Harry was pretty sure he was about to get punched in the face by Agent Barnaby Richards. This would have been rather unfortunate for three reasons. Firstly, Richards was still weeks away from fully recovering from his gun shot wounds. Secondly, Harry would probably have to punch him right back, which led directly to reason number three—Harry did not make a habit of punching senior citizens.

"Stand down, old man," Harry warned.

This did not sit well with Richards, who came at him with a growl, only to be obstructed by the Minister for Magic.

"This is unhelpful!"

That was true. And to be fair, Harry knew how Richards was feeling because they were both feeling it. They were men of action. They strategised, did the sums, suited up. They went to dangerous places and did dangerous things. None of this was required of them at the moment. The two remaining Project Christmas experts—Dr McAlister and Professor Yoshida—had been eating, sleeping and working in the laboratory for the past few weeks. All inhabitants of the Grimmauld Place house worked to assist their efforts. Nothing, absolutely nothing else was more important than saving lives that would surely be lost, if the cure was postponed and the American's bombs allowed to obliterate London.

Or so Scrimgeour said.

But that was bullshit, Harry decided. Prioritising and acceptable casualties was for politicians. Harry understood why the Ministry had kept its murky secrets, but he would not forgive them. He'd had quite enough of helpless resignation and bystanding when it came to the Ministry's fuck-ups.

Richards' fist was still wrapped tightly around a handful of Harry's shirt. Presently, it relaxed, as did the man himself. The Cowboy backed away, looking weary. He ran a hand through his black and silver hair.

"You spend eight hours a day flying over open water. I can't seem to get through your thick skull how dangerous that is. Brooms are not designed to do that. I know you're Harry fucking Potter, but it's still a miracle you haven't crashed. This needs to stop."

Harry had been covering increasingly large stretches of coastline every day and he was still no closer to finding Amarov's fleet. The search was futile and everyone in the house knew it. One person, even a magical person, could not conduct such a search alone. But Harry would die before he stopped doing…something. Anything. He would not give up on Hermione.

"You don't need me here," he enunciated, his frustration so acute that it garnered a rare look of sympathy from Richards. "What the bloody hell else do you expect me to do?"

Richards placed a hand on Harry's shoulder. "Take Longbottom with you to Taransay. He's just as cooped up as you are. Help the Weasleys look after your people there.

Harry shook his head. "Neville can go. Ginny has things under control. I'm not needed there either."

"Listen to me, Potter," interjected Scrimgeour. "If Hermione and the others are still alive—"

"She's alive," Harry hissed. "I know it. I just need to get to her."

Richards narrowed his eyes at Scrimgeour. "Are you gonna tell him or do I have to get hit in the face after all?"

"Tell me what?" Harry demanded.

The Minister hesitated for the briefest moment. "We're evacuating everyone to Taransay. It's been decided."

Harry removed his glasses and rubbed the heel of his palm into his forehead. "Oh yes?" he asked, cuttingly. "Who decided?"

"I did." Scrimgeour said, with cold authority.

"And I agree with his decision," Richards added.

Harry put his glasses back on stared back and forth, between the two, older men. "And what happens when Hermione and the others turn up? If they have no wands, how are they getting to Taransay? They'll be stranded here in the city, in the worst possible place!"

"Potter—"

"Don't," Harry warned, shaking his head. He took a step back from the two men. "Evacuate the house. Do it. I'll help however I can, but I'm staying behind."

Richards took a step forward, closing the gap between him and Harry. He grabbed Harry roughly by the upper arm and pulled him to the parlour windows. The thick drapes were shoved to the side.

"Look! Look outside! What do you see?"

Harry saw what had been there for the last few weeks—a growing horde of zombies, drawn to 12 Grimmauld Place as if the house was sending out some kind of beacon to all the magical undead in the area. Or as if the creatures had communicated this same fact amongst themselves. Whatever the reason, they were there and they now numbered in the hundreds. They were passive, for the most part, standing, watching, occasionally testing the ward boundaries, only to be deflected.

But the wards were weakening. No amount of shoring up would protect the house from simultaneous attack from that many magical entities. And if or when the zombies worked this out, it would be minutes before they brought the walls down.

"They are going to breach, son," Richards said into his ear, his fingers digging hard for emphasis into Harry's arm. "They've been wearing down our wards, bit by bit, day by day. My guess is that there probably isn't any fresh meat for miles and they see us here, sittin' pretty. We're like a termite mound to a determined ant eater."

"The wards will hold," Harry said, through gritted teeth.

"Sure, but for how much longer? I know this place means something to you kids—to you and Granger. But we'll have to cut our losses…"

In another time, another place, Harry might have been embarrassed to show a man like Richards the agony he felt, the tears that filled his eyes, but he was too worn down; too bereaved to care. "I've endured enough losses," he said.

Richards sighed. He stared at Harry, long and hard. Harry could feel Scrimgeour nearby, watching them.

"I'll stay with the kid," the Cowboy announced, still looking at Harry with narrowed eyes. "We'll catch up with you at Taransay."

Scrimgeour seemed angered, but unsurprised. "Very well."

Honoria peeled her heavy eyelids open, blinking rapidly so her vision could catch up to the conclusion her other senses had already arrived at.

She was in the Pit; her current stupor due to the application of (quite likely) the same sedatives Prestin had administered to Hermione. Well, she supposed that was fitting. The unusual numbness in her extremities made her glance down at her hands, at which point she noted that her torso, arms and legs were all tightly bound to a chair. Sitting across from her, beneath the glare of a floodlight and trussed in a similar position, was Alexander. He sat regally in his chair, no specific expression apart from something that could best be described as resigned amusement. The dark hollows on his face were due to more than the shadows cast by the lights overhead. She estimated they had been kept in the home ship's vaults for about a week. Unlike her, Alexander had already gained his bearings. Perhaps he had not deserved the forced sedative, as she had.

"You should have run," he told her.

It took her a while to work her tongue, heavy and dry as it was. "From them or from you?"

"Both. Seems a rather moot point now, anyway." He stared around the Pit, looking nothing more than contemplative. "We're going to be killed shortly."

Yes, they were. Honoria had known that fact the moment little Henry Zabini discovered her trying to make her surreptitious way aboard the Cassiopeia.

The human and zombie remains that previously made up the inherent décor of the Pit had been removed and it looked like the arena had been scrubbed to an almost sterile state. Perhaps the rebels were planning to reclaim the infamous Morning Star as a refurbished fleet residence? That made sense, as they now had nearly a thousand additional souls to rehouse within more humane, spacious conditions. The hatch that led to the zombie containment area was sealed, the heavy metal doors virtually welded shut from the heat of the fire that had signalled the start of the rebellion. The other door; the one that combatants walked through to enter the arena…that was open.

Beyond it, lay darkness, but Honoria guessed that whomever had put them there was not far away.

"I have to ask," Alexander said, bringing her attention back to him, "how were you intending to escape?"

Honoria flexed her wrists, testing her bonds. There was hardly any give. "I was going to steal one of the smaller boats and take it back to the mainland."

"And how long do you think you would have survived on your own?"

"Indefinitely," she replied, without hesitation.

Alexander snorted. "I believe that. You're a survivor. But I think you have loftier ambitions these days. I turned you into something more, made you consider a life that holds greater rewards than merely getting through each day." He stared around the arena, as if remembering the crowds that used to fill the levels. "Not like a beast of burden or a lower order animal."

He was referring to her recruitment to work for him, fresh from graduation at Salem. That was the year everything had changed for her. He had changed everything for her.

"Do you regret it, I wonder?" he asked.

No. She would never regret any of it, but she would not give him the satisfaction of saying so. "And is this is where that promise leads? I get to die in a pit with you?"

"Transformation can come at a high price. I never said there was no risk."

"You changed, too," she told him. "Over these last few weeks. You're conviction…it waivered."

"Perhaps," he conceded. "But do you know what's worse than me, Honoria? None of my beliefs were your beliefs. The prisoners, the Games…none of that sat well with you. You never agreed with it. And yet you carried out your duties for me. You did everything I asked and you were able to do it all without believing any of it was worth it. Do you know what that makes you?"

She looked away so that he would not see her distress. "More of a monster than you are."

"They'll be writing the history books, you know," he said, with a small smile. "The winners always do. And you, Honoria, will finally get what you've always wanted, what you told me you deserved the very first day we met. Notoriety. Fame to rival Harry Potter. He was an orphan just like you, wasn't he? Bred for greatness, whereas you had to earn your stripes. You will finally be memorable among both our peoples."

"As will you," she pointed out.

"I'm already in the books, my dear," he said, managing to shrug, despite his bonds. "I hoped to create the cure in time. That would have been a better legacy…"

"They'll be the ones to find the cure. If nothing else, we've given them the impetus to work together."

He snorted. "Yes, there is always that."

She had to ask. She could not go to her death without knowing the truth. "When they were questioning me in the vault, they said you'd attacked Hermione Granger."

It was astonishing (and hurtful) to see his contrition. Honoria had long assumed that such a thing was an alien concept to him. Alexander Amarov did not suffer from regret or self-doubt.

"I concede it was not one of my finest moments," he replied, with a sigh.

They were silent for a while.

"Does it shock you?" he asked. "Does it fly in the face of your preferred view of me—a villain, yes, but a civilised one?"

Honoria considered this. "She was playing you from the beginning, but you wouldn't hear it from any of us. And then you finally saw it for yourself, didn't you? You worked it out after the rebels attacked and then you couldn't handle knowing it. She wounded you, fooled you and you wanted to hurt her in return. How could she not already be half in love with you? Because that was how you felt about her. Hermione Granger was meant to be everything you hated."

Alexander gave her a look that was almost malicious. "What you're really interested to know is why her and not you?"

Honoria replied with a look of intense loathing.

"I've seen a great deal of this world. I've travelled and I've experienced things both ordinary and extraordinary; enough for several lifetimes." He looked away from her, focussing on the metal grating of the floor. "I thought I might experience, just once, what it's like to know someone who would walk through fire for me…"

"I was that person!" Honoria shouted, her voice breaking.

"Yes, I suppose you were."

"She broke your heart."

His smile was wry. "And let that be proof, my dear, that I have one after all."

"As touching as this is, I have loads to do today," Draco Malfoy said.

They hadn't noticed his arrival in the arena. He stood just in front of the entrance, white-bandaged hands on his hips. He looked as Honoria remembered him in their final days at Grimmauld Place—intense, less contained, less cautious. She'd always found it so unsettling that Alexander's cruelty and ruthlessness was encased in such a comely form. It made him even more monstrous, she thought, and added a poisonous edge to his beauty. Malfoy was much the same, but while Alexander was actually quite easy to decipher at the end of the day, Malfoy's inner motivations were still unclear to her. He played his cards quite close to his chest and he was the sort who could play several games all at the same time. Following the successful coup, he was among friends now. She didn't know whether this made him more or less dangerous. Honoria had no doubt in her mind, however, that he was going to be their executioner that day.

He approached her first. "Good morning," he announced, cheerfully. He lowered down to his haunches so they were eye to eye, observing her for a moment. And then he leaned closer. Honoria immediately tensed, trying to see if he held any weapons. His hands were empty save for the bandages.

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to break my promise to you," he whispered into her ear, almost tenderly.

She knew the promise he was referring to, of course. Draco Malfoy promising to kill you was not something one was liable to forget. But of course he reminded her, for good measure.

"I am going to kill you, but you're not going to be alone when it happens." He inclined his head to Alexander. "You'll have company."

She stared across at Alexander, desperation evident in her expression. But he said nothing. Not a word, though his cobalt gaze never left Malfoy. Honoria supposed he had said enough to Malfoy already and none of it had warranted any mercy. Malfoy walked over to the entrance. There, on the ground, was a hessian sack. Inside was a something small and squirming. Honoria noted that Alexander was staring at the bundle quizzically. He may not have realised what it contained, but Honoria did.

After all, it had been Honoria who had taken little Eloise Withinshaw from the child's hysterical mother.

"Draco."

Malfoy paused in the middle of untying the top of the sack.

"You asked me once about Hogwarts. I never answered your question. I wasn't in a lower year. I was in Gryffindor. In the same year as you, in the same year as Harry and Hermione and Ron and Parvati and Neville and all the rest."

He frowned and she could see him retrieving the requisite memories. "I don't remember you," he said, now staring at her with genuine surprise in his pretty, silver eyes. In his hands, the small thing he carried in the sack began to growl. "I don't remember you at all."

And this was why it had been so easy to become what Alexander needed. Seven years at a school where even the furniture had more presence, where she had seemingly blended into the stone, where even teachers barely cared to remember her name, let alone anything else about her. Seven years of her life with her identity all by obliterated by the blinding, brilliant glare of another orphan—Harry Potter, and his friends and their stories. She had been no one.

Alexander was staring at her, looking oddly proud. She was his creature and they would both go into the history books together. If nothing else, there was that.

"I know," Honoria said. She smiled, sadly. "No one remembers me. But now you will."

Draco made it to the end of the first corridor before the screams started. Little Eloise had been left to starve until he'd found a new purpose for her. As the only remaining zombie specimen in the fleet, she was now an endangered species.

And she needed to eat.

Belikov was waiting for Draco in the transport vessel they would take back to the home ship. Not surprisingly, despite everything that the old professor had endured at Amarov's hands, he disagreed with what Draco had done.

"I say again, this is savagery…"

"And that's why I had to be the one to do it," Draco replied, steering the boat back to the home ship.

He was zipping up a long duffle bag filled with weapons and ammunition, when the door to his quarters flew open. Draco didn't have to turn around to know that it was Blaise who entered. It was his room too, after all.

"I just spoke to Belikov. Were you even going to tell me you're leaving?"

Draco picked up a second bag—a knapsack—and walked to the closet. He pulled out several woollen jumpers.

Blaise was in no mood to be ignored. He took hold of the second bag and yanked it from Draco's unresisting hands. "You are not leaving this fleet."

"Why not?"

"Be serious about this!"

"I am being serious. Why can't I leave?"

Blaise blinked, anger momentarily stalling his tongue. "Because you are needed here! The cure—"

"Will be devised by Belikov and his team. Assisted by Dr Felix Wallen, Professor Yoshida and Dr Katherine McAlister. You have everything you need here to create the cure, certainly more than we had at Grimmauld Place."

That caught Blaise off-guard. "You…you want us to go to London and bring your colleagues here?"

"Yes," Draco nodded. "Accomplish what Amarov never had the foresight to even consider. Unite the teams. Bring them and their magic."

"Wands," Blaise repeated. He shut his eyes, looking almost pained.

Draco took a step closer. "Yes, wands. Zabini. We are not made to live without magic. It is…anathema. It is not to be borne."

"And yet we bear it…" Blaise whispered. He moved to the bed, sagging down on top of the thick bedcovers. He put his head in his hands.

"You'll not hear me discussing this in front of Granger," Draco told him, "but I suspect us Purebloods experience magic deprivation differently. The discomfort is...acute. Over time, all magical folk lost our ability to cast wandlessly, as easily as our forefathers once did. We rely on a conduit. Without a wand, we are crippled."

"You survived more than six years," Blaise pointed out, head rising.

"I did," Draco agreed, "But even in prison, I was surrounded by magic. A poor substitute, but it was something. After I was released from Azkaban, the first time I held a wand was in the service of the same Minister who put me in my cell. The sensation was…" Draco's eyes unfocussed for a moment "…exquisite."

"You did it to save lives," Blaise concluded, but then he gave Draco a canny look. "To save Granger's life, more likely. Merlin, that's why you're leaving. She's asking you to take her away!"

"She didn't insist. I offered." A long, black coat was taken off a hanger in the closet. Draco tested the depths of its pockets and seemingly satisfied, slipped it over his blue jumper and dark jeans. "Even with your limited knowledge of her, do you know Hermione Granger to be anything other than self-sacrificing? If anyone breathes so much as a word about needing her, she would stay, to her own detriment. Sanity be damned."

"Tell her you've changed your mind! Tell her it's impossible!"

"I haven't and it's not." Draco took a handgun from the duffle bag and tucked it into the waistband of his jeans, under his jumper.

"You cannot leave the fleet. People here need you. The people out there, the ones who are dying by the millions. They need a cure!"

"They'll get their cure, just not from me. We're going to the Manor and we're leaving within the hour. There are hidden artefacts there that the Ministry had no hope of finding, no matter how hard they looked. I will recover what I can." Draco stared pointedly at the bag in Blaise's hands.

Blaise stood, he shook his head. "You selfish son of a bitch."

"I have never claimed to be otherwise, Zabini."

"Well, if you won't see sense, I'm sure Granger will! I'll speak to her."

"Blaise," Draco said.

Blaise stopped at the doorway.

"Were you with Daphne when she died?"

The question was unexpected. Blaise looked momentarily lost for words, and then he looked angry again. "Yes."

"She died in your arms?"

This was delivered so callously that Blaise actually flinched. He swallowed, now wary at the turn in the conversation. "Yes."

"Sick. Suffering. Helpless. Just as helpless as you were to do anything about it."

Blaise's hands fisted. His gaze dropped to the carpet and then he started shaking. "You bastard…"

Draco walked up to his friend, using the full two inches of additional height to bear down on him. "In those last, wretched moments, did you at all wish you had made a different choice? That you didn't risk everything by bringing your family to the fleet? Perhaps take your chances out there, on your own, instead of relying on people you barely knew? Did you feel regret, Zabini? Did you feel responsible for making the wrong decision? Did you ignore your doubts at the start?"

A clenched jaw was all the response Draco received for a minute or two. "Yes," Blaise said, more softly.

Draco nodded. "I'm going home to find something magical that can be of use, or better yet, a wand. Malfoy Manor is my best bet. And then I am taking Hermione to safety and we will remain there until such time she chooses to return. In the meantime, join the teams and bring magic to the fleet. You'll have your cure. And when you see me next, we can apologise to each other for this."

Blaise looked numb. He leaned heavily against the door, eyes red-rimmed and downcast.

"May I have my bag back now?" Draco asked.

Blaise hadn't realised he was still holding on to it. He handed it to Draco. "I don't think I ever thanked you for what you did for us."

"That's probably because you're still not sure if did it for you in the first place," Draco said. He resumed stuffing the jumpers into the second bag.

That earned a snort from Blaise. "Call it Slytherin scepticism."

Draco pulled at the drawstring of the bag before slipping on a pair of thick gloves over his bandaged hands. When he was finished, he picked up both bags and made for the door.

Blaise blocked the exit. "You'll die out there."

"Possibly."

"You don't know what it can be like because you were in Azkaban when it all happened. You don't know what people do to each other to stay alive…"

Draco raised an eyebrow. "Is it any worse that what happened here?"

There was no response to that question.

"Move, Zabini." There was no anger in Draco's voice, but his tone was a few degrees cooler than previously.

With a great sigh, Blaise let him pass.