Nobody spoke as Professor Van der Weghe led them through a door in a stretch of wall that Quentin could have sworn had been blank the day before, between a pair of ten-foot-high oil paintings of clipper ships foundering in heavy seas. They shuffled up the dark wooden stairs without speaking, fifteen of them—ten Fourth Years, five leftover Fifth Years—everyone wearing identical navy blue Brakebills-issue pajamas. Despite Van der Weghe’s orders, Gretchen sullenly gripped a worn black teddy bear along with her cane. Up ahead of them Professor Van der Weghe banged open a wooden trapdoor, and they filed out onto the roof.
It was an awkward perch, a long, narrow, windy strip with a shingled drop falling away steeply on either side. A low wrought-iron fence ran along the edge, providing absolutely no protection or reassurance whatsoever; in fact it was the perfect height to take you out at the knees if you accidentally backed into it. The night was bitingly cold, with a lively cross-breeze. The sky was lightly frosted with high, wind-whisked clouds luridly backlit by a gibbous moon.
Quentin hugged himself. Still nobody had said a word; no one even looked at anybody else. It was like they were all still half asleep, and a single word would have shattered the delicate dream in which they walked. Even the other Physical Kids were like strangers.
“Everyone take off your pajamas,” Professor Van der Weghe called out.
Weirdly, they did. Everything was so surreal and trancelike already that it made perfect sense that they would all, guys and girls alike, get naked in front of each other in the freezing cold without a hint of self-consciousness. Afterward Quentin even remembered Alice putting a warm hand on his bare shoulder to steady herself as she stepped out of her pajama bottoms. Soon they were naked and shivering, their bare backs and buttocks pale in the moonlight, the starlit campus rolling away far below them, with the dark trees of the forest beyond.
Some of the students clutched their pajamas in both hands, but Professor Van der Weghe instructed them to drop them in a heap at their feet. Quentin’s blew away and disappeared over the ledge, but he didn’t try to stop them. It didn’t matter. She moved down the line, dabbing a generous gob of chalky white paste on each forehead and both shoulders with her thumb as she passed. When she was done, she walked back the other way, lining them up, checking her work, making sure they were standing up straight. Finally she called out a single harsh syllable.
Instantly a huge soft weight pressed down on Quentin, settling on his shoulders, bending him forward. He crouched down, straining against it. He tried to fight it, to lift it. It was crushing him! He bit back panic. It flashed through his brain—the Beast was back!—but this was different. As he doubled over he felt his knees folding up into his belly,
And then the weight was gone. He squatted on the gray slate roof, breathing hard. At least he didn’t feel cold anymore. He looked at Alice, and Alice looked back at him. But it wasn’t Alice anymore. She had become a large gray goose, and so had he.
Professor Van der Weghe moved down the line again. With both hands she picked up each student in turn and threw him or her bodily off the roof. They all, in spite of the shock or because of it, reflexively spread out their wings and caught the air before they could be snared by the bare, grasping treetops below. One by one they sailed away into the night.
When it was his turn, Quentin honked in protest. Professor Van der Weghe’s human hands were hard and scary and burned against his feathers. He shat on her feet in panic. But then he was in the air and tumbling. He spread his wings and beat his way up into the sky, thrashing and punishing the air till it bore him up. It would have been impossible not to.
Quentin’s new goose-brain, it emerged, was not much given to reflection. His senses now tracked only a handful of key stimuli, but it tracked those very, very closely. This body was made for either sitting or flying, not much else, and as it happened Quentin was in a mood to fly. In fact, he felt like flying more than he had ever felt like doing anything in his entire life.
