Hermione kicked off her shoes, climbed onto the upper bunk and collapsed into exhaustion. She slept lightly, only for twenty or so minutes at a time before waking in confusion and anxiety. After casting a complex spell that outlined the protections of their wards and concealment charms in glimmering threads of silver and gold, she fell back asleep. Another twenty minutes would pass before she would wake, once again, in a panic. This meant that after a four-hour nap, she felt only mildly refreshed, but unable to sleep any longer.

The tent was lit by amber lantern light. Harry sat in the doorway, keeping watch over the darkness outside. Raindrops spattered the wooden floor by the threshold. She couldn't see Ron, which meant he was lying in the lower bunk. Hermione eased herself into a sitting position, and then crawled down the ladder. Each aluminum rung was cool beneath her socked foot.

Ron looked up as she reached the floor. He was not lying down at all, but sitting upright on his blanket, shuffling a deck of cards. Making her way to the bathroom, Hermione was careful to step around the detritus of empty soup cans, spell books, candy wrappers, torn parchment and unmatched socks. A heavy-duty Muggle torch lay uselessly by Harry's bed; the plastic piece that held the batteries in had broken off, and they could not find any more AA batteries without visiting a Muggle town. Cutouts from the Daily Prophet featuring any name or place that had to do with Godric's Hollow had been discarded ever since her and Harry's near-deadly sojourn to the village of his birth. No use, now. They'd glimpsed the caved-in house, the splintered Tudor beams, the enchanted statue smiling blankly into the snowy night. And Harry was no longer interested in anyone or anything but the Deathly Hallows.

The washroom smelt rotten. Hermione did not bother turning on the bathroom light. She finished her business in the dark, pumping hard, mineral-laden water out of the cistern to wash her hands.

Back in the sleeping area of the tent, Ron held up a playing card.

"Snap?"

"I don't think so," she sighed. "I'm kind of tired of explosions."

"D'you know any other games?"

"Yes. But they're all Muggle games, and you don't play them with those kinds of cards."

"Chess, then."

She half-smiled. "So you can humiliate me, then?"

Ron nodded. "That's about it."

She didn't really want to play, but he'd cleaned up the whole campsite, and she was feeling charitable. Maybe it was only because the socks all over the floor were clearly Harry's, as evidenced by the initials Mrs. Weasley had knit into the ankles.

"Okay."

Ron had a travelling board with magnetic pieces, which he set up on his lower bunk. She sat down cross-legged on his bed. It was dark under the shadow of the upper bunk. As if reading her mind, Ron lit his wand. The chess pieces were outlined in mystical Arctic blue, the same shade she had painted her bedroom back in London. Her mother's hands stitching matching blue lace trim to the white comforter they bought at John Lewis. Worlds away.

"You can be white," offered Ron.

"No, it's alright. It's easier for me when you go first."

"So you can see what I'm up to?"

"Exactly."

Ron advanced a pawn. She responded in turn. Over the next few moves, he set up a complicated maneuver involving a knight that freed up his bishop whilst threatening her own.

Hermione clapped her hands over her eyes in dismay.
"I knew this was a bad idea," she moaned. "Harry! Harry, come and help me."

Harry, who was nodding off in the doorway, jolted up with a start. "Sorry..." he muttered. "Dozed off. What's wrong?"

"Hermione's being a crybaby at chess, that's all—"

"He's being ruthless! It's not fair!"

Harry rubbed at his eyes beneath his greasy glasses. "Just castle your king."

"I can't, it's too late for that."

Harry grinned. "You've really messed up, then." He stretched to his full height and reached for the canvas roof. She could hear his joints cracking.

"Are you coming then?"

"Don't facilitate this cheating!" said Ron. "What kind of Gryffindor are you?"

"Not the Hufflepuff kind, if that's what you're asking." Harry glanced out into the dark, where rain was pummeling the ground, melting snow and turning dirt to rivers of mud. "D'you think it's alright if I go in?"

"As long as we're all awake and have our wands on us," said Hermione.

Harry touched the mokeskin pouch he wore around his neck; she knew he was thinking of his broken wand. "Alright, then." He squeezed his borrowed wand a bit tighter, and ambled over to Ron's bed.

Hermione scooted over to make room for him, and he sat down beside her, his long legs swinging off the edge. It was a very small bed, barely a twin size, and the three of them were quite cramped in that tiny space, but Hermione felt comfortable; it was warm, and dry, and it felt easier to account for everyone's whereabouts when they were close.

Ron touched his knight, but then moved a pawn instead.

"Can't do that," said Harry.

"We're not playing that version," Ron nodded towards Hermione. "She likes to touch her pieces and change her mind. It's only fair that I can too."

"You're both demented," said Harry.

"Actually, we're three-of-a-kind," retorted Hermione, fending off Harry's playful swat.

She fought Ron valiantly, with Harry's help. Occasionally, Hermione would touch a piece, only to notice Harry silently shaking his head, at which point she would notice her obvious mistake. He was good with the diagonals; always noticing Ron's sneaky bishops lurking from across the board. Hermione took care to avoid Ron's pawns, because Harry often failed to notice the immediately obvious. He likes conspiracies, thought Hermione, not stop signs.

"Don't do it," said Harry, interrupting Hermione's thoughts.

"How could you know what I'm—"

Harry nodded significantly towards Hermione's queenside knight—the knight she had resigned herself to sacrificing.

Ron smirked.

"But I have to," she said.

"No, you don't," said Ron, "but I'm not going to explain why." He grinned, and she noticed bits of beef jerky stuck between his teeth.

"Can I move for you?" asked Harry. She nodded.

"Someone still has to be killed," Harry said, pushing a pawn forward, which Ron abruptly knocked over with his knight. It shrieked, and ran screaming away from the board. "But at least I saved Sir Talks-a-lot."

"The bespectacled one speaks the truth, milady," said squeaky, high-pitched voice. "I do thank thee, Monsieur."

The knight in question had been so dubbed back in September, when Ron first debuted this new travelling wizard's chess set. Most pieces were sullen and quiet, resigned to their violent fates. Sir-Talks-a-lot was not.

"You've a made bad decision." Ron flicked his queen forward by six squares, executing a horrifyingly flawless assassination that left his queen utterly unthreatened by any black piece. To worsen matters, only a single (vulnerable) black rook stood between her hapless king and utter annihilation.

"HARRY!" Hermione clapped her hands to her cheeks.

"Er...sorry," muttered Harry, "I thought—"

"You thought wrong! Oh gosh, I'll never be able to fix this..."

"Might as well offer me a handshake now," said Ron. "Just knock him over, do it the civilized way..."

"Don't give up," Harry coached her. "Just keep fighting, go to the end."

"That's not how real men play chess. They actually lose with dignity intact," Ron pointed out.

"Well, I'm not a man," said Hermione, "so those rules don't apply to me."

"And we both know Hermione has more dignity than the two of us put together," said Harry.

She smiled at him shyly, a bit embarrassed but deeply pleased. Enduring Harry's moods, his obsessive fixations, and the shocking mortality rate of his close friends and family was not exactly easy. And on the longest nights that winter, she'd wondered if befriending Harry back in the girls' bathroom on Halloween hadn't been the equivalent of skydiving with no parachute. But then, every so often, he would produce the familial affection she so craved, like the full moon slipping out from behind a dark cloud, flooding a barren landscape with brilliant, milky light.

"I know I'll be in check." Hermione moved her final pawn. "But I want to go out on my own terms."

"Yeah," said Harry. "That's what I'd do."

Ron only nodded, as he cleanly destroyed her rook. "Check."

"I'd say good game," said Hermione, peeling her king's tiny hands off the board that he clung to for dear life, "but we both know it wasn't."

"It beats sitting in the rain all night," said Harry. "Which I'll still have to do anyway. When are we switching out again?"

"Three a.m.," Ron yawned. He folded up the board and gathered the pieces that were rolling around on the blanket, clearly enjoying its fuzzy texture. "But you can stay in for a bit before we're off to sleep."

"Thanks."

Harry slid off the bed, and sidled off to his trunk. He rummaged inside it, pulling out a battered notebook and Biro he used to record his theories. With Harry gone, and the chess set put away, remaining on Ron's bunk felt too intimate, too obscene. She stood up, nearly smashing her head on the upper bunk.

"Careful about that," said Ron. "I've got a permanent dent in my forehead."

She nodded, and climbed up the aluminum ladder to her own bed. The beaded purse was lying across her pillow. Looking for her copy of The Gift of Magical Healing, her entire arm disappeared into the bag, up to her shoulder. Looking down at the strange optical illusion before her, she felt disoriented by magic's utter senselessness.

"What're you writing?" grunted Ron.

"Just stuff," said Harry. His voice had lost its playful tone. He was lying on his stomach on the camp bed, sinking back into lethargic self-absorption.

Hermione found the book she wanted, recognizable to her fingers by the large, debossed lettering along the spine. It fell open before her to the place she had charmed with a bookmarking spell. Crooked typeset letters and velvety smooth pages, like the skin of a peach.

The Lácnian Charm

Invention: circa 1066-1100 AD

Incantation: Lácne

Purpose: to heal serious and life-threatening wounds, staunching bleeding at the source

Wand movement: Drawing concentric circles around the site of a wound, moving wand in a clockwise direction

Spellcaster's intention: To heal; to bring together that which has been torn apart; to sew; to make whole; to join

Spellcaster's avoidance: To tear asunder; to rip art; to rend; to cut; to slash; to separate

The Lácnian Charm originated in Southern England during the reign of either Harold Godwinson, William the Conqueror or William II. Magical historians have long attributed the spell's invention to the necessity of healing those injured in battle, and certainly a spell like the Lácnian Charm would have been highly valued during the Norman-Anglo-Saxon wars of the period.

However, recent evidence has emerged from a midden in Winchester indicating that its origin might be more mundane. Archeological finds in the area include fragments of cauldron, bone dust from magical creatures, and even stained rags still bearing traces of soothing or detoxifying charms. These magical remnants are associated with midwitchery and its Muggle counterpart, midwifery. The majority of the scholastic community now believes that the Lácnian Charm was first formulated by midwitches as a treatment for postpartum hemorrhage. Its adoption by knights and mages would have been hasty, since the spell can be applied to a much broader range of injuries than those merely obtained through childbirth.

See also: Brackium Emendo for healing broken bones (Hector Shatterford's Essentiale Magyckale Anatomie); Draught 33 (potion) for healing incorporeal wounds of the soul (Shivani's Experiments, 1911)

Hermione's lips had formed a thin, stiff line. She did not approve of the casual condescension of this writer towards witches and female medicine—the assumption that midwitches were "mundane," that wizards slashing each other in war were somehow more important than "mere" women tearing themselves open in childbirth. Unfortunately, none of this came as a surprise to her—the wizarding world was conservative and backward in more ways than one. She ought to have known, when she first walked into the Great Hall of Hogwarts and saw the dark oak tables and the massive house banners fluttering in an enchanted breeze, that the school's resemblance to the wood-panelled dining halls of Oxford and Cambridge warned of an even greater congruence of values. But she had only been eleven, and tremendously excited to be chosen by this fantastic world.

She paged forward, reading through more spells for healing and curing. She moved the incantations, visualizing the wand movements. What would come in handy? What would prove unnecessary? It was impossible to know how many more ways Harry and Ron would injure themselves over the coming weeks—months—years, eve. The only thing to was to get prepared. You-Know-Who had not waited for Harry to grow up before coming after him with demonic snakes, gnashing fangs, streaks of emerald light, or humiliation in a graveyard. She would not grant herself the privilege Harry had never had. To be grown up, thought Hermione, was to plan for all contingencies. Even if it all went to the hell in the end.

"Hermione...?" said a hesitant voice, just past the upper bunk's rail.

She rolled over to view Harry's big, shiny spectacles sitting just above the railing, which his nose was pressed into, quite comically. She could tell, from the way he said her name, that he wanted something.

"Yes...?"

"Sorry to bother you, but you don't know if there's clean pajamas, do you?"

"Well..." Hermione peeled his glasses off his nose with one hand and tapped her wand to each lens, to strip off the dirt and grease that had been driving her crazy. "It depends on whose pajamas you're talking about. I know I have some."

Harry blinked at her blearily. "Mine, obviously." Without glasses, he reminded her a sphynx kitten—newborn, hairless, just barely ready for this world. Hermione threaded his glasses back onto his face. She carefully untucked the unruly hair from each wire arm hooked over his ears.

"I haven't washed any of yours of late. Are they really that bad?"

Harry responded by bouncing his forehead into the railing several times, as if to do penitence.

"You'll just have to get by tonight," said Hermione. "And you're on watch, anyway."

"I know," Harry grimaced. "I'd just hoped—never mind."

Hermione lay back down on her pillow, staring up at the slanted canvas roof. "Goodnight, Harry." She knew he'd get the message.

"'Night, then."

She heard Ron whisper, "Bad luck, mate," and both boys sniggering in the dim light. The lantern light dimmed; Ron must be preparing for sleep. Harry pulled his coat on and slouched out through the canvas flaps. Hermione closed her eyes, then realized that she had not changed into her own pajamas, or even refreshed her sanitary protection.

"Screw it," she said out loud.

"What?" came Ron's voice from beneath her bed.

"I'll sleep in my clothes. I don't care." And stains could be vanished. She knew that caring for Harry had sucked up the last remaining drops of energy she had in her entire, aching, cramp-ridden body.

"Fine with me," said Ron, approvingly.

Hermione rolled over, into the cocoon of her aching body. She listened to the rain and the metallic creak of Ron moving on the lower bunk. Her cramps were loosening their iron grip, how blissful. Sleep would come...yes, it would...and the hard edge of stress dissolved, like a mirror, into the skin of a pond through which she fell and fell and fell.

In 2003, the manager of a Tesco in Dumfries, Scotland, hired an electronics repair firm to examine the faulty closed-circuit cameras they used to monitor their parking lot. An employee of the electronics firm discovered that the camera was recording at a rate of one frame every 40 seconds, rather than 30 frames per second, the minimum standard for security footage. He was bemused. In an effort to identify the origin of the problem with this early-model digital camera, he scrolled through reams and reams of faulty digital footage on his Windows XP. The employee wondered why the manager had only noticed the problem recently, when their cameras had been taking substandard footage for years.

And then the employee stopped endlessly scrolling through foggy low-fi pictures of shopping carts, cars, prams and plastic bags blowing in the wind. He'd found something—perhaps nothing—but it was an odd series of pictures nonetheless. To begin, the pictures were time stamped with a late-night hour during which the store could not possibly be open. In the first image, a shopping cart full of food is seen in the parking lot, just before the shop doors. The glass doors do not appear to be broken or tampered with in any way—yet the shopping cart of food clearly indicates some kind of break-and-enter. The employee might have brushed this off as the mistake of a cart-return employee, were it not for the next two pictures.

In the second image, the cart has moved about two feet to the right. A single ankle is visible next to the cart. Just an ankle—no human body attached to it. Was it possible that a digital problem had resulted in the cameras superimposing part of a prior still image over this image, thus obscuring the shoplifter's body? It must be. Still, that didn't explain the next still.

The third picture—time stamped 40 seconds later than its predecessor—was madness. The shopping cart had disappeared entirely, which made no sense, given the broad area of the parking lot captured by the camera and the amount of time that had passed between photos two and three. To complicate matters further, three individuals—one of whom wore socks matching the ankle visible in the second photo— were standing in the place of the shopping cart. Two males were each holding hands with a female, and all three had their heads bowed, as though in prayer. The female's hair was wild and bushy, and it appeared to be lifted by the wind. Both males wore hooded sweatshirts over their heads, ostensibly to obscure their identities from police. (But why didn't the female also cover her head?) The male on the right appeared to have something on his face that was catching the light—possibly glasses or a piercing. All three individuals were dressed in what appeared to be dirty, partially torn clothing. Both males wore jeans with holes at the knees, and the female was wearing an unzipped coat, which showed an unbuttoned cardigan and plaid shirt underneath. But the weirdest thing about the still image was that each mysterious individual held a stick—the males with their free hands, and the female, in the hand she shared with the taller male. All three sticks emitted a kind of stark glowing aura, which appeared to have messed with the camera's very capacity to record. The area of the glow had glitched entirely, and what should have been a completely still photo instead contained three staticky, buzzing areas through which rainbow-coloured stripes moved up and down, like a broken television seen through a drug-induced coma.

The employee double-checked the preceding footage, taken prior to the 3rd of March, 1998. Yes—all prior footage had been taken at a rate of 30 frames per second. The malfunctioning of the camera had only begun when the mysterious, unattended shopping cart appeared at a quarter past four in the morning on the 3rd of March.

Upon presenting his findings to his superior, the footage was sent off to a senior level employee with greater technological expertise. After two months of wrangling with the camera repair company, invoices piling up like snowdrifts in his office at Tesco, the grocery manager decided to simply replace the entire security system with a modernized one. The damaged camera was sent off to a recycling facility for old electronics, and the investigation was closed without resolution.

Nobody ever found out who leaked the grainy security still to the Daily Prophet, which splashed the photo all over their front page. The headline: ULTRA-RARE PHOTO OF POTTER ON THE RUN WAS TAKEN BY OBLIVIOUS MUGGLES.

So you see, despite their many precautions—the cryptic spells, the coded wards, the Invisibility Cloak, the frequent location hopping from sodden forest to bleak moor—Harry, Ron and Hermione were photographed at least once during that miserable, soggy year in the tent. And even though she abhorred the Prophet, that didn't stop Hermione—by then, a junior solicitor at the Department of International Magical Cooperation— from forking over five knuts for a paper as soon as she saw it on the newsstand. Her heart rate picking up, drumming inside her chest like a disco beat. She touched the surface of the paper, trailing her fingers across the bowed heads, feeling ink rub into her fingerprints.

There they were—Harry with scar covered, Hermione trying to keep them moving, Ron, squeezing her hand tight with nervous excitement at the prospect of real food. They had really lived that way—hand to mouth, back to back. Every day urgent and monotonous like an ice cube melting—nothing to see here, except how little time is left before a catastrophe. She stood still on the pavement staring at the picture for so long that multiple wizards bumped into her, demanding apologies before they recognized her face, the face that was featured in a professional portrait photo inset on Page 2.

"Oh my god," said a young wizard who had only just walked into Hermione. He pointed to the paper. "That's not you, is it?"

Hermione answered without peeling her eyes from the picture—this security still, this precious relic, this hard evidence of a vivid, terrible dream. The photo softened and saddened her at once. She could clutch this photo like a rabbit skin, silky and hollow of what had lived inside it.

"It's not me," Hermione replied, "but it was us."