“You gotta watch yourself around the desperate ones. They don’t know enough to be dangerous, most of them, but they attract scavengers. Fairies and demons and whatever. Fucking jackals. That’s where you get problems. The predators don’t mess around with us because we’re too much trouble, but those poor bastards, the hedge magicians, they want power and they’ll do anything to get it. I’ve heard of them striking some pretty bad bargains.

“But you know what? I like them. You know I never fit in that well at Brakebills. That whole fake Oxford thing, with the wine tasting and the fancy dress and all that—that was always more your scene, you and Eliot. And, and Janet.” He almost mentioned Alice but swerved away at the last second. “And it was great, don’t get me wrong. But it’s just not my style.

“I get along better with the underground people. People thought I was a joke at Brakebills, but here I’m a big wheel. I guess I just got tired of being the bottom of the food chain. Nobody really appreciated me there—no, not even you, Quentin. Not really. But here I’m like the king.”

Quentin could have denied it—but no, he couldn’t really. It was true. Everybody loved Josh, but nobody took him seriously. He’d allowed himself to think that it was because Josh didn’t want to be taken seriously, but that wasn’t true at all, of Josh or probably of anybody. Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief. Josh had probably been carrying that around as long as Quentin had known him. No wonder he gave them a hard time in that room with the bowl.

“So is that why you sold the button? Because you felt like we didn’t take you seriously?”

Josh looked wounded. “I sold the button because I got offered a fuckload of money for it. But would that have been a bad reason? Look, I had a little anger to deal with. They treat me with respect here. I never knew what that was like before. I’m the bridge between the two worlds. There’s things you can’t get in the underground that I know how to find and vice versa. So people come to me with problems from both sides.

“It’s actually pretty wild. The underground scene has shit we never could have gotten our hands on, and they don’t even know it. They have these sad little swap meets, and then something really legendary turns up, totally at random, and they don’t even recognize it. One time I found a Cherenkov sphere. Nobody knew what it was, I had to show them how to hold it.”

“So what about the button? Did you sell that at a swap meet?”