Probably niffins didn’t eat. Probably this was her first meal in seven years, because this was her first time having a body in seven years. After another minute she clumsily dipped a spoon in it. There was a sense of everybody trying not to stare at her. She chewed for a few seconds, robotically, like somebody who’d seen some crude diagrams of what chewing food looked like but had never actually tried it before. Then she spat it out.

“Told you we should’ve got Honey Nut,” Plum said.

“Give her time,” he said. “I’ll run out for some fresh fruit. Fresh bread. Maybe that would go down easier.”

“She might be thirsty.”

Right. Quentin got her a pint glass of water. She drank it in one long swallow, then she drank another, gave a colossal belch and stood up.

“Are you all right?” Plum said. “Quentin, why isn’t she talking?”

“Because fuck yourself,” Alice said in a hoarse whisper. She went back upstairs and back to bed.

—

Quentin and Eliot and Plum sat around the kitchen table. The fridge had developed an annoying fault whereby it hummed loudly until somebody got up and gave it a shove, the way one would get a sleeper to stop snoring, whereupon it fell silent for half an hour and then started humming again.

“She should be eating,” Quentin said. He got up. He couldn’t stay sitting down; as soon as he sat he bounced back up. He’d sit down when Alice was better. “She should at least be hungry. Maybe she’s sick, maybe we put her body back together wrong. Maybe she has a perforated liver.”

“She’s probably just full,” Eliot said. “Probably she ate a bunch of people right before we turned her back and she just has to sleep it off.”

Quentin couldn’t even tell if it was funny or not. He didn’t know where the line was anymore. And whatever Eliot said, he’d spent almost as much time at Alice’s bedside as Quentin had.

“She’ll be fine,” Plum said. “Stop fussing. I mean, I was sort of expecting her to be grateful for us having saved her from being a monster, but that’s OK. I don’t need to be thanked.”

“She looks good, anyway. Hasn’t aged a day.”

“I keep wondering what it was like, being a niffin,” Quentin said.

“Probably she doesn’t even remember.”

“I remember everything.”

Alice stood at the foot of the stairs. Her face was puffy from all the sleep. She came in and sat down at the table again, moving more confidently now but still like an alien unaccustomed to Earth’s gravity. She seemed to be waiting for something.

“We got some fruit,” Quentin said. “Apples. Grapes. Some prosciutto.” He’d grabbed whatever looked yummy and reasonably fresh at the fancy market around the corner.