly water. His testicles shrank in on themselves away from the cold. Wavering, heatless sunbeams lanced down through the darkness.
After the first shock the coolness of the water, combined with the weightlessness, felt indescribably good to his dried-out, feverish, unshowered, hungover body. He could have thrashed and panicked, but instead he just let himself hang there, arms out in a dead man’s float. Whatever was coming next would come. He opened his eyes, and the water bathed them in moist healing chill. He closed them again. There was nothing to see.
It was a glorious relief. The numbness of it was just magnificent. At the moment when it had been at its most intolerably painful, the world, normally so unreliable and insensitive in these matters, had done him the favor of vanishing completely.
Granted, he would need air at some point. He would look into that in due course. As bad as things were, drowning would still be a hasty course of action. For now all he wanted was to stay here forever, hanging neutrally buoyant in the amniotic void, neither in the world nor out of it, neither dead nor alive.
But an iron manacle was clamped around his wrist. It was Alice’s hand, and it was pulling him upward ruthlessly.