"Yeah, sure. An eight-hour flight back to the States with my sister, Greer, bugging me the whole way about life at that crazy magical school. She'll be disappointed that, so far, the only way I can affect things with my wand is to hit them with it."

        "We're not allowed to practice magic out of Hogwarts, anyway," Ralph said instructively.

        Zane ignored him. "And then Christmas with the grandparents and all my cousins in Ohio. You have no idea what kind of craziness that always is."

        James couldn't help asking. "How do you mean?"

        "Imagine the traditional all-American Norman Rockwell Christmas scene, right?" Zane said, holding up his hands as if framing a picture. "Opening presents, and carving turkey, and carols by the Christmas tree. Got it?" Ralph and James nodded, trying not to smile at Zane's grave expression.

        "All right," Zane went on. "Now imagine hinkypunks instead of people. You'll get the idea."

        James burst out laughing. Ralph, as usual, just blinked and looked back and forth between the two other boys.

        "That's fantastic!" James hooted.

        Zane smiled reluctantly. "Yeah, well, it is pretty funny, I guess. The screeches and the clawing, all those tiny shreds of wrapping paper flying all over the place, landing in the fireplace and nearly burning the place to the ground."

        "What's a hinkypunk?" Ralph asked, trying to keep up.

        "Ask Hagrid next Care of Magical Creatures," James said, still chuckling. "It'll all make sense."

Late that morning, Ralph and James said goodbye to Zane, then hauled their trunks out to the courtyard. Ted and Victoire were already there, sitting on their trunks on the top step, framed against the strangely silent, frost-laden grounds. Victoire's hair had been regrown as well as possible by Madam Curio in the hospital wing, but the new hair was just different enough in texture and color to be noticeable. As a result, Victoire had taken to wearing a rather amazing variety of hats. The hats, if anything, enhanced her appearance, but she complained about them at every opportunity. Today, she had donned a small ermine pillbox cap, cocked rakishly over her left eyebrow. She glared coolly at Ralph as he dragged his trunk out onto the step. A few minutes later, Hagrid drove up at the head of a carriage. Ralph's mouth dropped open when he saw that nothing, apparently, was pulling the carriage.

        "You lot aren't s'posed to see these until next year, mind," Hagrid said to James and Ralph. He yanked the brake lever, climbed down, and began heaving their trunks easily onto the back of the carriage. "So be sure to act surprised when yeh sees 'em next spring, right?"

        "Oh, Hagrid," Victoire said haughtily, "if zese awful things are as ugly as mummy tells me, I'm glad I can't see zem, anyway." She held out a hand and Ted took it, helping her rather unnecessarily into the carriage.

        There were a few other students crammed into the carriage, all similarly late departures for the holidays. Hagrid drove them to Hogsmeade station, where they boarded the Hogwarts Express again. The train was far emptier than it had been on their arriving journey. The four of them found a compartment near the end, then settled in for the long trip.

        "So Hogsmeade is a wizard village?" Ralph asked Ted.

        "Sure is. Home to The Three Broomsticks and Honeydukes Sweetshop. Best Cockroach Clusters in the world. Lots of other shops, too. You'll get to go on Hogsmeade weekends starting your third year."

        Ralph looked thoughtful, which meant his brow pinched down while his lower lip pooched up, squeezing his entire face toward his nose. "So how do wizards keep Muggles out of a magical village? I mean, aren't there any roads or anything?"

        "Tricky question, mate," Ted said, slouching on his seat and kicking off his shoes.

Victoire wrinkled her nose. "You will keep zose dirt-kickers away from me, Mr. Lupin."

        Ted ignored her, stretching his legs across the compartment and resting his feet on the opposite seat. "I'm in old Stonewall's Applied Advanced Technomancy class this semester, and all I can tell you is that places like Hogsmeade aren't just hidden because Muggles can't find a road in. It's all quantum. If Petra was here, she could explain it better."

        James was curious. "What's 'quantum' mean?"

Ted shrugged. "It's a joke in A.A.T. When in doubt, just say 'quantum'." He sighed resignedly, gathering his thoughts. "All right, imagine that there are places on the earth that are like a hole in space patched with rubber, see? You can't tell anything's different from the top, but it's maybe a little bouncy or something. Then, say, some wizard comes along who really knows his quantum. He says, 'Gor, here's a place where we can put up a smashing wizard village." So what he does is he conjures something sort of like a huge magical weight, but it's really, really tiny, right? And the weight drops into the bit of rubbery reality and pulls it down, down, down. OK. So the weight punches that rubber reality right out into another dimension, making a funnel in the shape of space-time."

        "Wait," Ralph said, frowning in concentration. "What's space-time?"

        "Never mind," Ted said, waving dismissively. "Doesn't matter. It's all quantum. Nobody gets it except for crusty old parchment-heads like Professor Jackson. So anyway, there's this funnel in space-time where the weight pushes down on the rubber reality. Muggles, see, can only operate on the surface of reality. They don't see where the funnel dips down into this new dimensional space. To them, it just isn't even there. Magic folk, though, we can follow the funnel down off main-space, if we know what to look for and share the secret. So we build places like Hogsmeade there."

        "So Hogsmeade is down in some sort of funnel-shaped valley," Ralph said experimentally.

        "No," Ted said, sitting up again. "It's just, you know, a metaphor. The landscape looks just the same, but dimensionally, it goes out through the other side of space-time, where Muggles can't go. Lots of wizard places have been built that way. We breed magical creatures in quantum preserves. Whole mountain ranges where the giants live, all buried in quantum, off the Muggle maps. That's pretty much how unplottability works. Simple as that."

        "Simple as what?" Ralph said, frustrated.

        Ted sighed. "Look, mate, it's like the Cockroach Clusters in Honeydukes. You don't need to understand how they make them. You just need to eat 'em."