Hermione's sixteenth birthday passed almost without her realizing it. The students were somewhat easier, she slept a little late, making her feel behind when she woke on her cot of banana leaves and cushioning charms, and a few Order members apparated in by evening to give reports, but with all the things she had noticed that day, turning sixteen was not one of them.

The birthday did not really mean anything, of course, in her home country all of her legal freedoms would arrive either the following year for the magical world, or the year after that in the regular world. What arrived this year was really more of a responsibility. In the United Kingdom, she was officially old enough to understand the implications of having sex, meaning adult men could touch her as long as she allowed them, or at least as long as it could not be established she did not allow them. Sighing a bit as she checked the enchantments on her clothes, she wanted to get off the subject as soon as possible. In the midst of a war, even just her responsibilities as a teacher, she felt she had an infinite number of better occupations of her mind.

She woke up with a headache, but at least she woke up on time. It escaped her exactly how to cast the alarm charm, but there was a man and his little son who passed by the stilt house where she slept every morning at exactly six in the morning, so it was a simple matter of warding the place where they passed to wake her up. Hermione knew it was not exactly the most responsible thing, but it worked well enough, and had not yet failed her, which had to count for something.

The reports from the Order members the previous day had mostly taken the form of warnings. She could hardly remember a time when she had not essentially been on high alert, but hearing that there were Death Eaters and allies of theirs in the Caribbean was not exactly conducive to sleeping well. According to Sturgis Podmore, Bellatrix Lestrange had something of a penchant for voodoo, dark magic born out of a combination of various cultures, and she was taking the opportunity to build bridges in Haiti as well as Cuba. What disturbed her the most was that it constituted something of an inroad to Magical America through Louisiana, where French colonists had moved after the abolition of slavery in their own colonies, reinforcing the area as both French and dark. Though it was mostly speculation, she had some understanding that slave holders were not at all averse to the use of dark magic to discover magical children born among the slaves.

Out of all the disturbing things she had learned about the magical world since joining it, trying to get out, and deciding that she was stuck with it for better or worse, the worst things she learned were really just terrible things about people rather than magic. The fact that magic had been used to uphold the system of slavery was no more surprising than that it had been used in dismantling slavery and assisting former slaves. The Underground Railroad was perhaps the best example of magic being used to oppose the terrible things of which humanity was capable.

"I really wish we had some idea of what's going on over there," she said, waxing whimsical. The reports were few and far between chiefly because of how few members they had, which was because of how few people they could trust. She had literally no problem getting the overly excitable boy from her second class to carry out basic tasks, but anything that could be used against the Order in some way had to be done by an actual member; that was a non-negotiable order straight from McGonagall.

Getting out of the stilt house dressed and ready for class, she was stopped on the way by Professor Sprout.

"Do you need me to help find local plants, Madam?"

"No, that is not what is required this time. Miss Abbott has requested your help."

"She's asked for me specifically or we decided we could spare me-" The combination of a frown and a blank stare cut off her question. "Right. It doesn't really matter."

Drawing the teleportation ward on the ground with magic so that it would disappear after her using it, she was in Burma in a matter of seconds, by her estimation. Casting a cheering charm on herself, the nat sin which was most likely named Saw Lu decided she had the appropriate attitude to be allowed to pass through his area of protection. It's an effective measure of security, and I'm grateful the nat-kadaw could set it up for us, but if I cast enough cheering charms on myself, I'm going to start erasing my own memories.

It was not that cheering charms were addictive, which had been her worry when she first learned it in school; it was that using them enough would cause her own brain to dump memories that she expended effort keeping. She knew of no mechanism to reverse either memory charms or natural lethe, so all she could do was remind herself of them every night before she went to sleep.

When she got into the village the Order had essentially been using as a base, she saw Hannah quickly. It had been over two months since she had last been, and the same amount of time since the two witches had seen each other. Somehow the Hufflepuff looked even more different than she had expected.

"Hermione- how have you been?" she asked.

"I've been all right. Not much has happened on my end, though there is most likely way more happening than we have the information to predict."

"Oh. Well, I did bring you here for a reason."

"I know." It was a stilted conversation, but perhaps things were just stilted between them. "Is it Ron?"

"No, he's- the nat-kadaw managed to pick up some activity, but that is not why I asked you to come here. Moody caught a Death Eater. He's been trying, but he can't get inside the man's head by himself."

"Is he that good of an Occlumens?" Hermione had not explicitly known Legilimency to be part of Auror training, but it seemed likely that Mad-Eye would be proficient in it.

"He's just a really specific kind of Occlumens that happens to be- he can make himself think in Chinese and no one can get past that."

"Oh. Moody speaks Burmese but not Chinese?"

"Don't tell him I said this, but it's the problem with his basic approach to being prepared for things. By insisting on being prepared for anything, he's prepared for a lot, but some of it's less likely than others. It's not like he's some kind of idiot, he's just really committed to getting on top of whatever might come up, which is time he can't be spending on what's most likely."

Hermione decided not to say 'that sounds like someone I used to know'. It seemed like bad policy to make fun of people for how they previously acted.

Thinking on it herself, she wondered why he learned Burmese if not because terribly many people spoke it, and it was most likely that he started on it when he learned about Voldemort's attempt to influence things for the royal family. I suppose there is some logic to learning on an as-needed basis, especially if you know there are other people with more common skills.

"This is the dark wizard we found?" she asked when led to a hut. There was a girl in gold chains not far from the man in a black cloth, and the Ravenclaw surmised she was the hostage. Alastor Moody simply stared at everyone in the room, sometimes two people at once.

"Death Eater," he corrected. "Look at his arm. He's marked." Hermione got down on her knees and touched his arm with her wand. In what looked like black ink, a snake surfaced from the eye of a skull. "It's a trade secret for Voldemort; no one else even knows about it."

"How did you learn of it?"

"Severus Snape had a lot to say when we asked him to prove his new loyalties. Letting him speak might have been the last good thing the Corps ever did."

"Where is he, lately?" Hannah asked.

"Part of what we're trying to find out, Miss. Fact that Voldemort's got marked men in Burma wasn't something we knew until this kind fellow paid us a visit."

Hermione nodded. Sitting down in front of the dark wizard, she reached out and offered a warning.

机不可失，时不再来

There was no immediate response, either in spoken word or in thought, but she continued to listen. If the dark wizard's mental shielding was focused on keeping foreign Legilimens from his mind, it was probably a way of appeasing the Imperial Ministers, who had recently abandoned their attempt to kill Voldemort, and had most likely decided to work with him rather than against him.

The dark wizard started to communicate with her, but not in words. She was aware that Voldemort himself had directed him to come here and make demands of the royal family. Moody seemed to want to know what was going on.

"He came here on Voldemort's orders," she explained. "I'm confused about something, though."

Returning to the mental link, she sort of wondered whether or not the Death Eaters were aware that the emperor no longer had complete control of the country, with his eldest daughter being held hostage by the rebels. He responded with genuine surprise. Pressing on the subject, she inquired as to whether or not his master had told him anything about the Order presence in the country, and it seemed he had expected to be the only foreigner, more or less. There had been another marked Death Eater who had died in Burma not too long ago, but there had been no word from the royal family on how that had happened.

"I'm still confused, but at least that answered my last question," Hermione continued. "It seems like they have no idea that we're here. They don't know we're working with the rebels, they don't know we have a fragile peace with the emperor and empress, and they don't know about who killed..."

"Rowle," the ex-Auror supplied. "They most likely don't know I'm out of retirement. I took every precaution I could think of." Hannah's lips straightened.

"I mean, I would guess he's just too busy to check on everything," the other witch ventured. "Think about all the trouble we've had with our information network; it's probably basically the same for him."

"We don't guess around here, Miss Abbott. Make sure he isn't lying. Look for traces of mental manipulation."

"Yes, sir," Hermione said.

The tell-tale signs of the false memory charm were not present. It was hard to know for sure without a Pensieve, but there were no cuts or sharp edges in his recent memories, and she found a segment where Voldemort, as Karkaroff, was giving him orders, though it was hard to tell where they were. Not that I need to know.

"I think I've read most of what we need to know there were no signs of mental manipulation," she said. "We might need to go to Durmstrang."

"Is it Karkaroff?"

"Yes. The translator addressed him as 'my lord', and the fact that he was speaking English is suspicious enough. Voldemort has probably been masquerading as Karkaroff for years. I don't know why he would, because he's visible like that-"

"It gives him a reason to be communicating with his old friends, I imagine," Hannah said. "It also gave him a way of getting back into Hogwarts with Evan, in case he needed either of them to be there."

Everyone in the room except the hostage was probably aware that Voldemort had once been a young wizard named Tom Riddle. Hermione knew from asking a handful of Order members who were old enough that the very same wizard had been an orphan, and preferred to stay at school, even when the holiday afforded him an opportunity to leave. As much as Hogwarts represented a cornerstone in British wizarding history and heritage, it was also something their enemy desired on a personal level, and with the school no longer existing, they could no longer use that one insight into what remained of Voldemort's soul against him.

"How do we use this information against the other Death Eaters?" she asked. "Can we use this wizard to lure them into a trap?"

"We don't know enough about what he wanted here."

Taking the cue, the Ravenclaw witch resumed her mental invasion. It was not exactly easy to get past the dark wizard's Occlumency, her advantage was only in that they had no idea there was an Order member with serviceable Chinese. Once inside, she asked what he had intended to get out of going to Burma, and he basically explained that they needed a new base of operations, now that Crouch had Britain entirely under his control. Magical Russia was not seriously going to defend Georgia against all of Europe, and it was looking more and more like the continent was subsumed in the ideology. There had been hundreds of reported dark wizard attacks and no one knew if they were real or only reports. Since she wanted to know a little more about the mark on his arm, she went ahead and asked about that.

"They want a new base of operations," Hermione explained at length. "Their whole situation is pretty desperate at this point. Durmstrang is based in Georgia, right?"

Moody only nodded. He seemed to understand where she was going with it. Hannah was not exactly on the same page.

"Okay, so now that they've lost their home, they're going here?" she asked. "Why do the Burmese want them if they're that useless?"

"Loyalty, they would hope," the ex-Auror explained. "They did assist with the royal family taking over, and if they're going to be here anyway, they can assist with the search for their lost daughter."

"Fortunately, they don't know about that," she said. "How de we use this?" I have to attack my own ideas if Ron's not around to do it for me. "Even if we did lure some Death Eaters to Burma, what do we do when they get here?"

"We'll capture as many of them as we can," the Hufflepuff witch said. "Then we talk some sense into them."

"Are you mad?" Hermione asked. "Could you possibly think of anything more deranged? I need to get an idea of what you consider normal."

"I'm not a loon. I'm the one being realistic. If we get rid of the Death Eaters, Crouch will just invent more of them and keep getting more powerful. We need to be focusing on him."

"You're only saying that because Ron-"

"Not everything is about Ron, Hermione. I'm not talking about joining the blood purists, they'll kill you the year they take over, and they'll kill me the year after they take over. We need their magical knowledge."

"Oh, so now you're on the side of magical research, now that it becomes clear that Terry and I were right-"

"That was two years ago! Terry admitted that he'd been mistaken."

"That's only for the fact he died before he could see what would happen. With all those people, we still couldn't have taken down two Death Eaters without our wands, and they dragged him away and killed him."

"Yes, and how was it that we lost our wands?" Hannah demanded. "Crouch decided to accuse us of being Voldemort's plants after we saw his son loading the school with dementors! If we keep going with trying to research ways to kill dark wizards who just don't want to die, the best thing that could happen is we succeed, and then what- we're the new dark wizards!"

"So, what, we ask the Death Eaters what their plan is? I don't know how to tell you this, but they already lost. Their master is driving them into the ground and they left them without a way of opposing him. Some of them might want to join Grindelwald, because at least he'll die if they wait long enough, but they don't have that option because they're marked. Voldemort knows where they are at all times. He can't get into their heads unless he's close to them, but they'll never beat him in a fight because he can use the mark against them."

She did not know exactly how it worked, because all she had was the memory of the Chinese wizard restrained next to her, but he had clearly seen the Dark Lord punishing another Death Eater for his failure, with a mere look he was nearly paralyzed. The whole point of the mark, most likely, was to swear fealty by getting cursed so that you can never oppose him.

"They did lose, but they're still fighting," the Hufflepuff witch said after a moment. "They must have something."

"What is it that we have?" she asked, shaking her head. Her face fell; anger had been replaced by sadness. "I'm sorry. If this is all we need of me here, I'll be going back. I have students to teach."

She drew the teleportation ward on the ground outside where she remembered leaving a gap in the warding. She could get there by floo, of course, but the powder was not free and there were only so many people in the organization capable of independent travel. Hannah's probably been learning a few things from Moody. She'll be able to apparate soon, and if there's time, he'll teach her how to create a portkey.

"Wait." The voice came from behind her.

"Yes?"

"Have you been back to the Black property in Uganda?" her friend asked.

"Not in a few months, why?"

"There's a long road ahead of us, but what we're doing there is working. We're making that little corner of the magical world a more peaceful place, and people are thanking us for it. We're helping people, and we have their gratitude. That's what we have."

"Hannah, I didn't mean-"

"No, it is important that we have something. Thank you for lending us a hand. I'll tell you if anything happens with Ron."

"Thank you. I appreciate it."

As the other witch left her, she changed a few of the characters before teleporting, landing in one of the holes she had left in the Black Manor's defenses. Bakr of the Draa was still alive somewhere, and therefore still a concern, but with his defeat, he had lost some of his retinue. Already there were other dark wizards and witches claiming to be the true sorcerer of darkness of legend, but their efforts did more to divide the dark magic of the continent than unify it. She could hope that they would kill each other rather than deciding to work together, but thus far hoping her enemies killed each other had yet to yield positive results.

Knocking on the door, it was opened to her. Diggle greeted her and welcomed her in, Andromeda Tonks was apparently 'taking a breather', which she assumed referred to some sort of magical smoking. The children were taking a nap, as she was informed.

"Where are you putting them all up?" she asked. "You haven't had to expand the building, have you?"

"Oh, no, no, just the beds, dearest. Mundungus has been quite helpful in locating orphans too small to start school. Sometimes too helpful, though."

"We aren't taking in local orphans, though?"

"No, we are unable to take nonmagical orphans, and the magical children in this area mostly still have their parents. We're only taking children who were caught in the wake of the war. There are quite a few of them, more than we can afford to rehome among the nonmagical, even if we could go back to Britain."

"Wait a moment, sir... are you saying that muggles with magical children were just-"

"No, dearest, please continue believing that your parents are your true parents. Magic is... truly magical, and that kind of thing does happen, though there were some instances where children had to be placed in new homes, and there were not always enough wizarding families to take them." He sighed before sitting down. "I only wish we never had to resort to False Memory Charms..."