She had teetered on the edge of the rabbit hole, windmilling her arms for balance, but in the end she had not fallen. She had not. She had stayed in the safe sunlit world of grass and sky, and she would never leave it again. She had been so wrong ever to think about it. It had tried to take her, but she would not be taken.

Plum sank down on the couch. Her knees were two bags of water. She forced herself to think about what it meant. Someone had found out that she was a Chatwin, or something had found out, and they or it was trying to scare her. Or maybe it was one of those things where you automatically saw your greatest fear or something.

But what it felt like was, Fillory itself had reached out and tugged lightly on the invisible thread tied to the fishhook that was lodged firmly in her back, and it had whispered: Don’t forget. You belong to me.

But she had learned her lesson. Or at any rate a lesson: she would never try to enter the wine closet in anything but a straightforward and conventional fashion. The couch was so saggy and brokeback that it almost swallowed her up. She stopped thinking. She looked at her reflection in the long mirror that Darcy and Chelsea had cracked last night.

But she wasn’t in the mirror. There was another girl there instead of her. Or at least it was shaped like a girl. It was blue and naked and its skin gave off a soft unearthly light. Even its teeth were blue.

It smiled at her. Its eyes were the same color as its skin. It hung motionless in midair, a yard above the floor, slightly smaller than life size. The girl’s outlines were strange: sometimes she was slightly blurry, other times crisp and clear.

Plum sat up. She got to her feet, but slowly, and after that she didn’t move at all, because she understood that all moving was over with. She knew who this was.

It was the ghost of Brakebills. It had been the ghost all along. This wasn’t a friendly ghost. It wasn’t a mischievous poltergeist. This was a dead thing that hated the living. Once as a child, after a storm, Plum had seen a downed power line writhing like a lethal snake on a road, arcing over and over again on the wet asphalt, bright as a sun. This blue girl was like that. The insulation had come off the world, and Plum was facing the raw naked current.

The two girls stared at each other: the one who survived and the one who hadn’t. It smiled wider, like they were having a tea party.

“No,” Plum said. “It’s not me. You don’t want me.”