AN: This chap is for Renaid. *nods*

Ginny knocked on the door of the room Hermione had commandeered. She knew it was Ginny, because Harry and Ron made too much damned noise as they barreled down the hall. "Come," Hermione called over her shoulder.

The door opened, and Ginny slipped inside with an armful of books. "This was all they had on code breaking," she said, stacking them on the table by the door. "McGonagall had Madam Pince assist me, and she picked out a few more that she thought might help."

"Excellent," Hermione said, not looking up from her notes.

She heard Ginny moving around, picking up and setting down the reams of parchment scattered on all the tables. "Wouldn't it be better to let Snape help you?" she asked. It wasn't the first time she'd asked, and she hadn't been the first one to ask that.

Hermione gave her the same answer as always. "It might be easier, but it wouldn't be safer. Betrayal comes in all forms. No one needs to know what I discover."

Ginny pulled out a stool and sat down. Hermione lifted her head and looked at her. The room was on the top-most floor, and had the most windows of any room at Grimmauld. Hermione had appropriated it as her research center, taking the small room next door as a bedchamber. She'd sent Ron to Hogwarts to bring back the tablets and had holed herself up in her new retreat days ago.

"Hermione…"

Ginny's warm brown eyes irritated her. Why couldn't she see? Her decision had been made. No more distractions. Hermione found herself resentful that the Harpies were out of the league. If they'd just scored twenty more points in that last game, Ginny wouldn't be sitting here trying to make her feel bad that Snape was apparently moping about the castle.

"You ran into him, didn't you?" she asked.

"You know I did. He showed up as if he'd been expecting me."

"He most likely was. He's not stupid. He knew I would need those books and probably had a Sentry Charm on them." Hermione narrowed her eyes at her. "Did you tell him anything?"

Ginny frowned at her. "You asked me not to. Really, Hermione, this trust thing is making you a bit of a bitch."

Hermione grimaced. "I'm sorry. You know I didn't mean to imply anything."

Ginny waved her hand. "Forget it. I still think you're being foolish, though. You said yourself that he's always been a help when you've hit a dead end. You remember what you told me you said to the Iranian fellow? That your skill was in getting others to find your answers for you?"

"Farzeem would have been a help," she replied in a flat voice. "Snape? He's good with Portkeys and libraries, but I knew more about languages in my fifth year than he does now."

"Then why don't you call in an Unspeakable?"

Hermione sighed and threw down her quill. "Because I don't trust them," she said.

"Why?"

"Why? Why should I? Caleb was an Unspeakable. Osterhoudt was an Unspeakable. Worple's the Chief Unspeakable and I trust her as far as I could throw her. If it wasn't for Shacklebolt, I'd have tossed her off the team ages ago. I don't trust any of those bastards."

Ginny sighed and shook her head. "All right. I won't try and persuade you any differently. I'm just worried. We all are. Ever since you returned from Greece, you've been… cold."

"No. I've been busy. I've only got the entire world hinging on whether or not I can decipher an ancient language based on a single known phrase."

"But you aren't looking for experts. You aren't asking for help."

"I can't trust anyone else!" she snapped.

Ginny threw up her hands. "Who said it had to be a wizard? Did it never occur to you that perhaps the Muggles already know what language this is?"

Hermione blinked several times and then tilted her head to the side. "No, actually. That never occurred to me at all." Looking around at all her papers, she smiled. "What a fantastic idea!"

She jumped up and grabbed her bag, charming it to look like a Muggle briefcase before she began cramming it full. When she was done, she pecked Ginny on the cheek. "Don't tell anyone I've left. I don't want anyone following me."

"Where are you going? You know you're not supposed to go anywhere!"

She snatched a jacket off the hook by the door and then Disillusioned herself so she could sneak out. "Oxford!"

"Hermione, wait. Let me come with you!"

"Don't worry, I have my coin and my bracelet!" With that, she raced down the stairs.

:

Hermione sat in the tiny office with her briefcase on her lap and waited. The slap, slap, slap as the leather case hit her bouncing knees was oddly soothing. She looked around at the walls, covered in the ubiquitous posters and notices promoting some cause or underground music group that one would find in a graduate student's office. A part of her was wistful. She would have liked this life. The messy desks the computers customized with graffiti or stickers. The rubbish bins full to bursting with old crisp packets. If I ever do save the world, I might just enroll in Uni, she thought to herself. It would be nice to pretend I was normal for once.

Her reverie was interrupted when the door was violently flung open. She only just managed to get her knees out of the way. A woman in her mid-twenties, black, with square-framed glasses and chunks of blue and green in her choppy, spiked hair squeaked in surprise when she saw her.

"Oh! I'm so sorry! I wasn't expecting—Oh bugger! I should have been expecting! You're Henrietta Grammar, right?"

Hermione stood up and held her hand out, wincing at how badly the woman had mangled her name. "Hermione Granger, actually."

"Right, Granger. I'm terrible with names. Professor Bindar told me to expect you. I'm sorry. I lost track of myself. I'm Anne, by the way, Anne Peete. Boring I know, but we can't all be Hermiones. Have a seat," she said flopping down in her own. "Did you want some coffee? There's a vending machine down the hall. It's horrid, but it does the job."

"No, thank you. I'm fine."

The other woman slapped her hands down on her thighs. "So, you want a computer to run a symbol check? Bindar said something about linguistic decryption…"

Hermione wrinkled her nose. "I'm not going to lie. I know enough about computers to check email, but the rest of it is over my head. I'm looking to break a code, yes, but it's an ancient language. I have one phrase translated, and need to use it to figure out the rest of it."

Anne's face lit up. "You have part of it? That's better than nothing. What language is it?"

"I don't know. It's similar to Phoenician, but I can't really tell if it predates it or is an offshoot. I can tell you that it's boustrophedon."

"Hold up. You lost me there. I'm a computer dork, not a language dork. Bindar knows boostoboodle; I just help him with the odd word search now and again."

"Sorry. It just means that every other line is written in the other direction. The letters are reversed as well."

"Oh. Well, that's not a problem. We'll just flip them back. Provided we know which is the right way. Have you got it with you? We can start scanning it in now…"

"I do." Hermione flipped open her briefcase and pulled out several sheets of parchment. Anne looked at them askance, but then shrugged and started loading them into the scanner one at a time. She spent the next hour cutting and reversing sections of the images on the screen until all the characters faced the same way.

"Now we let the computer run imaging programs and develop it into a library of symbols. This will take a while. You sure you don't want coffee? Tea? We have enough time to head to the canteen."

Hermione stared at the computer willing it to work faster. "I'd love to."

:

"So yeah, there was me with my knickers hanging off one foot, Professor Schlecter squealing like an injured piglet on top of me, and in walks my boyfriend, Alexander. Not one of my better moments. But, yes, I sympathize with falling for a professor. It's never what it's cracked up to be, but it's a hell of a lot of fun while you're cracking, isn't it?"

Hermione snorted through her nose and reached for the napkin dispenser. "You're awful! But, yes. The cracking can be pretty incredible. Do you think it's really them? Or is it just the dynamic that makes it seem so amazing. I have to tell you, I had my chances with some really good-looking blokes and tossed them all over for this homely man with stringy, greasy hair. I swear to you, he's the best lover I've ever had."

"I think it's both. You mentioned the nose. We all know about blokes with big noses. But then there's the fact that he treats you like shite. That can be kind of addictive for us swots. I think you have a classic situation. Not a healthy one, mind, but a bit stereotypical, nonetheless."

"You think? He doesn't really treat me like shite. At first, I was the one that said I didn't want emotions involved. I can't really sit here and whine because he doesn't want me to be emotional. That's a bit too hypocritical, even for me."

Anne laughed and picked up her tray, jerking her head towards the door. "That does change it a bit. Can't cry foul when he's following your rules. Come on. I'm sure we've given it enough time by now. Let's put in your translation and see what we come up with."

The two women made it back to Anne's office, where the screen flashed a notification that the first decryption program had finished running.

Anne's hands flew across the keys and Hermione couldn't make any sense of what she was doing. The computer chirped and Anne reached her hand out. "Okay, gimme the translated bit."

Hermione handed over her working copy. It was the most faithful to the actually rubbing.

"This is it?" Anne asked. "Bless us, Mother Cybele?"

Hermione scrunched up her face. "That's it."

Anne raised her eyebrows and whistled. "You don't ask for much, do you?"

Hermione barked a laugh that fell flat, even to her ears. "You have no idea," she said.

Anne gave her a quizzical glance and then slipped the sheet into the scanner. Hermione watched as the image came up on the screen. The program seemed to trace it, outline it, throw it into relief, and then scrambled it into pixels, before it resolved back into its original state. It chirped and Anne pounded the enter key. She sat back and clasped her hands behind her head.

"If we're lucky, this will take a—" The computer chirped again and a small window popped up. "Damn. We're not lucky." She sat forward and opened several files, looking at code that meant nothing to Hermione. "Sorry, Granger. Your translated sample was too small."

Hermione sat down heavily in the other chair and dropped her face into her hands. "You've no idea how much is riding on this," she whispered.

"I can run diagnostics," Anne offered, "and we can probably break down patterns and structure, but without having a clue what they're saying, none of that will really help. The best I can do is replace the letters we know with our own alphabet, but I'm thinking that would have been the first thing you tried."

Hermione gave her a listless nod. "I tried that first." She stood up and started stuffing her notes back into her briefcase. "Thanks anyway. You've been a big help, despite everything, and I had fun chatting with you. I'm sorry I took up your afternoon."

Anne started biting her stubby fingernails. "Hang on. You said it was like another language, right?"

"It's similar to Phoenician."

"Has anyone figured out how to read Phoenician?"

"Yes, of course."

Anne tapped her hands against the edge of her desk. "Let's try one last thing before we give up," she muttered, more to herself. Hermione sat down with her briefcase in her lap and bit her lip.

:

"Oh, my god, you have to listen to this one. You'll love it. It will absolutely apply." Anne thumbed the skip button on her CD player until she got to the track she wanted and then jammed the headphones back over Hermione's ears. "It's Cat Power. She's a Yank, but her voice… Oh, my god. You have to hear it…"

Hermione hit play and threw her feet back on the desk. It had been two hours since Anne had set the machine to find comparisons between the Phoenician alphabet, and the ancient text that Hermione had given her. She'd given the computer both languages' versions of 'Bless us, Mother Cybele,' and hit enter. The fact that it was taking forever was, according to Anne, a good thing.

Hermione closed her eyes and bobbed her head along to the music.

It was another hour, and three more CD's, before Anne patted her on the leg.

Pulling off the headphones, she said, "Okay, you're right. The Sugarbabes are a guilty pleasure." She caught the expression on her new friend's face and frowned. "What's wrong?"

Anne pointed to the computer screen. "Granger, what's the Crystal of Time? And what does it mean when it says, 'The end of all things?' What are you into?"

:

Hermione left Oxford with a heavy heart, a weakened resolve, and a briefcase full of computer paper. She took one last look over her shoulder, regretting the Obliviate she'd had to cast. She would've liked to have had a friend like Anne. There'd been something almost painfully normal about her.

With a sigh, she headed to the nearest Apparition site, where she found Harry sitting on a low wall, swinging his legs back and forth. "Ginny told me you were here. She thought she'd go ahead and get her betrayal out of the way so you would trust her."

Hermione snorted and gave him a sad smile.

"Do you want to tell me?" he asked in a quiet voice.

She sighed and shrugged. "Tell me what you felt when your head came out of the pensieve that last day," she said in a quiet voice.

Harry grimaced and pulled her against his shoulder. "Like I'd died already, so doing it again wasn't a big deal," he answered.

She nodded and closed her eyes. "Call a meeting for tomorrow night," she whispered. "Gather everyone."

:

And so we begin the race toward the end...

Should only take eleven more chapters.