Hermione awoke to an odd, swaying sort of motion, almost as if she were lying in a hammock. Not that she'd ever been in a hammock to know, but this is what she imagined it would feel like if she ever was. She certainly wasn't in her cosy bed on The Jily Harmony, and there was a strange wetness on the air, along with a strong smell of fish. She wondered if Harry knew what was going on.
And that's when her memory clicked into gear.
She snapped open her eyes and tried to get up, only to be bodily pushed back down into the chair she'd leapt up from.
"Oof!" Hermione groaned, as she crashed painfully back into the chair. "What are you doing?"
There was a click of a door opening to Hermione's right. She looked up in stunned shock at the man who entered through the now open arch.
"Yes, Pewsey, what are you doing?" Thaddeus Valentine quirked as he crossed to them with his impressive, domineering gait. "Miss Granger is our guest ... and manhandling is no way to treat a lady, now is it?"
"She ain't no lady," Pewsey spat. "She ain't even a proper person!"
"Yes, well we all know that," Valentine smirked. "But that's no excuse for you not to be one. Now, Miss Granger ... tea?"
"Shove it up your arse!" Hermione sniped.
"See!" Pewsey cried, waving his arms as if to say, 'I told you she ain't no lady!'.
"Where am I?" Hermione demanded. "Wherever it is, you're going to let me go right now!"
"You are on the raft city of Head-In-Borough," Valentine explained. "And, I'm afraid, no prisoner - either in history nor fiction - has ever been let go simply by asking for it."
"Head-In-Borough!" Hermione squeaked in fear. "No wonder I cant move properly. I was only just getting my air-legs ... I'm nothing like ready to get my sea-legs, too! I think I'm going to be sick."
"Please, stop being so over dramatic," Valentine replied, firmly. "Or I shall have to have you tied down. Now sit still, girl."
"Why have you kidnapped me?" Hermione seethed. "And where is Harry? If you've hurt him ..."
But Valentine held up a strong hand to silence her. "Please, Miss Granger, do not waste your breath on threats that you have no way of carrying out. That will get us nowhere."
Hermione scowled at her captor. "Fine. But tell me where Harry is."
"About now, I imagine he is drifting through the clouds somewhere," Valentine replied, his tone sharp and cruel. It made Hermione shudder to hear it.
"If you didn't kidnap him, too, then you can expect him to come for me. Then you'll be sorry. You'll see."
"I doubt that," Valentine smirked. "And I have no expectation of Harry doing anything of the sort."
"He loves me, he'll come for me," Hermione volleyed back, confidently.
"Even if he does, he wont be much use. I don't see ash as dangerous. You see, we locked Harry inside that pretty little airship of yours then set the whole thing ablaze. That's what I meant about him drifting through the clouds. He's probably in a million little pieces by now."
"NO!" Hermione howled out in shrill anguish. She felt as though she'd been slugged in the chest by one of the giant dismantling cranes down in London's Gut. Harry couldn't be dead, he just couldn't. He wouldn't just leave Hermione all alone like that. She didn't believe it, wouldn't believe it. Not without proof. Valentine was a master manipulator, everyone knew that. He knew just which buttons to press to get a person under his sway, and Harry was definitely Hermione's biggest button.
But maybe she could use that to her advantage. If she could play the part, the girlfriend driven mindlessly docile by sheer grief, maybe she could find a way to get out of here. She'd swim back to shore, make her way across the Out-Country somehow, find Harry, then they'd hunt down Valentine together and shove that long knife of Harry's through the famous adventurer's throat.
So she had to let that sudden shock of tears keep flowing.
"W-why?" she snivelled. "Why did you murder him? He was my love, my s-soulmate! I feel like my heart has been snapped in two. You cold bastard!"
"It is for precisely that reason that young Harry had to die," Valentine replied calmly. "It had been noted that he had quite the temper. And if this experiment with the two of you proves successful, he would have posed far too much a problem. He was an unacceptable risk, so we decided it was best to terminate him."
Ah, a chance at information! Hermione thought in triumph. Valentine was known for loving himself a bit too much, with his favourite pastime being to boast about his prowess in battle, his archaeological achievements, or his most daring schemes to advance the power of London. Hermione simply had to stoke his ego.
She sniffed dramatically at the idea of Harry being 'terminated', then she glowered at Valentine. "What experiment? What rubbish are you talking now, murderer?"
Valentine smirked at the moniker Hermione had given him. After all, she wasn't the first person to use it, and Thaddeus Valentine always found it amusing that these stupid fools thought that the tag might offend him. Indeed, he was actually proud of it.
"Do you really not know?" Valentine taunted. "Have you not put the pieces together yet? And you were so vaunted by our Guild when you graduated ... I think the respect must have been misplaced."
"Harry and I were just working it all out ... then you went and killed him!" Hermione spat. "So why don't you fill in the blanks in my obviously tiny mind?"
Valentine was stirred by Hermione's impudence, despite her situation. He was powerless to resist her ruse as it washed over him.
"I exist, Miss Granger, to do all that I can to make London strong again," Valentine began. "It was the first ever Traction City, so it should be the most dominant one also. But instead, she has spent over a decade skulking around the damp mountains of that part of Northern Europe where she has been hiding, desperate to avoid other, hungrier cities.
"But no longer. I have given Magnus Chrome a piece of Old-Tech that will make every other city - both Traction and the static powerhouse of Shan Guo and beyond - quake in fear. Once Chrome demonstrates London's new power, the city will never have to hunt for prey again. We will simply command other cities to come to us, or they will face violent destruction.
"Though on my travels, I uncovered evidence of another type of power, one far older and more potent than any technology our ancestors may have created. And I knew, if I could find a way to harness it, it would make my fortune and secure London's future."
"You're talking about magic," Hermione hushed out. "You really did find it, then? It's real?"
"Very real, and very powerful," Valentine confirmed. "I first stumbled on it by complete accident, you know. I was browsing the books recovered from the ancient library of Glasgow, after London ate it, when I came across a series of seven tomes, all chronicling the same thing. They were written by an author whose name was Jake A. Rolling ... and what fantastical tales they were too! Of a young hero who battles trolls and serpents and the reanimated dead. It was gripping stuff.
"And it all played out in the school of Hogwarts, a name I happened upon in London's own library. So I came to understand that these weren't simply fanciful tales ... they were history. If Hogwarts was real - which we know it was - then all the rest must have been, too. So I set out to prove it ... to find the evidence of this great hero.
"I was determined to find the final resting place of Harry James Potter."
Valentine allowed his words to hang dramatically in the silence. Hermione was genuinely stunned by the revelation, and made for the perfect audience. Valentine enjoyed himself for a minute, then continued.
"I learned from Rolling that Harry Potter was a wizard, and that his weapon of choice was a magical wand. I knew his bones would have long turned to dust, but an artefact like a wand - infused with a force like magic - might have endured. So I just had to find out. I went on so many expeditions I cant tell you, most of them fool's errands, but then I found Godfrey's Hello, which is now the final resting place of poor Harry for the second time."
Hermione howled out dramatically again. She was being very convincing. Valentine ignored her, in full orator mode now.
"The tomb was excavated, the wand just sitting there above the headstone. I retrieved it, took it to my good friend, Evadne, in London. She took up the project with some zeal from there."
"But if you had the wand, why did you need us?" Hermione whimpered. "Why not just leave Harry and I to our rest?"
"We learned that a wand was useless without a witch or wizard to wield it," Valentine explained. "So Evadne devised a theory. Many old religions talk about resurrection. The Ancient believers used to mummify their dead, or revere great relics that had been touched by prominent kings and prophets. They defended such relics with ferocity, believing that one day the dead could be revived using them.
"Then the Ancients learned how, when they discovered something they called De'Enay."
"De'Enay? What's that?"
"A code of all our genetic material," Valentine explained. "Much of the knowledge of how it is made up and what it does is lost, but the first civilisations to build Stalkers left basic records of how to do it, and this involved integrating human De'Enay with machine parts. It created a philosophical conundrum at the time ... and it still does in many circles. Are Stalkers alive? They have brains, and some have even shown memory and cognitive thought, but they were dead once. Some more than once. So what does that make them?
"One theory is that the body dies but the soul cannot. That once the energy of a soul enters the universe, it can never leave it. Nothing can completely destroy conscious energy. The body dies, and the soul goes ... somewhere. But, when a Stalker is made, part of that comes back. Memories are stored in chemicals in the brain, but the emotion of them is kept by the soul.
"So the idea is that, if you can reanimate a person using this De'Enay material, the soul will be wrenched back from wherever it goes and inhabit the body once again. It isn't like cloning, where we simply manipulate natural forces in a laboratory setting, this is something else. We don't know all we should about it, but that doesn't matter.
"The only thing that is important, is that it works. And you, my dear, are the living proof. Harry was, too, but now he's dead, obviously."
Hermione blinked hard as she tried to get her head around all this. Valentine seemed in a jolly mood and happy to share, so Hermione plied him for more.
"So ... Harry and I were alive, in the distant past, and you found our De'Enay on this wand ... then grew us new bodies from that, which pulled our souls back from our eternal rest. Is that about right?"
"Exactly correct, with a few minor details missing about your genetic structure that you needn't be concerned about just now," Valentine chuckled. "Perhaps you aren't as slow as you made out earlier."
"And now you expect me to use this wand for you, because you don't know how to do it?" Hermione pressed. "Well, that isn't going to happen. You killed my love ... and I'll die before I help you."
"Nonsense, do you think that Evadne would leave something like that to chance?" Valentine quirked. "She's brilliant, but prone to sentimentality. She wanted to see if this magic would manifest in you in a natural way. But I am far less patient. You are a slave, Miss Granger, a tool ... and like all slaves you have been programmed to do as we tell you."
Hermione shivered at that. "W-what does that mean?"
"The clones we make for mining and such have no souls, no personalities. They are bred for a function and don't know better to complain. You, on the other hand, are different. You are a reanimation, but not one without a failsafe. If Evadne tells you to do something, you have no choice but to obey.
"So that's what I am going to get you to do ... obey. Whether you want to or not. Evadne is sending me an audio recording featuring all sorts of commands for you. Many of them you will not like, but I'm chancing that the emotion it stirs in you will stoke up this magic that you once had.
"And then you will be the ultimate weapon. Magnus Chrome will use the machine I gave him to destroy any Traction City that opposes us ... and I will use you and your magic to get into Shan Guo undetected, to kill Anna Fang and her Anti-Traction League, and bring an end to savagery once and for all.
"You will be a legend, a hero, Miss Granger ... in the future, I wouldn't be surprised if they gave you a title ... how does The Butcher of Batmunkh Gompa sound? I think it has a nice ring to it, don't you?
"Now get some rest," Valentine taunted viciously. "You have a lot of killing to do in the days and weeks to come. And after that, you probably wont want to sleep ever again."
Then Valentine rose and left the room, leaving Hermione to weep again, only this time her tears, and her fears, were very real.