Dangerous Women Part 2

She watched herself leave the courtyard. That was her in a nutshell, Plum thought: standing there and watching her own life go by. She wondered whether, if she shouted and waved her arms, she would hear herself, or if this was more of a two-way-mirror deal. She frowned. The causality of it became tangled. This much at least was clear: if that’s what her ass looked like from behind, well, not bad. She would take it.

The next door was even more temporally noncontiguous, because it put her in a different Brakebills entirely, a curiously reduced Brakebills. It was a smaller and darker and somehow denser Brakebills. The ceilings were lower, the corridors were narrower, and the air smelled like wood smoke. She passed an open doorway and saw a group of girls huddled together on a huge bed. They wore white nightgowns and had long, straight hair and bad teeth.

Plum understood what she was seeing. This was Brakebills of long ago. The Ghost of Brakebills Past. The girls looked up only momentarily, incuriously, as she passed. No question what they were up to.

“Another League,” she said to herself. “I knew there must have been one.”

Then the next door opened on a room that she thought she knew—no, she knew she knew it, she just didn’t want to think about it. She had been here before, a long time ago. The room was empty now, but something was coming, it was on its way, and when it got here, all hell was going to break loose. It was the thing: the thing that she could not and would not think about. She had seen this all happen before, and she hadn’t been able to stop it. Now she knew it was coming, and it was going to happen anyway.

She had to get out, get out now, before the horror started all over again.

“No!” Plum said. “No, no, no, no, no.”

She ran. She tried to go back, the first time she’d tried that, but the door was locked behind her, so she ran ahead blindly and crashed through the next door. When she opened her eyes again she was in the little trapezoidal lounge where the League held its meetings.

Oh. Oh, thank God. She was breathing hard, and she sobbed once. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. Or it was real, but it was over. She didn’t care, either way she was safe. This whole fucked-up magical mystery tour was over. She wasn’t going back, and she wasn’t going to go forward either. She was safe right here. She wasn’t going to think about it. Nobody had to know.

Plum sank down on the ragged couch, boneless. It was so saggy it almost swallowed her up. She felt like she could fall asleep right here. She almost wondered if she had when she opened her eyes again and looked at the reflection in the long mirror that Darcy and Chelsea had cracked earlier. Of course she wasn’t in it: magic mirror. Right. Plum was relieved not to have to look at her own face right now. Then her relief went away.

Another girl stood there in the mirror instead of her. Or at least it was shaped like a girl. It was blue and naked, and its skin gave off an unearthly light. Even its teeth were blue. Its eyes were utterly mad.

This was horror of a different kind. New horror.

“You,” the ghost whispered to Plum.

It was her: the ghost of Brakebills. She was real. Jesus Christ, that’s who was fucking with her. She was the spider at the center of the web.

Plum stood up, but after that, she didn’t move; all moving was over with. If she moved, she wouldn’t live long. She’d spent enough time around magic to know instinctively that she was in the presence of something so raw and powerful that if she touched it, it would snuff her out in a second. That blue girl was like a downed power line. The insulation had come off the world, and pure naked magical current was arcing in front of her.

It was beyond horror: Plum felt calm, detached. She was caught in the gears of something much bigger than her, and they would grind her up if they wanted to. They were already in motion. There was nothing she could do. Part of her wanted them to. She had been waiting so long for her doom to catch up to her.

But then: bump. The sound came from the wall to her left—it sounded like something had run into it from the other side. A little plaster fell. The bump was followed by a man’s voice saying something like “Oof.” Plum looked.

The ghost in the mirror didn’t.

“I know,” it whispered. “I saw.”

The wall exploded, throwing plaster in all directions, and a man crashed through it covered with white dust. It was Professor Coldwater. He shook himself like a wet dog to get some of the dust off. White witchery sparked around both his hands like Roman candles, so bright it made purple flares in her vision.

Always keeping one hand pointed at the blue ghost, he walked toward Plum till he stood between her and the mirror.

“Careful,” he said over his shoulder, relatively calmly given the circumstances.

He 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 reaction was: I must tell Chelsea that she doesn’t have to worry about paying for it.

Breaking the mirror didn’t dispel the ghost—it was still watching them, though it had to peer around the edge of the hole. Professor Coldwater turned around to face the wall behind Plum and joined his hands together.

“Get down,” he said.

The air shimmered and rippled around them. Then she had to throw her forearm over her eyes, and her hair crackled with so much static electricity, it made her scalp hurt. The entire world was shot through with light. She didn’t see but she heard and felt the door behind her explode out of its frame.