“I don’t know.” Alice sneezed again. “What do you want to do?”

Quentin plucked at the grass. A burst of faint laughter came from inside the house. If there was a password they hadn’t found it. He and Alice had spent an hour looking for hidden writing—they scanned the door in every spectrum they could think of, visible and invisible, infrared to gamma, and tried to strip the paint off to look underneath, but it wouldn’t come. Alice even tried some advanced graphological enchantments on the squiggly grain of the wood itself, but it just stared back at them blankly. They’d sent currents of force twisting into the lock, jiggling the tumblers, but they couldn’t pick it. They looked for a fourth-dimensional path around the door. They’d jointly plucked up their nerve and summoned a kind of phantasmal axe—it wasn’t explicitly against any rule they could think of—but they couldn’t even scratch it. For a while Alice was convinced the door was an illusion, that it didn’t even exist, but it certainly looked and felt real, and neither of them could find any charms or enchantments to dispel.

“Look at it,” Quentin said. “It’s like some lame Hansel and Gretel hut. I thought the Physical Kids were supposed to be cool.”

“Dinner’s in an hour,” Alice said.

“I’ll skip it.”

“It’s lamb tonight, with a rosemary crust. Potatoes au dauphin.” Alice’s eidetic memory retained odd details.

“Maybe we should have our own seminar. Out here.”

She snorted. “Yeah, that’d show ’em.”

The beech tree was on the edge of a field that had just been mown. The giant cinnamon rolls of hay dotting the field cast long shadows.

“You’re a what again? A photomancer?”

“Phosphoromancer.”

“What can you do?”

“I’m not sure yet. I practiced some things over the summer. Focusing light, refracting it, bending it. If you bend light around something, it turns invisible. But I want to understand the theory of it first.”

“Show me something.”

Alice turned shy. It didn’t take much.

“I can hardly do anything.”

“Look, I don’t even have a Discipline. I’m a nothingmancer. I’m a squatmancer.”

“They just don’t know what it is yet. You have your little sparky thing.”

“Same difference. And don’t make fun of my sparky thing. Now bend me some damn light.”

She grimaced, but she got up on her knees on the grass and held up her hand, fingers spread. They were kneeling face-to-face, and he was suddenly aware of her full breasts inside her thin, high-necked blouse.

“Watch the shadow,” she snapped.

She did something with her fingers, and the shadow of her hand disappeared. It was simply gone, leaving behind only a few ghostly rainbow highlights.

“Nice.”

“It’s pathetic, I know.” She waved her hand, scrubbing out the magic. “My whole hand is supposed to go invisible, but I can only do the shadow.”

There was something here. Quentin felt his sulk starting to dispel. This was a test. Physical magic. They weren’t Morris dancing with tree spirits here. This was a brute-force problem.