The mirror-house collapsed from the outside in. There was a moment of silence—Quentin imagined the cold sandy outskirts dispersing outside, the raining streetlights ceasing to be. Then came a distant bang as the lower floors began contracting like an accordion. Quentin backed up as far as the doorway. Alice looked over her shoulder—if a niffin could disbelieve, there was disbelief on her face. Then the banging came closer, and finally the room behind her shut like a trash compactor and she was shoved rudely through the doorway into reality.

When she turned to face him again there was a new seriousness of purpose on her face. She wasn’t playing anymore either. Quentin called down the stairwell.

“Guys! Plum!”

Alice smiled at him as if to say: sure, go on and call your little girlfriend.

“It’s not like that.”

As she passed the table her fingers brushed it and it began to burn. He backed down the stairs gingerly, never taking his eyes off her, as if she were a wild animal.

“Plum?” he called. “Eliot? Alice is out. I collapsed the land and she came through.”

He heard Plum stir in her room.

“What?” She opened her door in a sweatshirt, hair loose, and saw Alice at the top of the stairs. She must have been taking a nap. “Oh. Was that a good idea?”

“Probably? Eliot!” Where was the High fucking King?

What was weird was, Quentin wasn’t afraid. Usually in moments of crisis he was lost in a swarm of choices, paralyzed by the possibility that he might do the wrong thing—there were so many wrong things to do, and so few right ones! But not this time. This time the throughline was clear to him. There was only one right option, and it could be fatal, but death would be preferable to a life spent doing either the wrong thing or nothing at all.

“Plum, get behind me.”

She did, for a wonder, and together they retreated downstairs to the living room, where he tried to stall Alice by blocking off the doorway. Kinetic magic: crude, but he had to try it. He threw together a barrier out of books, dishes from the kitchen, the pillows from the sofa, whatever he could get a magical grip on. But she passed right through them, and where she touched them they burned.

“Quentin!” Plum said. “This is my house! That I own! Don’t break it!”

She put the fires out, but the air smelled like burning insulation.

“Plum, you have to get out of here,” he said quietly. “Find Eliot and go.”