“Holeeee . . .” someone said. Then everybody started talking at once. Alex didn’t look happy, but he didn’t throw them out either.

“Sign in,” he said. He blinked and blotted his eyes on his sleeve. “I don’t know where you learned that, but just get your flash working next time.”

“Cheers,” Quentin said.

Alex peeled a blue star sticker off a sheet and stuck it on the back of Quentin’s hand. Then he handed Quentin the clipboard. Where it said “Name” he wrote King Quentin and handed it to Julia.

When she was done Quentin dragged her out through the kitchen, with its bumpy linoleum floor and its fifteen-year-old Easy-Bake-looking range and its countertops crowded with a multicolored metropolis of unwashed glassware. Enough was enough.

“What the hell are we doing here?” he hissed.

“Come on.”

She led him deeper into the house, down a hall that in another, saner universe would have accessed Daddy’s study and a TV room and a laundry room, until she found the cheap hollow-core door that opened on the basement staircase.

He closed it behind them. The chilly mildewed silence of suburban basements everywhere embraced them. The stairs were unfinished pine planks, shaggy with cobwebs.

“I don’t understand this, Julia,” he said. “You don’t belong here any more than I do. You’re not like these people. You didn’t learn what you know from a bunch of unlicensed losers in a frat house. You can’t have.”

They were alone except for a roomful of taped-up cardboard boxes, a dead TV the size of a washing machine and half a Ping-Pong table.

“Maybe I am not who you think I am. Maybe I am an unlicensed loser too.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” Was it? He was still trying to get his head around this place. “I can’t believe they haven’t burned this whole house down by now.”

“I think what you are trying to say is that you do not think they are good enough. They do not meet your standards.”

“This isn’t about standards!” Quentin said, though he felt the ground getting marshy under him. “This is about—look, I paid my dues, that’s all I’m saying. You have to earn this kind of power. You don’t just pick it up at the 7-Eleven with your Big Gulp and your Pokémon trading cards.”

“And what did I do? You think I did not pay dues?”

“I know you paid your dues.” He took a deep breath. Slow down. This place wasn’t the problem. The problem was getting back to Fillory.

“What did he call this house? A ‘dojo’?”

“Dojo, safe house, same thing. They are safe houses. He is just a dork.”

“Are there a lot of them?”

“A hundred maybe, in this country. There are more on the coasts.” Jesus Christ. It was an epidemic.

“What was that test back there?”