"It makes sense really," I said. "Remember what happened to the kids that tried to go home?"

Hermione was upset. Apparently she'd been looking forwards to going home with her parents for Christmas.

"They can't do this!" she said.

"They say it's for our protection, and for the first time, I think I kind of agree with them."

"What?" she stared at me disbelievingly.

"The Death Eaters know where our families are," I said. "And they don't seem to care enough about muggles to bother with them unless we are there. This keeps your parents safe too."

She scowled.

"They're just trying to get us used to it in case the bill passes," she said.

"That's probably true," I said. "But this way we'll have more time to get ready."

"You don't think there will be another attack?" she asked, suddenly concerned.

"A castle filled with mudbloods and free of almost all of the important kids?" I said. "They're going to attack and they'll blame it on the Death Eaters. The only thing I'm not sure of is how they're going to get rid of the staff and the aurors. They have to make it look like they weren't involved."

"They'll use the dementors again, won't they," Hermione said.

I nodded.

"Most of us can't cast a patronus charm to save our life," Hermione said. "And those who can barely manage it probably won't be able to do it when they face real dementors."

"I want you to get a list of all those who have the strongest patronuses," I said. "Everyone else is to stay near one of them at all times over the holidays. It'll be inconvenient, but better than having your soul removed."

"I'll get right on it," she said.

I'd been working on a conventional light patronus for weeks, but I still wasn't able to create even a single wisp of silvery light.

Sometimes I wondered if it reflected some kind of fundamental flaw in me, that I was unable to call up a single happy memory without pairing it with something bad. In that respect, someone like Neville, innocent as he was was having a much easier time.

I'd been working on some plans to defeat them, although I couldn't be sure how they'd work until I tried them, and if I was wrong the results would be disastrous.

Still, I wouldn't have any choice but to try if the attack happened like I expected.

"We'll need to work out different sleeping arrangements over the holidays too," I said. "I wouldn't put it past the Ministry to have the dementors attack when we are asleep. If we are in our own rooms, that would mean that some kids who can't create patronuses will be left to their own devices."

"Maybe we should all sleep in our common rooms?" Hermione suggested.

"Possibly," I said. "I still don't like the fact that we'll be separated by House. It splits our forces in a way that's unacceptable."

"Well, I don't see what else we could do, unless we all sleep in the Room," she said. "And I doubt that the Professors would agree to that."

"We'll table it for the moment," I said. "But let's keep looking for solutions. If we can get at least one of the professors to believe us, then they might agree to something a little more creative."

The Room would be ideal; if could be locked from the inside, and I doubted that the dementors would be able to find us. However, it would raise alarms with the professors, and it would be likely the end of our using the room once it was discovered.

"Maybe the Great Hall," I said. "Convince them that we're looking for a slumber party or something. That would keep us where we could all fight."

If the attack happened, I'd have to figure out an appropriate counter-response. Simply allowing ourselves to be attacked until we all died off from attrition wasn't acceptable. I didn't say anything to Hermione, because I suspected she'd be distressed by what I planned to do.

She was a lot more ruthless than I would have thought when I'd first met her, but she still had some moral reservations about the things that we did.

"How have the experiments in forging the Dark Mark gone?" I asked.

"They're almost ready," Hermione said. "It's been a little harder than we thought at first, requiring some tricky spell work, but I think that as long as nobody looks at the wands they'll have no idea that it's not the real spell."

We had some seventh years working on it, and they'd done some excellent work. It was a sign of the trust the others had in me that no one asked why I needed it. I hadn't told them either.

Being able to commit atrocities and then blame it on an enemy was going to be very useful in the long run. I might not have to use it at all, but I'd rather have a weapon I didn't have to use than not have a weapon I needed.

"Have the others been making the purchases I asked for?"

Hermione nodded.

"We've had some success in buying Peruvian Darkness Powder through OWL order. Mr. Fletcher has been helpful in getting some of the other items, especially the ones too large to be transported by OWL."

By splitting the orders up among more than a dozen buyers, I was hopefully keeping people from seeing the patterns in what was being purchased. The orders had been sprinkled in among more conventional contraband being bought; muggle magazines, hair care products and the like.

Fortunately, the others had been willing to lend their money toward the endeavor. The money I had from selling Millie's parent's jewelry was a lot for a first year, but it wasn't anything when it came to the needs of an organization.

We needed a way to make money, and I wasn't quite sure how we were going to fund things. It wasn't like Brockton Bay, where you could always raid a Merchant Safe-house and steal a few thousand dollars in drug money, or raid and Empire 88 base for weapons and equipment.

Even if I knew where the British equivalent of the criminal gangs were, the Trace would reveal us before we got very far. Our number of Seventh year members was limited; they might be able to take the risk, but I hated the idea of them being shot for a few British pounds.

A better idea would be to have our enemies fund our organization. Raiding Death Eater houses and robbing them appealed to me, but we weren't to the point where we could even contemplate such a thing.

If it weren't for the Trace there would be all sorts of ways to make money. I'd heard from Lupin, and he'd managed to put my car repair scam to work, buying totaled cars and repairing them, then selling them to muggles for a large profit. He'd already made enough money to buy himself a house if he wanted, although he was apparently busy in France trying to drum up foreign support for Dumbledore.

"Take care of all of it," I said. "We want to be ready for when it happens."

"How will we know?" she asked. "When it will happen I mean?"

"They'll start pulling aurors away," I said. "Most of the aurors here are ineffectual, but they'd never let children be attacked. My guess is that they'll send a lot of them home for the holidays under the guise of there being less children to protect. The ones who are left will be called away on one pretext or another; maybe a distraction on one end of the castle."

It was what I would do, if I was determined to wipe out an entire generation of students without being blamed for it.

"They'll blame the Death Eaters for it if it happens," I said. "And they'll use it as an excuse to say that it's too dangerous for the Muggleborn to go to Hogwarts. They'll try to send us away, either to an orphanage, or out of the country."

"Maybe that would be for the best?" Hermione asked. "Leaving until this is all over?"

"There will be more muggleborn coming to Hogwarts next year," I said. "And the year after that. Are we going to leave them to be slaughtered, either by the Ministry of by the Death Eaters?"

She shook her head.

"This won't be over until all of us are safe to live our lives," I said. "And even if we leave, what guarantee do we have that it won't follow us? Do you think the Death Eaters will be content with just Britain? I wouldn't be. I'd be trying to expand a little at a time, just slowly enough not to alert the larger Wizarding World until it was too late."

"They say that he's trying to become immortal," Hermione said. "Which is why he chose his name."

"If he lives long enough, he might be able to take over the entire world," I said. "Which mean that no place will be safe."

I was being a little disingenuous with her.

I doubted that Voldemort was competent enough to be a worldwide threat. Even Grindelwald hadn't been all that successful, and he'd been a lot more competent.

Still, there was always the possibility that he was smarter than I was giving credit for. He still had access to a seer of unknown ability, and he'd been modestly clever in trying to infiltrate the Ministry.

Hermione nodded, then said, "I'll get right on it."

"I'm going to talk to Lockhart," I said. "Hopefully he has some advice."

She looked at me incredulously.

By now, it was clear to everyone except a few of the most infatuated girls that Lockhart wasn't nearly as competent as Travers had been. Some people wondered if he was even as competent as a sixth year.

"He's pants as a Wizard," I said. "But he's great at public relations. We've got a public image problem, and hopefully he might be able to give me a few ideas about how to deal with it."

She frowned, then nodded.

If she'd met Glenn Chambers, she'd have understood just how important public perception could be. Killing people and destroying tings could only take you so far; the only way to truly win a war was to either get the support of the people, or to simply kill everyone and burn the earth.

I was hoping to avoid that second option, which meant that I needed all the advice I could get.

I left Hermione and made my way up to Lockhart's office.

"Professor Lockhart?" I called out.

"Miss Hebert," he said. He looked a little nervous. He always had since that first day when I'd been overly enthusiastic in disposing of the pixies.

I stepped into his office and I sat down.

"I need some advice," I said.

He relaxed a little and sat down himself.

"How can I help you, my dear?"

"You've heard about how the Ministry is painting the muggleborn as terrorists," I said. "Making people think that we are all out to kill everyone."

He looked strangely uncomfortable for a moment before composing himself. "It's a pity, yes?"

"I was wondering how we fight that? We've got the Quibbler on our side working full time, but it doesn't seem to be moving the needle much."

He frowned.

"It's a troubling question. I could tell you how to improve your own, personal reputation, but improving the reputation of an entire group of people... that would be a challenge, especially considering your limited resources."

"Any help that you could offer would be appreciated," I said.

"Well, you have access to a public paper," he said. "Which is a good start. You don't want articles that are obviously pro-muggleborn; people will see through that and will discount it. You need to be more subtle than that."

"Oh?"

"People believe authority figures," he said. "Which is part of your problem. When the Ministry has people like the Minister saying that muggleborn are dangerous, it's hard to have someone of similar authority saying that she's wrong."

"I'm not even sure the whole muggleborn resistance thing is real," I said. "I think the Ministry is making it all up."

"It doesn't matter," he said. "All that matters is what people believe. If a false terrorist group scares people into pushing legislation through, does it matter that they aren't real?"

"So how do you fight that?' I asked.

"Get people's emotions involved," he said. "People aren't impressed by numbers; they can't really care about more than a hundred or two hundred people. Tell them that a thousand African Wizards got killed by a Nundu, and they'll shrug their shoulders. Make them care about one child, and they'll get all up in arms."

He was right.

It was why all those animal welfare ads on television showed pictures of dogs in cages, why people sent millions of dollars to charities that showed a single suffering child.

I needed a child who was photogenic, one who'd been harmed by the Ministry or the Death Eaters, a muggleborn poster child.

That couldn't be me; I already had too much baggage. I needed someone who had lost their family, someone preferably who was good looking with big eyes and a terrible sob story. I needed to make the Wizarding parents see their own child in that muggleborn kid, and I needed a story that would incite the people.

"The Ministry is trying to tell people that the muggleborn are different, that they are the other. You have to remind them of how similar they are," he said. "Make people think of them as the people next door."

I nodded.

"Ultimately, it's not your responsibility, though," he said. "It's not as though you are the representative for your entire race."

Were the muggleborn a race? I wasn't sure of that.

"I've heard an interesting theory," he said. "That the muggleborn are all descended from Squibs who intermarried with the muggles. If that is true, then the muggleborn are actually just as related to everyone as the rest of us are."

It would make sense. Whatever mutation had created the ability to do magic, it had probably arisen in a single person and then spread throughout the population.

"How would we prove something like that?" I asked.

"Trace people's ancestries," he said. "if you can find even a handful of muggleborn who are related to squibs, you might be able to make people question if it is true. If they came to believe that the muggleborn were like everyone else..."

It wouldn't even have to be true.

All it would have to do would be strong enough to pass casual scrutiny. Wizards tended to be gullible, a product of depending on a state sponsored newspapers and not having competing media. They'd never learned critical thinking, in part because magic made so much of life easy.

I'd read that life as a hunter gatherer had been relatively easy, with people working an average of four hours a day to provide everything they needed in life. Human history had gone on like that for hundreds of thousands of years, and the pace of innovation had been incredibly slow.

Why innovate when you had everything you needed?

Life as a farmer was much harder, and human innovation had sped up considerably once people had to work long and horrible hours. Better communication had sped things up; the printing press had led to an explosion of creativity and innovation, and the Internet even more.

Wizards had stagnated in part because they had things too easy. The average Wizard didn't have to work much to keep food on the table. If he wanted, he could simply steal muggle food and expand it over and over until he got tired of it.

Without the Trace, the only reason a Wizard would need money was for things that were made by other Wizards. It boggled my mind that they even had an economy.

Muggles had had to work harder, and that meant that they'd had to work smarter. More importantly, numbers mattered.

There was a reason that rural high schools with few students didn't have the same caliber as large schools with three thousand students.

Truly exceptional people were rare. If one in ten thousand people was a genius, and you only had a population of ten thousand, you weren't going to be able to compete with the geniuses in a population of ten million.

The entire population of Wizarding Britain would have fit in a very small town. They simply didn't have the numbers to have the kind of exceptional people the muggle world had.

"You've been very helpful, Mr. Lockhart," I said, rising to my feet.

"I'm always happy to help my... most enthusiastic student," he said.

His smile looked a little strained. He always looked a little uncomfortable around me; I wasn't sure why. However, he actually had been helpful and so I was willing to overlook it.

Now it was time to get to work.