For a second they both thought there was something in Quentin’s bed, but he jerked the covers back and it was just a pillow. This was seriously creeping her out. Something shattered downstairs in the kitchen—it sounded like somebody dropping a wineglass.

Obediently, they both trotted downstairs, Quentin first. Lo, a lone wineglass lay in pieces right in the middle of the floor. Lookee there.

“Must have been the wind,” Plum said.

Now she was doing it. Her shrink would say she was using humor to avoid deeper feelings. She would be right.

They rummaged around aimlessly; they were both hoping to stumble on something that would make the land exciting, and magical, and Romantic, the way they were hoping it would be, but they didn’t. She didn’t like this land. It was like they’d dialed a wrong number. This wasn’t what they’d ordered.

“I wonder, if there’s food here, if you can eat it?” Quentin said.

She nerved herself to open the fridge. There had been a bowl of green grapes in it, but the grapes had become green glass marbles.

Quentin was picking up books one after the other and opening them.

“Dude. They’re all going to be blank.”

“Maybe. This isn’t what I expected, but I don’t know why it’s not what I expected. It felt right when we were casting it, but something must have gone wrong.”

He put the book down and walked boldly over to the front door, but before he could open it there was a muffled thud from the second floor. It might have been a lamp falling over onto a rug. He stopped, his hand on the doorknob.

“Quentin—”

“I know,” he said. “This is definitely a land, but I’m not completely sure it’s our land.”

“Whose then?”

He shook his head. He didn’t know. It was literally everything she could do not to start humming “This Land Is Your Land.”

“Well, we made it,” Plum said.

“I know, I know. Want to go see who knocked over the lamp?”

“Let’s go.”

She followed Quentin up the stairs but he stopped halfway, listening.

“Why do I feel like we’re getting decoyed here?” He turned around and edged past her, back down the stairs. “I’ll be right back.”

“Famous last words.”

She watched him reach the bottom of the stairs and freeze, staring at something out of view.

“Shit.”

“What is it?”

Except that she knew even as she was asking him. There were blue highlights on the polished banister next to him. She knew that blue.

“Run!”

He pelted up the stairs at her, white-faced.

“Jesus, run!”