When Quentin first suggested a field trip to Antarctica Plum wasn’t enthusiastic. It was cold there, and a pain to get to, and also Professor Mayakovsky was kind of a dick. But Plum was a creature of enthusiasms, and it didn’t take her long to come around to the idea. It would be an adventure! She could be a goose again! She’d loved being a goose.

“Except,” she said, even more excited, “why be a goose? We’ve been geese. We could go as something else! Anything else!”

“I was thinking of going as a human being,” Quentin said. “Like on an airplane.”

Plum was already at her laptop and Googling.

“OK, check this out. What’s the fastest migratory bird on Earth?”

“An airplane.”

“Whatever, you are like the bullshittest magician ever. Look at this, it’s called the great snipe.”

“Are you sure that’s a real bird? It sounds like something from Lewis Carroll.”

“‘Some have been recorded to fly nonstop for forty-eight hours over 6,760 kilometers.’ I’m quoting here.”

“From Wikipedia.”

But still. He looked over her shoulder. The great snipe was a plump little wading bird, roughly egg-shaped, with a big long bill and zigzaggy brown stripes, like a not particularly exotic seashell. It didn’t look like a speed demon.

“‘Female great snipe are, on average, significantly larger than the male,’” Plum said.

“We’d need something to base the spell on, like some great snipe DNA. At least the first time we did it. I don’t think we can do the transformation based on an image from a Wikipedia entry.”

“Are you sure? They have it in hi-res.”

“Even so. Plus I’m kind of concerned about the cold. That bird doesn’t look like it was evolved for Antarctica.”

“Except it’ll still be summer,” Plum said. “Backward seasons.”

“Even so.”

“Stop saying that.” Plum frowned, then brightened up again. “OK, forget about birds. I don’t know why I was even thinking birds. We could be fish! Or whales—blue whales!”

“We’d still have to go the last bit. After we got to Antarctica.”

“We’d just swim under the ice!”

“That’s the North Pole. Antarctica is a continent. Under the snow it’s all rock.”

She huffed her annoyance.

“Whatever, Nanook.”