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They took a few steps back, like they were preparing to fight a duel, then faced the same direction Quentin braced hioose transforoing to be really unpleasant He took a deep breath, held up his hands, andthe start of a Mahler symphony

It began Surprisingly, it wasn’t that bad

Shrinking, having the mass squeezed out of hih part of beco, Quentin was expanding, and it didn’t feel that bad at all He was inflating like a balloon, especially his head, which was getting absolutely huge His parka strained and stretched and then burst apart in a cloud of down

His neck and shoulders rew and his eyes zooantic head His ar proportionally smaller, then flattened and dearticulated into flippers—it was like wearing s fused together, and so on with his feet, but he took note of this fact only in passing—it didn’t especially alarm him The most hilarious part was his mouth: the corners raced back toward his ears so that his head was practically split in half by a fifteen-foot recurved smile

His lower teeth thened and multiplied crazily into a hairy overbite, more like a mustache than teeth

The only real moment of panic came when he toppled forward into the water and went under His human instincts told him he was about to freeze or drown or both, but he did neither The water was neither war It was like air He did utter so whale-sneezes before his blowhole-based respiratory syste But even that was kind of enjoyable

And then everything was still He was hanging in the void, neutrally buoyant, twenty feet below the surface The Quentin-blihly as long as a basketball court He was in a really good mood

For a few minutes he and Plum floated next to each other, eyeball to eyeball Then at the same time—somehow they coordinated this—they surfaced, arched their backs, sucked in gallons of air through the tops of their heads, and dove

Quentin didn’t knohen he’d ever felt so calether with Plu through the water It took hardly any effort; it would have taken an effort to stay still He sucked in a huge mouthful of water—his mouth and throat distended hilariously to take in h his weird front teeth (his baleen, that was the word) like he was spitting tobacco It left behind a tasty residue of wriggling krill

He’d iet soe of nehale-senses, but in fact he didn’t see much better than he had as a human With his eyes on different sides of his head his binocular depth perception was shot, and having no neck, all he could do to change the vieas roll his eyes around or steer his whole huly, he didn’t seee decreased over time, but it never completely went away

Once they cleared Tierra del Fuego Quentin’s sensoriuhtelse entirely

To a blue whale the whole ocean was a vast resonating chareat watery tyitive vibrations constantly zipping back and forth across and through it Based on these Quentin could feel the shape and proportions of the world around hiertips across it If he’d had hands he could have drawn you the coastlines of southern Chile and Antarctica and a relief map of the ocean floor in between

And if the great blue chamber ever fell silent, he

His throat was like a didgeridoo, or a foghorn, blasting out deep, resonant pulses and moans The ocean was full of voices, like a switchboard, or an echo cha through it in the for in with each other, and Quentin checked in too, in a language he kneithout having to learn it

They weren’t just being social Here was a great secret: whales were spellcasters Jesus, the entire ocean was crisscrossed with a whole lattice of subic Most of the spells took ned to bend and herd large clouds of krill, and occasionally to reinforce the integrity of large ice shelves He wondered if he’d reain He wondered, but he didn’t really care

And there was so down there in the black abyssal trenches of the ocean So it down What was it? An ar Carcharodon alodon? Quentin never found out He hoped he never would

Much oose or a fox or a polar bear Quentin felt like hi fat brain that was capable of running most of his personality software at the same speed he was used to But he wasn’t the same Quentin, not exactly Whale-Quentin was a cal through the blue gloo h his e was about five hundred miles across, and it would take them two or three days to swily hard tie, and very little changed for a blue whale

He noticed everything but was concerned with nothing Drake Passage had the worst weather in the world, literally, but all that meant was that when he surfaced for a breath, once every fifteen ainst his wide, slick back He and Plutip, and everything around thee to thereat white, swaggering along by itself through the depths with its perrin It had so many teeth it looked like it had braces Nature’s perfect killing machine! Go on with your bad self No, really It’s cute

And then the ocean floor began sloping up tohere, fumbled it away and allowed his mind to disappear forever into the endless blue whaleness of it all But no: they were here for a reason

This was always going to be the worst part They were going to have to deliberately beach themselves, hopefully on nice soft sand, but more likely on some rocky shale, or worse They just had to hope their skins were thick enough, and the terrain gentle enough, that their delicately flanged stoet shredded in the process They moaned a bit at each other, as one does, then they aimed themselves at the Antarctic coastline

As they got closer e the them to turn back for deeper water Look out! Don’t do it! It was surprisingly hard to ignore the 747 and the air traffic controllers were begging him to for God’s sake pull up, pull up! But they stayed the course, churning with their tails, pouring on speed, their h the water If they’d had teeth they would have gritted them

Then Quentin was lying facedown on black stones under a white sky, naked, with the weak surf of the Southern Ocean washing fiery-cold over his bare legs, which were already going nu spat out of the war cold world In short it sucked

Quentin did the one thing he kneould feel good: he shut his eyes for the first tiood minute He’d missed his eyelids

Pluo he wouldn’t have had to turn his head to look at her, but now he swiveled his small, pale nub of a human head in her direction She looked back at hi

“Final leg,” he said thickly

Huh: lips and teeth What a concept He pushed at theue

“Final leg,” she said

Quentin levered himself up off the shale and immediately fell over Gravity,up felt like trying to balance a telephone pole on one end

They were on a narrow curving beach, black pebbles and gray sand; it was just about the least tropical beach in the world They were both naked, and there ht have been a time when, as a huht of Plum without her clothes on, but he was still mentally more than half cetacean, and the relative nakedness or clothed-ness of a human of either sex really could not have been more beside the point to hi here

Fortunately they’d talked through ould happen next, drilled it into their brains, which they kneould not be functioning at full capacity They both began searching through the rocks and tide marks, heads down This had to be done quickly, before hypothere, unbearably soft yellow-pink feet on the unsyray He plucked it out of a mass of sticky, s but a penguin would do