Lexy put the Orlov’s viper into the cauldron with one of the obsidian crystals. The baby yeti watched her the whole time she was doing this. He seemed to understand that Lexy was trying to help him. But his breathing was becoming labored. Lexy had a horrible feeling he was more seriously injured than she thought. The pool of blood at the back of the stable was growing larger. Lexy realized she had to do something about that before she could try to move the baby yeti. She ripped off the bottom section of her skirt and made it into a makeshift bandage and did what she could for the creature’s leg.

Then she returned to the cauldron and began saying the spell that would turn it into a bomb. She added one of her own hairs to it. The whole thing started glowing red.

“Brace yourself,” she said to the baby yeti. She ushered it into the back corner of the stable and threw the makeshift grenade at the stable doors. She put her fingers in her ears, and the baby yeti copied her. They both closed their eyes. The explosion blew the doors completely off. They were free.

There was a large bang from outside as Effie hurried down the corridor toward the entrance to the University Library. Was it lightning? Someone in the Funtime Arcade had said something about a big storm approaching tonight.

A student was walking quickly toward Effie, balancing a great pile of books, folders, a pencil case, a glasses case and on top of it all, a pager. Since Effie had been in the Flow this time she almost felt as if she was experiencing the world in a kind of slow motion. Or . . . Not slow motion exactly, more like higher definition. No, that wasn’t quite it either.

Whatever it was, it meant that she could see the student’s pager begin to slip from the pile and start to fall toward the hard ground, where it would surely shatter. It was a strange sensation. Just for a second—not even that—Effie could see the future and the past at once: all the pieces of the broken pager, its insides, its history, what it was made of. In a split second she knew everything about it. She could see it broken and whole. Its beginning and end. After all that, it seemed very easy to just give it a magical nudge back onto the pile.

The student walked on without even realizing that Effie had helped her.