Whatever he was going to do, he couldn’t do it if he was worrying about Plum too. He couldn’t hold back, and his control wasn’t going to be good. In fact if he was lucky his control would be really, really bad. It was going to end here one way or the other: he was going to fix Alice or he was going to die trying. She’d died for him once already, he couldn’t do any less for her.

An experiment: he brought his hands together, laced his fingers, and all the electrical cords in the room made for Alice like striking snakes. It was a trick he couldn’t have pulled off before his father had died, but he carried that extra strength with him now. Current flowed, the lights browned out, and Alice’s blue aura flickered. Quentin smelled melting plastic. Alice slitted her eyes with pleasure.

What next. He’d already tried magic missiles. A magnetic cage maybe. No? Just force then: wards, shields, thick invisible layers of power, one after the other, like he’d done when he was working on the page, wrapping around her and then contracting and then having the next one wrapped around it. Light refracted and bent around Alice, producing incidental distortions and rainbows. The spells shed little orbital sparks and streamers. He felt her pushing, probably with a tiny fraction of her strength, but she hadn’t burst through yet. The mere fact that she felt resistance was progress.

Maybe it was love, or courage, or the plastic fumes, but Quentin felt strength building up in him, a rising, cresting flood of it. He’d felt this way once before in Fillory, on Benedict Island. And even farther back, that first night at Brakebills, when it had all come tearing out of him for the first time. But he was even stronger now.

It felt good.

Not much time left. Thank God the building was already warded up tight, because he could feel the energy in the room pressing at the walls, bulging them outward, threatening to blow out the windows. Alice shoved harder at the envelope of force, frowning. His eyes flicked around the room for anything metal, found the bare steel frame of the couch, jerked it to him with a magnetic spell. Amping up his strength, toughening his hands, he bent it into the shape of an arch with two feet: an omega.

He was almost too late. Like tearing tissue paper Alice was through her prison and on him. Her blue hands gripped the sigil just above his, but she couldn’t get past it. Their faces were close together now. She was smiling as usual, showing her perfect sapphire teeth, as if she could barely keep from laughing her head off. Quentin smiled back.