Raised voices, but still indistinct. Warren was placating her, playing the reasonable one, but eventually Julia got under his skin and he got loud too.

“. . . everything I taught you, everything I gave you . . .”

“Everything you gave me?” Julia shouted back. “What I gave you . . .”

Quentin cleared his throat. Mommy and Daddy are fighting. The whole scene was starting to seem funny to him, a clear sign that he was becoming dangerously detached from reality. The door opened and Warren appeared. His face was flushed; Julia’s was pale.

“I’d like you to leave,” he said. “I gave you what you wanted. Now I want you out of here.”

“You gave me what you had,” she spat back. “Not what I wanted.” He opened his eyes wide and spread out his arms: what do you want me to do.

“Just set the gate,” she said.

“I can’t afford it,” he said, through his teeth.

“God, you are path-et-ic!”

Julia walked stiff-legged back through the house, back the way they came, with Warren trailing after. Quentin caught up with them in the mirror room. Julia was scribbling furiously in the ledger. Warren was busy with his own issues. Something odd was happening to him. A long twig was poking through his shirt at the elbow. It seemed to be attached to him.

It was like a dream that just went on and on. Quentin ignored it. They seemed to be leaving anyway.

“You see what you do to me?” Warren said. He was trying to twist and snap off the twig, but it was green and bendy, and there seemed to be another branch sticking out from his ribs, under his shirt. “Just by being here, you see what you do?”

He finally wrenched it off and waved it at her, accusingly, in his fist. “Hey,” Quentin said. He stepped in front of Julia. “Take it easy.” They were the first words Quentin had addressed to him.

Julia finished writing and stared at the mirror.

“I cannot wait to get out of here,” she said, not looking at Warren.

The meek dishwater woman looked horrified by all this. Another of Warren’s acolytes, without a doubt. She had faded even farther into her corner.

“Come on, Quentin.”

He got the freezing shock again, and this time when they stepped through the transition wasn’t instantaneous. They were somewhere else, somewhere dim and in-between. Beneath their feet was masonry, old stone blocks. It was a narrow bridge with no guardrails. Behind them was the bright oblong of the mirror they’d come through; ahead of them, twenty feet away, was another one. Beneath them and on either side was only darkness.

“Sometimes they pull apart like this,” Julia said. “Whatever you do do not lose your balance.”

“What’s down there? Under the bridge?”

“Trolls.”

It was hard to tell if she was joking.