Another apparition crack split the air. Another pair of wounded witches had been evacuated to St. Mungos. Down the street, sirens were whirling and keeping the entire city awake as the Muggles were evacuating their wounded to a dozen hospitals. Harry was barely paying any attention to the recovery efforts. Instead, he and Ron had been isolated from each other and everyone else besides a senior Auror from a different shift as soon as the transportation jinxes had faded away.

Harry sat quietly, a mug of chocolate in his hands as he carefully raised his wand to his forehead. A steady stream of silver liquid emerged. He mechanically moved copies of his memories from his mind into enchanted vials. The incident reconstruction team had, after the war, started to review memories whenever an Auror used potentially lethal force. Ron was, undoubtedly, repeating the procedure in another room. He had nothing else to do, even as every other Auror, Auror trainee and Hit Wizard was scouring London looking for trouble. The Auror supervisor handed him a dictaquill before leaving the room with the tray full of memories, and hopefully evidence.

Harry began to speak for the dictaquill.

"Harry Potter, Auror, reporting on the incident of May 28, 2001 in London. I, along with Ronald Weasley, also an Auror, were part of the security detail for a Ministry conference. We had a perimeter overwatch position southwest of the main entrance to the conference center. Our position was approximately eighty meters from the position. We had arrived on shift at 1800 and noticed nothing unusual for the next hour and a half…."

By the time that he had finished recounting the mundaneness of the evening, his thighs had knotted up, his arches had tensed and his heart rate was beating as if he had just finished a ten mile run in slightly over an hour. By now, the other Auror had seen the stress in the young man who had been asked to do too much before he had ever been invited to the Academy, and now he and his partner and his best friend had charged straight into gunfire, spell fire and a mass casualty event. She took the quill out of the young Auror's hand and kept her fingers on the wand arm tricep applying just enough pressure to insurer that he knew that someone was there but not enough to leave any mark or pain. They sat in companionable silence.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck…." Harry could barely hear himself speak as he whispered to himself. Before he had exited the building, he had seen a dozen bodies lined up in the same way that he had seen Fred and Tonks and Lupin and Colin and so many other people whom he had shared laughs and hopes and perhaps the possibility of a life intertwined together at Hogwarts only three years ago. The dictaquill scratched another sheet of parchment with these new notes.

"I couldn't do enough. The machine guns kept Susan pinned and then Ron took care of her, and I was trying to keep us alive… and as I was doing that, the wizard, had to be a wizard, was slaughtering innocents. Fuck, fuck, I couldn't do enough."

Hermione gazed in shock at the carnage. Ginny could not even look. They had run to the chaos with wands ready when the first Patronii went out with a call for general assistance. Each also carried their go bags with expansion charms that contained first aid potions and enough material to engage in a minor insurgency.

The slightly older witch looked around. Everyone around her, including half a dozen Obliviators and a few Aurors trainees, were in a daze. She would allow herself confusion and shock afterwards. She was in charge, or at least she was expected to be in charge and sure of what needed to be done.

"Ginny, you get a team together to help the obliviators working on the muggles…" Her mind started prioritizing tasks.

"Luna, you and Neville start triaging the wounded. Send to Molly those who just need to be mothered, tag the priority cases to Mungo, and be kind to those who can't be saved right now…."

"Summers, you and the rest of the Muggle Excuse Team get working on something to explain why another hotel was attacked…. Come up with something plausible." She paused and took a breath before thinking about Ron and Harry. They were alive; she knew that as her otter had found them and relayed a message. She had never sent her otter to deliver a message and had it wander around aimlessly and confused and she feared for the day when that would happen.

"Oy, you four Auror trainees, go find Proudfoot and make yourself useful securing the site." Ginny gave an order to people who should have known better even as the half dozen recently impressed civilians had finished reviewing the basics of memory charms. They were dangerous charms if done sloppily, but Ginny had them practice a basic thirty minute charm where shock and trauma would make every memory a bit muddled and confused. Allowing a charm to merely accentuate a reaction was far more likely to hold than forcing a new memory.

Just before she removed her wand to obliviate in front of an older Muggle man who was already confused and probably concussed, she saw a phalanx of Muggle security forces march down the street. The man leading them looked familiar. She focused and recognized the man that had recognized them. He barely cast a glance in her direction as he pointed his fingers and gave quiet commands. Each time he spoke, another pair of Muggles with long guns paused and then left the group. Every ten to fifteen yards, another pair of men were set up. Rapid obliviation would not work with them. Too many different stories and too many incongruities would arise for a determined investigator to pull at, especially if they had access to cameras and potentially recorders. Ginny cursed and cast out a wandless and nearly silent Patronus to the rest of the obliviation team - cease work, and confound people instead without visible wand waving. Not everyone could do this precise magic, but confounding was a far simpler set of spells than destruction.

The last men of the troop took up their position. The Sergeant Major allowed himself to not scowl for a moment as he could enjoy the satisfaction of seeing working professionals work professionally. As he surveyed the scene and saw that each pair had at least two interlocking fields of fire and vision with the other pairs, a police inspector jogged over to him.

"Sergeant, the Yard will want to be speaking with you and your men later on tonight, but right now, we have something we need to figure out." As they walked, a junior constable armed only with two cups of tea fell into stride with them and handed piping hot paper cups to each man before finding other places to be usefully busy. John looked around as he was briefed on the emerging response. An eight block by twelve block square of the center City would be shut down for several days, and the entire area was a crime scene that would be picked over with magnifying glasses, metal detectors and police dogs. This was the first time that he had a chance to really look around. He paused and took a sip of his tea as the adrenaline left his body. He no longer had to fight to stay alive, he no longer had to fight to survive. He could now think as an investigator instead of react as a man who spent the lifetime of his children training for a night like tonight.

The street near the bomb blast had wreckage strew about. Glass was being crunched underneath his boots every step both men took. The building nearest the truck bomb had its front collapsed like a stereotypical foppish inbred-jawline of an aristocrat who would have gotten nowhere without their name nor connections of a favored uncle. A dozen floors had collapsed and a rubble pile stood in front of the street. He had seen enough buildings that had been bombed; he had lased more than a few Tornadoes armed with Paveways to have seen similar results in southern Iraq the previous decade.

Closer to the conference center and the hostage fiasco, the damage lightened up. Windows of cars were blown in from the shock wave, and the facades of buildings were ripped apart. A few bodies were covered with sheets. They would be addressed properly in the morning once anyone who could benefit from attention had been attended to. Pools of congealing blood were on the street and the sidewalk. His trained eyes began to draw patterns. Off to the right was a couple who were walking back to a new apartment block after going off for some curry…. A man's body laid twisted on the sidewalk while a woman's coat had been shredded by steel and stone shrapnel. She was at an A&E as most of the force of the blast had been absorbed by her lover's last expression of love for her. To the left was a young teen who would never dream again. A few more steps, there was a half a dozen splatters and splotches of blood, a few yards in front of the splashes was a three fifths of a circle of debris maybe two bodies wide and just a few steps closer to the bomb blast was a massive bleed out. He could see used tourniquets lying next to a woman's purse and bloody rags that had likely kept a victim alive long enough for the medics to make a decision in her favor at least. He looked around again, cars had their windows rolled up and intact near this little eddie of protection.

"That is odd…."

"Yes, it is sergeant… any thoughts…."

"Shrapnel is a funny thing but this is very funny….if we're going to see the butterfly wings of spray, it should be a lot wider by now and far more persistent but it is a little bubble where nothing went through…. That is very odd….Anything else…."

The inspector allowed the older man who had seen things that he could not imagine nor would he want to imagine ponder this first oddity. He had noticed it when he walked the crime scene for the first time. Bombs, he knew, were funny things but this was peculiar. It was good to know that an experienced man had the same first impression.

A moment later, the inspector began to walk down the street again. The two men took their time, allowing their eyes to collect all the little details that would stick with them for the entire case but that they could not explain why they would be important tonight. Eighty yards more, and they were at the detonation crater that held the skeleton of a burned out truck. This too was odd. If the goal had been destruction, the truck bomb was not even close to efficiently placed. Steel plates had reinforced the passenger side and rear of the truck, they were lying on the ground severely dimpled as they redirected the blast from being a circular blast to a far more linear destruction wave. More importantly, the vehicle was at least one yard too far from the curb and eight yards from the building itself. A destruction attack would have been parked at least abutting the curb and a suicide destruction attack would have driven the vehicle into the lobby with the attacker destroying himself and bringing most of the building down on top of himself. Every step away from the building dramatically lowered the absolute destruction potential. That was odd.

A nurse adjusted the blanket on the blue haired girl's grimy body. Leah had been checked out by both the medics and the triage team at the hospital and cleared each time. She was not there for herself. The young woman she had saved with a combination of pressure and magic, Hayley Marks according to her passport and student identification card in her purse, was an American student taking a summer semester at the London School of Economics. Her mobile phone had few numbers in it beyond a carry-out place, the American Embassy, and three numbers that had been quickly verified to be school related numbers. Leah discovered this as she searched for identification and contact information as they were both transported to a hospital that still had space. Once it became clear that the American student had no one else to hold vigil at her bedside, Leah told a matron that she would sit and wait for her to wake after her time in the surgery. No one at the hospital had the interest or the energy to bother her until at least after the Embassy had been notified and a consular officer had arrived. Until then Leah would doze in a chair, out of the way, and do for a stranger what she wished someone had done for her.

The Daily Prophet was almost as lurid as the Daily Mail's above the fold picture of three young delegates from a country most of the readership could not locate without a map and three hints hunched over lifelessly. The only difference between the two was movement as the head of a severely wounded witch flopped lifelessly after a few seconds and her body collapsed to the floor.