When he left Brakebills for New York, Quentin had expected to be knocked down and ravished by the sheer gritty reality of it all: going from the jeweled chrysalis of Brakebills to the big, messy, dirty city, where real people led real lives in the real world and did real work for real money. And for a couple of weeks he had been. It was definitely real, if by real you meant non-magical and obsessed with money and amazingly filthy. He had completely forgotten what it was like to be in the mundane world all the time. Nothing was enchanted: everything was what it was and nothing more. Every conceivable surface was plastered with words—concert posters, billboards, graffiti, maps, signs, warning labels, alternate-side parking regulations—but none of it meant anything, not the way a spell did. At Brakebills every square inch of the House, every brick, every bush, every tree, had been marinated in magic for centuries. Here, out in the world, raw unmodified physics reigned, and mundanity was epidemic. It was like a coral reef with the living vital meaning bleached out of it, leaving nothing but an empty colored rock behind. To a magician’s eyes, Manhattan looked like a desert.

Though like a desert, it did have some stunted, twisted traces of life, if you dug for them. There was a magical culture in New York outside the handful of Brakebills-educated elite who resided there, but it existed on the city’s immigrant margins. The older Physical Kids—a name they had left behind at Brakebills and would never use again—gave Quentin and Alice the outer-borough subway tour. In a windowless second-story café on Queens Boulevard, they watched Kazakhs and Hasidim construe number theory. They ate dumplings with Korean mystics in Flushing and watched modern-day Isis worshippers rehearse Egyptian street hexes in the back of a bodega on Atlantic Avenue. Once they took the ferry across to Staten Island, where they stood around a dazzlingly blue swimming pool sipping gin and tonics at a conclave of Filipino shamans.

But after a few weeks the energy for those educational field trips had all but evaporated. There was just too much to distract them, and nothing particularly urgent to be distracted from. Magic would always be there, and it was hard work, and he’d been doing it for a long time. What Quentin needed to catch up on was life. New York’s magical underground may have been limited, but the number and variety of its drinking establishments was prodigious. And you could get drugs here—actual drugs! They had all the power in the world, and no work to do, and nobody to stop them. They ran riot through the city.