“This isn’t where I want to be,” she said, and knew it wasn’t true. She tried again. “This isn’t where I’m supposed to be.”

The sun was rising, and she tried to feel its warmth—something other than its brightness. To warm herself. What she would have given to feel that wet velvet crust of the top layer of sand under her feet, to feel the cold grittiness of the sand underneath change in temperature as the warmth of her human feet soaked away. To scream herself hoarse, knowing that no one would hear over the roar of the surf. She squatted and tried with every particle of herself to pick up a piece of beach glass. But it was a useless endeavor. She had no more effect on the world than a fragment of dream. It seemed to her, in fact, that she was shrinking, growing smaller and smaller until she no longer stood on the sand, but was instead slipping between the icy grains, now large as boulders around her.

“No!” she said. And was no longer on the beach in Los Angeles. Instead she was back at Dimmet Tarn, her bare feet skimming the deep black.

“Get a grip on yourself,” she told herself sternly. “And try again. What’s the worst that could happen?”

This time, instead of thinking of Idris, Livvy thought of the way in which it was bounded. She thought of the wards that kept out everyone who was not welcome. She imagined Idris, picturing the terrible dessert they served at least once a month at the Scholomance, in which unidentifiable pieces of fruit were embedded in a vast Jell-O dome. There were certain advantages to being dead: you were not expected to be enthusiastic about terrible desserts simply because they were desserts. But nevertheless, even dead, she remembered the consistency of Jell-O, and she imagined Idris as if it had been encased in gelatin instead of magic. She imagined traveling to Idris, to the shore of Lake Lyn, as if she were pressing up against a Jell-O mold. Doing this, she could almost feel the wards of Idris resisting her: tingling, slippery, and only the slightest bit yielding. Still she persisted, imagining pressing all of her incorporeal self against their magic.

Livvy closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she was in a green meadow where she had never been before. There were sugar-white mountains against the horizon, and insects, buzzing languorously like secrets, in among the blades of grass. She was not in Idris. What was even the point of being a ghost if you didn’t get to infiltrate the bad guys’ lair in order to haunt jerks like the Cohort?

“This would prove that you fail at life, Livvy, except, you know,” she said to herself. And then was surprised, because it seemed that someone had heard and was answering her.