The town was called Amenia, as it happened, like Armenia but without the r. It was in Dutchess County, New York, and it turned out to be the very last stop on the commuter train line to Manhattan, two and a half hours away. So they steal-o-mancied some dollars out of an ATM and bought tickets, plus some bad coffee and rubber croissants at the snack bar in the lobby of the train station. Then they sat on the old red bench in said lobby. It was nine in the morning, and the next train wasn’t till noon.

It had been a long night, and a long day before that, and Plum needed to go to sleep and perchance to dream—maybe dreaming she could begin to process and understand the sight of a roomful of robed figures with golden hands, and Betsy standing over an electrocuted corpse, and Lionel opening fire on Stoppard, and Asmodeus née Betsy carving a suddenly nonhuman Lionel to pieces with a knife . . . thinking about it again she started to shake. Things had gone much too far, and her brain felt raw and scarred from it all.

It wasn’t how she’d imagined spending what should have been her last semester at Brakebills. It wasn’t even how she’d imagined spending her post-Brakebills life of crime. As soon as she read the letter she found on her bed the night of the ghost, she knew she was going to take the job. Keep moving, keep busy, that was rule number one of being Plum. And yeah, part of her got an illicit thrill out of it. She’d never had a rebellious phase, and she wasn’t sure she wanted one, but she’d sure as hell gotten one. It was crazy and weird and kind of sleazy but she embraced it.

At least she’d learned some new magic from Quentin and Pushkar. Maybe she could spin it to her parents as an internship. What she really wanted was something she could fall in love with the way she loved Brakebills, but at this point she wasn’t sure she would ever find it.

Even after her dramatic reveal she and Quentin had eventually run out of conversation, and now they just sat there on the bench in the empty waiting room of the Amenia train station, looking out at the cement platform, and the empty tracks, under the empty white sky, feeling the weight of the sleepless night pressing down on their shoulders like a mile of ocean, and them sunk to the bottom of it. Plum let her mind spin off its axis. Her brain wasn’t up to thinking about the future right now, or about the past. It wasn’t functioning on that level. So she hung out in the present, second by second.