The Magicians - Lev Grossman [195]
It was partly Jane’s fault, of course. She had lured him on at every turn. Well, he wouldn’t get fooled again. He wouldn’t give anybody the chance. Quentin felt a new attitude of detachment descend on him. His molten anger and grief were cooling into a glossy protective coating, a hard transparent lacquer of uncaring. If he couldn’t go back, he would just have to do things differently going forward. He felt how infinitely safer and more sound this attitude was. The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything.
The funny thing about it was how easy everything got, when nothing mattered. Over the next few weeks the new Quentin, with his white Warhol hair and his wooden Pinocchio shoulder, took up his magical studies again. What was wanted now was control. He wanted to be untouchable.
In his little cell Quentin practiced things he’d never had time to master before, or never dared to try. He went back to the most advanced Popper exercises—gruesomely difficult, only theoretically executable etudes that he’d faked his way through back at Brakebills. Now he repeated them over and over again, smoothing out the rough edges. He invented new, even crueler versions and mastered them as well. He relished the pain in his hands, ate it up. His enchantments took on a power and precision and fluency they’d never had before. His fingertips left tracks of fire and sparks and neon indigo smears in the air, that buzzed and whined, too bright to look at directly. His brain glowed with cold, brittle triumph. This was what Penny had been looking for when he went to Maine, but Quentin was actually doing it. Only now, he thought, now that he had killed off his human emotions, only now that he didn’t care anymore, could he wield truly superhuman power.
As the sweet spring air drifted through his room, and then the oven-hot summer air, and sweat poured down his face, and the centaurs trotted by outside his door, lofty and incurious, he came to see how Mayakovsky had performed some of the feats Quentin had found so baffling. In an empty meadow he carefully reverse-engineered Penny’s flashy Fireball spell. He found and corrected the mistakes he’d made in his senior project, the trip to the moon, and he finished Alice’s project, too, in memoriam, isolating and capturing a single photon and even observing it, Heisenberg be damned: an infinitely furious, precious, incandescent little wave-spark.
Seated in the lotus position on top of the sun-faded Florida desk, he allowed his mind to expand until it encompassed one, then three more, then six field mice in all as they went about their tiny urgent business in the grass outside his window. He summoned them to sit before him and, with a thought, gently extinguished the electrical current that lived within each of them. Their little fluffy bodies went still and cold. Then, just as easily, he touched each of them with magic, instantly relighting their tiny souls as if he were touching a match to the pilot light of a stove.
Panicked, they scrambled in all directions. He let them go. Alone in his room, he smiled at his secret greatness. He felt lordly and munificent. He had tampered with the sacred mystery of life and death. What else was there in this world that could engage