"The muggleborn are evil," the man on the radio said. "Most people just aren't willing to come out and say it."
The muggleborn were all around me, listening to the radio. We'd known this broadcast was coming, but we'd wanted to judge how bad it was for ourselves.
"How can you say that?" the host asked. I'd listened to him before, and he was blandly pleasant, but he wasn't exactly known for asking the hard hitting questions. "Aren't they just our brethren? We've gone to school with them. Some of us have married them. You can't just make a blanket statement..."
"Look at the statistics, Harold," the other man said. "The muggleborn are only twenty percent of our population, but they commit eighty percent of our crimes."
I was willing to bet that a large part of that was because the muggleborn were targeted. The purebloods probably made deals behind the scenes that kept their precious children out of the crime listings. Without connections, the muggleborn went straight to jail.
"They make up more than half of those incarcerated in Azkaban," the man said. "And they commit the majority of the Misuse of Magical objects violations; these are serious issues that endanger us all. But ultimately that's what they intend."
The purebloods probably didn't even know what muggle items did; of course the muggleborn and halfbloods had more of that type of interactions.
"What?" the host asked.
"The Muggleborn agenda is to have us reveal ourselves to the muggles and to subjugate ourselves to them. They'd tear down everything we've tried to build, and they'd bring every Wizard down to live like animals, to live like muggles."
"You think muggles live like animals?" the host asked.
"They spread across the world like an infestation," the man said. "Breeding to the point that they do not have enough food to feed their children. Then you know what they do?"
"What?" the host asked. He sounded suspicious.
"They breed some more! Then they start fighting among themselves. Muggles are murderers who destroy entire peoples...in the Muggle Second Great War, eighty five million of them perished, and it wasn't a drop in the bucket compared to their numbers. In the last century they have killed over a hundred and twenty three million of themselves. I can only applaud their initiative, and I would hope for them to get even more efficient in murdering each other if it weren't for the fact that sometimes good, honest Wizards are caught up in their wars."
"There have been some deaths," the announcer said cautiously.
"And what do you think will happen if they learn about us? They will attack us with bombs and firelegs, with everything they have because ultimately they are unable to face the fact that we have souls and they do not."
"That hasn't been established," the announcer said faintly.
"They do not produce ghosts," the man said. "What more proof do you want? Once a muggle dies, that is it, but a Wizard lives on. We have proof that they are nothing more than smart apes, and the thought of the vast nothingness that awaits them will infuriate them. Muggles can't stand to see others having more than themselves."
"Surely you can't think that the muggles could defeat Wizards?" the announcer asked, incredulous.
"Even ants can kill a muggle if there are enough of them. There are six thousand muggles for every Wizard, and while most of them are idiots, there are occasional muggles with a low, animal form of cunning."
I wondered for a moment if he was talking about me. I was famous enough now that he might have been.
"We were talking about the muggleborn, though," the announcer said hastily. "There are those who say that they are essential for the survival of Wizardkind. The dangers of inbreeding alone..."
"Inbreeding?" the man interrupted. "You're talking about that discredited muggle science claptrap."
"You don't believe in the science of breeding?" the announcer said, sounding surprised. "Haven't you ever bred dogs or maybe nibblers?"
"Wizards aren't dogs!" the man snapped. "The only way to keep our species strong is to keep it pure. Diluting our blood with muggle filth will only lead to more Squibs. Back in my day, families knew how to deal with squibs."
I heard a slight gasp from behind me. The older students knew what the man was talking about, even if the younger ones looked confused.
There had been a time when Squibs were simply... disposed of. Not all of them had been sent out into the muggle world. Some had simply found their way into an unmarked grave.
If it had been up to me, I'd have used Squibs as spies into the muggle world. Put them in the military, in coroner's offices, in positions that real wizards would feel were too demeaning, but that would be a step up from where the squibs were now. I'd have then given them an honored place in Wizard society to keep their loyalty.
It was almost as though the Wizards were trying to get groups to revolt.
I saw a third year whispering in a first year's ear. The first year looked like he wanted to cry.
Turning the radio down, Hermione scowled.
"They played this interview yesterday...they go on like this for the next thirty minutes. They won't even admit that the radio came from the muggles, and now they're using tape?"
"They're probably stupid enough just to go over the whole thing again line by line."
"I've got a transcript of the rest of it if anybody wants to hear it," Hermione said. "It's even more disgusting than this was."
Everyone was looking at me expectantly.
"What do you want me to do about it?" I asked. "I'm not exactly in a position to get rid of some Ministry stooge."
"You think he works for the Ministry?" Hermione asked.
"You don't think it's convenient that they're trying to drum up hatred toward the muggleborn just as Umbridge's muggleborn protection law is stagnating in the Wizengamot?" Harry asked.
For all that he hadn't done well as a First Year, he wasn't stupid.
"Wouldn't that just make more families unwilling to take us in?" she asked.
She'd been really upset when she'd first heard about the law; she felt that her family would rather move to Australia than have her taken from them. I had advised caution.
The Minister wasn't a King. She had to get support from the Ministry, and at least for the moment she didn't have the votes.
Harry had wondered if he could get himself reclassified as a muggleborn. Apparently his family life wasn't happy. He'd likely have been happier in an orphanage than at home. Unfortunately, that wasn't true of most of the muggleborn. They loved their families, and the thought of being separated from them wasn't just painful, it was terrifying.
"It doesn't matter if the law works," I said. "It just has to look like it's working. They'd be happy to shove us all into an orphanage somewhere, with signs leading the Death Eaters right to us."
"So what can we do?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said. "Killing Umbridge wouldn't necessarily kill the bill, not unless we were sure of who her successor would be. The fact is, nobody knows."
It was one of the things that was keeping me from going after her myself; the possibility that whoever came after her would be far worse. She was at least not in the Death Eater's pockets, even if her policies were favorable to them.
Six weeks ago they would have been horrified at my causal mention of killing the Minister for Magic. Now, nobody around me gasped or even looked surprised. Some of them even looked a little disappointed. A lot of kids had taken the proposed law very personally, and I suspected that if Umbridge were to meet some of them in a dark alley, it wouldn't go well for her, especially know that I'd been training them.
"Also, if we tried and failed, or even if we succeeded and were caught... how much would the Ministry blame us and punish muggleborn who never even thought about going against them. You think it's bad now?"
"So it's hopeless?" I heard a boy ask from the back of the room.
I shook my head.
"We've got to watch for our opportunity and then do whatever is best for us. Nobody else is watching out for us and so we have to do what's best for each other. That may mean sitting this out while the Ministry and Death Eaters destroy each other, and then killing whoever is left. It may mean stepping in before that."
There had been a time weeks ago that this kind of talk would have shocked them, horrified them even. But I'd been working on them a little at a time, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable just over the line often enough that this became the new normal. Then I'd pushed the line even farther.
It wasn't brainwashing like the Slaughterhouse had used; that had required constant exposure to horrors that would break a man's mind.
I'd just been running them through scenarios that were disturbing while convincing them that this was what the Ministry and Death Eaters had planned for them.
Sometimes I wondered if what I was doing was alright, but I didn't do it very often. Putting them in stressful situations together would improve unit cohesiveness. It would save lives. The fact that it tended to isolate them from the other students wasn't really my concern, not when lives were on the line.
Listening to broadcasts like this had only made my job easier.
They had to believe that I was going to improve their lives. They had to believe that not joining me was going to make their lives measurably worse.
The first dementor attack had established that without my having to do any work at all.
The deaths of the ones who had tried to leave had cemented the idea that they were alone and helpless. I was just giving them a way to take control over their lives, to feel less afraid.
The fact that I actually intended this to improve their lives was irrelevant.
"This only proves what I've been telling you," I said. "We can't trust the purebloods, not the adults at least. We can trust some of the halfbloods, but knowing who to trust is hard to tell, unless you are Harry Potter."
Everybody chuckled.
"All we've got is each other," I said. "And we have to keep our eyes on the long term goal. They claim that we want to burn down the old order and create something new... are they right?"
"Pretty much?" Neville asked timidly.
"We won't stop until every Wizard has equal rights," I said firmly. "Until they leave us in peace. We aren't against the purebloods, or the halfbloods. We just want what's ours by right. If that means access to computers and telephones, who's going to tell us no?"
I had other plans, but they weren't ready for those yet.
"This is what we're up against," I said. "Why I've been teaching you tactics all this time. Against a trained auror or Death Eater, we don't have a chance, not one on one. As a group, it's possible that we might be able to bring him down."
They'd seen how that worked when I'd had a group of second years take on a sixth year. It hadn't been pretty, but the older boy had eventually gone down.
"Has anyone learned the anti-apparition jinxes?" I asked.
Several of the older students nodded. They were beyond my current level of understanding, but we needed the ability to trap Wizards if we were to ambush them.
I had a team of sixth years working on writing up a book of curses and jinxes to be used in warfare. My contribution was to be muggle tactics. It would be our version of the anarchist's cookbook.
"We've sat around long enough," I said. "Let's get back to work."
"I think the Headmaster approves of us," Hermione said as we left the Room. "He's got to know that we're involved in something, but he hasn't investigated at all."
"We've cut down on discipline problems," I said. "Which means less of a headache for him. He doesn't want to know."
The muggleborn had been walking with a lot more confidence since I'd started training them. They'd taken my anti-bullying message to heart, and they'd started to speak out against it wherever they found it...not in the presence of teachers but on their own.
The other students had learned that trying to bully a single muggleborn meant facing upwards of a dozen, and so they'd stopped even trying.
The fact that I was their leader was an open secret around the school, and I'd been getting looks from the students who weren't in my group.
I doubted that Tom Riddle's group had been anywhere nearly as large as mine when he was in school; of course, the Ministry had practically thrown them in my lap, and I was never one to turn down an opportunity.
"I've got the reports on the new aurors at school," Hermione said.
I'd been developing quite the intelligence network. Having the muggleborn students asking classmates might seem to be primitive, but we didn't have the kind of family connections that the pure and halfbloods did. We had to take whatever information we could get. They'd also taken to casually asking vendors at Hogsmeade, professors and anyone else they could corner, including the aurors themselves.
I glanced at the papers.
As usual, Hermione had annotated the sources for the information at the bottom of the paper. That way, if we got bad information, we could figure out who was responsible, and we could begin to work out whether it had been an accident, or if it was the result of malice.
"She's a metamorphmagus?" I asked.
"She's barely out of school," Hermione said. "Some of the students knew her from last year, which is why her file is thicker than some of the others."
"Hmm.." I said, reading halfway down the page. "That's embarrassing."
Hermione flushed. "She was a bit of a wild child."
Maybe it was something we could use, but the impression I got was that this Tonks wasn't easily embarrassed. I'd seen her around, but she hadn't approached me yet, even though she always seemed to be watching me.
"And the others?" I asked.
"Some of them are Ministry plants," Hermione said. "They aren't here to help us; more to gather dirt on us to use to help Umbridge's campaign."
I didn't have to ask how she knew that; the aurors had rooms in the castle, and we'd run an operation where our best stealthy students had gone through their rooms while the rest of us had worked at distracting them. I'd supervised both ends at the same time.
I'd already had the information through my bugs, but it had been real world practice, and a way to bring some of them further into the fold. They'd committed an actual crime now, and it was human nature to feel that you were committed once something like that happened.
They'd used Colin Creevy's camera to take pictures of the documents in question, and they'd barely gotten out undetected. The excitement of their first real operation had buoyed them up for a week.
"How's morale?" I asked.
Again, I knew, but I wanted to make sure that Hermione had a grasp on it. In a war like this, no single person could be irreplaceable, not even me. It was entirely possible that I might die, and I wanted these kids to have a chance to make it on their own if I was no longer around.
"It was low after Umbridge's announcement," Hermione said. "But people are feeling better about things now. They have confidence in you and they believe in what we're doing."
The youngest of the aurors stepped out from behind a suit of armor.
"And what exactly are you doing?" she asked.
I'd known she was there, of course; she'd been trying to follow the students to the Room of Requirement for the last three weeks. I had teams whose whole purpose was to frustrate her in her attempts to do so. She'd been getting closer and closer.
"Study group," Hermione said smoothly. "We're trying to prove that the muggleborn aren't as helpless as the Ministry likes to think."
That was the official reason that we all met. I'd taken Nape's advice to heart, and I'd officially registered us as a school group with Rowle. Officially we were the Muggleborn Against Discrimination .
Harry had liked the acronym, and it was scads better than what I and Hermione had come up with.
Somehow Muggleborn Under Discrimination Being Loud Out Of Desperation hadn't gotten out of committee. The older students had thought that M.U.D.B.L.O.O.D. Would have been somewhat offensive. Simply being M.A.D., had been thought to be the better alternative.
"That's a ...revolutionary idea," Tonks said. She looked at me. "People are saying you are the person to ask if there are any questions about what's going on in the school."
I looked at her, then shrugged.
"What do you want to know?"