Quentin was studying the bud fountain, wondering if even his narrow, bony hips were narrow and bony enough to fit through it, when something brushed his shoulder. By reflex he snatched it out of the air: it was a piece of paper, a page ripped from a book. The page was dense with writing and diagrams on both sides. He was about to let it go again, to give it back to the wind, but then he didn’t. He folded it in quarters and shoved it in his back pocket instead.

Then he fell to Earth.

—

It was raining on Earth, or at least it was in Chesterton: bucketing down, hard and freezing cold, a November New England monsoon. For reasons best known to itself the magic button had chosen to place him in the lush Massachusetts suburb where his parents lived, on the wide flat lawn in front of their too-large house. Rain hammered on the roof and streamed down the windows and vomited out of a drainpipe in a rooster tail. It soaked through his clothes almost immediately—in the Neitherlands he’d still been able to smell the sea salt of Fillory on his clothes, but now the rain dissolved it and washed it away forever. Instead he smelled the smells of autumn rain in the suburbs: mulch rotting, wooden decks swelling, wet dogs, hedges breathing.

He took the silver watch out of his pocket, the one Eliot had given him before he left Fillory. He’d hardly glanced at it before—he’d been too shocked and angry when they told him he had to leave—but now that he did he saw that its face was studded with a really glorious profusion of detail: two extra dials, a moving star chart, the phases of the moon. It was a beautiful watch. He thought about how Eliot had harvested it himself, from a clock-sapling in the Queenswood, and then carried it and kept it safe for him during all his months at sea. It was a great gift. He wished he’d appreciated it more at the time.

Though it had stopped ticking. Being on Earth didn’t seem to agree with it. Maybe it was the weather.

Quentin stared at his parents’ darkened house for a long time, waiting to feel an urge to go inside, but the urge never came. As dark and massive as it was the house exerted no gravitational pull on him. When he thought of his parents it was almost like they were old lovers, so distant now that he couldn’t even remember why his link to them had once seemed so real and urgent. They’d managed the neat trick of bringing up a child with whom they had absolutely nothing in common, or if there was something none of them had ever risen to the challenge of finding it.