"I think that we should call ourselves Crucible," I said quietly.

There had been several names passed around, but all of them had been as horrible as would be expected when it was pre-teens trying to come up with them. Hermione, despite her competence in other areas had proven terrible at naming things. She kept coming up with embarrassing acronyms.

Some of the names would have been good except for my own personal history. Calling ourselves the Protectorate, or Cauldron just brought up associations in my mind that were unpleasant.

"Why's that better than Cauldron?" Ron asked.

He'd proven to be a boy of his word over the last month, doing his best to catch up with everyone else. The fact that we met three times a week while the dueling club met once a month meant that all of us were rising in the ranks. It was simply a matter of doing more work.

Hermione kept notes for us when we watched the matches between the other students. Spells used, tactics, mistakes made; she took notes both from me and from Potter, who was proving to have a tactical mind.

We then tried to use what we'd learned in our practice sessions. Sometimes the study group did actual studying; the older students didn't help us with that, considering it to be cheating, but we helped each other in the things we were weak in.

Still, Ron tended to be opinionated.

"There are two meanings to Crucible," I said. "First, it's a pot used to melt things at high heat. We are trying to meld all the houses into one cohesive whole. It can also mean a severe trial in which different things interact, creating something new. The American Marines cal their final test the Crucible."

"Wasn't there an American play called that," Hermione asked. "About burning witches?"

I frowned.

Well crap.

The naming had been going nowhere, but our skills were getting a lot better. I'd been fighting multiple opponents for the past month; without my bugs it usually didn't end well for me. I was getting better though, and in the meantime, they were learning group tactics.

Working together, I suspected that they might be able to take down even adult Wizards. Against someone like Flitwick or Dumbledore they'd have been meat, but that wasn't the stick they were being measured against.

Still, although the boys worked at transmuting various kinds of furniture and I'd been teaching them about the virtues of seeking cover, our biggest limitation was that we had to work in small spaces. An ideal situation would have been for us to stage war games all through the castle.

Teaching them how to hide, to snipe and then move, that was my ultimate goal, but I still hadn't found the ideal space for that. The Forbidden Forest would have been ideal, but that would have left us vulnerable to real sniping from actual Death Eaters.

The same thing could be said of the outer grounds. I wasn't about to trust whatever nebulous defenses the castle had; they seemed to be stronger in side the castle anyway.

I'd been trying to get the Weasley Twins to transmute me a treadmill, but they'd never seen one, and they thought it was some kind of weird muggle torture device. In a way they were right.

I still couldn't run around the castle, and yet I'd proven to them that endurance was important. Out fights were taking longer and longer as our defenses got better, and sometimes the difference between winning and losing was who flagged later.

It wasn't a matter of magical power; it was simply that as you tired your reaction speed tended to slow, and in Wizarding combat, speed and accuracy were everything.

"We'll figure something out," I said. "They can't all be bad."

"School's about to end," Hermione said. "It may have to wait until next year. Has Dumbledore told you who you will be staying with yet?"

I shook my head.

"He still thinks someone will try reading my mind, and he's not ready to teach me occlumency yet."

Personally I suspected that he was afraid that having my mind entirely blank to him and Snape would be a disaster.

"I've hit up Fletcher, though," I said. "And he says he can get me a book on it before the end of the semester. He's tripling the price that he's paying in Knocturn Alley, though."

"That's highway robbery!" Hermione gasped.

"That's the black market for you," I said. "He's risking his position by moving contraband, so he deserves a profit for it. The Twins have been buying things from him too."

Some of the things they'd been buying had been for me. I suspected that Fletcher was reporting everything I bought to either Snape or Dumbledore himself, and so anything that seemed more dangerous I had to get through intermediaries.

That meant that I owed the twins favors.

They'd long since given up on the idea that their training me was a favor; we'd moved past that. They were developing a reputation as duelists in the school, and apparently that had been getting them some attention from the girls. I wasn't sure they entirely knew what to do about that, but they seemed to be enjoying it, so I wasn't going to argue.

Neville was passing Snape's class, and Hermione was learning how to be a version of me. All of my associates were benefiting from our arrangement, which was a good thing.

Even Ron was doing better at dueling. He hadn't moved up in the ranks yet, but he was reaching the top of his grade. I suspected he'd have been proud of himself if he hadn't kept comparing himself to the rest of us.

Hermione was possibly the brightest witch in her year, despite all appearances. Harry seemed to be naturally gifted in combat. The twins were two years older and gifted at causing chaos. Riggs was older than any of us.

Only Neville, Millie and Tracey were on Ron's level, and he barely seemed to notice them. He only saw us, the people he compared himself to.

Other than Ron, I was the only one who was suffering socially. People had been talking about Warrington's death; I suspected that it had taken some students a while to really process it. Many of them had taken to isolating me even more than they had before. It didn't feel like bullying; it was more like they were afraid to be around me.

It didn't bother me, really. I'd been alone for much of my life, even when people were all around me. Even before Emma had turned on me, I'd been a chatterbox, but I hadn't had many close friends.

Now I had a few friends and everyone else left me alone, and that didn't bother me much. It gave me more time to study and prepare instead of spending all of my time watching my back.

I hoped to get the book on occlumency before the end of term. It was almost certain that Dumbledore was going to put me with a Wizarding family. Not only would placing me with muggles be an almost certain death sentence, but he probably wouldn't trust muggles to handle me.

If I was staying with Wizards, then I most likely would be able to use magic. The system was designed that way nominally due to the secrecy rules, but the fact that it gave pureblood kids a leg up didn't hurt any.

Studying occulmency over the summer would let me teach it to the others next year. I had a sneaking suspicion that some of the Pureblood parents were going to be teaching their children Legilimency over the summer, and we'd need to counter that.

A child spy who was able to look into the minds of other students would know what other students' parents were telling them. My spying on people's letters was a less efficient version of that. Having several agents like that in the school would be invaluable.

I'd tried to get Fletcher to get me a book on Legilimency, but he'd told me that had been specifically forbidden by Snape. It was frustrating, but I planned on trying to get some training as soon as I could.

Sometimes I wondered if there was some sort of penalty for trying too much too fast, but I hadn't heard of anything. I suspected that most kids didn't have the emotional maturity to handle the higher level spells, and they had to be taught the basic theory of magic before they tried various higher difficulty spells.

Seeing that the others were gathering in the room, I spoke up.

"Today I want to talk about the basic strategies for entering a room," I said.

They all stared at me like I had grown a second head.

"Imagine that a Death Eater had been waiting in here, planning to kill all of you," I said. "Just walking in would have gotten you killed. There are ways to make that less likely. Can anyone think of any?"

They all frowned and they were silent for almost a minute.

"A mirror?' Hermione asked finally.

I smiled and nodded.

"And if there are a group of you, moving from hallway to hallway checking for enemies, there are ways to have one person watching to help keep everyone safe as you move forward. I'm going to show these to you today."

They'd questioned my tactical knowledge at first, but I'd managed to put them off until they'd finally learned to simply accept it.

"Let's get started," I said.

"I can't believe they are putting you and Harry on the train," Hermione said.

The last month had been punctuated by increasingly vicious attacks on various Ministry officials, often in their own homes. The fact that most of these were known to be the most loyal and tenacious people in their departments hadn't been made public, but I'd learned about it from various stray comments made by Dumbledore and Snape.

Final exams had been easy for everyone. Even Ron was feeling confident, for all that he'd grumbled endlessly about having to study.

At least he'd kept up with his dueling. He'd finished as top of first year, and the rest of us had finished at the top of our respective years as well. Snape had insisted on keeping me with the fourth years, though.

"They're going to pull both of them off before the train stops, right?" Ron asked.

I was sitting in the compartment with Ron. Harry, Hermione and Neville, Millie and Tracey. Higgs and the twins were in another car, in part because there wouldn't have been room for them, and in part because the twins had their eye on a pretty pair of Ravenclaw girls. Higgs was sitting with the Slytherin Quidditch team.

I nodded.

Word had been spread that the Death Eaters had plans to kill me and Harry. The papers hadn't said anything about me at all, but they'd made a huge deal about Harry.

That had given Moody all the excuse he needed to triple the auror presence at King's crossing. Unfortunately, there was no way to find out how many of those aurors had been recruited to the other side. It was possible that this was going to end up as a bloodbath; if Voldemort had subverted two thirds of them and told them to kill the other third, this could get very ugly very quickly.

Moody had arranged for a gas explosion to seemingly happen in the station; with special charms on the exits designed to obliviate anyone who passed through them. Under the kind of heavy use they'd undoubtedly get they wouldn't last very long, but it would keep the obliviators from having to work themselves to death.

No one was yet sure whether Voldemort wanted to break the Statute of Secrecy and go to war with the muggles, or to simply rule them from the shadow. That would have seemed like a basic part of the platform to me, but it was possible that he was playing both groups off against each other.

"It still doesn't make any sense," Hermione said. "They've got people who are going to polyjuice into you... into all of us, so why have us get on the train at all?"

I suspected that the train renewed the Trace every time that we rode it, but I wasn't going to mention that to Hermione. I could be wrong after all.

"Average polyjuice potions don't last long enough," Harry said. "Or at least that's how Dumbledore explained it to me. He figures that there are kids on board who will be watching us, and telling the Death Eaters somehow."

"Probably by mirror," I said.

It wasn't like wizards were likely to be using cellular phones; I had a vague thought that they might exist in this time period, but that they were huge.

"It's an eight hour trip," Hermione said after a moment. "I guess that makes sense. They'd want people to think that we're just in here, unguarded."

"They'll apparate in once the train stops," I said.

Apparently appareling onto a moving vehicle was more disorienting than onto a stable platform. It wasn't impossible, but if they were going into combat shortly afterwards, they'd want to be at their best.

Disillusioning themselves on the train would have been the smartest thing, except that the train was packed with students; it would have been almost impossible not to be detected by someone simply bumping into them.

The whole thing made me uneasy.

I'd urged them to ambush the ambushers, but now that it was public knowledge that they were after Potter, they had to know that the aurors would be waiting. The entire thing might be a ruse to gut the aurors; if I was Voldemort, I'd have put a bomb in the station set to explode before the children arrived.

My followers would have been encouraged to show up late.

One bomb would destroy a lot of Wizarding Britain; hundreds of Wizarding parents, all of whom were in the opposing parties, and the aurors, gone in a moment.

Then I'd deny responsibility; I'd blame muggle terrorists. I'd pass new laws requiring that the orphaned children be taken in and educated by proper Wizarding families, and if I was actually against the muggleborn, well, they could disappear very easily.

There were a thousand ways this could all go wrong; the problem was that the ball was always in the attackers court. They had the element of surprise, even in a situation like this, because while we knew where they would be and when, we didn't know how they planned to attack.

Was this actually an assassination attempt on Harry?

Killing him would deal a blow to the morale of Wizarding Britain. People had built up a mythology about the Boy-Who-Lived. He'd become almost a talisman against Voldemort and his crew.

Those who'd gone to school with him knew different, but most adult Wizards worshipped him. It made Harry distinctly uncomfortable, but there was going to come a time when we needed that fame.

The Wizarding World was a sleeping giant. Most Wizards could barely defend themselves; they'd let the skills they'd learned in school atrophy, except whatever they used in their jobs.

However, I was convinced that in the same amount of time that it took to train a soldier to shoot a gun, I could train every adult wizard to become an army. It wouldn't matter how powerful Voldemort was if he faced an army of ten thousand enraged Wizards.

That was why I was worrying that he was going to go for a total kill scenario at the train station. This was the sort of operation where he ran the risk of wakening that giant. If people knew he was threatening their children, many would run away, but there were a lot who would fight. The last thing he needed was to empower his enemies, to light a fire of anger in them, or to make them brave because they were protective parents.

There was something I was missing.

The smart thing to do would be to kill Potter without hurting anyone else. That way they'd ruin the morale of the common people, but they'd claim that they had been merciful to the other children.

But killing Potter on the train station would inevitably have casualties. People would die, and most likely children would die. That ran the risk of starting the kind of war that he didn't want to start.

An uneasy feeling in my stomach, I closed my eyes and I expanded my senses outwards. It was the beginning of summer in Scotland, and the numbers of bugs had increased to the point that I had large swarms available to me.

I expanded my senses out as far as I could, looking in every direction.

It took me almost a minute; at this speed bugs kept entering and slipping out of my grasp almost before I could use their senses.

However, I tensed as I saw shadows from above. The insects had a natural fear response; usually something like that was a predator bug, but these were moving too quickly to be birds.

I'd been a fool, assuming that he'd attack the train station.

The train station was well protected and so was Hogwarts. Terrorists rarely attacked hard targets; they preferred to go after soft, easily attacked targets.

The Hogwarts Express was worse than defenseless; there were a certain number of people already on the train who would be happy in taking it over, especially if their parents told them to.

"They're going to attack the train," I said suddenly.