CHAPTER 1: LONG TIME NO SEE


November 2002, The New York Times, MAGIC IS REAL

...the existence of a secret magical society was revealed yesterday when the whole European continent suddenly disappeared under a seemingly unbreachable barrier…


August 2014: The Free Wizard, published in Finland: MAGIC ACTING STRANGE

...for years we have discouraged fellow wizards and witches from approaching the Magical Curtain, as it seems to influence the outcome of many charms and enchantments. Numerous studies have been conducted but none have determined the cause as of yet.

And now, a new oddity has emerged: just a few kilometres away from the Curtain, close to the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, an area of approx. five kilometres in perimeter seemed to lose its ambivalent magic altogether. It is impossible to invoke any spells, and any previously charmed objects (including wands) self-combust. Teams of researchers from all over the world have been called to the zone, looking for an explanation as to why magic seems to die in that place.


March 2019 - twenty years after the battle of Hogwarts, somewhere outside the Curtain

"Well, a Scotsman clad in kilt left a bar one evening fair…"

He was whispering the lyrics under his breath, desperately trying not to sing but the words seemed reluctant to come from his memory without the melody.

Outwardly calm, he marched into the rhythm of the song, one step belonging to every syllable, never halting. And whilst he sang, the forest path snaked underneath his boots, leading him through the suffocating wards around him.

"…about that time two young and lovely girls just happened by..."

He pondered who might have chosen this silly tune for a password. It was something his wife would have picked, but she wasn't the one to design these wards. Someone else would have to find it amusing.

"...Ring-ding-did-a-little-la-di-oh, Ring-di-diddly-eye-oh..."

He stopped, carefully looking around. He sighed in relief when he spotted the square rock covered in moss Luna had described.

He was safely through the wards.

Without further hesitation, he rolled the stone away, uncovering a metal box underneath it. He smashed his fist into its lid. A mechanism snapped inside and the top opened to reveal a shallow space, empty except for one pair of round glasses.

He examined them for a moment, careful not to touch them. They seemed ordinary enough.

With a weighty sigh, he started going through all his magical possessions and putting them safely in the box. He rolled up the sleeves of his heavy coat and untied the wand-holsters on both of his forearms, his wands still within. He carefully placed them at the bottom of the box. The spare wand strapped to his left calf also went inside. He took off his bottomless belt pouch, his talkie-talkie watch, little Portkey-earring, his filling with bezoar from his second molar, and even the enchanted muggle gun from his belt. After a beat of hesitation, he took off his wedding ring too. Luna always said it had some magical potential even if he'd never felt a single spark from it.

With all of that inside, he closed the lid, covered it with the rock and rearranged the moss around it. Armed with just a mundane gun, borrowed specifically for this occasion, he started walking to the edge of the forest where the sun was shining through the thinning wall of trees.


He easily recognized the moment when he stepped across the borders of the dead zone. The world suddenly seemed less colourful. Something was missing in the air, and the part of him that always responded to ambient magic found itself quite alone.

He hated dead zones.

A second later, there was a weak bang and a flash of light. Simultaneously, Neville felt two punches into his stomach.

He started frantically thumping his belly where two small combustions had set his coat on fire. When the smoke subsided, he found two charred patches where his buttons used to be.

He swore under his breath. Lovely. Luna promised she had sewn those on without magic.

When he exited the forest, he found himself on a vast clearing, surrounded by trees from all sides. He could hear dogs barking in the distance: a small house sat a few hundred metres away, with an orchard and a garden on its remote side. Several satellite dishes were installed on its roof, and behind a wooden fence, two large dogs were barking threateningly at him. There was nobody else in sight, but he couldn't shake the feeling that someone had their eyes on him.

He was right. When he approached the fence, he noticed a face behind the curtains and a gun aimed at his forehead. Then the face and the gunpoint disappeared. Two seconds later the front door slammed open, and a woman stepped outside, a broad smile on her lips.

He had to smile back.

Hermione looked much better than the last time he'd seen her, some seventeen years ago. Back then, she was a poor copy of her former self; but the years of solitude and peace seemed to have agreed with her. She was now a forty-year-old lady but she looked closer to the spirited girl he used to know in Hogwarts.

Still, she was a middle-aged woman now, with the wrinkles to prove it. He was lucky, with his magic slowing down the ageing process. Hermione, however, was quite the opposite, and even though they were the same age, she now looked almost a decade older.

She stopped behind the fence and extended her hands as to embrace him. He awkwardly reached over the fence, hugging her back. The moment he touched her, the dogs finally stopped barking.

"It's good to see you again, Hermione."

She didn't answer, of course, she just hugged him tightly before she let go.

"Luna said you wouldn't mind if I dropped by," he said hesitantly when she let him through the gate. The dogs immediately loomed over, sniffed his hands and scurried away.

Hermione, still smiling, motioned him to the house and made for the door herself. He followed, talking nervously again: "I brought you something from Luna; it's not exactly a present, though, more like a task. She made me warn you to watch it before she visits next time; otherwise, you won't have any idea what she's talking about."

He fished in his pocket for a slim case, bringing it to the light. He vaguely recognized some of the faces on the cover of the DVD and scowled at them. "And please, for the sake of our marriage, convince her to stop watching that Muggle crap! We haven't had dinner on time for months, not since they started airing that perkele soap opera at six sharp…"

Hermione just smiled at him and led him through the entrance hall to a modest kitchen. Neville liked the inside even more than the outside; it was tidy and homely, with light flooding in through the wide windows. He hesitantly sat down at the table in the middle of the room and watched as Hermione went to heat up water in a kettle. She turned to him with a questioning look on her face, a tea caddy held in one hand, and a coffee can in the other.

"Oh," he blinked after a beat of confusion. "Of course. A cup of tea would be nice."

And then he was at a loss for what to say. He'd never been a skilled conversationalist, and after seventeen years of not seeing each other, he was struggling to find a safe topic to start with. Hermione couldn't help him, of course. He knew Luna had a way to communicate with her just fine, having learned muggle Sign language for that purpose, but he was clueless without any magical aid.

He looked around the well-lived kitchen. "You have a lovely place here. How long have you lived here?"

Hermione turned to him with five fingers raised on her right hand.

"Five years?" Neville deduced, surprised. The very first dead zones started appearing five years ago. "How did you manage to rent a dead zone for a safe house?"

Hermione looked up from the kettle and levelled him with a hard stare. Neville flinched, but he understood his blunder. He had no right to pry - they were not close friends anymore. Hermione was under no obligations to tell him the secrets of her hideout - he was lucky to get an invitation.

He dropped his eyes and the subject with it. After a moment, he heard the water running again and knew Hermione had turned back to her task.

Once again, Neville was at loss of what to say next, awkwardly watching in silence as she prepared their tea. She'd had it bad; he mused, maybe the worst of them all. She had lost almost everyone and her magic as well, ending in this isolated place alone with her nearly catatonic mother.

"How is Mrs Granger doing?" he finally asked, considering it polite and safe enough.

Hermione just smiled at him again, nodding her head without hesitation, which convinced Neville it'd be okay to continue. "Luna mentioned she'd started drawing pictures. That's excellent news - the fact she's using her imagination again has to mean something; my parents never got so far."

She turned to him with another smile on her face, though it was a little less bright this time, and she pointed to a picture hanging on the wall. It wasn't anything more than childish doodles, but Neville thought that he recognised three figures; one of them considerably smaller than the other two.

He'd always thought that he could empathize with Hermione more than most, with the childhood he'd had. But in truth, he had grown up with catatonic parents, and he couldn't remember them ever being anything other than vacant; Hermione, on the other hand, had watched her loving parents being tortured into insanity with her own eyes - as well as her baby sister, a toddler their parents also named Hermione in the haze of Obliviation.

Hermione startled him from his reverie when she placed a Muggle tablet in front of him.

"How are you, Neville?" The screen read.

Of course, that would have been the sensible question to start with. "I'm good. Life is good- uh, stable. Finland can get really cold, though." He struggled with his answer, realising Hermione wasn't just offering empty pleasantries, but actually inquired about the last seventeen years of his life. "Did Luna tell you what I do?

"You work with muggle police," she typed.

Neville smiled. "Well, that's essentially true, except that they don't know much about our cooperation. We use their files to search for cases where magic was involved."

Hermione looked pleasantly surprised. "I'm glad to hear wizards still help muggles."

That assessment threw Neville right off. He looked up at her sharply and then chuckled. "Half of my days at work are spent explaining to the public how exactly I'm not helping muggles." He shook his head and came out with his well-practised response. "What our department does is all for the safety of the wizarding world: to prevent future conflicts. We cover any trace of criminal magic in the muggle world. The muggles claim their insurance money and don't raise hell for being harmed by a wizard."

Hermione frowned. "You don't chase the wizards responsible?"

"We would hardly get the funding for that," Neville laughed at the idea. "My department is as unpopular as it gets right now, just because it already looks like we are helping muggles. We couldn't look like we are helping muggles and punishing wizards for it at the same time."

"But those wizards are criminals." Hermione looked positively peeved now, her sense of justice evidently insulted.

Neville remained cool. "Wizards and witches have always been stealing from muggles; that's nothing new. We are just not the sort to grow our own vegetable. As long as we help them once in a while, most wizards consider us even where muggles are concerned."

Hermione didn't seem convinced. She was staring at him with her eyes wide, seemingly gathering her thoughts, ready for her counter-argument. Neville wasn't here to discuss muggle rights, though. He spoke up again before she started typing.

"You know, besides my day job, I'm still in touch with the Resistance," he said, looking carefully for a reaction.

She nodded after a short pause, allowing him to change the subject. "Luna told me."

"Did she?" Neville scowled. How much did Hermione know? "Did she tell you why I'm here?"

She shook her head although Neville did notice that beat of hesitation preceding it. She knew something, or suspected at least; that much was obvious.

No matter. Neville decided to explain everything from the start, anyway. "A couple of months ago, we found a group of muggle families wandering through the forests just a few kilometres away from the Curtain. They claimed to have come through the Crossing from Europe. Since then, eight more groups have been smuggled through. They are the first refugees that managed to escape from the Magical Empire since the Curtain was raised seventeen years ago." He watched her face, but her expression did not change. He carried on. "We spoke to them at length, we learned as much as we could about the Empire. They didn't have much to say, though. They lived sheltered lives in muggle slums, and most of the stories they tell us about wizards are mostly muggle superstition. There was one thing that was clear enough, though." He took a deep breath, "Some of them claimed that the person who helped them through the Curtain was... Harry Potter."

He was watching closely, waiting for some sort of reaction, but when she didn't offer any, he carried on. "We investigated their memories, and we have no reason to believe they are lying; Harry is alive, and living behind the Curtain."

Hermione's face didn't change one bit.

"You don't look surprised," Neville remarked.

Hermione bent over her tablet. "Were you?"

Neville hesitated. Was he? "The last time we heard of him, he was entering the Amazonian jungle, alone and delirious due to his addiction to Felix Felicis," he pointed out instead of answering. "When the Curtain was raised, we thought he had been buried somewhere in the Southern hemisphere. We certainly didn't think that he was alive and inside Europe."

He took a deep breath. "And that's not all: the refugees' reports are incomplete at best, but we now know at least something about the new regime in the Empire. What we've learned is disturbing: Harry must have been living like a muggle to avoid detection and survive - or he must have joined the other side."

Hermione frowned. "If he switched sites and joined the Dark Lord, why would he be helping muggles to escape?"

Neville nodded. "That's the only thing giving us hope."

Hermione raised her eyebrows at that. "What exactly is the Resistance hoping for, Neville?"

Neville took a deep breath. There comes the reason why he was here. "We hope that if he could smuggle muggles out, he could smuggle wizards in."

"The Resistance?" Hermione wrote after a moment of hesitation. "You?"

"I can't tell you much more than that, Hermione - I'm bound by oaths," he said regretfully. "I was hoping that you could help me find him, though."

"How?"

"You were the last one to speak to him before he left the Resistance."

Hermione's fingers trembled as she went to write a response. "That was more than eighteen years ago. How do you suppose I can help you contact him now? And through an unbreachable magical barrier, nonetheless?"

"It is not unbreachable anymore; there is a Crossing with trucks driving through it every day. We could send Harry a message - I just need to figure out how."

"You would only draw attention to him, and to your plan."

Neville shrugged, "We know it's a bit far-fetched. Our plan isn't based on his help, though. If he can help us, great, if not, we'll go ahead with it anyway."

Hermione's eyes narrowed. "Is your mission to find him, or to find out if he poses a threat to the Resistance?"

Neville sighed. "We're putting a lot of good people at risk here. We need to be careful." Hermione grimaced at his answer so Neville added, "You know well enough that Harry wasn't exactly popular in the Resistance just before he left. Most of his friends were gone by then." Killed under his command, Neville added in his head. "People are no less suspicious of him now than they were back then."

Hermione looked away, taking a sip of her tea. She knew Neville was telling the truth. He used the moment to retake control of the conversation.

"Can you answer some questions for me?"

She took her time, but then she nodded slowly. With that hesitation, she practically admitted to Neville she intended to hide something from him. He needed to tread carefully.

"Were you in touch with Harry when he left the Resistance for America?"

"No," she answered readily. "He left everything behind, including his friends."

Neville knew that. "And have you been in touch with him since?"

This time, she hesitated for a second, and then she typed a simple: "Yes."

"When?"

She was looking into his face now; her fingers typing seemingly on their own accord. "He started regularly visiting when the Crossing was opened."

It took Neville a second to catch her meaning. "He was here?!" he breathed out in disbelieve.

She nodded.

"Why hasn't he approached us? We could have learnt so much from him!"

"Harry has no reason to trust the Resistance; it was the Resistance that kicked him out, not the other way around."

"That was years ago," Neville argued. "And you know very well they had their reasons for it - Harry wasn't really in the right state of mind back then. Surely, the situation has changed since then."

"Has it? You said it yourself a minute ago. The Resistance doesn't trust him either."

Neville ran his palms over his face. This was unexpected. "How does he do it? Is he one of Riddle's soldiers then?" That would be one possible explanation for how he could use the Crossing so often.

Hermione frowned at him harshly, not answering that question. "Drink your tea, Neville," she wrote instead.

That was a good idea. He obediently took the first sip of his cooling cup; his head shot up in surprise, sniffing the tea. He took a second taste to make sure he wasn't just imagining it.

"This is Elf Grey!" he proclaimed.

It was his grandmother's favourite tea she used to serve every morning. He had been searching for the tea leaves for the last seventeen years without success. There was only one place where House-Elves were trained to grow and dry tea this way: and that was England, on the other side of the Curtain.

Neville easily put two and two together.

"So, Harry is a smuggler? Is that what you are trying to tell me? Does he smuggle both people and goods across the Curtain?" he asked.

Hermione nodded.

"And is he trustworthy?" Neville asked in a decidedly blunt manner.

Hermione was Harry's oldest friend and her opinion would hardly be impartial. But she was also fiercely loyal to the cause, and the smartest witch he knew. She hesitated before answering, which Neville noted down carefully. What she wrote next erased all his thoughts, though.

"You can be the judge of that in a moment."

"What?" Neville asked, shocked.

"Harry should be here in half an hour. You can judge his credibility then," she replied.

Neville did not expect that. "You set me up?" he blurted out.

She did that thing again - her fingers were typing whilst she levelled him with a disapproving glare.

"I didn't set anyone up. You have thirty minutes to decide if you want to see him or leave before he gets here," she wrote.

"Does Harry know I'm here?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you tell me right away that he was coming?" Neville asked.

"I had a decision to make, too."

Neville understood. She could have just kept silent about this and asked him to leave before Harry's estimated time of arrival. Neville would have never known he had missed him. Instead, she decided to give him a chance. He must have passed some sort of a test.

He took a sip of his tea again. He grimaced; it was tepid now.

"Can I heat this up somewhere? I refuse to have my first cup of Elf Grey in years to be anything short of perfect."

She gave him a small smile, correctly recognizing his question as a request for a reprieve from the conversation. She took the cup back to the stove herself and left him to gather his thoughts.

When she returned a couple of minutes later with a fresh cup of tea, he had regained some of his composure and had a list of questions ready. He knew which one he wanted to ask first; to hell with professionalism, they used to be friends. "How is he doing, Hermione?"

Hermione's face softened, letting him know she appreciated that question. Her reply was coming slowly; she was picking her words carefully. In the end, she just wrote, "He's not taking Felix Felicis anymore."

"That's good," Neville assessed. "That's very good. Is he completely recovered? I mean, does he still suffer from the… side effects?"

"I think it has been a very long time since his last dose," she typed.

"Good," Neville kept repeating. "And how is he, Hermione?"

"He's changed," Hermione wrote. "But so have you and I. He's still Harry, though. He won't betray you to Voldemort, no matter what."

Neville involuntary shivered reading that name; it had been years since he uttered it even in his mind. The fear of the Taboo was still strong among wizards; although there was now a magical barrier between Neville and any Death Eaters.

He took a deep breath and read Hermione's sentence again, focusing on the content now. "How can you be sure, though?" he asked. "How can you know what he's been doing all those years on the other side? How did he even find himself behind the Curtain when all our reports suggest he was somewhere in South America when the barrier was raised? And how did he manage to survive? He was not a part of the Resistance anymore but I doubt that would stop Riddle and his Death Eaters from hunting him."

Neville barely took a breath as the flurry of questions rushed out. He stopped himself when he realised he hadn't actually given Hermione a chance to answer any of them.

"Sorry," he mumbled. "I guess I'm in a bit of a shock; this is all pretty insane. It's so- so Harry." He said with a small smile only to pause right afterwards, surprised when that expression involuntarily popped out of his mouth. It was a popular phrase from times long forgotten.

But it seemed to capture Hermione's attention. She looked up from her tea and smiled fondly at him, nodding slightly.

Hoping to use the change in her mood, he pressed on with the questions. "Do you know what he was doing before he became a smuggler? The Crossing opened only a couple of years ago."

Hermione didn't have a chance to answer. They were interrupted by a loud bark from the outside. Neville looked at Hermione but she didn't seem alarmed, not even glancing at the rifle from earlier. Neville nervously drew his hand to the gun in his own pocket but didn't grasp it, not just yet. Judging by Hermione's calm reaction, it was an expected guess.

And surely enough, Hermione typed, "I guess Harry is early."


A/N: There will be guns in this story. I like and understand firearms as little as the wizards forced to use them. They'll never be the focus of the story, just a necessary tool. Magic still rules!