Let the power-leveling begin. Here come the big secrets. At least she didn’t have to fuck anybody this time.

She didn’t have to stand up, either: apparently she now qualified for some furniture. She and Iris sat on chairs and faced each other across an actual table, a sturdy chunk of old butcher block. On the table was, yes, a three-ring binder, but it was the most beautiful three-ring binder Julia had ever seen: leather-bound, with those sturdy steel rings—none of this bendy aluminum Trapper Keeper shit—and above all thick, thick, thick. It was stuffed with neatly transcribed spells.

Under Iris’s steady gaze Julia went up two levels that day. The next day she did five. Every level she gained wiped out a little bit of what she’d been through in Brooklyn. Julia had a hungry mind, she always had, and she’d been on starvation rations for longer than she cared to think about. She’d even worried that her brain might be starving to death, losing its plasticity, that she’d been running on fumes for so long she might not have the mental muscle tone to wrangle large tranches of hard data. But she didn’t think so. If anything, wandering in the information jungle had made her tough and efficient. She was used to doing a lot with a little. Now that she had a lot, she was going to work wonders with it. And she did.

It was frustrating having to pound levels while the others were off doing God knew what. She was running through new fields of power, frisking through them, but she was already eager to get on to whatever it was the rest of them were up to. She kept trying to run ahead, and Iris had to drag her back and make her trudge through the levels in order. I mean, it was so blindingly obvious that if you took the kinetic elements from level 112, and borrowed the reflexive bits from the self-warming spell at level 44, then you had a basic working model for how to make yourself hover a few feet off the ground. But that wasn’t till 166, and level 166 was 54 more levels away.