She’d been wrong. The pain was worse than the anticipation, worse than anything she’d ever experienced or imagined. It felt like someone had pushed jagged shards of glass into her eyes and was twisting them back and forth in the sockets, sending searing tendrils of pain all the way down her body. Her toes curled and her arms jerked, ready to claw at the offending orbs, but Geryon held her in a firm grip. Her vision had gone black, but she could hear someone screaming, a pathetic, little-girl shriek of terror and agony.

It was over nearly as soon as it began, a single telescoped instant of mind-numbing suffering, but it was a few moments more before she could form a coherent thought. Geryon’s voice broke through the clouds of phantom agony still echoing in her skull, the gentle monotone of a hypnotist.

‘Alice. Listen to me, Alice. You’re all right. It’s all over, and you’re all right. Just listen to me. Listen to my voice . . .’

She drew a ragged breath and shuddered. Her fingers had gripped Geryon’s forearms so tightly that her nails had dug tiny cuts in his skin.

‘You’re all right,’ Geryon repeated. ‘Can you hear me, Alice?’

‘I can hear you,’ she said. Her voice was a croak.

‘It’s all over. You never have to do that again.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled, realizing that the shriek had been her own. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You did well,’ he said. ‘When I did it, I bit my tongue so badly, I couldn’t speak for three days. Now. How do you feel?’

‘I’m . . . all right.’ Tingles of pain still came and went, but they were fading.

‘Open your eyes, then. But be careful. Remember what I said about what’s real.’

She hadn’t realized her eyes were closed, or even still intact. When she opened them, her breath caught in her throat. The pillowed room was gone, Geryon was gone. Even Alice herself was gone. When she looked down at her lap, there was nothing to see, as though she’d been turned invisible. Her hands clenched tighter on Geryon’s wrists.

In place of the room full of carpets was an enormous starry vista, utterly dark except for tiny pinpricks of light scattered both above and below her like grains of sand on black velvet. They weren’t the stars of the real world – she couldn’t see any familiar constellations, and they lacked the friendly twinkle of the stars she knew.

‘You are still here,’ Geryon said in his calm monotone. ‘Sitting in a room in The Library, with me. What I have done is taken control of your vision and trained it a new direction, a way you’ve never looked before. Not up or down, left or right, but inside. This is the other half of magic, to look inside and see the essence of things. Now, don’t be alarmed.’