In some cases whoever set the portal up had had a sense of humor. One was in a TARDIS-style English phone booth. One portal had a mural on the wall around it: a giant circus fat lady bending over and lifting up her dress, so that you had to step right into her ass.

One stop was completely unlike the others: a hushed executive suite somewhere high up in a skyscraper in some unidentifiable nighttime metropolis. From this height, at this hour, it could have been anywhere, Chicago or Tokyo or Dubai. Through a smoky pane of glass, possibly one-way, Quentin and Julia could see a roomful of men in suits deliberating around a table. There was no attendant here. You were on the honor system: you dropped your ticket into a little bronze idol with an open mouth, and you hit the mirror.

“There are rooms like this all over the world,” Julia said as they walked. “People set them up, keep them running. Mostly they are fine. Sometimes you get a bad one.”

“Jesus.” They’d done all this, and nobody at Brakebills had a clue about it. Julia was right, they wouldn’t have believed it was possible. “Who was that see-through prepster guy?”

“Some kind of fairy. Lower fairy. They are not allowed upstairs.”

“Where are we going?”

“We are going my way.”

“Sorry, that’s not good enough.” He stopped walking. “Where, specifically, are we going, and what are we doing there?”

“We are going to Richmond. Virginia. To talk to somebody. Good enough?”

It was. But only because the bar for good enough had gotten very, very low.

One portal was unexpectedly dead, the room empty and dark, the mirror smashed. They backtracked and haggled with an attendant who rerouted them around the dead node. They gave the last of their tickets to a meek, pretty young flower child with dishwater hair, center-parted. Julia marked the woman’s ledger.

“Welcome to Virginia,” she said.

They’d slipped in time as well as space somehow. When they came upstairs the first thing they saw was morning sunlight in the windows. They were in a big house, nicely appointed and immaculately kept, with a Victorian feel: lots of dark wood and oriental carpets and comfortable silence. They’d definitely traded up from the Winston house.

Julia seemed to know the layout. He followed her as she prowled through empty rooms as far as the doorway of a generous living room, which revealed another face of what Quentin had mentally tagged as the underground magic scene. An older man in jeans and a tie was holding court from an overstuffed couch to three teenagers, undergraduate-type girls in yoga pants who watched him with expressions of awe and adoration.

My God, he thought. These people were absolutely everywhere. Magic had gotten out. The antimatter containment field had collapsed. Maybe there had never been one.