Quentin hesitated.

“I know,” Penny said, more quietly. “Not as tempting as you’d think, is it? I’ve never opened mine. There are those in the order who have looked, and I’ve seen their faces.”

Plum slid her volume off the shelf and held it cradled in her hand like a baby. The urge to read it was almost overpowering. Almost, but not quite.

“You spend your whole life trying to understand yourself, what your story is about,” Penny said, “and then suddenly it’s all there. All the answers, spelled out in black and white. Some of them are indexed even. Look at Quentin’s, it’s alphabetized.” It was true: there were little half-moons cut into the pages, labeled A–B, C–D and so on, in a diagonal ladder down the side.

Slowly, reluctantly, Quentin handed his book back to Penny.

“I guess I’m supposed to be writing it,” he said. “Not reading it.”

Penny reshelved it—a little cavalierly, Plum thought. Plum replaced hers with appropriate care. You can’t unread a book. She was dying to look, but she supposed that if she lived her life properly then by the time it was over she’d know what was in it. That was sort of the whole point, wasn’t it? To understand your own story? Reading the book now would just be cheating. And what kind of jackass cheats at life?

“Hang on,” Eliot said, “this raises a lot of questions. Does this mean we don’t have free will? And if you burn somebody’s book do they die?”

“Keep moving!” Penny shooed them out into the hall. “There’s a lot to see! I thought you were in a hurry.”

He hustled them along as far as a plain unmarked door, which he opened. It was the first room they’d seen that was completely empty of books. There was nothing on the walls, not even a picture. It had no windows either, only a desk with a leather chair behind it. In fact it was rather gloomy.

“Let me guess,” Plum said. “Invisible books. Or no, microscopic. Like they’re in the air, and we’re breathing them.”

“This is my office.”

Penny sat down at the desk, facing them, and steepled his eerily luminescent fingers.

“The system notified me as soon as you entered the Neitherlands. There’s a reason I brought you here.”

“You have literally three minutes,” Eliot said. He was practiccally fidgeting with impatience.

“You have something of mine,” Penny said. “Quentin.”

“I do?”

“A page. From one of my books.”

“Oh.”

Everybody looked at Quentin. Plum hadn’t thought of that, but she guessed it made sense. Probably technically Quentin had stolen that page from the Neitherlands. But even so Penny was being kind of scoldy about it.

“Fair enough.” Quentin extracted it from his coat pocket. “I took good care of it for you, I promise.”