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Jane stared at hiusted noise in her throat and turned away and boosted herself up onto the bent trunk of the clock-tree

“All right,” she said “All right I’ll tell you what I know, but it isn’t much I feel like I know less and less every day Maybe it’s the ti to live backward, like Merlin God, I think I would kill myself Or would I already have killedago”

“What, Martin? Not likely”

“Not him, the other one Rupert He spent a lot of time in Fillory He was close to Martin”

“That’s not actually a huge plus in our book,” Janet said

“It should be Martin was an asshole, but he was ss about Fillory that you and I will never know, and he was only thirteen when he did it Have you ever wondered where he got all that power from? How he became what he was?”

“I guess I have wondered that,” Eliot said

“I have too I never knew But I think Rupert did He ith Martin the day he disappeared He always said he didn’t see anything, but I think he did He was an open book, our Rupes, no good at keeping secrets, though he thought he was

“If I were looking forpuzzle pieces, I would start there Go back to Earth Find his things, see what he left behind Maybe he wrote so—you weren’t supposed to bring things through, fros anyway, but I think Rupert did I think he stole so stink about it No one ever pinned it on hiot lost in the shuffle, but I think he had so he wasn’t supposed to

“That’s what I would do: go back, all the way back to where this whole disaster started You weren’t there, and even I wasn’t there But Rupert was”

That was all they got out of her Eliot asked her soarden, while Janet walked froet them to open for her the way they did for Jane; Jane claimed not to knohy they didn’t After ten more minutes Eliot said they should be on their way, and Jane didn’t disagree

She walked the of clock-trees

“Good luck,” the Watcherwoman said “And I do mean that”

“Thanks,” Eliot said “Good luck with your clockwork lessons”

“Thank you”

“I bet you wish you hadn’t broken that watch,” Janet said

She wouldn’t leave it alone

“Wishes are for children,” Jane Chatwin said “I grew up”

CHAPTER 16

It was like a really terrible party where on top of everything else at the end it turns out your ride bailed and you have to walk ho that the bird would come back at any oods Or the surviving half of the Couple, if he had survived She worried to the point where she kept losing her shit every ti cawed or hooted or one of them stepped on a stick It had to be after theths it had already gone to The only question hen

After Betsy left, or Amadeus, or whatever her name was, Stoppard had departed the scene too at top speed on the busted club chair, with promises to reconnect back in New York once the coast was clear Plu to take the pool table, but when they tried to shift it they discovered that they lacked the necessary th was spent So they set off on foot instead

Maybe they should have taken Lionel’s gun, for added protection, but they didn’t They just didn’t want it

It was a long night, and a long walk, but then again everybody had a lot of explaining to do, and a lot of thinking to do too Quentin told her what he knew about why Asmodeus (that was it) would have wanted the knife, and after hearing the tale of Reynard the ht it was pretty understandable She , that was the whole reason she was there All else being equal Plum wished her well

But how had she known it was in the case in the first place? Pluuess Quentin didn’t either, or if he did he didn’t make it

More disquieting was the fact that Asmodeus obviously knew about Pluo that the bird must knoas clear that her secret identity wasn’t anywhere near as secret as she thought it was, and that being a Chatwin meant that she was already part of a lot of other people’s stories in ways that she was only now becoht as well tell Quentin at this point; she felt safe with him She’d almost told him once, at the hotel bar, and anyway he asked why she could open the suitcase when nobody else could, because of course he wasn’t going to let that go, and that had to be the answer Her great-grandfather had locked it and made sure only a fa, but she was so tired she couldn’t think of a lie, and anyas the point

For the record Pluht it was pretty rich that Quentin turned out to be connected to a hard case like Betsy, if only indirectly But he was turning out to be a pretty hard case hiht based on first i connected up, or rather it was beco clear that they were already connected in ways that she was only just now picking up on It was a worrying trend Everybody else was deep into their own stories, and all the stories oven together just beneath the surface into a web that included Plum But as Plum’s story?

Toward dawn they’d recovered enough strength froy of the day before that they could risk soht, just above the trees They had no idea where they even were Once the sun was up they found a road and walked along it looking sufficiently pathetic and unthreatening that soave them a ride into the nearest town

The toas called Amenia, as it happened, like Armenia but without the r It was in Dutchess County, New York, and it turned out to be the very last stop on the commuter train line to Manhattan, two and a half hours away So they steal-o-ht tickets, plus some bad coffee and rubber croissants at the snack bar in the lobby of the train station Then they sat on the old red bench in said lobby It was nine in the , and the next train wasn’t till noon

It had been a long night, and a long day before that, and Plu she could begin to process and understand the sight of a roo over an electrocuted corpse, and Lionel opening fire on Stoppard, and As a suddenly nonhuain she started to shake Things had gone much too far, and her brain felt raw and scarred from it all

It wasn’t how she’d i what should have been her last seined spending her post-Brakebills life of crime As soon as she read the letter she found on her bed the night of the ghost, she knew she was going to take the job KeepPluot an illicit thrill out of it She’d never had a rebellious phase, and she wasn’t sure she wanted one, but she’d sure as hell gotten one It was crazy and weird and kind of sleazy but she embraced it

At least she’d learned soic from Quentin and Pushkar Maybe she could spin it to her parents as an internship What she really wanted was so she could fall in love with the way she loved Brakebills, but at this point she wasn’t sure she would ever find it

Even after her dramatic reveal she and Quentin had eventually run out of conversation, and now they just sat there on the bench in the e out at the cement platfor the weight of the sleepless night pressing down on their shoulders like a mile of ocean, and them sunk to the bottom of it Plum let herabout the future right now, or about the past It wasn’t functioning on that level So she hung out in the present, second by second

It was a surprisingly substantial train station for a town this tiny, this far froed into one corner of the lobby showed local news, including shaky iPhone footage of strange objects seen streaking across the sky last night Plum wondered if people actually commuted to Manhattan froular civilian person who lived in Aht be pretty nice

Quentin kept taking out his pocket watch and looking at it Plu—it was kind of a hipster affectation, that watch, like a novelty beard, especially since it didn’t appear to work in spite of Stoppard’s attentions—but it was such a strange and beautiful object It drew her gaze, ift, she supposed, from someone who loved him That Julia person maybe More stories

“Do you want to read the book?” he asked