But some people, a very few people, were different. Magic meant something else to them, something more primal and urgent. They didn’t have a secret, the secret had them. They wanted more. They wanted to penetrate the veil behind the veil. They did not faff, they learned. And when they hit the ceiling of what they could learn in the safe-house scene, they banged on it till somebody in the attic opened up a trap door.

That’s when they ended up in Murs. Pouncy and his gang skimmed off the cream of the safe houses and brought them here.

Life was easy in Murs, at least at first. There was a living wing and a working wing. Julia was assigned a beautiful bedroom with a high ceiling and wide floorboards and big stripey-curtained windows that let in floods of that champagne-y French light. Everybody cooked and everybody cleaned, but they’d worked out a lot of magic to smooth the way—it was amazing to watch the floors repel dust and herd it into neat little piles, like iron filings in a magnetic field. And the produce was second to none.

The others didn’t welcome her with open arms, exactly. They weren’t open-arms types. But there was respect there. She was geared up to prove herself all over again, since based on her life thus far she was used to having to prove herself to a new gang of assholes every six months or so. And she would have, she really would have. But they weren’t going to make her. The proving was done with. The journey was the test, and she had arrived. She was in.

It wasn’t Brakebills. It was better. She felt like she’d finally won—she’d won ugly, but she’d won.

They knew about Brakebills at Murs. Not much, but they knew. Their attitude toward it was bracingly snobbish. They considered Brakebills—to the extent that they considered it at all—rather cute: a sanitized, safety-wheeled playpen for those who didn’t have the grit and the will to make it on the outside. They called it Fakebills, and Breakballs. At Brakebills you sat in classrooms and followed the rules. Perfectly fine if you like that kind of thing, but here at Murs you made your own rules, no adult supervision. Brakebills was the Beatles, Murs was the Stones. Brakebills was for Marquis of Queensberry types. Murs was more your stone-cold street-fighting man.