Nott and Bulstrode practically surrendered, but Ron made sure they were disarmed and contained all the same. Not three hours earlier, he and his allies had taken advantage of the enemy being too lax with those they thought they had under their control, and the irony would be too much for him if either of the new arrivals were carrying with them some ridiculous contrivance that would turn the situation on its head once more. Luna certified that they had come with no idea that the Order had seized their operations; they had actually never even been to Quito before.

"I don't understand," the wizard they just captured said. "What happened here?"

"Your friends brought Neville in; didn't check to see what he had on him after they took his wand. He brought all of us inside of a box the size of a thimble. We had Lovegood listening in to the conversation to make sure that they wouldn't just kill him while he was unconscious, and then she waited until everyone else was asleep except for Erik, who was on watch, and we came out and stunned her. Didn't see it coming."

"You stunned Evan in his sleep?"

"No, we actually disarmed him and then stuffed him in the box after using a full-body bind and then we warded the box. We weren't predicting as much trouble with Flora; we just stunned her right as she was waking up."

Nothing was said for a moment; he stared at Nott for a moment before deciding that he was not going to do anything.

"Have you heard from Granger that we intend to propose an alliance?" he asked. It seemed he was still missing something.

"We didn't know how Goyle would react to seeing everyone stunned," Ron said. "I heard about what you said, but it doesn't mean anything if Evan doesn't say it himself. We heard that you sent a message back to him that you intended to capture Neville alive after your conversation with me."

"There are more options available to us while both the children of prophecies remain alive. As long as they have no desire to kill each other, then we can work against Voldemort without any issue."

"Is that all you want?" he asked. "Is it enough to work against Voldemort?"

"No," Nott said after a moment. "The coalition must never learn of this, but we would remain your allies until the war is won. We are not asking that your forces take direction from our own, only that they fight as fiercely and that any other conflict would be mediated before being acted-"

"We were planning to do most of that already," he said. "We've got a couple dark wizard groups in Africa who are allied to us and as long as they keep themselves in line, we don't make them swear allegiance or believe anything in particular." We're going to need all the help we can get. If the Canada situation takes any longer, the coalition is just going to declare victory over there so they can redirect their focus to our own primary base in Uganda.

He elected not to go into detail about how some of the dark wizard groups were kidnapping muggles and using them in bizarre experiments, not that it would have landed. Evan's 'followers', if they could be called that, had been subjected to worse, and apparently he only considered it a hazing ritual. One of them had been conscious for the last few hours and had explained how the entire operation worked. It was not a pleasant description, to say the least. The Heir could not raise followers at the drop of a hat, and he could not keep legions under the Imperius, even as powerful as he was. As a result, he had taken to other tactics to make slaves of his minions, making them dependent on dark curses for their very survival. It was ingenious spell work, and something he probably could have only learned at Durmstrang, but it was disgusting, and it put the lie to any claim he had about being better than the Death Eaters, or whatever he was claiming. The minions could no longer form expressions, and their dialogue was limited.

"Fitting," Mafalda had said. "He intends to be nice to his friends and raise an effective army at the same time by creating a hierarchy of favorites. He's basically the same as Tom Riddle when he was growing up. He basically reversed the concept of an Inferius."

If summarizing the actions of the Heir of Slytherin tired her out, she demonstrated it only by insisting that someone else take point so that she could sleep. The smattering of American kids who were still missing school had mostly returned, but one from their numbers threw his hat in the ring to watch out for threats and wake everyone if need be. Ron had basically been moving almost continuously for days; his one break had actually been being transported by Neville in the box, and that Luna had not been able to enjoy that explained why she was currently asleep.

"Tomorrow morning we're straightening all this out," he said to everyone who could hear him. "If anyone wants to start before I wake up, that's fine, but so you know, I'm the acting commander." That was not exactly true, but without Hannah, and with Hermione far behind on what had been going on, everyone else was probably going to look to him for Orders. As he took a seat against the wall, to sleep, perhaps, he thought of the matter that he had thus far not allowed to cross his mind.

She was gone.

It was especially cruel that when he had been certain he had lost his first friend and had it proven to him that his certainty was misplaced, this time there was no doubt. She who survived had verified the death of the other, leaving a hole in his heart where she had been. There was nothing more he wished to go over with her; he had already wondered what he could have done to save her when he had basically chosen that they should save Neville rather than her. He could put up with hating himself because of a hard decision he made, but the result itself was something else entirely. The simple fact that she was gone made it seem like he had jumped from the back of a flying dragon and was not even thinking about whether or not he would hit the ground.

He realized he had fallen asleep, as always, when he woke up. No one had thought to wake him for a watch, and for that he could be grateful, but if he were ever permanently in a unit with any of the students they were borrowing, he would have to tell them he had no greater sleeping privileges, even if he had named himself the commander. It was a painful sort of self-imposed double standard.

"You're killing yourself again." It was Hannah's voice inside his mind. That was the annoying thing about the fact that people's voices would come to him sometimes, he could never respond to them and expect a response. "You know I don't care if you think it's heroic. I don't care if it really is heroic; I don't like it."

"Weasley?" It was one of the kids. His name was Yuda, Ron was pretty sure.

"I'm up," he said, getting up to find the base more or less in the same condition in which he had left it. "Anything been decided yet?"

"Most of the rest have gone back to Bog's Rock. Theodore Nott was wanted there." He was reminded that he could not simply ignore the crimes of the Death Eater's son, even if they were about to sort out an alliance. He had wronged people at the school, and that meant there were things they had to run past the officials there. Hogwarts and his own country basically no longer existed, so he was less worried about tallying up leftover offenses that had taken place back home. "Can you take me by Side-Along Apparation? They basically left me here to wake you up."

"Yeah, no problem," he said, remembering how the kids had been useful in the last few days. "Is there anyone else here?"

"No." He shook his head.

"That's fine, let's just go."

He took the kid as far as he could with every jump until they were back at the school. Yuda knew a trick for getting in that was more or less common knowledge among some of the upper years; he put blue sparks in the sky and they had to take him in without asking any questions; it was part of some policy of theirs where a student was meant to inform them if in danger, and that was judged to be more important than obedience to the rules. Ron was confused.

"Couldn't someone exploit that?"

"It hasn't come up yet."

They went inside and found the others, and as he had expected, Mafalda had preempted him by offering them all the chance to apply to be in the Order. As had been stated, they would not take just anyone; only those with a sincere conviction and at least some knowledge of their principles and demonstrated character. A misguided individual who had fought on the wrong side was no better or worse off than a fence-sitter with no principles. There had not been an instance where they needed to remove membership, but there were procedures in place for removing someone from office if that individual ever betrayed the text or the Phoenix.

It was a moment before his friends noticed him, but as soon as they did, he was aware of the shift in the mood. It was like there was something that they were waiting to tell him. All of a sudden it made sense to leave without him and leave some kid to wait for him to wake up; it was to give him some time to wake up before the bad news hit.

"Might as well tell me."

"The coalition is redirecting pressure to Africa. They're coming in from all sides," Hermione said after a moment. "We had someone read it off a Spanish newspaper in Quito this morning, but, well, we went ahead and went back here to regroup."

It was what they had feared would happen in the unlikely event that the dark wizards in Canada, which was a force of almost all of what was left in the Americas, managed to hold on long enough for the enemy to count it as a defeat, furthering the narrative that greater measures were needed to combat dark magic and blood purism, even though there was no argument that the remaining forces were even blood purists beyond a smattering of individuals here and there. The coalition would be forcibly marked in service to their opaque overlords, and the defeat of the Phoenix, if they managed it, would gain them another continent.

"Then the world has given in to hatred," he said. "As always, they told themselves they only had to hate the right people."

No one said anything for a moment. Perhaps they expected tactics or something. His mind was sore even after sleeping. Neville, strangely, had his nose in a book.

"We have to bring the children of prophecy to the Phoenix," he said after a moment. "There's no prophecy about what we're meant to do with them; we'll let her decide. We can come up with plans for her to look over on the way there... or whilst we're fighting." He went over the specifics of the prophecy. There were different ways it could happen, but at the moment there was nothing to stop the most likely outcome, which was Voldemort defeating one, and then the other.

"Are we waking Evan up?" Hermione asked.

"We'll wake him up when we get to Wahde. Won't be long."

It would not be a long trip; they could get to the base easily enough if they used the closed floo, but it would not be without its complications, and they did not know that their spiritual leader was necessarily at the base. As they made their way outside and apparated to the base in Mexico with everyone who wanted to come along, he tried to put together the next few hours in his mind. It was easy to imagine that they would find the Phoenix at the base, because she had the authority to give orders, and her Order would be informing her decisions, but it was also easy to imagine that she would be leading from the front. When they reached the advance base, they ordered an assembly for reinforcements in Africa, but apparently their friends had already heard; they already sent what able wands they had.

Apparating more, he was no longer worried he would ever deafen himself with the sound; if that were possible, it would have already happened. They reached the secure base in Belize where they had the closed floo, and had to wait for a team of scouts to get back so that they could explain the mission and its risks to the volunteers there. When he looked over at Hermione, she was decoding something written in Chinese characters. Did she write it like that so that no one would know what it said? Or was that Cho?

There would be no grand army riding on the backs of gently floating dragons, he was sure. It was not that the Imperial Ministers or the Xian were foolish enough to think they could crush the entire coalition after it took over the rest of the world, it was, most likely, that they already knew it was controlled by Voldemort, whom they already tried to assassinate once, which now that he thought about it was probably his own plan yet again. The fact that powerful wizards from all the way across the Eurasian landmass could just show up in Georgia turning over stones to look for dark wizards effectively convinced everyone that national borders no longer mattered, like Grindelwald and his open threat of building an army had already convinced them that even if Voldemort was quiet for some reason, other dark wizards were perfectly willing and able to raise an army and make use of it, even in the muggle world. It was hard to blame the average person for not realizing that their real enemy did not seek the end of Secrecy and would assassinate the paper tiger as soon as his purpose was served, but there were many who did not even know that Voldemort had ordered his release.

"Yuda, did you know Neville at school?"

"Yeah."

"Is he any good in a scrap?" It was the wrong question to ask. Technically, most of the students who had fought with them were better than many adults he had seen, just by virtue of being in practice. He reminded himself that he was really meant to be in school at the moment, for his last year, even though he had reached majority.

"He's been doing a lot of reading. Showed me a lot on how to study and apply magic. Do they teach you differently at Hogwarts?"

"If they did, he wouldn't have remembered it," he said, shaking his head. Most likely, Neville was something of a late bloomer who had gone through the same process of realizing that he had to study seriously instead of just studying for a grade that a lot of them had, and he had even been tutored by that one witch whose name he had since forgotten with everything else that had happened. He and his friends had gone over the reasons why he was lagging behind, but if he was understanding things well enough to where he was explaining to other students how they could study and improve their own academic standing, things must have started to make sense to him.

It came time to pass through the floo and he went without a moment of hesitation, even though somehow it seemed worse that they were knowingly marching towards their doom. It was like recovering Neville had been a reverie of his own memories of the past six years and he was only just waking up to reality. The skeleton crew at the Africa base had been expecting them and Diggle put himself in charge of getting them the latest updates.

"We have the children of prophecy with us. We need to get to Wahde."

"I see. I'm missing Miss Abbott, where is she?"

"She didn't make it," Ron managed, annoyed that he would even ask, though he was sure the old wizard just wanted to send the barn. "Luna, go with Neville and bring Evan to the Phoenix," he ordered. "I'm taking everyone else to the front, Bulstrode and Nott included." No matter what happened, there was going to be a battle and loads of them were going to die. He had to have some baseless belief that he was the main character in some fictional story to believe that he was going to survive, and not someone else, and that was even if they won. It was sort of ridiculous that he had survived so far.

Luna accepted the order without saying anything and levitated the unconscious Heir out of the base. He had wanted to go himself, so he could factor what they learned into the plan, but he did not know that they would be far away. Even if the continent was being beset from all sides by the coalition, the response was probably going to entail beating them out in one place rather than spreading themselves just as thin. Practically begging Hannah's voice in his mind for an idea the enemy would never expect, he turned to their remaining forces when he had an order for them.

"The enemy is marked," he said. "Any act of disloyalty isn't going to kill them, but they're going not going to be able to retreat entirely. We frighten them, we hit them hard; we scare the ones that we can scare into slowing down. That's all they can do if they're concerned about the kind of threat we present."

It felt like a long time ago that Terry's Patronus told them that Voldemort was effectively holding out in Georgia and he would most likely have to remain there until the remainder of the resistance against the coalition was crushed. Whatever Wahde told them about their next steps, it was going to involve going there to fight him, because even if he realized that both of the children of prophecy were in the same place in Africa, he would not go to kill them himself. Expertly had he pit them against each other, and only with some otherworldly power that they possessed were they ever going to be able to work together against him.

He took a large force outside the base's warding, and Hermione insisted on coming with him because of some guilt about not having been putting her life at risk so far, but she did not exactly say any of that, or he would have told her that she could not have done anything. All the same, he doubted there was anything in the world that could tear her away from her responsibilities. Right when they were about to leave, she asked for a word with him, ostensibly to go over the strategy.

"Are you going to be okay?" she asked.

"I've pushed through worse," he said.

"You had her."

There it was. It was a reminder that before he ever loved, he had friends.

"Hermione, I'm going to get over her after I'm dead. Not long before that at this rate," he said. "Thing is, Dumbledore said death is just the next great adventure."

"Don't hurry along to catch up with her," his friend said, wiping a tear out of her eye. "She'll wait for you."

"I know."

"She always did. Every moment we thought you were lost to us, she waited."

"There were better things she could've done with her time," he said, smiling a little. "Could've been reading something."

"That's rich, coming from you." Perhaps the fact that they were smiling meant things were going to be all right. It had been a long time since the two of them had shared such an expression. It had been a longer time since either of them felt anything resembling genuine hope. All that was left was to do his best to make sure it was well-founded.

"Well, then it's another test on something I haven't studied yet. Can't be worse than Snape."