“Stole it.”

“We tried to steal it too.”

“I know,” Plum said. “From us. Next time try harder.”

The failure didn’t appear to sting Penny. He looked like a little boy with a new puppy. It was weird: he was obviously an asshole, but he wasn’t a sociopath. He had feelings—in fact from the way he held the book it looked like he had an enormous capacity for love. He just wasn’t very good at loving people, apart from himself.

Only Eliot looked grave.

“I just thought of something,” he said. “That was the last book. The wall’s full. The map is finished. That must mean the story’s over, Fillory’s history has been written. The apocalypse must have already come.”

“You don’t know that,” Quentin said.

“Yes, I do,” Eliot snapped. “And don’t try to make me feel better.”

Could it be true? The idea made its way through Plum in a cold ripple. All this time, all her life really, she’d been thinking about Fillory, dithering about it, hiding from it. Fillory and the Chatwins and the fatal longings they represented had been her dark side, and she’d tried to pretend they didn’t exist. She’d wanted to have one side only, like a Möbius strip. A Möbius person.

But that was a mistake. She was starting to suspect that facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future. She was ready to face it, thought perhaps she might even quite like to face it, that there might be not just danger but joy and love in facing it—and just like that she’d lost it forever. She should have done what she’d told Quentin to do with Alice (totally correctly by the way): she should have met it head-on and made her peace with it when she could. Now she’d never have the chance. The books in front of her looked subtly different now. They’d gone from being about the present to being about the past.

Or had they? Maybe they had. But maybe that was giving up too easily. Fillory didn’t feel dead to her, that was the thing. She could still sense it out there, just the other side of the thin partition that stood between this reality and the next. If she pressed her ear to it she could still hear Fillory singing to her, however faintly.

“The wall isn’t actually full, you know.” She cleared her throat—it was dusty in this damn library. “Not necessarily. You could run another row of books under there, along the floor.”

She pointed. There was still space under the lowermost shelf.

“You certainly could not,” Penny said.

“Well, you actually could, if you wanted to.”