The safeguards were probably beside the point. Alice had been stronger than him when she was human, and now she was on another power scale entirely. Now she was plugged into the main line. But he had to get closer to her. He didn’t understand why she was here. Maybe he’d summoned her somehow, without even knowing it, trapped her and bound her in this weird mirror-house. Maybe she’d come on her own—Alice had found him at Brakebills, and now she’d found him again here, wriggled her way into his land like a worm into an apple. She was the snake in his Eden.

It didn’t really matter. He hadn’t managed to make a land, or not much of one, but this was better. Making a land was a distraction anyway. So was the robbery. This was what he wanted.

But what did Alice want? To haunt him? Laugh at him? Hunt and kill him? The scholarly literature on niffins was pretty thin. Their behavior was unpredictable at best. But whatever she wanted, he knew what she needed, and that was to be human again. He couldn’t have asked for a better chance.

And he needed her too: he needed to see her again, she was the only person he’d ever felt completely at home with. He knew he should wait and eat and sleep and talk it over with Plum, but—he told himself—it was hard to know how long he had. The whims of a niffin were pretty much the definition of perverse. If she left now he might never find her again. He was going to finish this.

And plus Plum would try to talk him out of it.

The house was quiet. He wasn’t even remotely tired. Staring at the red door he tried to summon up in his mind the Alice he knew. Did he really remember what she was like? Maybe he was pursuing a ghost, the ghost of a ghost, a figment of his own memory. It had been seven years: that was longer than he’d known her as a human. Maybe he was chasing some long-gone, never-was fantasy-Alice. If he could bring her back, who would she be?

Quentin was going to find out. He opened the red door but didn’t cross the threshold. The other room was still there, the mirror room, with its mirror windows. He sat down on the floor, cross-legged, and waited.

He’d been sitting there for ten minutes when Alice swam by, slowly, in profile, her legs trailing lightly behind her, as silent and malevolent as a shark in an aquarium. She was slightly smaller than she had been in life, like an expensive doll of herself. She didn’t see him; if she knew he was there she didn’t bother to turn her head.