“I would like a double scotch with one large ice cube in it,” Alice said.

Oh.

“Sure. Coming right up.”

She still wasn’t making eye contact with anyone, but it seemed like progress. Maybe it would relax her—help her get past the shock. So long as her liver wasn’t actually perforated.

Quentin took down the bottle, feeling very conscious that he was making things up as he went along. He clunked an ice cube into the glass and poured whiskey over it. The thing was not to be afraid of her. He wanted her to feel loved. Or maybe that was too much, but he wanted her to feel safe.

“Anybody else?” he called from the kitchen.

The silence in the room was stony.

“Right then.”

He poured one for himself too, neat. He was damned if he was going to let his newly resurrected ex-girlfriend have her first drink in seven years alone. Plum and Eliot were both for once at a loss for anything to say. He poured them scotches too, just in case they changed their minds.

Alice slurped her whiskey down thirstily, then she took Plum’s and drank that too. When she was done she stared into the empty tumbler, looking disappointed. Eliot discreetly moved his glass out of her reach. Quentin thought of getting her the bottle, then thought maybe he shouldn’t. She should have more water.

“Do you want—?” he began.

“It hurt,” Alice said. She let out a shuddering breath. “If you want to know. Have you ever wondered, Quentin? Did you ever really try to imagine what it felt like—really try? I remember thinking, maybe it won’t hurt, maybe I’ll get off easy. You never know, maybe magic fire is different. I’ll tell you something: it’s not different. It hurt like a bastard. It hurt approximately as much, I would guess, as being on fire with regular fire would. It’s funny, the worst pain I ever felt till then was getting my finger caught in a folding chair. I guess I’d been lucky.”

At the memory she stopped and looked into her glass again, to make absolutely sure she hadn’t missed anything.

“You’d think your nerves wouldn’t go up that high, but they do. You’d think they’d have an upper limit. Why would it be possible for people to feel so much pain? It’s maladaptive.”

No one had an answer.

“And then it didn’t hurt at all. I can remember when the last bits of me went—it was my toes and the top of my head at the same time—and then the pain was completely gone, and I wanted to cry with relief because it was over. I was just so relieved that my body was gone. It couldn’t hurt me anymore.