"Do you really believe that what you are doing is right?" Tonks asked.

We were standing out in the hallway, and most of the others were dispersing quickly. The auror hadn't seen the Room of Requirement or how to enter it, and that was the most important thing. Still, I was unhappy that she'd managed to get as close as she had, and we were going to have to work on some different procedures in the future.

"Advocating for muggleborn rights?" I asked mildly. "I'd think that wouldn't even require an answer."

Officially we were just a student group just like any other. I wasn't sure how much stock in it people gave, but as long as the fiction kept the administration off our backs I didn't care.

"I've spent much of the last year training with the aurors," she said. "There's a way that dangerous people move, and now I'm seeing it everywhere that I look in this school. Curiously, it's only the muggleborn students."

She was a little more perceptive than the others; I doubted that the other aurors had even noticed. Of course, my information suggested that Umbridge had made sure not to send the cream of the crop to guard the school. It was considered scut work by the aurors, and the better aurors were out looking for werewolves and Death Eaters.

"Well, that's a little racist," I said.

She stared at me. "What?"

"Saying that muggleborn move like predators... are you sure that you aren't projecting your own insecurities on us?"

"No!" she said. "And you know what I mean."

"Maybe people are just copying me," I said. "I seem to have become a lot more popular since your Ministry tried to exterminate us."

She flushed. "That was a mistake."

"You're naive if you think that it wasn't deliberate," I said. I tilted my head and I looked at her. "My only question is whether you agree with your leader's agenda or not."

She frowned and then leaned forward.

"Let's say you are right," she said. "What do you think someone like that would do if she thought that a rebellion was brewing in this school?"

"She'd come in with jackbooted thugs and try to restore order," I said. "Throw the leaders into Azkaban, maybe have a few of them accidentally Kissed."

"You know that and you still..." she asked.

"She tried to murder every one of us," I said. "And she's going to keep doing it until someone stops her."

"Are you threatening the Minister for Magic?" she asked disbelievingly.

I shook my head. "Hopefully that will be when she's voted out of office, in which case we just have to stay alive until then."

"And if that doesn't happen?" she asked, watching me closely.

I shrugged.

"We'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it. My job is to keep these kids alive. I'd have thought that you'd have been happy with anything that furthers that... unless you see your job as something else."

"I uphold the law," she said.

"They rushed your training, didn't they," I asked. "It's normally three years and they pushed you out into the field in one. Why is that, do you think?"

"The Ministry needs aurors," she said stiffly.

"They've been dropping like flies," I said. "And the ones who are left aren't exactly people you can trust. They've put you in a job you are barely qualified for, because they think that you can be trusted. Can you?"

"Can I what?" she asked.

"Be trusted to follow the Ministry line?" I said. "Even if they tell you to line us up against a wall and murder every last one of us? You know half the kids here; do they really look like revolutionaries to you?"

"If they aren't why are there a half dozen of them hiding in the shadows watching us?" she asked.

She'd missed half of them, which I was pleased about. It meant that my training wasn't entirely in vain. Letting some of them be seen would sometimes make the mark overconfident.

"There's been attempts on my life on multiple occasions since I've been here," I said. "My friends worry."

"Right..." she said, her tone disbelieving.

"Let me turn the question around," I said. "Are you sure that you are the one who's doing what's right? Working for a Ministry that would happily murder children in the interest of expediency?"

"That was an accident," she said, although her voice didn't sound completely sure.

"Ask the dementors," I said. "You've got the authority. Find out who ordered them to kill us. Maybe then you'll have something I'm willing to listen to."

With any luck she'd ask while on Hogwarts property and I'd hear the answer as soon as she asked the question.

"But be careful," I said. "If your bosses find out that you are asking questions... well, if they're willing to kill kids, then a full grown adult would be nothing to them."

She stared at me, and she looked a little pale.

"You aren't a child," she said.

I shrugged.

"I'd think that I'm the perfect child," I said. I smiled at her, but it didn't reach my eyes. "Children are willing to do things that adults would never believe them capable of. The morals aren't fully set yet, you see."

"Even if I were to find out something incriminating," Tonks said in a low voice, "You've already explained why I couldn't do anything about it."

"You could tell Moody," I said casually. "And he could tell Dumbledore."

She stiffened and stared at me.

"I'm a seer," I said, lying through my teeth. I hadn't been sure until I'd seen her reaction, but it had been an educated stab in the dark. Her profile didn't fit with that of the other aurors here. They were washed up has beens, incompetent clods, or people whose careers had stalled and were entering a death spiral.

She was considered bright and an up and comer. She didn't fit, and with her mutation she'd have been perfect for undercover work. She was exactly the kind of auror who would be wasted here unless she'd been put here for some other reason.

I couldn't be certain, but I suspected that Moody reported directly to Dumbledore, and his people reported directly to Moody. That was why they'd been so successful against the Death Eaters last year, because the leaks in the department were somewhere higher in the chain.

"I don't know what you mean," she said stiffly, but she looked around to see if anyone else had heard. There were no paintings here, and everyone else including Hermione were out of earshot.

"What do you think he could do?" she asked finally in a low voice. "He's struggling as it is to keep the Muggle Protection Bill from passing."

"He never should have let Umbridge in office in the first place," I said. "An actual Death Eater would have been more competent and more circumspect, and would have been easier to remove politically."

"I'm here to discover the truth," she said after a long moment. "Whatever it may be."

"If that's true, you'll find that you have a lot of friends here," I said. I glanced over at the visible students and gave a quick nod of my head. They began vanishing into the scenery.

She started as disillusioned students began appearing all around her. I was watching in case she had an unfortunate reaction, but she managed to restrain herself.

"On the other hand," I said... " We at the Muggleborn Against Discrimination take it very poorly when people try to threaten us."

"Are you trying to threaten ME?" she asked incredulously.

I shook my head.

"I'd never threaten a duly appointed officer of the law," I said. "I'm just saying that it's the right of every Wizard to defend themselves and their families. It's just that my definition of family is a little larger than that of most purebloods."

If she'd been a Ministry stooge I'd have never bothered giving her a warning. As Dumbledore's agent, she deserved a little courtesy.

Dumbledore was apparently better at politics than he was as a headmaster. He was the one who'd almost singlehandedly kept the Muggle Protection Act stalled, and I'd heard rumors that he was involved in secret activities with the aurors. I had a suspicion I knew what that was.

At the very least he was useful in that he drew attention away from us. The Death Eaters undoubtedly considered him Enemy Number One, which took some of the pressure off me and allowed me to concentrate on training my people.

We weren't ready yet for a skirmish, much less a war. But eventually we would be.

Hogwarts was one of the most defensible positions in all of Wizarding Britain, and I had a team working on a defense plan. They were learning as much as they could about the castle defenses. I'd had Fletcher bring us books on strategy and tactics, supposedly for a game that was becoming popular among the muggleborn.

We'd even set up tabletops with Wizarding chess figures charmed to do battle without the chess board. The fact that the tabletops looked just like Hogwarts hadn't seemed to occur to anyone, and there was a faction of muggleborn who had even grown enthusiastic about our fake strategy game.

I'd based the rules on vague memories of a game Greg Vedar had prattled on about. I'd been only half listening, so we'd had to fill in the gaps ourselves. I was satisfied that we'd done a pretty good job though.

Seeing the battlefield from above was something I could do with my skills, but I was teaching the others to think strategically, and not just tactically.

It was also a good way to disguise any strategy discussions; we'd cloak them in the guise of being a silly geekish game.

Weirdly, we'd had requests from some Ravenclaws to join in. They wanted to be seen as the smartest kids in the room so strongly that they had to join in. Some of them had even come up with strategies that hadn't occurred to the rest of us.

We had scenarios in other places too; Diagon Alley, the Ministry, the houses of people that were suspiciously similar to those of certain Death Eaters.

I'd used my connections to find out as much as I could about those households, and we'd run scenarios in the room of requirement, with teams acting both as guards and as infiltrators. We'd play through the scenarios on the board first, and then in the room if we thought we had a winning strategy. Sometimes we were surprised by things that hadn't appeared on the board; other times things went swimmingly well.

The game was getting more and more popular among the students; I'd planned on it being an esoteric game that no one would pay attention to, but we were getting more and more spectators all the time. It was the novelty of it, I suppose. Wizards seemed starved for entertainment, given their lack of mass media. There were only so many games of exploding snap you could play, after all.

I'd seen Rowle wandering through the gaming rooms, looking over people's shoulders. He never complained, although he sometimes looked thoughtful. Snape hadn't seemed interested, but Flitwick had been enthusiastic, suggesting the idea of gaming leagues.

I'd have objected, but cloaking training in the guise of play actually tended to motivate children better than almost anything else; if they approached this with half the fanaticism they did Quidditch, we'd be an unbeatable army in the space of two or three years.

Even better, despite what I had told my people, I knew that we were going to need the help of at least some of the half-bloods before everything was over and done. I'd have to be very careful in evaluating who to let in, and at least this fostered a sense of camaraderie between them and my people.

Ideally, I'd have had some seventh years entering the aurors next year, but I had a strange feeling that this administration had no plans to hire mudbloods. That meant that I need to suborn some halfbloods and then work to get them into positions where they'd be able to help the rest of us.

The Ministry was already riddled with Death Eaters and presumably with Dumbledore's people; why shouldn't I have my own pieces in place?

The most frustrating thing was that some of my plans were going to take years, and part of me was afraid that we wouldn't have that long. The Wizarding World was in a state of cold war at the moment, but it was like a zit that was pulsating and ready to explode, sending infected pus everywhere. All it would take was the slightest pressure in the right place, and everything would be terrible.

Most muggle revolutionary groups were utterly dependent on money; money was needed for ammunition, for food and shelter and training facilities. That wouldn't be as true for us, except for the Trace. A competent Wizard could supply himself with everything he needed, with the exception of food, and that we could steal from the muggle world and then duplicate it. But the Trace was going to be the one thing that kept us from being a viable fighting force.

The only solution, of course, was to get rid of it. I'd been trying to find out as much information about it as I could about the Ministry department that ran the Trace, and about the mechanism that it used to keep track of all the children.

Hopefully the spell had some sort of physical focus; if it did, I'd simply have to either steal it, or destroy it. That would involve a raid on the Ministry itself, which was part of the reason we were running all these scenarios.

The Ministry table games were not open to the public; the last thing I needed was for a curious Ravenclaw to ask the wrong questions.

"Running a student organization and a gaming league," Tonks said, almost as though she was reading my mind. "You are staying busy these days."

"The gaming thing isn't mine," I said. "I play sometimes, but I don't have a lot of time for games these days."

"Oh?" she asked casually. "What are you spending your time doing?"

"Plotting the overthrow of the Wizarding world?" I said.

She stared at me, and I grinned.

"I've got school and friends," I said. "All the rumors about me being some kind of boggart queen are total exaggerations. I'm a totally normal kid."

"Right..." she said. I could tell that she didn't believe me.

"Ask any of my friends," I said. I gestured for Hermione to come over.

"Hermione, wouldn't you say that I'm a totally normal kid?"

"Well," she said slowly, then glanced at me. "Uh... normal... totally normal."

"See?" I said. "And Hermione should know. She's totally normal too."

Tonks stared at me like I'd grown a second head.

"I remember what it was like to be a second year, and I'm not sure you even know what normal is."

"Normal is trying to protect the people you care about," I said firmly. "It's standing up against people who would try to hurt you and fighting for what you believe in."

"That's not normal at all!" Tonks said.

"And that's the problem," I said. "If the adults would stand up for what's right, we could just play exploding snap and go about our day learning to turn turtles into teacups or whatever."

"I'm just worried that you are going to get these kids into something they aren't ready for," she said. "If kids fight, kids are going to die."

"And what happens if they don't?" I asked. "Even more of them would die."

She shook her head.

"Personally, I wish that aurors were teaching us defense," I said "And that they were actually teaching us how to defend ourselves."

She stared at me silently.

"But as long as the adults plan to leave us to our own devices, we're sitting ducks here," I said. "The Death Eaters and the Ministry know exactly where we are, and the Ministry knows how to side step the school;s defenses."

I let that sit in her mind.

I doubted that I'd accomplish anything today, but the Ministry had made a mistake sending an auror who was so recently a graduate. She knew too many of these kids, which meant that she was likely to be sympathetic to us.

It was possible that Dumbledore had meant for this to happen when he'd had Moody send her to us. He'd always been sympathetic to our cause, in a patronizing way, and he probably saw this as a way to keep a spy in the school. If I could subvert her, I might be able to get a spy in both Dumbledore's camp and in the Ministry.

"I've got to get to class," I said. "But I'd be perfectly happy to talk to you again."

The first step in Radicalizing someone was to take them away from their normal environment. The longer she was at school, the more her loyalties would begin to switch back.

It was only a matter of time until I had her, and through her, I'd have a foothold in the Ministry.