That was the hard part, accepting that you didn’t get to choose which way you went. Except of course he had chosen.

“Don’t keep us in suspense,” he said. “Did you find the keys?” Eliot nodded.

“We found some of them. It was always either a fight or a riddle, one or the other. One was a huge beast like a giant spiny lobster. It had the key inside its heart. Then there was a beach that was all made of keys, millions of them, and we had to go through them till we found the right one. There was probably a trick to that one, but no one could think what it was, so we brute-forced it instead—took shifts, trying keys on the key ring, round the clock. After a couple of weeks we got a fit.

“Now I’m sorry if I’m a bit direct about this, but you have to remember, we’ve been at this for a full year, week in and week out, and frankly all this questing is wearing pretty thin. So here it is: we have five of the seven keys. One the dwarves gave us, and four we found. Do you have one? The one from After Island?”

“No,” Quentin said. “Julia and I left it behind when we went through the door. Didn’t somebody take it?”

Quentin looked at Bingle, then at Benedict. Neither one of them met his eye.

“No? But we don’t have it either.”

“Damn,” Eliot said. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

“But what happened? It can’t just have disappeared. It must still be on After Island.”

“It’s not,” Benedict said. “We looked everywhere.”

“Well, we’ll just have to keep looking.” Eliot sighed and raised his glass to be refilled. “So it looks like you’re going to see some adventuring after all.”

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 18

The house in Bed-Stuy was Julia’s first safe house, and it was the end of Stanford. She was never going to college now. It was her parents’ hearts broken for the second and final time. It was too terrible to think about, so she dealt with it by not thinking about it.

She could have said no, of course. She could have finished dialing the number of the car service, and turned her back on the man with the porkpie hat, and waited till the black town car came, and gotten in and repeated her home address to the Guatemalan highlander behind the wheel until he finally understood and whisked her away from it all. Or she couldn’t have, but she wished she could. She wished it then, and she would rewish it many times in the years to come.