Whoever lived here now didn’t use the top floor at all, and it had gone unrestored. Another piece of luck. They hadn’t even refinished the floors—the varnish had worn off them, and the walls were old wallpaper, with even older wallpaper showing through in places. The ceilings were low. The rooms were full of mismatched and broken furniture under sheets. The quieter it got the realer Fillory began to feel. It loomed in the shadows, under beds, behind the wallpaper, in the corner of his eye, just out of view. Ten minutes from now they could be back on the Muntjac.

This was the place. This was where the children played, where Martin vanished, where Jane watched, where the whole terrible fantasy began. And there in the hallway, the back hallway—as it had been written, as the prophecy foretold—stood a grandfather clock.

It was a beast of a clock, with a big fat brass face orbited by four smaller dials tracking the months and the phases of the moon and the signs of the zodiac and God knew what else, all framed in plain, uncarved dark wood. The works must have been hellishly complex, the eighteenth-century equivalent of a supercomputer. The wood was the wood of a Fillorian sunset tree, it said in the book, which shed its flaming orange leaves every day at sundown, endured a leafless winter overnight, and then sprouted fresh green new ones at dawn.

Quentin, Julia, Josh, and Poppy gathered around it. It was like they were re-enacting a Fillory book—no, they were in one, a new one, and they were writing it together. The pendulum wasn’t moving. Quentin wondered if the connection could still be live, or whether it had broken after the children went through. He couldn’t feel anything. But it had to work, he would make it work. He was going back to Fillory if he had to cram himself into every fucking piece of cabinetry in this house.

Even so it was going to be a tight fit. Maybe if he breathed out all his air and wriggled through sideways. Not how he planned to make his triumphant return to Fillory, but at this point he’d take whatever worked.

“Quentin,” Josh said.

“Yeah.”

“Quentin, look at me.”

He had to tear his eyes away from the clock. When he did he found Josh watching him with a gravity that didn’t suit him. It was a new-Josh gravity.

“You know I’m not going, right?”

He did know. He’d just let himself forget in all the excitement. Things were different now. They weren’t kids. Josh was part of a different story.

“Yeah,” Quentin said. “I guess I do know. Thanks for coming this far. What about you, Poppy? Chance of a lifetime.”