“All right. You can go in.”

He rolled his eyes to make sure that Quentin knew that he didn’t really care if Quentin went in or not.

Quentin opened one of the doors. It wasn’t locked. He wondered what the boy would have done if he’d just barged in past him. Probably he would have transformed into some unspeakably horrible Exorcist thing and eaten him. The door opened onto a vast open space dimly lit by banks of buzzing fluorescent lights overhead.

It was full of people. Stale air and the muttering roar of thousands of conversations washed over him. The place was a gymnasium, or that was the closest analogy he could come up with off the cuff. A recreation center. The people in it were standing and sitting and walking around, but mostly what they were doing was playing games.

Right in front of him a foursome was listlessly swatting a shuttlecock back and forth over a badminton net. Farther off he could see a volleyball net set up that no one was using, and some Ping-Pong tables. The floor was heavily varnished wood and striped with the overlapping curving lines of various indoor sports, painted over each other at odd angles, in odd colors, the way they were in school gyms. The air had the empty, echoing quality of large stadiums, where sound travels a long way but doesn’t have much to bounce off of, so it just gets gray and ragged and indistinct.

The people—the shades, he supposed—all looked solid, though the artificial light washed all the color out of them. Everybody wore loose white exercise clothing. His pajamas wouldn’t look that out of place after all.

The dry air pressure pushed into his ears. Quentin resolved to take everything as it came, not think too hard, not try to figure it out, just try to find Benedict. That’s why he was here. This was a situation where you really needed a Virgil to show you around. He looked behind him, but the doors had already closed. They even had those long metal bars on them that you pressed to open instead of a doorknob.

Just then one of the doors opened, and Julia slipped inside. She looked around the room, the same way Quentin had, but without his air of utter bewilderment. Her ability to take things in stride was just awesome. Her fever and her listlessness seemed to be gone. The door closed behind her with a metallic clunk.

For a second he thought she was dead, and his heart stopped.

“Relax,” she said. “I thought you might want company.”

“Thank you.” His heart started up again. “You were right. I do. I’m so happy you’re here.”