Hogsmeade was only a mile from the outskirts of Hogwarts; it took us less than a minute to get there. Here I was at a disadvantage; unlike the older students, I hadn't actually been to Hogsmeade, although I'd looked at maps provided by the other students.

I had bugs on all of the others, so even though they were disillusioned I knew where they were.

We all landed, and I called out softly, "We're all here."

"Right then," I heard Thomas Cooper mutter. A moment later, the door in front of us clicked.

The older boys had learned to cast soundlessly, something I still hadn't managed. We all slipped inside the shop, and a moment later the fire in the fireplace at the back of the room flared up.

A softly muttered command, and the fire flared; once, twice, finally six times.

I stepped up, grabbed the powder and tossed it into the fire.

We were using the floo network because none of the boys knew the Ministry well enough to know how to apparate there, and because we weren't certain whether they had anti apparition charms in place.

"Ministry," I said.

A moment later I stepped through.

I stepped into a one end of a long and beautiful hall, with a highly polished mahogany floor. There were golden symbols on the peacock blue ceiling that were constantly moving and changing. The walls behind me were paneled in dark wood, with gilded fireplaces.

This was the atrium, designed to welcome visitors to the Ministry of Magic. At this late hour, no one was coming through the fireplaces; it was after midnight.

There was a large banner with a portrait of Umbridge on one wall; it had probably been intended to make her look heroic; instead it made her look smug and self-satisfied.

A golden fountain filled the center of the hall, casting shimmering spots of light over the polished wood of the walls. The fountain had golden statues; a majestic looking wizard, a witch a little lower than him, and a centaur, goblin and house elf looking up at both of them adoringly.

Placing it here, right in the entrance was a sign of their belief of the order of the world; Wizards were on top and the other races were below them. Muggles weren't even in the picture. Their world view was so deeply ingrained that it never even occurred to them that it might be offensive.

We were on the eighth level below the surface.

The Trace was administered from the Improper Use of Magic Office, which was on the second level. That meant we had to move through six levels of the Ministry undetected, through whatever defenses that we hadn't heard about, destroy what we had to destroy and then return.

There was a guard at the security desk. He'd looked up at the sound of the fireplace flaring.

"Confundus," I heard a soft voice say, and the guard looked suddenly confused.

We were all moving past the desk a moment later, ignoring the weighing of the wands. That was a security measure designed to check for polyjuiced imposers; most Wizards would use a different face, but they'd keep their own wand.

Presumably they had a list of Wizards and their wand characteristics; if they didn't match they'd look into it more closely. Why no one ever simply presented a second wand, I wasn't sure; there seemed to be a cultural blind spot about that.

The guard was carrying a probity probe, a device used to detect concealment spells and hidden magical devices. It was flashing now, but the guard was staring slack jawed, not paying attention to it at all.

There was a small food stand nearby, but it was closed at this hour.

We were headed for the elevators at the far end of the hall. They were located behind a pair of golden gates.

There were twenty elevators behind the gates. I saw the button being pushed several times in quick success.

"It doesn't make it go any faster," I murdered. "Stay calm."

Although I couldn't see any of them, the bugs could detect the stench of their fear. This was something that could get all of us put in Azkaban, or given the current political climate, Kissed.

I had gotten a good look at much of the Ministry when I'd been incarcerated here; three days to look over things and to get an idea of the way that people moved. I hadn't seen everything; there had been some areas outside of my range, and those were the ones that worried me the most.

Worse, I hadn't understood everything that I'd seen. There were magical devices that I'd had no idea what to make of; if they weren't used when I'd seen them, I didn't know what they were for.

As we stepped into the elevator, I grimaced. The elevators here didn't just go up and down; they went side to side. As a result, they had golden ropes hanging down from the ceiling; handholds that I was still too short to reach.

During the day, they had an elevator attendant, but by this time at night, he'd gone home.

"Are you ready?" Thomas Cooper asked quietly.

I'd warned them about this part; I quickly wedged myself into the corner of the elevator and pushed my back up against the wall; hopefully I'd be able to avoid falling down.

The doors closed, and the elevator jerked. Despite my determination, I felt myself thrown forward, and I felt a steadying hand on my arm.

A moment later, the door opened, with a woman's voice calling out, "Department of Magical games and sports."

There was a messy looking hallway filled with posters of Quidditch teams tacked on the walls.

The next level was the Department of Magical transport, and we all froze as something white and fluttering entered the compartment. The Ministry sent interdepartmental messages like this; apparently using owls had been unsanitary.

The door opened again to the Department of International Cooperation. The memo left, and I could hear several sighs of relief, even though I'd never seen any indication that the memos had any sort of sentience.

We reached level four, the Department for the regulation and control of magical creatures. From what I'd heard, they kept a list of the names and addresses of all known werewolves in the country. Umbridge was using this to put werewolves in Azkaban, and there had been deaths already as they resisted being evicted from the nation.

Level three worried me; it was the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. This was where the obliviators were based. Those were some of the most compent aurors in the entire Ministry; they'd been the ones who'd kept the secret over the past several hundred years.

It made sense that they were the best of the best; arguably, their department was the entire reason for the Ministry. Without the Statute of Secrecy, Wizards might barely need a government at all.

Finally we reached level two. Second only to the obliviators, the aurors here were the best. They were the ones who went after the Dark Wizards, the ones who kept the peace. They were the gloved fist of the Ministry. It was the largest of all the offices.

We stepped out into a corridor lines with heavy oak doors on both sides.

Moving quietly, we moved down the hall and around a corner. There, a heavy set of double doors led into a large open area divided into small cubicles.

I froze, and then quietly said "We have two aurors, in cubicles two and seventeen."

Those weren't the actual names of the cubicles; as far as I knew they didn't have names. But in our simulations we'd named the cubicles for exactly this sort of reason. There wasn't another way to get through to the Improper use of Magic office except through here.

One of the aurors was faced away from us; he likely wouldn't be a problem. The other had a desk that faced the door, and he was looking right at it.

"If it had just been me, I probably could have slipped through the door when the man looked away; six of us would require the door to be open for longer, long enough that the auror would surely notice. Worse, with us invisible to each other, there was a chance that we'd run into each other in the attempt.

"I'll let one of you in when he looks away," I murmured. "Get close and confundus him. When that's done, I'll let the rest in."

This was a dangerous step. It depended on the auror not hearing a shoe scuff on the floor, and not sensing that something was wrong. I'd intentionally had all of them scrubbed clean of any colognes or scents of any kind; the last thing we needed was to be outed because a teenage boy thought he had to bathe in cologne.

I waited, and it seemed to take forever, but finally the auror looked down. I slipped the door open and I felt Thomas Cooper slip through. I watched with my bugs and listened until I saw the auror look up with a dazed look on his face.

"Did you say something?" his mate asked from the other desk. I opened the door, and a moment later I felt several of the others slipping through.

The auror leaped back, his wand coming out and his chair falling behind him. He stumbled and fell, and that was all it took.

Invisible hands set the chair back up and placed him back in the chair. Both aurors looked confused, and a moment later, I heard a pair of quiet obliviates.

A moment later, we were through, moving through other hallways. This part of the Ministry was a maze. It was enough of a maze that I'd struggled to remember the exact layout, which meant that our training wasn't as on point here as for the rest of the Ministry.

Worse, the office we were looking for had been outside of my range when I'd been imprisoned here.

"Let's go," I murmured.

Grabbing several small pieces of string from my pack, I attached the string to the left wrists of each boy. I found them by the bugs I had on them, but as far as they knew I could see them despite their being invisible.

They were all tied together, wrist to wrist. If they needed to fight, their wand hands were free; half the boys were left handed, and they were attached by their right wrist. One of our greatest dangers was in losing track of each other as we ran through the corridors invisibly.

I heard a sound of screaming from a room in the distance.

Umbridge was in a room with a pair of aurors; a man was tied to a chair.

"I don't know anything about the Muggleborn Resistance!" the man in the chair insisted. There was blood on his face and he looked terrified.

"Clearly you do," Umbridge said sweetly. "Otherwise you would call them terrorists, like every good, decent Wizard. Instead, you claim they are a resistance.. as though there is something to resist. Why would people resit their rightful government?"

Before the man could speak, one of the aurors, a thuggish looking man pointed his wand and electricity shot out of his wand. The man screamed and his body jerked.

"It's a pity that the time is not yet right for the Unforgivables to be used," Umbridge said. "A simple Imperio and this could all be over. Instead we are forced to resort to... cruder methods."

"I don't know anything!" the man said. After a moment, he began sobbing. "What do you want me to say?"

"Just the truth, dear boy," Umbridge said. "That you were part of the cell that killed my predecessor, and that they are the ones who have been targeting the poor, dear children in Hogwarts along with the werewolves."

As far as she knew, most of the muggleborn had already been slaughtered; the man would think that he was admitting to an attack that had already happened. Undoubtedly she planned to have him Kissed shortly after his public confession so that he couldn't be questioned.

She leaned forward.

"All of this can go away, you know. Simply admit the truth, and we can find you a nice, comfortable cell somewhere, with decent food, a nice, warm bed. All you have to do is tell the truth in front of an audience."

"I...Will my family be all right?"

On some level, he had to know that this was the end for him. The fact that he was even asking was a sign of his desperation.

"My dear boy, we aren't barbarians... your lovely children will be safe, provided that you keep your end of the bargain."

The man was silent for a long moment, and then he nodded.

"You will sign this document," she said.

One of the two brutes with her already had a sheet of paper with everything written out. The other waved his wand, and the ropes fell off of him.

He staggered, but they put a quill in his trembling hand, and he sobbed as he signed his name.

"Take him down to his cell," Umbridge said. "And get him cleaned up. We want him looking his best for his speech to the papers tomorrow!"

The aurors grabbed the man, one under each arm, and they began dragging him down the hall.

I stopped.

"Aurors are coming," I said in a low voice.

I pulled them all into a side room and gently closed the door. I waited until the aurors dragged the sobbing man past us.

I then pulled them toward the office in question.

A quick spell unlocked the door; I wasn't sure why anyone in the Wizarding world even bothered, really.

A moment later we were inside. Two more doors, and we reached what I thought had to be the source of the Trace.

I'd come across a historical record of the Ministry stealing an Analytical Engine; it had been created by Charles Babbage in the late 1830s as one of the world's first computers. The official, muggle record was that it had never been completed by funding issues, but the truth was that he had been confunded and obliviated, and the engine had been stolen.

The Hogwarts Express had been acquired in a similar way, stolen from the very muggles that the Wizards determined to be inferior.

The engine was really nothing more than a primitive calculator, but my guess was that they wouldn't have kept it here for that. They wouldn't have enchanted it if they didn't need it, and the timing... it had been stolen shortly before the Trace had been implemented was suspicious.

"You know what to do," I told the boys.

Blowing it up wasn't going to be enough; if enough parts were left, the technicians could simply repair it and start all over. Blowing it up might interfere with the magic, but we couldn't be sure. The only way to be absolutely sure was to cut it up, shrink it, and then dispose of it in different places.

This was going to take a while; the Engine was larger than I would have thought.

There was a bowl next to the engine, and I looked through the papers; there were lists of the underage Wizards, the spells that had been cast near them, and their location. There weren't that many right now; presumably all the spells that had been cast during the day had been taken care of by the day shift, and these only represented those that had been cast tonight.

Once the Engine was disposed of, we'd create an explosion to make them think that it had been vaporized.

Quiet rage had been growing within me since I'd listened to Umbridge's little torture session. Getting rid of the Trace was all well and good, but not if Umbridge simply escalated even more. She was a problem that had to be dealt with, and I would likely never get a better chance.

It would put this operation at risk, but the potential rewards were enourmous.

"I have other business," I said after a moment. "I'll be back. If you finish before I do, I'll make my own way out."

"What?" Thomas asked. He sounded anxious.

"We've been over the escape route a thousand times. If I get caught, it'll just be a single crazy girl who did this. If you get caught, it's every muggleborn who will be blamed."

I could hear some distressed murmurs from the others, but finally they agreed.

A moment later I was out the door, and I was heading up a set of side stairs.

Umbridge was in her office talking to someone through a Floo connection.

Everything in her office was a horrifying shade of pink. There were portraits on her walls with moving pictures. All the portraits seemed to be those of cats, though. I'd have to make sure than none of them were able to talk.

"Everything is going according to plan. With any luck, our Hogwarts problem will have solved itself by tomorrow, and we'll be able to get on to more important matters."

"I hope so," the man in the fireplace said. "You should remember who helped place you in office. We do not look kindly on failure."

"You should remember who I am," Umbridge said sweetly. "One does not threaten the Minister, not if one wishes to continue breathing."

The fireplace blazed and the fire returned to normal.

I stepped into the room, and I pointed my wand.

"Exelliarmus!" I said.

She whirled around and stared. I allowed the disillusionment to drop as I closed the door behind me.

"Miss Hebert," she said. "Give me back my wand."

"I think we have some things to talk about," I said.