"You've done our family a service, Miss Hebert," Neville's grandmother said. "But I'm still not certain why this has to be done here."

"The place I'm staying is too small," I said. "Not for the scale of what we'll be doing. Plus, the entire point of the thing requires secrecy. The more people who know about it, the greater the chance that someone will break."

"And you've chosen to tell me?" she asked. "Someone you barely know?"

"You have a reputation for integrity," I said. "More importantly, Neville is a good friend, and he has a high opinion of you. I've learned to trust his judgment."

"That's high praise,' she said. "Don't think that I'm unaware of your contribution to his development. He's hardly the same boy that he was when I sent him to Hogwarts two years ago."

"You can't turn a pig into a plow horse," I said. "He always had the ability to become someone better; it simply too time to bring it out."

Our training sessions had changed Neville in more than one way. The baby fat that had covered him had almost vanished, and he no longer spoke with a stutter.

Snape still intimidated him, but he'd learned to hide his feelings behind a wall of impassivity. The fact that the others helped him improve his potions skills had kept Snape from bothering him too greatly.

"There are dangers to what you're contemplating," she said.

"We'll have the help of someone who's been through it." I said.

She sniffed.

Apparently her opinion of Sirius wasn't as high as her opinion of me.

"You'll do it here," she said. "Under supervision, at least for those parts that are dangerous."

I nodded.

She hesitated.

"My son will never be what he once was, Miss Hebert," she said. "But you returned a part of him to me. I will be eternally grateful."

I nodded.

"I didn't do anything anyone else wouldn't have done," I said. "Had they thought of it."

"You don't think like anyone else, though, do you?"

"It's why it's good to have outsiders introduce new ways of thinking," I said. "I might see things in a way you don't, but it doesn't mean I can't learn from you."

She meant that I didn't think like the other muggleborn. That was because the system was designed to encourage conformity of thought. Bring the children in at an impressionable age, dazzle them with magic, and then keep them away from their muggle lives. Cults sometimes did worse jobs of indoctrination.

"You have my permission."

"Using a sticking charm seems like cheating," Sirius grumbled.

"I thought you were all about cheating," I said. "And there isn't anything we could find that says it will cause any problems in the spell."

Hermione looked smug.

The sticking charm had been her idea, and the research hers as well. We'd sent Sirius out to get books for us, and we'd scoured everything he'd allow us to see in the Black Library.

We'd all just finished applying the small leaf to the insides of our cheeks and my cheek was already turning numb.

"The next three days aren't going to be easy," Sirius told us for the third time.

"The leaf is poisonous," Hermione said. "I know."

Sirius smiled, and it wasn't a pleasant smile. "You have no idea."

There was something strange about his face. It took me a moment to realize that it looked as though there was something moving under his skin.

Was this really Sirius or had he been replaced by someone who had been polyjuiced?

I opened my mouth to speak, but the world seemed to tilt on its axis. I felt myself slipping to the floor, and my heart was beating in my chest.

The others weren't in any better shape.

Hermione had fallen as well, although Neville and Harry seemed to be doing a little better, probably because they were larger and had more body weight.

"I did mention that it was hallucinogenic, didn't I?" Sirius said. As he leaned toward me, it looked like his head was expanding like a balloon.

Worse, my sight with my insects was distorted as well. I saw him in a thousand different eyes like a kaleidoscope.

The world expanded and contracted around me, and I struggled to stay conscious. Sirius had warned us that this would be unpleasant; I had brushed his concerns aside.

Maybe I shouldn't.

I could see insects crawling out of the walls. I wasn't controlling them, and I couldn't sense them at all with my insect senses.

I saw them crawl over all of my friends, and I could hear the sounds of chewing as they quickly defleshed them.

All I could do was stare as I realized that I was alone.

Why was my face hanging over a toilet bowl?

Oh.

My midsection heaved again as my body tried to rid itself of the poison that was still flowing through my veins.

"Drink this," Sirius said. "It'll help to undo some of the damage to your organs without ruining the leaf."

I took what he offered me, a vial, and I drank it without even checking to see if it was poison or not.

It was cool, and it made me feel better the moment that I drank it.

"Aren't you glad I insisted on just four of you?" he asked.

I nodded weakly. My stomach heaved again, and I hoped that I was managing to keep at least some of the potion down.

"How long has it been?" I asked.

"Fifteen minutes," he said. He grinned. "Just three more days and you'll be in the clear."

I wearily lifted one finger in his direction as he left the room, heading for the bathroom next door, where I could hear Hermione retching.

He'd done this on his own without supervision? All for Remus?

How in the hell had they managed to keep this secret when they were at Hogwarts?

According to Sirius, it had taken them the better part of three years to work out how to do it on their own. It was possible that they'd used the Shrieking Shack.

Had they taken shortcuts when they'd come up with the procedure, or were there things they didn't know, things that would have made all this easier?

Somehow I couldn't see McGonagall doing all of this.

I must have blacked out, because I woke with my head on the lid of the toilet. I looked blearily up at Sirius.

"This is probably worse for you since you are so small," he said. "We were fifth years by the time we managed this. What do you weigh?"

"Seventy five pounds?" I muttered.

"We were twice your weight then," he said. He wasn't grinning as much anymore. "If you want to stop this, we can..."

I shook my head.

"As long as it's not permanent damage, I don't care."

He stared at me for a moment, then nodded.

"Let's get you up and into the bedroom. I've set up sleeping bags on the floors; I don't want any of you falling out of the bed. I can yell you from experience that's not fun."

"And if we need to..." I gestured toward the toilet.

"Chamber pot if you need to hurl," he said. "The house elves will take care of it. If you need to use the restroom, ask one of the adults and we'll help you there."

He helped me to my feet. My feet felt numb, and they dragged behind me, and a moment later he picked me up and carried me to the room they'd set up.

They'd cleared out all the furniture except for the bedrolls and two chairs, presumably for the adults who would be watching over us.

Sirius lay me down on top of a sleeping bag, and I rolled over to my side.

A woman in her early thirties had Neville's head in her lap. She was stroking his hair gently and she was singing a gentle song.

Her face was still thin, but the worn look I'd seen in some of Neville's earlier pictures of her was gone. There was a quiet serenity in her face as she stared down at her son.

Neville seemed to be having a better time of it than I was. Maybe it was because he actually had his mother.

Seeing her stroke his hair made my chest ache... or possibly it was the poison.

Still, I could see Harry staring at the both of them, at Neville lying with his mother's hand on his head, and I could see a look of raw longing in his face.

If he was like the other orphans that I had known, he'd probably dreamed that his parents would one day show up alive, there to rescue him from the hell that his life had become.

"Harry," I said, and to my distress, my words came out slurred.

"Yeah?" he asked. He didn't look at me, instead choosing to continue staring at Neville like a man dying of thirst.

"Do you want me to have a talk with your aunt and uncle?"

His head snapped around and he was looking at me now. He grimaced, apparently moving his head had made him dizzy,

"What?"

"I could talk to them," I said. "Make them be nice to you."

"I know how you talk to people," he said. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment as though he was thinking about it, and then he shook his head.

"It wouldn't work," he said. "The wards wouldn't let you in. It protects them as much as me."

"They aren't always at home," I said mildly. I heard a ringing in my ears... was that normal?

"You'd ambush them at work, or at the grocers or something?" he asked. He sounded a little horrified. "You aren't supposed to use magic on the muggles."

"You don't think I could be... convincing without magic?" I asked.

"They're my relatives," he said, grimacing. "They're terrible people, but they aren't Death Eaters."

Did he think I'd mutilate them or something? That would just raise questions that none of us wanted answered. There was a lot of territory between a firm talking to and limb removal.

Of course, his family did sound particularly stupid.

"Just say the word," I said.

Hermione suddenly retched into her bowl, and hearing it made me nauseous as well. A moment later I was grabbing for my bowl.

After what seemed an eternity, I heard Harry say dryly, "Ron's going to be sad he missed this."

The irony in his voice was almost palpable. Yet Ron likely wasn't going to believe Harry about how hard this was, not until he went through it himself.

How's everyone feeling?" Sirius asked cheerfully. "Ready to give up yet?"

Neville threw up, and then shook his head. He looked even more miserable than the rest of us felt. The fact that he was going through this at all impressed me.

Hermione and I were both on the Death Eater hit lists, both because of being muggleborn and because I'd murdered a lot of their relatives and friends. Harry was in the same boat; I'd heard the prophecy and knew that Voldemort was going to have to murder him sooner or later.

Neville wasn't on anyone's chopping block. Staying friends with me didn't protect him like it did the others in my organization. If anything, it made his life more dangerous.

He could have easily hosted this and simply abstained from doing it. I wouldn't have thought less of him for giving up early.

"Well," Sirius said, "If you're sure... the fun part is about to start."

"What?" I asked.

That was when the entire world began to morph and change around me.

"Muggle mandrake is bad enough," Sirius said. "But Wizarding mandrake...whooo."

The next three days were considerably harder than Sirius had let on. The month after that passed quickly.

"It's cloudy," Sirius complained.

I'd gotten to know him better over the past month. Apparently, he'd considered underselling the strength of the mandrake's poison to be a form of a prank.

The reason Snape hated him was obvious; I couldn't see Snape ever taking a prank in good spirits, much less actual bullying.

Sirius didn't think he'd bullied Snape, of course. He seemed to think of his school days with a sort of rose colored lens. I could read between the lines, though, from the stories he told Harry, and more importantly the ones he didn't.

"Does the ritual require a clear sky, or just moonlight?" I asked. We'd had this argument a dozen times.

"Moonlight," he muttered.

"The most dangerous thing is the possibility that we might have Death Eaters popping in when we go up."

"You could fall off your broom," he said.

"Sticking charms," I reminded him.

The one advantage we had was that we were going to be in the air. I'd been gathering insects for days in preparation; they wouldn't be waiting for us.

If they appararated in on brooms, the odds were that they would have a moment of disorientation. I'd soaked some insects in a poison that was harmless to insects, but deadly to mammals. It was one of our more successful potion mishaps.

I liked to think of it as an ironic reversal of pesticide. It was dangerous enough that a few flies in the mouth would be enough to take care of an average sized human. The only unfortunate thing was that it had to be ingested.

Bezoars wouldn't work on it either. There was a cure, but I kept the formula hidden and the antidote in my fanny pack.

"Are you ready?" I asked the others.

They nodded.

This would have been safer if we'd simply been able to stand on the roof and mix the potions there, but I wasn't willing to wait another month.

According to Sirius, the potion was only the first step. Learning to master your new form would take time, and the summer was short enough that I felt a strange sort of urgency.

"Bubble head charms?" I asked.

They all nodded.

Sirius was going with us; in part it was to protect us, and partially because he was hoping that the Death Eaters showed up. He'd been practicing with a ferocity that I normally only saw in my muggleborn trainees.

We'd helped him train, of course. It had helped to keep our skills sharp, and he'd turned out to know a few tricks I hadn't heard of. In turn, we'd impressed him with our organization and efficiency.

"Up," I said.

The bubblehead charms were because I wasn't sure how far we'd have to go to get above the clouds. Even better, if the Death Eaters apparated to our position, the lack of oxygen might slow them down.

I wasn't sure how far up my insects would still be viable. Hopefully, if they weren't, then the Death Eaters would suffocate.

We soared into the air. We were all disillusioned, of course. The last thing we needed was to make the obliviators work overtime. That might strain whatever goodwill I had with the Ministry.

Being disillusioned would help in the event of an attack. Presumably the Death Eaters would have to use the human revealing spell, and that would cost them time.

Although I couldn't see him, I knew that Sirius was grinning. He'd shrunk a bludger; solid iron, the thing weighed a hundred and fifty pounds at full size.

It was enchanted to ignore us and to attack anyone else on a broom.

Wizards had small bits of accidental magic when it came to falls, but at thousands of feet, nothing was going to make a difference.

If they kept their heads, they'd be able to apparate away, but I was going to do everything I could to disrupt their concentration.

No plan was foolproof, but Sirius loved the idea when Harry had suggested it. The thought of Death Eaters raining down had tickled his fancy, although he'd insisted that we move two blocks to the right of his house.

We reached the top of the clouds, and the moon was shining brightly.

The clouds here were low lying, otherwise we'd have have had to put the whole thing off all together. Despite this, we were still almost a mile in the air.

At temperatures of seventy degrees, most of my insects could only reach a height of thirty six hundred feet. At ninety degrees, that would reach six thousand.

There'd been cases of flies being found at nineteen thousand feet, but that wasn't the norm.

In any case, we were at the safe limit of my insects flying ability, but I was able to scan the area and see that it was clear.

"Drop the disillusionment," Sirius said. "The potion has to be visible to the moon."

Whatever that meant.

I complied and so did the others. It made me feel like a sitting duck.

I pulled a vial out of my fanny pack, and I put my wand to my own cheek to unstick the leaf. I then spat the leaf into the vial. I plucked one of my own hairs and dropped it in, and pulled out another vial painted black.

It had the dew in it. Adding that to the chrysalis of the Death's Head moth, I held the potion up to the light and pointed my wand at it.

We'd practiced this indoors, going through the steps over and over. There had been a lot of mistakes; they hadn't been terrible as we were using false ingredients.

This time, everything went smoothly.

I spoke the words of the ritual while waving my wand, and a moment it changed.

When I was sure the others had all succeeded, we disillusioned ourselves again, and returned to Neville's home.

It seemed impossible; we'd had a flawless run without a single Death Eater in sight.

We didn't learn about the attack on Diagon Alley until the next day.