They followed him up. He couldn’t stop them, and Eliot was right, he needed their help. He climbed the stairs to the fourth-floor workroom, the skin on his back sore and stretched tight like a third-degree sunburn.

“Coins,” he whispered. “Mayakovsky’s.”

There was enough room here. The spell came to him easily, automatically, like it had worn a deep channel right down the middle of him, even though he was casting it for the first time. He could see the page from the Neitherlands in front of him in his mind: the columns of numbers, the turning orbits that spun around each other like a magician juggling rings, the plant with its long leaves rustling demurely in a wind from somewhere out of frame. He knew the whole thing by heart. Until now he just hadn’t understood why.

This was what it was for. This was why he’d snatched it out of the air and saved it. Matter and magic. He’d thought it was about making matter magical, but now he had something that was pure magic, and he was going to give it matter. Reverse the flow. He was going to bring Alice back into the world of the physical.

He snapped out orders—there was no time to be polite—and Plum and Eliot handed him things as he called for them: powders, liquids, books open to such and such a page, one of the gold coins. He took them without looking, like a surgeon up to his elbows in a patient.

It was like he’d been assembling the pieces without knowing it. He couldn’t have done it without his newfound strength, and not without minor mendings either: he knew how to knit broken things together. He scraped at his insides for every last scintilla of magical strength. He was feverish, and his knees felt like they could buckle at any moment, but his mind was clear. He knew what he had to do, if he could just stay upright long enough.

When everything was complete, when the enchantment was hovering latent in the air like a thundercloud about to burst, he turned his back to the room and opened the trap.

It was like letting out an enormous breath that he’d been holding for way too long. The room flooded with blue light, the light in a swimming pool on a summer afternoon. Quentin almost blacked out with relief. Later he would look at his tattoo and find a raised, blackened scar in the center of the star.