When he saw what was in the mirror he froze.
“Oh,” he said quietly. “Oh my God. It’s you.”
Plum didn’t think he was talking to her. Did he recognize this thing? It was almost like he knew it personally, which would be pretty weird even for him. He took a deep breath and pulled himself together.
“Don’t move till I tell you,” he said.
That was meant for Plum. She didn’t move, but she didn’t dare to believe that he could actually save her. All she’d done was drag him into the catastrophe too.
With an arm protecting his face Professor Coldwater reared back one of his long legs and kicked in the mirror. It took him three kicks—the first two times the glass just starred and sagged, but the third time his foot went right through it. It got a little stuck when he tried to pull it out. It was a measure of how shocked she was that Plum’s first thought was, I must tell Chelsea that she won’t have to pay for the mirror.
That didn’t dispel the ghost, but it was definitely inconvenienced. It was still watching them, suspended in midair, but now it had to peer around the edge of the hole. Professor Coldwater turned his back on it—the ghost threw something at them, Plum couldn’t see what, and he deflected it with one hand without looking. Then he placed his palms together.
“Get down,” he said. “All the way. On the floor.”
She got down. The air shimmered and rippled, and her hair crackled with so much static electricity it made her scalp hurt. The entire world was shot through with light. At the bottom of it was the dull bass pressure-beat of the door exploding outward out of its frame.
“Now get up and run,” Professor Coldwater said. “Run! Go ahead, I’m right behind you.”
Plum ran. She could have stayed and tried to help, but that would have been compounding her stupidity with more stupidity. She did the hard thing and trusted him: she hurdled the couch like a champion and felt a shockwave as Professor Coldwater detonated some final spell. The force of it lifted Plum off her feet for a second and made her stagger, but she found them again and kept on running.
Going back was faster than going forward had been. She was bounding ahead seven-league-boots-style, which at first she thought was adrenaline till she realized, nope, magic. One stride took her through the hell-room, another and she was in colonial Brakebills, then she was in Wharton’s room, on the roof, in the dining room crawl space, the library, hard left turn at the creepy-pear-tree-courtyard, the passage. The sound of doors slamming shut behind her was like a string of firecrackers going off.
She didn’t stop till she was back in the safety of the Senior Common Room, breathing hard. He was right behind her, just as he’d said. He’d done it, he’d gotten them out. Never had anything seemed so certain than that she was going to die in that room, but now it was over. The bad thing, the horror, had broken out of wherever it had been hiding all her life, but he’d shoved it back down. For now.
Without a word Professor Coldwater set about resealing the passageway behind them. She watched him work, her breath slowly going back to normal, dazed but not so dazed that she wasn’t interested in the technical aspects: moving in fast-motion, his arms flying crazily like a time-lapse movie, he assembled an entire intricately patterned brick wall in about five seconds.
She wondered where he’d learned how to do that. Not here. This time he left out the fancy signature angles. Say that for him: he learned from his mistakes.
Then he climbed out and closed the door. They were alone. It could all have been a dream except for the plaster dust on the shoulders of Professor Coldwater’s blazer.
“How did you know?” she said. “How did you know where I was? Where the ghost was?”
“Not a ghost. A niffin. Very bad news.”
“What did it want?”
“She. She used to be human. And I don’t know. Did she say anything to you?”
“No. Can they talk?”
“I don’t know.” One of his fingers was still crackling with a bit of white fire; he shook it and it went out. “Nobody knows much about them. I’m not even sure I did anything to her. I just distracted her and got out of there.”
“But you looked surprised when you saw it. You looked like you recognized it. I mean her.”
“I know.” Professor Coldwater looked sadder and less triumphant than she would have thought. “I know I did. I wish she’d said something.”
“I don’t care if it recited the goddamn King James Bible.”
Dean Fogg rounded the corner of the L at speed. He didn’t look happy.
“Do you know how many alarms you two set off, blundering around in the subspaces like that?”
Professor Coldwater ticked off on his fingers, silently.
“Eleven?”
“Yes. Eleven.” Fogg seemed perversely unhappy that Coldwater had got the right answer. “What the hell were you doing back there? Purchas?”
Plum flushed. The prank—she’d completely forgotten about it. She still had Wharton’s stupid pencil case in her stupid pocket. It was so utterly pointless. Maybe that’s what the ghost was trying to teach her: it’s all pointless. Fate is coming whatever you do, so quit wriggling around, it’s only making you look more ridiculous than you already do. We’re all ghosts here, you just don’t look like one yet.
But she wasn’t having that. If that was true then what was the point of anything ever? She was going to wriggle a bit longer anyway. Who the hell cared how ridiculous she looked.
Plum squared her shoulders and lifted her chin.
“I was looking for a secret passage to the wine closet,” she said, loud and clear, “so I could play a prank on Wharton.”
“A prank.” Fogg was unimpressed with her existential courage. “I see. Coldwater?”
“Dean Fogg.”
“You didn’t perform the incursion protocols, any of them.”
“No,” Coldwater said. “I didn’t. There wasn’t much time. The situation was pretty urgent.”
“Did you at least try to terminate the damn thing? Or banish it?”
“I—” He bit something back. “No.”
“Why not?”
A muscle moved in Professor Coldwater’s jaw.
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Professor Coldwater saved my life,” Plum put in.
“Thank you, Purchas,” Fogg said, “and he also put the lives of everybody else at this school at risk. I took a chance on you, Quentin, and it was a mistake. You’re fired. Be out of your rooms by end of day tomorrow. Professor Liu can pick up the rest of your teaching.”
Coldwater didn’t flinch, didn’t even blink, but Plum flinched for him, the way you do when you see somebody else take a punch.
“All right. I understand.”
“Do you?” Fogg was so angry he was spitting. “Do you? Well, you always were a quick one! I would think you of all people would have caught on a little quicker, given that you witnessed firsthand the reason why these protocols were created in the first place. Purchas?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can finish out the last three weeks of the semester. Then you’re expelled.”
Fogg glared at them both in turn, then walked out of the room.
Plum so wished she could be cool about it. She didn’t think she was going to cry, she just had to sit down on one of the red leather couches and put her head between her knees for a minute while her vision grayed out around the edges. She really did love Brakebills. She loved it so much. She really did. She really had.
She felt the sofa squish as Professor Coldwater sat down at the other end. He blew out a long sigh.
“Well—”
“I’m so sorry, Professor Coldwater. I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to put you in danger! I didn’t mean to get you fired!”
And now she did sob: once, twice, three times. They were going to turn her out into the cold, scary world. She wasn’t ready. It wasn’t safe. What was she going to do? How was she going to live now?
“I know. Please don’t worry about it.” He said it quietly. “I’ve been thrown out of better places than this. And you might as well call me Quentin.”
“But what are you going to do? What am I going to do?”
“You’ll find something. It’s a big world. Probably bigger than you realize.”
“But I’m a failure! I’m a freak! I got kicked out of Brakebills, for God’s sake!”
The words barely had any meaning. They would soon, she knew, but right now it made her lips feel numb just to say them, as if the words were envenomed. She was expelled. She thought of having to say them to her parents and the gray came back.
“Something will come up, I promise you. Plenty of people have Brakebills degrees, but how many people can say they got kicked out? It’s a pretty exclusive club.”
She wasn’t so far gone that she didn’t snort at that.
“But if you don’t mind my asking,” he went on, “what exactly were you doing back there? I sealed that corridor off for a reason. Even I couldn’t figure out where it went.”
“Oh, I told Fogg the truth. I really was pranking Wharton.”
“But why?”
“Well, he’s been kind of stingy with the wine lately. Plus it just seemed to me like there should be more, I don’t know, chicanery afoot around here. Generally. High jinks. It sounds silly now, but you know what I mean? To lighten the tone. Because basically who knows, we could all drop dead at any moment.”
“That is true.”
“Or get expelled.”
Quentin appeared to accept her reasoning at face value. Old people: you never knew what you were going to get.
“Do you still want to know where the secret passage is? To the wine closet?”
“Sure,” Plum said, though not unshakily. She managed a bitter little laugh. “Why the hell not?”
But she meant it. Fuck it. They could take Brakebills away from her—apparently—but at least the honor of the League would live on eternally. She would always have that.
“You want the next panel over,” Quentin said. “You don’t count the half-panel.”
Aha. She drew the same rune-word she had before, and the door opened, and she peered inside. It was just what she thought: a cakewalk. Not even one hundred yards, more like seventy-five.
After all that the timing was pretty close to perfect. Plum had just closed the secret door to the wine closet behind her—it was concealed behind a trick wine rack—when Wharton came bustling in through the front door with the rumble and glow of the cheese course subsiding behind him. Her hair was a mess, but that was just part of the effect. It was all extremely “League.”
Wharton froze, with a freshly recorked bottle in one hand and two inverted wineglasses dangling from the fingers of the other. Plum regarded him calmly. Some of the charm of Wharton’s face came from its asymmetry: he’d had a harelip corrected at some point, and the surgery had gone well, so that all that was left was a tiny tough-guy scar, as if he’d taken one straight in the face at some point but kept on trucking.
Also he had an incredibly precious widow’s peak. Some guys had all the luck.
“You’ve been short-pouring the Finns,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “You have my pencils.”
“Yes.”
“It’s not the pencils I mind,” Wharton said, “so much as the case. And the knife. They’re antique silver, Smith and Sharp. You can’t find those anywhere anymore.”
She took the case out of her pocket. She wasn’t going to give an inch, not even after everything else. Especially not. To hell with the ghost, and to hell with Brakebills, and to deepest darkest hell with the Chatwins. The world had split open under her feet, and nothing would ever be the same, but she would still play her part to the hilt. To the end. They couldn’t take that away.
“Why have you been short-pouring the Finns?”
“Because I need the extra wine.”
God, was he really an alcoholic? Nothing should surprise her at this point, but still. He didn’t seem like the type. Epifanio, maybe, but not Wharton. And Wharton wouldn’t be an enabler like that.
“But what do you need it for?” Plum held the case just out of reach. “I’ll give you back the pencils and all that. I just want to know.”
“What do you think?” Wharton said. “I leave it out for the damn ghost. I thought the wine might keep it happy. That thing scares the shit out of me.”
Wharton had a lot to learn about ghosts. She sighed and sat down on a crate. All her strength was gone.
“Me too.” She handed him the case.