Julia had a weightless, floating feeling. Not a bad feeling, but like she’d been cut adrift. So this was it. As mysteries went it wasn’t exactly a showstopper.

“That’s it? That’s all there is?”

“That’s it. You’re done leveling.”

Well. You could do a lot with what she had. She already had some ideas about spells involving extreme temperatures, extreme states of matter. Plasmas, Bose-Einstein condensates, that sort of thing. She didn’t think they’d ever been tried. Maybe Pouncy would front her some money for equipment.

“So that’s what you’re doing here. Running the permutations.”

“No. That’s not what we’re doing.”

“Though we have run a hell of a lot of permutations,” Asmo put in.

She took over the narrating.

“Once we realized that the way forward consisted of an indefinite series of incremental advances, we began to wonder if there was an alternative to that. A way to break the cycle. To take the power curve nonlinear.”

“Nonlinear,” Julia said slowly. “You want to find a magical singularity, kind of thing.”

“Exactly!” Asmodeus grinned her wide Cheshire grin at Pouncy, as if to say, see? I told you she’d get it. “A singularity. An advance so radical that it takes us into another league, power-wise. Exponentially bigger energies.”

“We think there’s more to magic than what we’ve seen so far,” Pouncy said. “A lot more. We think we’re just dicking around in the minors while there’s power sources out there that could put us in the bigs. If we could just access the right power grid.”

“So that’s what you’re doing here. Trying to get on the big power grid.”

She realized she was repeating their words while her mind tried to take in what they meant. So there was more to it. Funny, she had almost been relieved for a minute there, when she thought that that was it, that was all there was.

She’d crammed a lifetime’s worth of magical study into the last four years, and the rest of her, the non-magical parts, was feeling somewhat neglected. Empty. She wouldn’t have minded spending some time filling in those blanks in a big French farmhouse with some close friends. The big energies could wait. Or they could have. But her close friends didn’t want to wait. And Julia would go with them, because—and it was so painfully tender to say it, even to herself, that she didn’t say it, even to herself—she loved them. They were what she had instead of a family. So excelsior. Onward and upward.

“That’s what we’re doing here.” Pouncy sat back and laced his hands behind his head. It was early, but there were already dark patches of sweat under his arms. “Unless you have any better ideas.”

Julia shook her head. Everybody was watching her.