They had dinner together at a bistro nearby, which Thomas thought was fairly decent, but Alastair described as “indifferent.” They talked late into the night; they closed down the restaurant while everyone else left and they were still talking: about books, travel, music, history. Thomas told Alastair that he planned to get a tattoo of a compass rose on the inside of his arm. He hadn’t told anyone else that, and Alastair seemed curious.

“Where on your arm?” he asked, and when Thomas showed him, Alastair ran his fingers over the spot, unselfconsciously, his fingertips tracing a path from the sensitive skin of Thomas’s inner wrist to the crook of his elbow.

Thomas sat stunned and shivering, though he was hot all over. Alastair didn’t seem to notice, only took his hand back and asked the waiter for the bill, which he paid. Alastair refused to tell Thomas where he was staying, but he told Thomas to meet him at a certain address the next afternoon, for a surprise.

Fifteen minutes after the meeting time, Thomas decided that Alastair was not coming, and was probably somewhere laughing about it, but Alastair did in fact appear, and even apologized for his lateness. He led Thomas to the doors of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin.

“I know we’re supposed to avoid mundane things,” said Alastair, “but you must see this. It’s a film. A moving picture! This one is the latest. It’s called Le Voyage dans la Lune.”

Even Thomas could translate this, and for seventeen minutes they marveled together at what the mundanes had done—made pictures move, like a theater but in images projected onto a screen. There was a narrator who, Thomas supposed, told the story, but he couldn’t follow it at all. He enjoyed it anyway, watching these mundanes in their strange costumes climb into a large metal box like an artillery shell, go to the moon, and be chased away by strange creatures already living there.

“Do you think it’s real?” he said to Alastair as they walked out, blinking in the sudden light of the daytime.

“What? No, don’t be stupid,” Alastair said, pushing a lock of dark hair behind his ears. People always fussed over blond hair, like Matthew’s, as if it were special, but privately Thomas thought dark hair and eyes were much more striking. “It’s like a play, or a magic trick. That’s what mundanes do; they can’t do magic, so they play tricks that look like magic, but it isn’t really.”