“That sounds like a good idea, but how exactly—”

“You will not speak. The button is useless to you. The Neitherlands are closed. But the first door is still open. It always has been.”

Quentin’s knees suddenly felt stiff from sitting cross-legged. He wanted to spit the salt water out of his mouth, but there was nothing but more salt water to spit into. The dragon whipped its tail out from under its chin, back into the darkness, slashing up a cloud of silt.

“You may thank me now.”

Wait, what? Quentin opened his mouth to speak—to thank the Dragon of the Grand Canal like a good boy, or to ask him what he meant, or tell him to fuck off for talking in riddles, he would never know, because he choked instead. He couldn’t breathe. The spell was gone, and he was gagging on filthy, freezing canal water. He was drowning.

He left his one remaining shoe stuck in the mud and kicked his way crazily up toward the surface.

CHAPTER 15

Oh, the return of the prodigal! The rapture with which Julia was received back into the domestic fold! The blurry, beaming faces of her parents, a pair of rain-soaked headlights trained upon her, as she presented herself to them in the form of a reprobate reformed. She had disappointed them so many times, in so many ways, they hardly dared to hope anymore. They’d been through so many stages of grief they’d lost count.

Now here she was, returned from Chesterton, her spirit crushed, ready to be part of the family again, and they let her. They actually let her. With a kindness utterly unlike anything she recognized in herself, they took her back, even though she could not have deserved it less. The wreck of the good ship Julia, out of Brooklyn, carrying the precious cargo of Their Love, was ready to be hauled off the Reef of Life and salvaged and refloated, and they did it. They took her back without a word of reproach.

Now it was Julia’s turn to grieve, and they let her, which was another gift. She mourned her lost life, and she mourned the death of the magician she would never be. She buried that mighty sorceress with full honors. And with the grief, unbidden, came its ghostly golden cousin, relief. She had been trying so hard, for so long, to be something the world did not want her to be. Now she could finally stop. The world had won. She yielded to her family’s embraces, and she was grateful for them. What was so great about magic anyway, compared to love? Seriously, what?

Oh, the timorous overtures of her sister, the humanist! By now she was a senior in high school herself. As she labored over her college applications, Julia reactivated her own. They worked on them together, side by side at the kitchen table, swapping tips, her sister coaching her on her essay, Julia dragging her sister through basic calculus by main force. They were a team again, the two of them. Julia had forgotten what it felt like to be part of a family. She’d forgotten how good it could feel, and how much she needed it.

Of Julia’s legendary seven acceptances, only Stanford’s could be salvaged, but that was enough. There was a gap or three in her résumé, sure, but if you cocked your head and blurred your eyes you could take her magical research for some sort of worthy independent ethnographic project. So it was sunny California for her. Just what she needed. Fun in the sun. Put some color in her cheeks. She’d spend a year saving up cash and matriculate in the fall. It was all arranged.

Because Julia had given up. She was packing it in. She washed her hands of the realms invisible that had so thoroughly washed their hands of her. She would take a page from the holy book of those child-raping utopian socialists she’d written about for Mr. Karras: when your sacred intentional community collapses, it’s time to suck it up and sell silverware instead.

Julia would take a page from Jack Donne. At the end of the poem, hadn’t he run to the Goat (by which he meant the constellation Capricorn, a footnote gallantly informed her) to find New Love? Or was it lust? Or maybe it turned out it was too late for him. Maybe that was somebody else. That poem was pretty fucking unintelligible. Anyway it had a happy ending. Ish.

She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where, most days, she untangled tangled networks for a song. On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on home to its dark master.

She couldn’t go back, she knew that now. The magic kingdom was closed to her. But some days she couldn’t see a way forward either.

She always righted herself in the end, with the help of a dandy cateyed new shrink, a woman this time, and her dandy 450 milligrams of Wellbutrin and 30 milligrams of Lexapro daily, and her dandy new online support group for the depressed.

Actually the support group really was pretty dandy. It was something special. It was founded by a woman who’d worked successively at Apple, and then Microsoft, and then Google. She blazed a glittering arc in the firmament at each firm for about four or five years, piling up tranches of stock options, before she rolled neurochemical snake eyes and a bout of clinical depression knocked her out of the sky. By the time Google was done with her she was forty-four and had her fuck-you money in the bank. So she retired early and started Free Trader Beowulf instead.

Free Trader Beowulf—you had to be at least forty and a recovering pen-and-paper role-playing-gamer to get the reference, but it was apt. Google it. FTB was an online support group for depressed people. But not your common run of depressed person. Oh, no.

To get in the door you first had to show them your prescriptions. They wanted credentials, solid ones. A bunch of nerds like this, they didn’t want to hear your whining, and they didn’t want to read your poems—sorry, Jack—or look at your doomy watercolors. This crowd wasn’t softcore. If you were depressed, they wanted to see the hard stuff, a diagnosis from an actual psychiatrist and hard-core chemical-on-neuron action. And if you were rocking double-neurochemical-penetration, like Julia was, all the better.

If that all worked out, then they sent you a video invitation. It was meaningless in itself, a red herring, just a bunch of new-agey platitudes delivered by a sympathetic hippie-type actor. But buried in it, for those who thought to look, was a clue: a single frame of what looked like white noise but which turned out to be hard data. The black-and-white pixels stood for ones and zeros that, when laid end to end, formed a sound file. The audio was of somebody speaking the phone number of an old-school dial-up BBS, which when you called it up, frog-marched you through a pretty chunky series of pure math problems, which if you solved them in six hours or less yielded a sequence of numbers that turned out to be Ulam numbers, Ulam being the password to the Web site at the IP address they gave you if you beat the test, where there was a Flash game that made absolutely no sense unless you could think in four spatial dimensions, but if you could you got a pair of GPS coordinates in South Dakota that turned out to be a geo-caching site from which you could recover a grotesquely complicated three-dimensional wooden puzzle, inside of which was etc. etc. etc.

All good clean all-American fun. A childless, clinically depressed, forty-four-year-old retiree with a genius IQ and an eight-figure bank account had nothing if not time on her hands. It was obnoxious, but nobody was twisting Julia’s arm, and she had time on her hands too, as it happened. It took Julia three weeks to work her way through the intellectual obstacle course—she would’ve liked to see Quentin try it—but at the end of it all she recovered, on the strength of many quarters, a plastic bubble from the claw machine in a neglected video arcade on the Jersey Shore. The bubble contained a flash drive. The flash drive contained the real invitation. No tricks this time. She was in.

Free Trader Beowulf had fourteen members, and Julia made it fifteen. It was only a message board, but it felt more like home than anything had since the two hours Julia had spent at Brakebills four years earlier. The people in FTB got her. She didn’t have to explain herself. They understood her gallows humor and her Gödel, Escher, Bach references, her sudden rages and her long silences. She picked up their arcane in-jokes and running gags pretty quickly. Her whole life she’d felt like the last living member of a lost Amazonian tribe, speaking her own extinct dialect, but here, finally, was her ethnic group. They were a bunch of depressed, overeducated shut-ins, but they seemed human to her. Or maybe not human, but whatever Julia was, they were too.

References to real life were tacitly discouraged on FTB. You didn’t use real names. In most cases she had only the vaguest sense of where the other members lived or what they did for a living, whether they were married or in a few cases even what gender they were. As far as Julia knew they never met in person. FTB just wasn’t a meatspace thing. Outing another member’s real-world identity was an offense punishable by expulsion, or it would have been if it ever happened, but it never did. Welcome to Facelessbook: an antisocial network.

That spring was the happiest time Julia had lived through since her old life ended. She chattered away to the Free Traders all day every day. They hung around her in an invisible crowd, bantering and kibitzing on her work projects. She typed while she ate her breakfast. She typed walking down the street. The last thing she saw before she fell asleep was the Free Trader app on her smartphone on the pillow next to her, and it was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes in the morning. She opened herself up to them in a way she never had to anyone: no irony, no caveats, no regrets. She poured out her broken heart to the Free Traders, and they took it and cleaned it up and fixed it up and gave it back to her fresh and bloody and pumping again.

She never said a thing about Brakebills—that would have been beyond the pale even for FTB—but she found to her relief that she didn’t really have to. Whatever was wrong, the details didn’t matter. It was enough for them to know that there was an enormous piece missing from her world, and they understood what that felt like because they were missing pieces too. Didn’t matter what shape it was. Julia wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that there were a few Brakebills also-rans among the Free Traders. But she never asked.

She had warm feelings for all the Free Traders, but inevitably there were a few with whom she formed tighter bonds: a little clique, a circle within the circle, comprising herself and three others. Failstaff, a gentle poster whose cultural references put him three or four decades older than Julia; Pouncy Silverkitten, whose acid sarcasm was extreme even for FTB, but who chose his targets humanely, mostly; and Asmodeus, who understood Julia’s feelings with telepathic completeness, and whose facility with theoretical physics was so extraordinary, she seemed to be posting from somewhere off-planet.

Julia posted as ViciousCirce. They’d been a trio before she came along, but they were happy to accept her as one of them, and to make their never-ending conversations four-handed.

It was acceptable on FTB to take a thread private, if all parties agreed, and once in a while she and Asmo and Pouncy and Failstaff would recede into their own highly abstract world together. In those private threads they would get a little more concrete about their personal lives, though it was still considered gauche to drop any geo-specific details. That became part of the game, keeping their identities obscure, and another part of the game was constructing elaborate fictional biographies and résumés for each other. Julia did an FBI serial killer profile for each of the other three, complete with police sketches.

Another game they were fond of was called Series. It was simple: somebody would provide three words, or three numbers, or names, or molecules, or shapes, or whatever. Those were the first three terms in the series. Then you had to figure out what the next term in the series was, and what principle generated it. You wanted to make your series maximally difficult but still theoretically solvable, while also making sure there was only one possible solution, i.e., only one guiding principle that could be extrapolated from the three examples. Once the solution was cracked, second prize went to the first person who could iterate the series ten times.

FTB took over her life, and she let it. Sometimes even when she was offline it was as if FTB was running by itself in her head—her brain had spent so much time with these invisible personalities that they’d calved off little clones of themselves in her brain, pirate software versions of Asmo and Pouncy and Failstaff and all the others, that ran on Julia’s hardware. She wasn’t demented—she wasn’t!—it was just a game she played with herself. It was a little insane, but hey, whatever got you through, right? And everything else was going fine. She’d gained weight, stopped scratching herself, barely even bit her cuticles anymore. She hadn’t done the rainbow spell in ages. She knew she was obsessed, but it was turning out that she was the kind of person who needed to be obsessed with something, and she could have done a lot worse. God knows she had before.

She figured, let the fever run its course. It would break, and the patient would wake up clammy but clearheaded, and the fever dreams would fade. She’d head off to Stanford in the fall, get a new life, get some real-world, visible, analog friends. Wipe the slate clean.

But first she’d give it its head, let it run a little. Which is how Julia found herself late on a weekend afternoon in March wandering through Prospect Heights toward Bed-Stuy. She’d become a prodigious walker of late, because she needed some kind of exercise, and exposure to sunlight improved her mood. And she could take the Free Traders with her, not only in their capacity as spectral presences in her brain but as actual presences on her smartphone, for which Failstaff had ginned up a clever little app. (No iPhones, natch, Android only. The Free Traders were huge open-source snobs.) She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship.