“Have you not guessed yet?” She practically glittered with pleasure. She was relishing his discomfort. “This is where I got my education. This is my Brakebills. It is the anti-Brakebills.”

“These people do magic?”

“They try.”

“Please tell me you’re joking, Julia.” He took her arm, but she shook it off. He took it again and pulled her back down the stairs. “I’m begging you.”

“But I am not joking.”

Julia’s smile was wide and predatory. The trap had sprung and the prey was writhing in it.

“These people can’t do magic,” he said. “They’re not—there’s no safeguards. They aren’t qualified. Who’s even supervising them?”

“No one. They supervise each other.”

He had to take a deep breath. This was wrong—not morally wrong, just out of order. The idea that just anybody could mess around with magic—well, for one thing it was dangerous. That’s not how it worked. And who were these people? Magic was his, he and his friends were the magicians. These people were strangers, they were nobody. Who told them they could do magic? As soon as Brakebills found out about this place they’d shut it down with a goddamned vengeance. They’d send a SWAT team, a flying wedge with Fogg at the head of it.

“Do you actually know these people?” he said.

She rolled her eyes.

“These guys?” She snorted. “These guys are just losers.”

Julia led the way back into the living room.

The only thing the denizens of the safe house had in common, besides their general seediness, was that a lot of them had the same tattoo: a little blue star, seven-pointed, the size of a dime. A heptagram, but solid, colored in. It winked at Quentin from the backs of their hands, or their forearms, or the meaty part between their thumb and forefinger. One of them had two, one on each side of his neck, like Frankenstein’s neck bolts. The shirtless Asian guy had four. As Quentin watched he started in on some involved casting Quentin didn’t recognize, staring glazedly through the web of his working hands. Quentin couldn’t even look.

A redheaded man with freckles, a pint-sized Dennis the Menace type, was sitting up on the gray slate mantelpiece by himself, monitoring the scene, but when he saw them he boosted himself down and strutted over. He wore an oversized army jacket and carried a beat-up clipboard.

“Hi folks!” he said. “I’m Alex, welcome to my dojo. You are—?”

“I am Julia. This is Quentin.”

“Okay. Sorry about the housekeeping. Tragedy of the commons.” In contrast to everybody else in the room, Alex was chipper and businesslike. “Check your stars, please?”

Julia did the thing again where she showed him the nape of her neck.

“Right.” Alex’s ginger eyebrows went up. Whatever he saw impressed him. He turned to Quentin. “And you—?”

“He does not have any,” Julia said.