Though once Plum forgot and spoke something she was supposed to skip, and just like that there was bright light and heat in the room. For an instant it was unbearable, like when there’s bad feedback in an auditorium.

“Shit!” Quentin bolted, and she heard water running in the bathroom. When he came back his fingernails were still steaming slightly.

“Sorry!” Plum said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Though you could tell he was annoyed. “Start over. From the beginning.”

It was funny about magic, how messy and imperfect it was. When people said something worked like magic they meant that it cost nothing and did exactly what you wanted it to. But there were lots of things magic couldn’t do. It couldn’t raise the dead. It couldn’t make you happy. It couldn’t make you good-looking. And even with the things it could do, it didn’t always do them right. And it always, always cost something.

And it was inefficient. The system was never airtight, it always leaked. Magic was always throwing off extra energy, wasting it in the form of sound, and heat, and light, and wind. It was always buzzing and singing and glowing and sparking to no particular purpose. Magic was decidedly imperfect. But the really funny thing, she thought, was that if it were perfect, it wouldn’t be so beautiful.

On the big day they agreed they would start at noon, but like anything else involving more than one person and a lot of moving parts—band rehearsals, softball games, model-rocket launches—it took about five times longer to get ready than they planned. They cleared away the books and stacked them tidily in the corners, and they laid out all the tools and materials on trays, neatly labeled and lined up in the order they’d be needed in. Quentin stuck a list of the spells on the wall, like the set list for a gig. There were a lot of things that they had, by mutual consent, skipped in the dress rehearsal but which it turned out were really time-consuming, like reading out the full text of one of these old cultic chants ten times.

They started in on the low-hanging fruit, making sure that conditions in the room were optimal and were going to stay that way. Constant temperature; a little extra oxygen; low light from the chandelier; no weird magical incursions. They cast spells on each other to ward off any weird charges or energies and to speed up their reaction times just a touch; some of this stuff you just couldn’t cast right at baseline human speed. Caffeine helped with that too, so they kept plenty of that around.

The air in the workroom became still and cool, and it began to smell very slightly sweet—jasmine, she thought, though she wasn’t quite sure. She couldn’t remember when they’d arranged that.