The Vampire Pirates of the Outer Hebrides

“Stand back,” said Harry Potter, aged nine, drawing his wand. “I’ve dealt with vampires before.”

so am I!

137

Volume III · Obscurus Books, 1989

♫ Listen along

By Sunday morning the kitchen at Grimmauld Place had become a war room.

Percy's boxes, now five of them, were stacked against the sideboard with new labels (EXHIBIT E: THE MINISTER). Theo had pinned a plan of the Ministry lift shafts to the wall with four of Kreacher's best silver forks, which Kreacher had permitted only because Draco said it was fine.

Kreacher had also begun ranking the guests by crockery: Draco got the Black family Sèvres, Theo got the second-best bone china, and Ron got the cup the Blacks had kept for tradesmen, presented to him every morning with a deep and ceremonious bow. Ron had started drinking out of it with his little finger crooked, purely to annoy him. It was working.

Hermione stood at the head of the table with her arms folded, ink on her fingers and a pencil stuck through her hair. She had been up all night with her Oath, clause by clause, on the theory that a false Minister ought to invalidate something. It hadn't.

The only thing keeping her upright was Nettleby's Pick-Me-Up, which Blaise had taken to ordering by the crate. He had taken one look at the sleeping habits at Grimmauld Place and described it as a boarding house for vampires, except that vampires kept office hours.

"Harry," she said. "Is my left eye blinking independently of my right?"

Harry had been watching it for some time, and was beginning to think it might be.

Hermione took a long swig of coffee, on top of the Pick-Me-Up. Next to Harry, Parvati made the small noise of a Healer deciding that the lecture could wait.

"We have to go in," said Hermione.

"In where?" said Ron.

She opened her mouth. Her jaw locked. Harry watched a small, familiar agony pass across her face.

"It's been a very pleasant autumn so far," she said through her teeth. "Oh, for the love of —"

"The Department of Mysteries," said Draco, without looking up from Luna's crossword. She was doing it upside down, which, from his side of the table, was rather convenient. "She means the Department of Mysteries. Don't you, Granger?"

Hermione gave him a look of furious gratitude.

"Right," said Harry. "Why?"

"Because that's where —" Hermione stopped. She pressed her lips together, tried again, and gave up.

"— the archive is," said Draco. "If you want to know what else they've taken off that shelf, you go and look at the shelf."

Hermione's eyebrows rose.

"And the missing people," said Ginny quietly. "Whatever was done to them came off that shelf. So did, maybe, the way to undo it."

"And the Veil's down there," said Harry slowly. "One of those folios was about it. If somebody's taken a book about it out of a sealed archive, we should take a look at it while we're in."

Hermione folded her arms more tightly. Her eyebrows had nowhere left to go.

"So you can't tell us any of it," said Ron.

"No." Hermione took a breath, and for the first time that morning she looked almost pleased. "I can't tell you what's down there. I can't tell you what they're doing. But I went through the Oath again last night, and there is absolutely nothing in it that says I can't show you."

"Six letters," said Luna, studying her crossword upside down. "Someone who keeps going into places where they aren't supposed to."

"Potter," said Draco, without hesitation.

"Oh, that fits," said Luna, and wrote it in.

"He's very good at getting into places he is supposed to," said Ginny, reaching for the toast. "It's getting him out again that's the trouble."

The table groaned as one.

"Ginny," said Ron, looking genuinely ill. "Not before breakfast."

Percy had removed his spectacles, apparently in the hope that this might somehow help.

Harry considered objecting. On the evidence available he didn't feel he had much of a case, so he raised his teacup to his wife instead.

"Four letters," said Luna, without looking up. "Pleased with oneself, to the annoyance of others."

"Smug," said Draco. "Write it in."

"Is that allowed?" said Draco, to Hermione, who was beginning to look as though she regretted finding a way round her Oath at all.

"It isn't disallowed," said Hermione. "I checked."

"You checked."

"I checked last night, Malfoy. Twice. I've got it in writing from myself."

"There's a complication," said Percy from the end of the table. He had plainly been waiting for his cue. He drew a sheet of parchment from Exhibit E. "Which you already know, of course, and are not permitted to say so. On the twenty-seventh of August, the Minister for Magic issued a sealing order on the inner chambers of the Department of Mysteries. The order was filed with the Wizengamot for oversight." He adjusted his spectacles. "I filed it."

Hermione, who had been trying to say it with her eyebrows for ten minutes, sat down.

"Of course you did," said George.

"Under the terms of the order," Percy went on, ignoring him, "access to the inner chambers now requires two of the Department's four senior keyholders to be physically present at the door together."

"Keyholders?" said George hopefully.

"The title is historical. There haven't been actual keys for centuries. It simply recognises the individual, and it opens for any two of them standing in front of it." He looked up. "The four keyholders are Unspeakable Granger, Unspeakable Croaker, Unspeakable Leventhorpe, and Cressida Thorne, the Head of the Department. The door also writes down who opened it, and when."

"Nobody reads that," said Hermione. "It goes to Records on the last day of the month. I've seen the pile."

"Croaker's been on sabbatical in Peru since 2006," said Pansy, examining her nails. "Studying something with a lot of legs. Leventhorpe's in St Mungo's with spattergroit. Rather a bad case, I'm told. She's gone quite purple."

Everyone turned to look at her.

"What? I have sources," said Pansy.

Very slowly, Draco turned his head and looked at Harry.

"Nasty thing, spattergroit," said Harry. "I'm told it goes straight for the uvula."

"Which leaves Thorne," said Draco, through his teeth.

"Who's one of the twelve," said Percy. "Head of Mysteries. Her tea order changed on the second of September. She used to take lemon."

"So we can't ask her nicely," said Ron.

"We don't have to ask her anything." Pansy leaned back in her chair. "Cressida Thorne has had her hair set every other Friday at two o'clock at Coiffure and Charms in Diagon Alley for thirty years. It takes two hours. The changeling's kept the appointment, which is remarkably conscientious of it, though my source says she's started asking for a fringe." Pansy's lip curled. "My source sweeps the floor. She'll sweep it into an envelope for me on Friday."

"Polyjuice," said Harry.

"Polyjuice," said Hermione. "The door reads the body, not the soul, which is presumably how the changelings have been walking in and out. So if Thorne's body is at the hairdresser, and a second Thorne body is standing next to me at the door —"

"That's the security?" said Theo. He had stopped turning one of his silver rings and was looking at Hermione with frank disbelief. "I've got better wards on my jewellery box."

"Eight letters," said Luna. "Somewhere nobody asks anybody anything."

"Ministry," said Percy. He picked up his quill. "I should like it minuted that I was answering a crossword."

Luna wrote it in. It ran down the grid from the M in SMUG to the T in POTTER, and Draco, who had been reading the crossword upside down all morning, leaned over and read the printed clue for it. It was about a fjord.

"Polyjuice takes a month to brew," said Ron. He frowned at Percy's parchment, considering it. "Right. We don't actually need to be Thorne. We just need her standing next to Hermione at the door. So we give her a reason to come down there, draw off whoever she's brought with her, and —"

"I have some," said Hermione.

Ron stopped. "You have some what?"

"Polyjuice."

"You have some? Just — lying about?"

"In the airing cupboard." Hermione looked faintly defensive. "I keep spares."

"You keep spare Polyjuice?"

"In case we need spare Polyjuice, Ron, that's what spares are for."

"Handy," said Ron. "There'll be a spare one of me in there somewhere."

"Nobody needs two," said Pansy.

Harry looked round the kitchen. It was, he thought, the second time in a fortnight he'd heard Hermione say that, and both times her spares had been the only thing standing between them and a dead end.

"Right," he said. "Then someone's got to be Thorne."

"I'll do it," said Draco.

Every head turned.

"You've got four weeks left on your probation," said Harry slowly. "And a spotless record. You said so yourself. You said you wanted the last few pages to stay boring."

"And every spell I cast," said Draco, "goes into a little book that Robards reads on the first of the month." He set down his teacup. "Polyjuice isn't a spell, Potter. It's a beverage."

​

♫ Listen along

It was Ron who built the plan.

He did it the way he had always played chess: standing in front of Draco's chalkboard with a stick of chalk, very quiet, moving everybody round in his head three moves ahead of where they actually were.

Draco had surrendered the chalkboard with visible reluctance. He'd made three attempts to explain the existing system of columns, two attempts to retrieve his ivory pointer, and one increasingly desperate observation that the arrows weren't to scale. Ron had ignored all of them. By the end of the morning the board was covered in chalk dust, names, arrows and little squares representing doors, and Draco had stopped complaining some time before.

"Ron," said Hermione, staring at the chalkboard. "That's actually brilliant."

"You don't have to sound so surprised," said Ron, without turning round.

It went like this.

"Three o'clock, Friday," said Ron. "The real Thorne's under a drier in Diagon Alley, asking for a fringe. The other one walks into the Atrium with Hermione, same as any other Friday, takes the lift to Nine and goes down the corridor. Nobody looks at Thorne twice. Nobody's looked at Thorne twice in thirty years." He tapped the board. "Harry and Ginny are next to them under the Cloak. Luna comes out of her broom cupboard Disillusioned and falls in behind."

Ron had drawn all five of them as little circles.

Harry noticed that his and Ginny's overlapped.

"That's going to be cosy," said Ginny.

"Don't start," said Ron, without looking over.

Over the five circles he had written SEEKERS.

"I have never played Quidditch in my life," said Hermione.

"You're the ones looking for it. That's what Seekers do."

Blaise, who had been issued a visitor's pass by Percy on the grounds of Wizengamot Records Consultation (Probate), would be at the security desk engaging the new Restitution Wardens in conversation. The Wardens were two stern witches in violet robes who had appeared in the Atrium the week the Act was passed and now weighed every wand that came through the door. "Engaging them in conversation" was how Blaise put it. Everybody else called it flirting.

Lee would be at the other end of the same desk, with a visitor's pass and a recording device, interviewing somebody from the Ministry press office about something nobody could possibly want to hear about, for as long as it took. From the security desk you could see the brass needle over Lift Four; from the fireplaces, at the wrong end of the hall, you could not. When the needle began to climb, Lee would thank the press officer very much, pack up his recorder and walk out past the fireplaces, and Ron and Pansy would know they had about a minute.

"I could do that," said Blaise. "I'm already standing there."

"Contingency," said Ron, and drew the arrow anyway.

"Against what?"

"You staying to see how it comes out."

"I'd have gone."

Ron wrote LEE on the arrow. Over the two of them he wrote BEATERS.

"I have never hit anything in my life," said Blaise.

"You're keeping them off the Seekers," said Ron. "That's the job."

Theo would already be inside the lift shaft, where he'd spend the morning carving a run of Ogham into the underside of Lift Four. Nobody would see it, and it would persuade the lift, when the time came, to go straight to Level Nine without stopping, without reporting its movements to the security desk, and without, Theo promised, killing anyone.

"Probably without killing anyone," he amended, as every head at the table turned slowly towards him. He gave them all a radiant smile.

Percy picked up his quill.

"Don't write that down," said Theo.

"I most certainly am writing that down."

"I'm an artist, darlings. Not a miracle-worker."

Ron wrote SNITCH over the lift shaft.

"I have never been so flattered in my life," said Theo.

"Nobody sees you, and it's over when you turn up."

Theo flicked his wand at the board, and SNITCH went gold.

Getting him into the shaft was Seamus's job. Lift Four would be out of order from Wednesday — he would see to that, and declined to say how in front of Percy — and the signs on it would be Dean's. Seamus had a Magical Maintenance pass that opened every service door in the building and a clipboard that nobody had ever once questioned, and on Friday morning he would sign Theo in at the service entrance at seven o'clock as his apprentice, and Luna as his other one. Nobody weighed wands at the service entrance. Luna would Disillusion herself in a broom cupboard off the Atrium and wait there until three.

"I don't mind at all," said Luna. "People mostly don't notice me in rooms, so I can't think why a cupboard would be any different. It's quite restful, not being looked for. I'll take the crossword."

"You'll carry the bag," Seamus told Theo, "and you'll keep your mouth shut, and if anyone asks you anything, you're from Cork."

Theo looked at him with great interest. "What do they sound like in Cork?"

"Not like you," said Seamus. He looked back at the chalkboard, at the arrow Ron had drawn going down to Level Nine, and frowned. "And don't be wandering any further down than that, either. There's a corridor under Nine, the old holding cells from the war. A job came through to us in August to seal it, and we sealed it, so we did. Next thing, there's a Ministerial order on the door saying Maintenance is not to attend. Us." He folded his arms. "Six years I'm in that department, and I've never once known them seal a thing without asking us to blow it up first."

Ron wrote it in the bottom corner of the chalkboard, under a heading that said LATER, which was getting crowded.

Over Seamus and Dean he wrote GROUNDSMEN.

"Grand," said Seamus. "Do we get a hut?"

"Me and Pansy are on the fireplaces for the way out," said Ron, "with George's new stuff."

George's new stuff was Stubborn Floo Powderʷ. He claimed it kept a fireplace open for ten minutes after the Ministry had ordered it shut. "Ish," he said. "Ten minutes-ish."

Over the fireplaces, in the largest capitals on the board, he had written KEEPERS.

"If the alarm goes and they seal the Floo," Ron went on, "Pansy holds one fire open and sends up a green spark so you know which one. Then I give the signal to run."

"Something subtle, Weasley," said Draco.

"Course," said Ron. "Nobody'll even know it's a signal. Subtle's my middle name."

"Your middle name's Bilius," said Ginny.

Ron drew the next arrow rather harder than it needed.

Percy would not be there. He had taken himself out of the plan on grounds he described as plausible deniability and Ron described as a day off, and on Friday he would be at his own desk all day with the door open. He was still taking the minutes. Ron had written REFEREE over him.

"I am not a participant," said Percy.

"That's what referees say."

Parvati had a shift at St Mungo's on Friday and would be keeping it, and if anything went seriously wrong she was to be the first to know and the first through the door.

Ron had written MEDIWIZARD over her.

"Mediwitch," said Parvati. "And I'll decide what's serious."

Ron corrected it.

"And Goyle," Ron finished, "will provide a diversion."

In the corner, Goyle looked up from his scone.

"Nothing dramatic," Ron said. "You walk in with the three o'clock visitors, you get lost, you ask the Wardens for directions in a loud voice, you're large, you're confused, you take a long time about it. That's all. Just enough to keep every eye in the Atrium off the lifts for thirty seconds."

Goyle thought about this.

"Where am I meant to be going?"

"Doesn't matter. You don't know."

"Right." Goyle nodded. "That'll make it easier."

Ron wrote BLUDGER over his name. Goyle read it, and nodded, and went back to his scone.

"And take this," said George.

He produced a small black object with legs, like a very stout beetle, and set it on the table.

The beetle immediately righted itself and began marching towards Percy's paperwork.

Percy lifted Exhibit C out of its path.

"Decoy Detonator," George said proudly. "If you need a bit more, drop it. It scurries off into a corner, makes a bang and a lot of smoke. Completely harmless."

The beetle had reached the butter dish. It went round the edge of it twice, appeared to make a decision, and set off towards Hermione's notes.

George intercepted it with a teaspoon.

Goyle watched this with some concern. "Harmless," he repeated.

"Completely," said George, slipping it into Goyle's enormous palm.

​

Draco surveyed the finished chalkboard: two people and three invisible ones, a disguise, a door that opened for bodies, an enchanted lift, a flirtation, an interview, a fireplace, a large confused baker, a standby healer, and one very large question mark, which George had drawn over his own name and which Ron had pointedly left there. He folded his arms.

"So this is what it feels like," he drawled, "to be part of a Golden Trio hare-brained scheme."

Harry rolled his eyes. He had a retort halfway out when Theo got there first.

"Don't mind him." Theo didn't look up from the rune he was sketching. He merely waved his stylus in Draco's general direction, like a conductor bringing in the strings. "His inner child is currently doing cartwheels across his frontal lobe in nothing but a cape. This is the dream, you see. He grew up on those adventure books they published about you, Potter, back when nobody knew where the Boy Who Lived had got to and everybody was very happy to guess. Harry Potter and the Vampire Pirates of — where was it, Draco? Somewhere cold."

"The Outer Hebrides, volume three, it was the best one," said Draco, before he could stop himself.

There was a short, terrible pause.

"Volume three," Theo agreed serenely. "His favourite. He read it until the spine gave out, and then he slept with it under his pillow. I've always privately suspected that's the real reason he spent seven years being so unbearable to you lot. Never mind blood purity. It was jealousy, pure and simple. You got the vampire pirates, and he got elocution lessons."

Draco went pink from the collar upwards, a shade that was entirely new to Harry in five years of working with him. Ron guffawed so loudly that Kreacher, at the stove, dropped a spoon.

Harry forgot what he'd been about to say. In its place came a slow, enormous grin: the grin of a man who has just been handed a present he intends to keep for the rest of his life.

"Why, Malfoy," he said. "I didn't know you felt that way."

Draco's flush deepened from pink to something closer to murder.

"The top shelf," said Harry slowly, as it dawned on him. "At your flat. The ones with their spines to the wall —"

"Spines to the wall," sighed Theo happily. "Like naughty children."

"Theo," said Draco through his teeth, "I will end you."

"He wrote to them, you know," said Pansy. "The publishers. Suggesting a new character."

"Pansy."

"Blond," said Pansy. "Extremely brave. Excellent at Quidditch. Tragically misunderstood."

"And they wrote back," said Blaise, very tenderly, "to say that the hero's friends were all spoken for, but they could offer him a goblin."

"Blaise!"

Ron slid slowly off the stool he'd been perched on and onto the floor, where he lay wheezing. At the far end of the table Hermione had been buttering the same piece of toast for some time.

"Get in line, Malfoy," said Ginny, reaching for the marmalade. "I sent him a singing valentine. It rhymed."

Harry laughed along with the rest of them. He couldn't help it; the look on Draco's face alone was worth a year's salary. But somewhere underneath it, very quietly, a small, unwelcome thought went through him, the way a draught goes under a door. At nine years old, while Draco Malfoy was reading about Harry Potter fighting vampire pirates in the Outer Hebrides, the real Harry Potter had been sleeping in a cupboard under the stairs in Little Whinging, learning not to make any noise.

He put the thought away. He'd think about it later. He found, when he looked up, that Draco was watching him with a small frown, as though he'd seen something cross Harry's face and couldn't work out what it was.

"Right," said Hermione, raising her voice over what remained of the meeting. Her face was severe. The corner of her mouth was letting the side down. "If everyone has quite finished. Friday. Three o'clock."

​

On Monday morning, Harry went back to work.

They all did. Hermione had pointed out that Percy had found the twelve through the Ministry leave register, and that there was nothing to stop somebody else doing the same sum with different names. So Ron went back to the shop, and Ginny to the Harpies training grounds, and Pansy to whatever it was Pansy did all day, and Harry sat down at his desk in the Auror Office beside the stack of counterfeit Sickles and looked sulky about it, which was getting easier every day.

Draco came back too, on the stroke of nine, a week paler and in a new scarf, and found a spider plant on his desk and Proudfoot in his chair.

"Out," said Draco.

Proudfoot got out. The chair, which Draco had spent five years adjusting to the quarter-inch, had not had a good week either, and he spent most of the morning putting it right.

The spider plant was the work of Idris Shafiq, who had qualified in August and was the newest Auror in the office and, as far as anyone could remember, its second Slytherin since the war. He had worked out for himself who the first one was, and what that meant, and he had brought the plant in on the Tuesday, when he heard about the spattergroit, and watered it every morning since. He was polite to Harry, the way you are polite to somebody's father. He called Draco sir, which nobody else in the building did.

Draco had understood the plant, the watering and the boy somewhere between the lift and his desk, and did not look up when Shafiq came and stood at the end of it with a question about Shield Charms that he had been saving all week. He answered it in full, correctly, and still without looking up, and Shafiq went back to his own desk as though he had been given a medal.

"Welcome back, Malfoy," said Robards, from his office door. "How's the uvula?"

"Fully recovered, sir."

"Pity."

​

At half past four Harry put two leave forms on Robards's desk, filled in, in two different hands.

"Friday," said Robards. "Both of you."

"Yes, sir."

"Reason."

"CPD, sir," said Draco, from the doorway.

"You've just had a week off."

"That was illness, sir. This is development."

"In what?"

"Partnership." Harry had brought the leaflet. He read from it. "Communication. Trust. Listening without interrupting. Managing conflict in the field."

"It's accredited, sir," said Draco. "There's a certificate."

"There's a residential option," said Harry, still reading.

"We're not doing the residential."

"It's held above Madam Puddifoot's."

Behind Draco, in the office, a quill stopped.

"Potter."

"It's a function room, Malfoy. They do a buffet."

"How are you getting there?" said Robards.

"Floo," said Draco.

"Apparating," said Harry, at the same moment.

Robards wrote nothing down. In five years Harry had only ever seen him do that with people he had already made his mind up about.

Outside the door, Proudfoot said, to nobody in particular, "Marriage guidance," and somebody's tea went down the wrong way.

Robards signed both forms.

"Spattergroit," he said. "Marriage guidance." He put the quill down. "Do the residential."

He kept the leaflet.

​

On Wednesday, Seamus Finnigan took Lift Four out of service.

There was nothing remarkable in that. The Ministry lifts went out of service all the time, generally for reasons that became apparent only after somebody had spent forty minutes stuck between floors with a trolley full of sandwiches. What was remarkable was that Seamus had got this one condemned without putting a single thing wrong with it.

He had done it with a form.

The form was pink, and concerned a reported irregularity in the lift's stopping mechanism. Seamus had filled it out in triplicate, cited an incident in 2003 in which Lift Four had deposited an elderly witch on the wrong floor, and added a note about the increasingly urgent need to inspect the underside of the carriage. By Tuesday evening it had collected a row of signatures, a Ministry seal and a repair allocation running through to Friday afternoon.

Nobody had inspected the lift.

"That's the beauty of it," Seamus told Dean Thomas, who was helping him unload a trolley of maintenance equipment in the Atrium. "You'd think somebody'd eventually ask was the bloody thing broken at all. Not a bit of it. Forty-three hours of work they've approved, and not one of them's asked me what the noise sounds like."

"What noise?"

"Exactly."

Dean had brought the signs.

He drew cartoons for The Quibbler these days, which was nearly a respectable living, though not so respectable that anybody at the Ministry would have known his face. He had spent Tuesday evening reproducing the Department of Magical Maintenance's official notices, down to the miserable little wizard who stood in the bottom corner of every warning sign in the building.

On the genuine signs, the wizard stood very still, holding a spanner.

On Dean's, he had opinions.

He was stamping his foot beside the words LIFT FOUR — CLOSED FOR ESSENTIAL MAINTENANCE, and every so often he stopped to check an imaginary watch and shake his head.

"He's meant to be standing still," Seamus said.

"He is standing still. Mostly."

"Dean."

"It's a maintenance notice. He's annoyed about the maintenance."

Seamus watched the little wizard throw his spanner down and fold his arms.

"Ah, go on, then," he said. "That's Reg Cattermole to the life."

They put the barriers up round Lift Four, hung the signs across the grille and wheeled the trolley into the service corridor. On the way, Seamus glanced at the crack in the Fountain's plinth, which had been on his list since March, and kept walking. Everyone who came past glanced at the notice, sighed, and went to another lift.

By mid-morning the little wizard had begun directing traffic.

By lunchtime the other lifts were doing double duty, and somebody had filed a complaint.

The complaint went to Magical Maintenance.

Seamus put it on his clipboard.

​

On Thursday afternoon, Lee Jordan was kneeling on the hearthrug of the smallest studio at the Wizarding Wireless Network with his head in the fire, attempting to persuade a Ministry press officer that a new system of weighing people's wands was a sufficiently interesting subject to warrant an interview.

The press officer didn't think it was.

Lee didn't think it was either, but he had been given a visitor's pass for Friday, and that was the important part.

"Public confidence," he said into the microphone, with the grave sincerity of a man who had spent several years professionally pretending to possess some. "Transparency. Accountability. These are the questions people want answered."

"Do they?" said the press officer.

"Absolutely."

"About wand weighing?"

"Particularly about wand weighing."

There was a rustle from the grate at the Ministry end, as of a diary being consulted against its owner's will.

"Well," said the press officer doubtfully. "I suppose you could come at half past two."

"Marvellous. I'll bring my equipment."

He pulled his head out of the flames, brushed the soot off his knees, wrote Half two. Atrium. Officially boring on a scrap of parchment and sent it off to Grimmauld Place.

Then he went back to preparing that night's edition of Jordan After Dark, which included a listener's complaint about a neighbour who had bewitched his garden gnomes to sing the national anthem every morning at six. Lee had been looking forward to that one.

​

Friday came in cold and bright, with a white October frost on the ground.

At breakfast Harry shook out the Cloak and held it up. "It was a snug fit for three eleven-year-olds," he said. "Two grown adults is a squeeze. Three is a fantasy."

"Poppycock, Potter." Theo, who was eating a Danish pastry standing up because he was due in a lift shaft, pointed it at the Cloak. "Invisibility Cloaks don't age like fine wine. They age like milk. Ten years if you're lucky and keep it out of the sun, and then the charm goes cloudy and you're wandering about half visible. There is no earthly way you've had that one since you were eleven."

"It's a very good cloak," said Harry.

Theo put the pastry down. He looked at the Cloak the way he had looked at the frost on Draco's window, and then, for once in his life, held his tongue.

​

The hair arrived by owl at the last possible moment, in an envelope that smelt powerfully of setting lotion. Pansy's source had been thorough. Along with a generous quantity of iron-grey hair, the envelope contained several strands of something auburn, a receipt for a cut and set, and a note in pencil that said SORRY ABOUT THE GINGER THATS MRS BULSTRODE SHE WAS IN THE NEXT CHAIR.

Hermione picked out the auburn with tweezers, one strand at a time, while Draco watched as though it were his own autopsy.

The Polyjuice, when she handed it to him in the hall, had gone the colour of a filing cabinet, and tasted, he reported afterwards, exactly like one. He drank it standing up, with his eyes shut, and the hall of Grimmauld Place watched a tall young man fold down into a small, stout, iron-haired woman, standing in a puddle of grey robe with her sleeves over her hands.

Kreacher had come up from the kitchen to see what the noise was. He looked at her for some time. Then he bowed, very low, and asked whether Madam would be taking tea before she went out, and whether the second-best china would do.

"He knows it's me," said Draco, in Cressida Thorne's gravel. "He does know it's me."

"He knows," said Harry. "He's making a point."

​

♫ Listen along

At seven minutes to three a small, stout, iron-haired woman of sixty-one in severe grey robes walked into the Atrium of the Ministry of Magic with a much taller young woman beside her, and every witch and wizard who saw them coming stepped quickly out of the way.

Draco had been Cressida Thorne for eight minutes, and he hated every one of them.

He was five foot nothing. His robes had had to be taken up by eleven inches, and Pansy had done it on Thursday night with her wand, in a silence of deep professional contempt. His new hair was set into a helmet so rigid it didn't move when he turned his head. His feet hurt. And for the first half of them he had walked, Pansy said, "like a man about to inherit something," until she'd grabbed him by the shoulders in the Grimmauld Place hall and shaken him.

"Thorne doesn't walk like she's about to inherit something," Pansy had hissed. "She walks like she's about to confiscate something. Chin down. Shoulders forward. Look at everything as though it's slightly damp."

He looked at the Atrium as though it were slightly damp. It helped.

Beside him Hermione walked with her Unspeakable's badge on her chest and her face perfectly calm, which Draco knew by now meant that she was terrified. And close behind them, so close he could occasionally feel an invisible elbow, came Harry and Ginny under the Cloak, and somewhere near them, a faint ripple in the air like heat above a road, Luna. Halfway to the lifts a voice murmured at his ear, "Chin down, Cressida," and Draco trod on what he very much hoped was Harry's foot.

Only one person tried to speak to Unspeakable Thorne. A young wizard with ink on his cuffs came hurrying across the Atrium with a sheaf of parchment, saying, "Madam Thorne! About the requisition for the —"

"Denied," said Draco, without breaking stride.

"But you haven't even —"

"Denied in advance," said Draco. "It saves time."

The young wizard fell back, crushed, and beside Draco, Hermione made a very small noise and turned it into a cough.

Somewhere behind his left ear, Harry's voice said, "Robards. Six o'clock. By the Fountain."

Draco did not look round. Cressida Thorne had never looked round at anything in her life.

At the security desk, Blaise Zabini was leaning on the counter in a coat of dove-grey wool, telling the two Restitution Wardens a long story about his mother's fourth husband and a Hungarian Horntail that happened to be almost entirely untrue. Both Wardens were laughing. One of them was fanning herself with a clipboard. Neither of them was looking at the lifts.

A little further along the counter, Lee Jordan was conducting what appeared to be a serious interview with a junior Ministry press officer, using a small silver recording device that hovered between them like an unusually attentive insect.

"And how many wands have you weighed since the new procedure began?" Lee asked.

The press officer consulted her notes.

"Four thousand, two hundred and sixteen."

"Extraordinary. And how many have been found wanting?"

"None."

"None at all?"

"No."

"Well, that's reassuring. And how many of those four thousand, two hundred and sixteen people have asked what you're weighing them for?"

The press officer looked at him.

Lee smiled pleasantly and adjusted the recorder.

Behind him the Wardens had begun laughing again at something Blaise had said. Lee glanced once towards the lifts, saw a very small Cressida Thorne stalking across the floor beside Hermione Granger, and returned to his interview.

And then Goyle came through the door.

Draco saw him from the corner of his eye: huge, anxious, turning slowly on the spot exactly like a very large man who has just realised he doesn't know where he is. It was, Draco thought, the most convincing piece of acting he had ever seen, mainly because it probably wasn't acting.

Goyle took a step towards the security desk. As he did, a party of Hogwarts first-years on a Remembrance tour came streaming across the Atrium towards the Fountain in a chattering crocodile, led by a harassed-looking witch with a banner. Goyle stepped back to let them pass. He was a big man in a crowded room, so he stepped back politely, the way his mother had taught him. And his hand, as it always did when he was nervous, went into his pocket and closed round whatever was in there.

Whatever was in there was the Decoy Detonatorʷ.

It was later established, by George, in a lengthy and slightly defensive post-mortem, that nobody had told Goyle that the Detonators were pressure-activated. It shot out of his pocket in a panic, all six legs going, and scurried straight under the black stone basin of the Fountain of Remembrance, which had stood in the Atrium for nine years without incident on a plinth of marble. There it went off.

It was, as George had promised, completely harmless. The bang was quite small. The smoke was purple.

The plinth, which had been on Seamus's list since March, gave way.

The slab of the Fountain, two tons of black stone engraved from top to bottom with the names of the war dead, running with water, tilted slowly and grindingly forward, straight towards the crocodile of eleven-year-olds, who had stopped dead and were staring up at it with their mouths open.

Afterwards nobody could say how Gregory Goyle got across the Atrium so fast. He simply seemed to be at the fountain, and then he was under the slab, his great arms up and his feet planted in the basin, and the slab stopped.

For a single second the whole Atrium was silent, except for the sound of water.

Then everybody moved at once. Wizards and witches ran from every corner of the hall. The Wardens abandoned Blaise mid-anecdote. Robards was sending the nearest Auror for a Levitation team, and someone else was herding the first-years back, and a photographer from the Prophet who happened to be in the Atrium for an entirely different reason was taking pictures as fast as his camera would let him. In the middle of it all Goyle stood in the basin with the water running down over his face and shoulders, arms shaking, holding the names of the dead above his head.

Draco could see his face. The slab was inches from Goyle's nose, and he was reading the names as they ran past his eyes, all the way down the stone. Draco knew which one he was looking for, and he knew it wasn't there.

Ron had asked for thirty seconds.

"Go," breathed Ginny from under the cloak. They went.

​

When the doors of Lift Four slid open in the Atrium, Theo Nott was leaning against the back wall with his ankles crossed, his stylus still in his hand, his spectacles pushed up into his hair and a fine sheen of sweat on his forehead, which he was dabbing at with a silk handkerchief.

The lift took them down without stopping, without a sound and without once pausing at a grille, as smoothly as if it were sliding through water.

"Well?" said Draco, in Cressida Thorne's gravelly voice. "Were you from Cork?"

"I was ready to be." Theo dabbed at his forehead. "Eight hours in a lift shaft, and I'd built an entire life. A mother in Skibbereen, three sisters, a tragic weakness for hurling. And in all that time exactly one man spoke to me. He put his head through a service hatch at about eleven and asked if I was the new lad." He sounded faintly wounded. "I said 'grand'. He gave me a biscuit."

When the doors opened again on Level Nine, Theo pushed himself off the wall, straightened his cuffs, tucked the handkerchief away and swept one arm out towards the bare corridor beyond, with the flourish of a lift attendant in a very expensive department store.

"Level Nine," he announced. "Department of Mysteries. Sealed archives, forbidden knowledge, and almost certain death. Haberdashery is one floor up. Do mind the step."

"Thanks," said Harry, from nowhere.

"You're very disconcerting when you're invisible, Potter." Theo leaned back against the grille. "I'll hold the lift here. It won't move without me, and nobody's calling it up while I'm in it." He consulted a pocket watch. "The runes stop it telling the desk where it is until half past four. After that it's a Ministry lift again, and a Ministry lift can be stopped between floors. And don't set off any alarms. An alarm calls every lift home, and nothing I've carved will argue with that." He paused as they stepped past him, and a faint shimmer in the air beside him, like heat over a road, pressed something small and wriggling into his palm.

"Would you mind her for me?" said Luna's voice. "She doesn't like the dark, and she's never been to a Ministry."

Theo looked down at Bolorma, curled in his hand like a bristling brown pinecone, and she looked back up at him with two tiny black eyes and made a very small kettle noise.

"I work alone," said Theo faintly, to the empty air.

"I know," said the air, warmly, and the doors closed.

​

The corridor was exactly as Harry remembered it from when he was fifteen, and he hated it just as much. Bare walls. Torches. Nothing at all but a plain black door at the end, which he had once run down towards in a dream, over and over, for a whole year of his life.

Hermione walked to it. Draco walked stoutly beside her. They stood in front of it together.

For a moment nothing happened. Then the door gave a very faint click, as though somebody on the other side had cleared their throat, and swung silently open.

The circular room beyond was as dark as Harry remembered, walled in black, with the dozen identical handleless black doors set all around its curve and the blue candle-flames reflected in the shining floor. The door closed behind them. The walls began to spin.

It lasted only a few seconds, but it was long enough to make Harry's stomach lurch, and long enough for him to remember that last time he'd come here, Sirius had been alive when he walked in.

The walls stopped. Hermione walked, without a word or a glance at any of them, to one door on the left.

"I'm going for a walk," she said to nobody in particular, in the clear, flat voice of someone reading aloud a statement drafted by a solicitor. "If anybody happens to follow me, that is entirely their own business."

The door she stood in front of was the one from Harry's nightmares. He knew it without being told.

"The Veil's through there," he said.

Hermione kept her eyes on the floor, which was answer enough. She turned instead to a door on the opposite side of the room.

"I'll be in the archive," she said. "For no reason. With the Head of Department, who has her own reasons. Harry —" Her composure cracked just very slightly. "Be careful in there."

"You too."

Harry, Ginny and Luna went through the door on the left. Hermione and a small, severe, furious old woman went through the door on the right. The two doors swung shut in the same moment.

​

♫ Listen along

The Death Chamber was bigger than he remembered.

That was the first thing. It had been a large room before, a great sunken stone pit with stone benches rising round it in tiers like an amphitheatre, and at its bottom a raised dais with the ancient crumbling stone archway standing on it. The archway was still there. So was the tattered black curtain, stirring very slightly in a breeze that was not there.

But it had grown.

Someone had built onto it. New stones had been fitted on either side of the old ones, dark and rough and cut from a different kind of rock, so that the archway was now nearly twice as wide as it had been and a good deal taller. The curtain had grown with it, somehow; it hung in the new, wider opening like a black flag, rippling gently. And all around the arch, on every stone old and new, in long vertical lines crossed by short straight strokes, somebody had carved Ogham.

"It's the tree alphabet," Luna said softly, beside him. Harry had pulled off the Cloak, and Luna had shimmered slowly back into view. The room was empty.

The whispering started as soon as they reached the benches.

Harry had heard it before, at fifteen: a murmuring beyond the curtain, like people talking very quietly in the next room. It was different now, and much louder. It sounded as if the next room was very crowded, and very close, and everyone in it was talking at once.

Ginny's hand found his. He held onto it.

"Luna?"

Luna had walked down to the lowest tier of benches and was standing with her head on one side, perfectly still, listening. Her face was very calm.

"They're cross," she said. "Ever so cross. Somebody keeps knocking on their door at night, and they don't want to answer it." She tilted her head the other way. "They keep saying names. Not their own names. Other people's. As if they're being told them and don't like it."

There was a table at the foot of the dais. Harry saw it now: a long plain wooden table like a school desk, set just to one side of the archway, and on it two things.

The first was a floorplan.

It was a sheet of grey slate about the size of a tea tray, engraved with silver lines so fine and so precise that Harry's breath caught when he bent over it. It showed one level of somewhere underground, a warren of tunnels and chambers with stairways that ran to the edge of the slate and stopped. There was no compass rose and no name on it, and nothing to show what lay above or below: only the one level, like the plan of a house with the house taken away. All round the border ran a band of carving in long lines and short strokes, the same kind as on the arch.

In the largest chamber, near the middle of the slate, lying in a neat row on the floor as though they had been laid out to sleep, were four tiny figures no bigger than grains of rice.

"It's a map," said Luna, very quietly. She had come up beside him. "It shows what's there. At this precise moment in time."

Harry bent closer. The four tiny figures lay perfectly still. And then one of them, the one on the end, turned over in its sleep.

"They're alive," Ginny breathed.

Cassia Selwyn. Tobias Rowle. Hector Mulciber. Flora Travers. Which was which hardly mattered. They were alive, all four of them, asleep somewhere in the dark, and until this moment he hadn't let himself believe they could be.

The second thing on the table was a ledger.

It was large and black and bound in something that wasn't quite leather, lying open on a wooden stand, and at the top of the open page, in red ink, in a clear, careful, clerkly hand, it said: THE TITHE.

Below were names. A great many names, running down the page and over onto the next, each one numbered. Next to the first four, in the same red ink, somebody had written a date and a single neat tick.

Harry's eye went down the list. Yaxley. Avery. Carrow. Macnair. Rookwood. Dolohov. Names he had last seen on arrest warrants and in trial transcripts, the surnames of every family that had knelt to Voldemort. There were children's names beside them, grandchildren's, nieces and nephews, dozens of them. And among them, scattered down the pages like stones in a field, were names he knew.

Nott, Theodore.

Parkinson, Pansy.

Zabini, Blaise.

Goyle, Gregory.

"Harry," said Ginny, in a strange, thin voice. "The end. Look at the end."

The last page. Number ninety-nine was somebody called Burke. And number one hundred, alone at the bottom of the page, written in darker ink than all the others, as if the pen had been pressed harder:

100. Malfoy, Draco. Reserved. All Hallows.

He stared at it. He was aware that Ginny had drawn her wand and was pointing it at the ledger, saying "Geminio" under her breath, and that a second black book had slid out from under the first. He was aware that she was doing the same to the slate, and that a second slate had appeared beside the first, and that she was stuffing both copies into the small beaded bag at her hip (one of a pair Hermione had given her and Luna one Christmas, about which Harry, as a serving Auror, had made a point of never asking a single question). He could hear all of it. He simply couldn't take his eyes off the name.

​

The archive of the Department of Mysteries was a long, low, dim room lined with iron shelves. It smelt of dust and old parchment and something faintly sweet, like a museum at closing time, and every shelf was stacked with identical black folders, each one numbered in white.

The way in was through a small, bare anteroom with a round black-framed mirror on one wall. Just inside, on the left, they passed another door, standing ajar, and from behind it came a soft, endless chattering, like a thousand small clocks all talking at once.

Draco's head turned.

"Come on," said Hermione, without breaking stride.

Hermione went straight to the section at the far end, where the sealed folios lived. She was not, technically, supposed to know where the sealed folios lived. She had worked this out on her third day in the Department by the simple method of noticing which shelf everybody else walked past quickly.

The slot marked 14 was empty.

So was the slot marked 22.

She had known they would be. It still made her feel sick to see it.

"Well?" said a small, severe, gravelly voice behind her. It was deeply unnerving, coming out of that face. "Don't just stare at it, Granger. What's next to it?"

She looked. And her stomach dropped, cleanly, like a stone into a well.

There was a third empty slot. Not on Percy's oversight log, because whoever had taken it had not reported taking it. A slot that she, personally, had checked a month ago, and which had been full.

9, said the white label beneath it. And underneath, in smaller letters, the index title: Peverell.

"Granger? What is it? You've gone the colour of porridge."

"Nothing," said Hermione.

She had never been a good liar. She was a worse one when her tongue kept threatening to turn to lead. Thorne's small grey eyes narrowed at her, and Hermione saw Draco's own expression looking out through them — sharp and quick and entirely unconvinced.

And then Thorne's face began to melt.

It started round the edges. The iron-grey helmet of hair loosened, lightened, slid down over the ears in pale blond strands. The small stout body stretched, groaning, upwards and outwards. The grey robes, which had been taken up by eleven inches, suddenly weren't long enough, and there was a noise of straining seams. It took about ten seconds. At the end of it, a tall, pale, extremely irritable young man stood in the archive of the Department of Mysteries in robes that ended halfway up his shins, with a very small pair of women's shoes on the floor beside him.

"You drank it at a quarter to three," said Hermione. "It's ten past."

"It's supposed to last an hour."

"Fresh, it does." Hermione had the grace to look faintly guilty. "That came from the back of the airing cupboard. It's been there since 2005."

Draco looked down at his shins. "So it's vintage."

"It's a spare."

"Then where," said Draco, "are the other spares?"

"Why are you asking me? You're the one who drank it. Why didn't you bring more?"

"Because you only gave me one dose," said Draco, "because you said, and I quote, we'll be in and out in less than an hour." He tugged at the hem of the robes, which made no difference to anything. "I'll be honest, Granger, I'd assumed you'd have spares."

"I do have spares!"

"Where?"

"In the airing cupboard!"

Hermione was already elbow-deep in her own beaded bag. Something inside it clanked, and something else rustled, and she came out with a pair of polished black shoes and held them out to him.

Draco looked at the shoes. Then at her.

"Those are mine," he said.

"You left them in the hall. I brought them in case."

"In case it wore off." He took them from her, very slowly. "You planned for it wearing off, Granger. You planned for it carefully enough to pack my shoes, and at no point did it occur to you to pack the —"

"Do you want them or not?"

He wanted them. He was still hopping on one foot, working his heel into the second shoe, when somewhere far away, somewhere deep in the stone, an alarm began to wail.

Hermione's heart stopped. Then the door at the end of the archive slammed shut with a sound like a coffin lid, and there was a series of heavy, grinding clicks from inside the walls, like enormous bolts sliding home one after another all round the room, and the torches along the shelves flared a harsh, bright red.

"Lockdown," said Hermione. "Somebody's read the door."

Draco was at the door in three strides. It didn't move. He tried a Charm on it, then remembered himself and swore, and then tried it anyway. Nothing. "How long?"

"It lasts until Security comes down to open it by hand." She was trying to think over the sound of her own pulse. "Ten minutes. Maybe less. And when they open it they'll find an Unspeakable who isn't supposed to be here, and a disgraced ex-Death Eater turned probationary Auror who definitely isn't supposed to be here, and they'll know exactly which two bodies opened the door —"

Draco's face had gone carefully blank.

"There must be a way out."

"There isn't. There's the archive door, which is locked, and there's the door through to the —" Her tongue thickened. She stopped.

Then she stopped thinking about the Oath, and about the door, and about the fact that her career was almost certainly ending in the next ten minutes, and thought about the room next door, and what was in it.

"Come with me," she said. "And don't touch anything."

​

The whispering behind the Veil changed.

It happened all at once, the way the noise in a room changes when someone important walks in. The hundred overlapping murmurs fell silent. Then they started again, but this time they were saying just one word, all of them together, over and over, low and urgent and very, very close.

Harry.

Harry.

Harry.

He turned round slowly. The black curtain in the archway had stopped rippling. It was hanging dead still, and then, as he watched, it bellied outwards, towards him, the way a curtain moves in a window when someone on the other side has opened the door. The Ogham carved round the stones of the arch lit up, stroke by stroke, a cold clear silver, like frost catching the sun.

And in the middle of all the voices saying his name, there was one — Harry, Harry — that he knew. That he would have known anywhere, in any room, for the rest of his life. A voice with a bark in it, and a laugh at the bottom of it, as though its owner found the whole business of being dead faintly ridiculous and was about to tell him so.

He took a step towards the dais without meaning to.

"Harry." Ginny had him by the arm, both hands, hard. "Harry, look at me. Look at me."

He looked at her. Her face was white and fierce and absolutely certain.

"That isn't him," she said. "I don't know what it is. But I know what it feels like to have something in your head that wants you to walk towards it, and that is not him."

Beside them Luna had tilted her head again, listening.

"It's Immy," she said. "She's in there with all the others, and they're all saying your name, but she's saying something else." Then she looked at Harry, and for once there was nothing dreamy in her face at all. "She's saying run."

Somewhere far above them, deep in the stone of the Ministry, an alarm began to wail.

​

♫ Listen along

The Time Room was full of light.

It came from the great glittering bell jar at the far end of the room, as tall as a man, where a tiny jewel-bright egg rose endlessly in a swirling current of light, cracked, hatched a hummingbird, which grew and aged and turned back into an egg and sank again. The clocks along the walls ticked in a thousand different rhythms, a great soft continual chattering. Hermione went past them all to a small locked cabinet of dark glass in the corner, touched her wand to it, murmured something, and opened it.

Inside, on a black velvet cushion, lay a single delicate golden hourglass on a fine chain.

Draco stared at it.

"Granger," he said. "Is that a Time-Turner?"

"I can't possibly comment."

"Every Time-Turner in the Ministry was smashed in 1996. Everybody knows that. You were there —"

"I can't possibly comment," said Hermione, hanging the chain round her own neck. "But if one were to —"

Her tongue went heavy. She stopped, frowned, and tried again, more carefully.

"If one were to hypothesise. Entirely hypothetically —"

The words came out perfectly clearly. For a moment Hermione looked faintly astonished, and then deeply annoyed, like a woman who has just found the loophole she spent many nights looking for, in the one place she hadn't thought to check.

"— that the Department had spent twelve years and an obscene amount of the taxpayer's gold building a single new Time-Turner," she went on, rather faster, "then one would also have to hypothesise that it was extremely unstable, and could go back exactly five minutes, and exactly once, and then needed a month to recover before anybody could use it again." She held out the other end of the chain. "Put this round your neck."

"Why?"

"Because I'm going back five minutes, to before the lockdown, and you're coming with me, and when we get there we are going to be in the same room as ourselves." She looked him dead in the eye. "Have you ever been in the same room as yourself, Malfoy?"

"No."

"It's horrible," said Hermione. "Put it on."

He put it on. The chain was very short. It meant standing so close to her that his chin was nearly on top of her head. Neither of them commented on this.

Hermione turned the hourglass five times.

​

The room dissolved around them, and flew backwards, and came back.

It was the Time Room still. The bell jar glittered. The clocks ticked. But the torches weren't red any more, and there was no alarm, and through the half-open door into the archive Hermione could hear footsteps.

Her own footsteps. And a second, smaller, heavier pair.

"Cupboard," she hissed. "Now."

There was a tall wooden cabinet in the corner behind the bell jar, full of spare clock parts and old brass pendulums, with exactly enough room inside for one person, or for two people who were extremely fond of each other. They got into it anyway. Draco pulled the door shut behind them.

It was very dark and very cramped. It smelt of brass polish and, underneath that, of something clean and faintly expensive that she realised, after a moment, was him. A pendulum was digging into her hip. Draco's chin really was on top of her head now, and his chest was against her back, and she could feel his heart going, quick and steady, through two layers of robes. There was absolutely nothing to be done about any of it. Hermione fixed her eyes on the crack in the door and began, silently and with great determination, to recite the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration.

Through the crack in the cabinet door she watched herself walk past the Time Room door towards the sealed shelves, with a small severe elderly witch stumping along beside her.

"Is that," whispered Draco, so close that his breath stirred her hair, "what I look like from behind?"

"That's what Thorne looks like from behind."

They watched through the crack. Past-Hermione went to the far shelf and stopped at the empty slots. Past-Thorne said something in a gravelly voice. Past-Hermione went the colour of porridge. And then past-Thorne began to melt, and stretch, and grow, until a tall blond young man was standing there in robes that ended halfway up his shins, looking down at them as though they had betrayed him personally.

"Merlin," breathed Draco. "My ankles."

Hermione shook so hard with suppressed laughter that the pendulum rattled against the cabinet wall. Draco clamped a hand over her mouth and an arm round her waist, hauling her back against him to keep her still, and they both froze.

His palm was warm against her lips. She could feel every one of his fingers. Eventually he took his hand away, a fraction more slowly than he strictly needed to, and his arm stayed exactly where it was.

Then another set of footsteps came into the anteroom outside the archive door: quick, light, purposeful, from the direction of the circular room. Both of them went absolutely still.

A man came into view through the crack. He was thin and neat, in the plain black robes of a senior Ministry official, with sleek dark hair and rimless spectacles and a leather folder under his arm. Hermione recognised him at once from a hundred Ministry functions.

Lionel Stroud, the Minister's Private Secretary. He'd been changed in August, the first of the twelve.

He went straight past the archive door to the wall of the anteroom, where a small round mirror hung in a plain black frame, and tapped it twice with his wand. The glass clouded over, then cleared. Hermione couldn't see the face in it from where she was hidden. She could only hear the voice that came out of it: low, and warm, and a little tired.

"Well?"

"The list is complete, sir," said Stroud. "One hundred. The last of them were entered this morning."

"And the four we have?"

"Sleeping soundly. They don't suffer. You were very clear about that."

"I was." A pause. "And the Malfoy boy?"

Hermione felt Draco go rigid against her back. The arm round her waist tightened, just once, as though he had forgotten it was there.

"Reserved, as you asked," said Stroud. "For the last night. You said he should come last."

"Yes," said the voice in the mirror, softly. "Yes. He should come last. Of all of them, I think, he'll understand best what he owes." Another pause. "And the other matter? The Master?"

"We're working on it, sir. The Wand is the difficulty. The tomb is guarded, and Minerva McGonagall is —"

"Minerva McGonagall is an old woman," said the voice. "So am I an old man. Keep working."

The mirror clouded again and went dark. Stroud tucked his folder more firmly under his arm, turned on his heel and walked briskly out of the anteroom, back the way he had come.

Hermione could feel Draco breathing against her hair, very carefully and very evenly, the way you breathe when you are concentrating on nothing else in the world.

"Malfoy," she whispered.

"Not now."

"Draco —"

"Granger." His voice was perfectly light. "If you're about to be kind to me in a cupboard, I would honestly rather you didn't. We've got less than a minute. Is the circular room door open?"

It was. She could see it through the crack: Stroud had left it ajar behind him.

"Now," she said.

The Time Room felt very cold after the cupboard. Hermione told herself it was the clocks. They slid out of the cabinet and across the Time Room like shadows, past the ticking clocks and the endless hummingbird, and out through the anteroom and into the dark circular room, just as, somewhere far away in the stone, an alarm began to wail. Behind them the archive door slammed shut with a sound like a coffin lid, and the bolts ground home all around the walls, and inside it, Hermione knew, two very frightened people were staring at each other in the red light and thinking there was no way out.

She almost felt sorry for them. She did hope that one of them would think about the cabinet in time.

"Did we just —" Draco began.

"Yes."

"And they're going to —"

"Yes."

"And then we —"

"Yes, Malfoy, that's how it works, don't think about it too hard or you'll be sick —"

The door on the far side of the circular room burst open, and Harry, Ginny and Luna came through it at a flat run.

​

The door of the Death Chamber swung shut behind them, and the walls of the circular room began to turn. That door had locked with the rest of the Department. Luna had knocked on it, and said something to it that Harry hadn't caught, and it had opened. He hadn't asked how. He was fairly sure he knew what the answer would be, and that it would involve the door's feelings.

Hermione didn't wait for the walls to stop. She crossed the spinning room to the one door that led out, the way you find your own front door in the dark, and they ran.

Lift Four was still there. It had no business being there. The whole box was shuddering in its shaft, straining upwards, and Theo was standing in the open doors with one hand flat on the wall of it, talking to it. Harry caught the end of it as they ran: that it was a very good lift, and nobody upstairs wanted it half as much as he did, and if it would hold on one moment more he would be eternally in its debt. Bolorma sat on his shoulder like a small bristling epaulette.

"In," said Theo, without taking his hand off the wall. "Quickly. I asked it nicely, and I've no idea why that's working."

"Thank you," said Luna, to the lift, as she got in.

The lift went up as though it had been fired from a cannon. Ron, when he heard about it later, maintained that the Ministry lifts had never once travelled that fast in their entire history. They stood crammed together in the hurtling box: Harry and Ginny and Luna, Hermione pale and set, Theo with his stylus and his passenger, and Draco in robes that ended halfway up his shins, not looking at anyone.

"Bit short in the leg," Harry said to him.

"I'm reserved," said Draco. "Apparently. For the last night." He looked straight ahead at the lift doors. "I've always wanted to be something's grand finale."

"Malfoy —"

"He knows about the Hallows, Harry," said Hermione, very quietly, before he could say anything else. "The folio's gone. And they're after the Wand."

Draco glanced at him and frowned, and Harry knew the colour had gone from his face. He knew exactly where the Wand was. He had put it there himself, and he knew who it still answered to.

Whatever Draco had been about to ask, the lift got in first. It gave a long, contented shudder, like a horse that can smell its own stable, and began to slow.

The doors opened on a half-circle of Aurors with their wands drawn, and in the middle of them, with his hands clasped behind his back, the Minister for Magic.

"Atrium," said Theo faintly. "Do mind the Aurors."

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