The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(59)

It was too cold to go outside, and if they did go outside they were at Newark International Airport, so they played cards or read or watched TV or did finger exercises or ran on the treadmills in the athletic center. Betsy scribbled in a voluminous diary. Sometimes they swam in the shallow hotel pool, which was enclosed in a damp, dripping glass grotto on the top floor and was so chlorinated that they felt slightly poisoned for half an hour after they got out. Quentin was happy to have a break in the routine. Maybe they were going off-site, for a dry run of the whole business.

They met in the lobby, all except for Pushkar, who was nowhere in sight. Stoppard arrived carrying two hard plastic suitcases, one of which was obviously pretty heavy. Quentin brought a duffel bag with everything he figured they’d need to break the bond, if it could possibly be broken, which was still an open question. It wasn’t like they had one to practice on. He had Mayakovsky’s coins in his pocket.

Betsy came empty-handed.

“Field trip!” she said. “Thank God. Now I can say it. Are you ready? Plum snores. There, I said it.”

“I’m glad it’s finally out there,” Plum said.

“Do you think this is it?” Stoppard said. “I mean, is this the job?”

“No.” Betsy shook her head. “Dress rehearsal. Shakedown cruise.”

“We’ll meet the others on-site,” Lionel said, and he led them outside. It was the white limo again. This time the driver got out, and Lionel got behind the wheel. The rest of them climbed in the back.

It was a good idea. Quentin was all for improvisation when there was absolutely no other choice, but it would be nice to be as overprepared as possible. Maybe the bird had even set up an incorporate bond for them to play with? The limo accelerated onto the highway, heading north.

The intercom clicked on.

“Cardboard box,” Lionel said. There was one, on the floor in a corner. Quentin slit the tape with a key. It turned out to be full of clothes: shiny black parkas and black jeans and watch caps. “Find your sizes. Get changed.”

It was all very black-ops. Stoppard rooted through the box excitedly till he found a parka that fit him. He pulled it into his lap and fingered it tenderly.

“I am in love,” he said. “I am in love with this coat.”

Betsy had already whipped off her pants, revealing practical white underwear and a pair of very pale legs, and begun pulling on her jeans.

“This tapered shit is so Jersey,” she said.

“I think I’ll wait,” Plum said.

The limo crossed the Hudson into Manhattan, then forged on farther north, through Yonkers and then veering east into Connecticut. Quentin watched the world flow by: hulking overpasses, brick housing projects dense with too-small windows, strip malls with giant signs shouting at the traffic, more housing projects and then finally, like a sigh of relief, trees. In the permanent twilight of the tinted windows it all looked as far off and alien as the contents of an aquarium.

They stopped twice, once for gas and once at a long low brick building with a sign outside proudly identifying it as a rehab center, where Lionel took receipt of a long brown paper package from someone who barely opened the door. Stoppard fidgeted in his black coat, which he’d already put on even though it was too hot for it in the limo, and he’d added a pair of aviator glasses. His hands kept straying to the controls for the disco lights.

“Don’t,” Plum said in a warning tone.

There was a lot of pent-up energy in the car.

“So,” Betsy said. “Stoppard. What the hell are you doing here? I mean, on this job?”

“Same as everybody else,” he said. “I’m here for the money.”

With startling quickness Betsy plucked the sunglasses off his face. Stoppard snatched at them but she made them vanish; she had a quick, fluid casting style that reminded Quentin powerfully of someone else’s, he couldn’t place it and then he could: Julia’s. Without the glasses Stoppard looked a lot younger.

“Don’t bullshit us, Maverick,” she said. “You’re like nine years old. You can have the glasses back when you tell us how you got here.”

“I’m seventeen! For your information. And anyway how did you get here?”

“Well, let’s see . . .” She put a finger on her chin and looked up and to one side, pretending to think. “I’m the best there is at what I do. I have some things I need to take care of, and it’ll be a lot easier to do that with two million dollars. And I enjoy violence and riding around in stretch limos with nerds. The end!” She smiled. “Now you.”

If Stoppard had not already had a raging crush on Betsy, he had one by the end of that speech. Either way some of the attitude went out of him.

“I just like building stuff, I guess?” He wanted to play the game the way she had, but he had nowhere near the necessary reserves of sarcasm and sangfroid, so he wound up just being honest. “I was into computers for a while, but it was hard to get what I needed, you know? Even when you build your own gear the chips are still pretty expensive. And I’ve been with a couple of foster families—you don’t get any privacy. You can never hang on to your stuff. Especially when it’s worth something.

“None of my families were magic. A couple of guys at the Best Buy, they got me into it, but pretty soon I kinda left them behind. When I get focused on something I just have to figure it out, you know? I don’t stop. I wasn’t going to school much at this point, and where I live you don’t want to be outside too much . . . I had a lot of time on my hands. And my last family, I got my own room. Give a nerd enough time and a door he can close and he can figure out pretty much anything.