A couple more quiet, doleful days went by and Sirius, James, Peter, Remus, and Lily submerged themselves in their studies, spending most of their time doing schoolwork in the library or common room and saying nothing more about the recent events that had affected them. But something was to happen that would take their minds off of those things for quite a while, though not in a way they would have chosen.
Lily was woken up one night by some voices talking in her dormitory. As her eyes gradually fluttered open she could see from the very faint light coming through the window that the sun had only just started to rise; it was still more dark than it was light outside.
As she looked across the room she saw that Professor McGonnagal was by Sarah Locket's bed and speaking to her with a very grave look on her face, which Lily could see clearly in the light coming from her wand. She looked at the clock on the table by her bed. What did Professor McGonnagal need to tell Sarah at 5:00 in the morning?
"I don't understand, Professor," Lily heard Sarah saying in a worried voice. "What happened at the office? Are my parents okay?"
"Perhaps you better come into the common room with me, Miss Locket," said McGonnagal. Something about the way her voice sounded gave Lily a horrible chill down her back. "Then I can talk to you without disturbing these other girls."
But that was apparently not a valid concern; as soon as Professor McGonnagal left with her arm around Sarah's shoulders, Lily saw that either her talking or the light from her wand had made both of the other girls in the dormitory wake up. Yvette Doisneau sat up in her bed and looked over at Lily questioningly, just as Tanya Korsakoff was rubbing her eyes and murmuring, "What's going on?"
But the answer came almost immediately when they all heard Sarah start to sob outside the door.
"No!...Oh, please, no..."
Yvette took a sharp inhale of breath and covered her mouth with her hand. Lily just sat very still, feeling as if she would never be able to move again, like time was standing still and trapping her in a sudden nightmare. The moment seemed to stretch on and on for a very long time, something that all of the girls in that room were going to remember clearly for the rest of their lives.
News at Hogwarts traveled fast even among a sleeping student body; by 5:45 nearly everyone had been woken up and told about what had happened. Before it was even time for breakfast to be served in the Great Hall, about fifty students were awake, some dressed, and congregated in the Gryffindor common room.
Still in the T-shirt and flannel pants he slept in, James shoved his way through clusters of people all over the room until he finally spotted the face he was looking for. Lily was sitting alone in an armchair, her hands clasped very tightly together, looking tense and shaking a little as if she was freezing in the cold, though the common room was quite warm. James dropped into a kneel in front of the chair and took her hands in his right away.
"Oh, James," she said, leaning forward in the chair to be closer to him. "Sarah...Sarah's parents were both there..."
"I know," he said softly. "Yvette told me. And Simon and Cynthia's dad-"
"Oh no!" she interrupted him. "I forgot about the Kinkaids! Their father is an Auror, too."
He looked at her sadly. "He was."
Lily's eyes became watery for a second. "Where are the others?"
"They went back up to the room to get dressed. I wanted to find you."
She squeezed his hands tightly. "You go get dressed, then, and I'll wait for all of you. I want to get out of this room."
He nodded and stood up, taking her face in between his hands and kissing her before leaving.
The four boys and Lily went down into the Great Hall early but found that they were far from the only people who had had the same idea. The first thing they noticed was that the Hall had been hung with flags like it usually was at the last feast of every school year, but instead of displaying the House colors of whoever had won the House Cup, the flags were solid black for mourning. They met with many others from Houses outside of theirs, who gave them terrible news of more students who had lost friends and family members overnight. When owls finally started flying into the Hall carrying copies of the Daily Prophet, there was a mad rush of students running toward anywhere they saw one land in the hopes that they could glimpse some words over the reader's shoulder. The front page article had been written and printed at just the last minute to make this morning's paper. Enormous text covering almost half of the front page read "DEATH EATERS' DARK LORD REVEALED! DEVASTATION STRIKES!"
Within minutes, everyone knew the whole story. The Aurors department in London had been attacked around 11:00 the night before. Almost a hundred employees who had been in the building had been killed. Because of the restless efforts to find and capture Death Eaters, the Department of Dark Wizard Management had become much busier than usual, crawling with Aurors and assistants at practically every hour of the day.
Other Ministry establishments had been attacked before, but this time it had been very different. All of those attacks had been done later in the night when almost nobody was in the buildings and no one was around to see anything. Very few people had died and the attacks had seemed to be nothing but an attempt to get attention. But this time the building had been left completely as it was before. The only difference was that every person was left lying on the floor dead without any apparent wounds or signs of even putting up a fight before dying, and the gigantic Death Eaters' symbol had been left in the sky above the building, accompanied by a message written in glowing words beneath it: "I AM LORD VOLDEMORT. YOU WILL NOW LEARN TO FEAR MY NAME."
"It says they talked to some Muggles who had been near the building and witnessed something strange going on," Frank Longbottom was saying to his friends, looking at his paper. "They heard screaming coming from what they thought was an abandoned old apartment building. Then they started seeing flashing green light coming from the windows. They just kept seeing this blinding green light flash again and again and again...You see, he killed all of them, on his own, this Voldemort-" Frank became very uneasy for a moment as he said it. "It was an entire building full of Aurors. People who know how to defend themselves against Dark magic, Wizards who are supposed to know how to deal with people like this! But it's like there wasn't even a fight, just a slaughter."
"Frank, would you stop going off about this?" his friend Polly Prewett said beside him uncomfortably. "All I can think about is Cynthia and Simon up in the hospital wing right now knowing their dad is dead because of this scene you're describing really vividly for all us. It's making my stomach turn."
"Sorry, Alice," he said remorsefully. "I'm just...so shocked, is all."
"Did you hear about Katrina Crane?" Alice Nightingale asked the two of them. "She had an aunt who was a secretary there. And a friend of Louis Zimmerman's family was an Auror there, too."
As they sat overhearing all of this, the boys and Lily could not manage to say anything. Lily was leaning her head on James's shoulder tiredly and kept breathing shakily as if she was crying, though no tears were actually coming out. Peter was staring down at the tabletop with a fearful expression and every once in a while would look around at all of his friends as if he wasn't sure how to react to all of this and was waiting for a cue from one of them that would tell him how to act. Nobody could see Remus's face because he had his head down on the table resting over his arms and his face was turned away from everyone. Sirius was just leaning forward with his elbows on the table and one of his hands covering his mouth, a vacant sadness and disbelief in his eyes.
"Hey, look at this," said Alice, who had taken Frank's paper to look at it herself. "There's a shorter article later on in the paper that talks about what the Ministry is doing to handle all this. Listen: 'As soon as is possible today, the Minister and the most important Ministry officials will be meeting with Richard Karlstein as well as all the other remaining Aurors and Albus Dumbledore to discuss a resistance against Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters that must be formed. News coverage of these plans will be limited in order to protect information about the organization from servants of Voldemort. Anyone who is interested in and capable of volunteering their efforts in the resistance may visit the new Ministry headquarters which are still under construction in London.'"
"New headquarters?" Alice echoed.
"Yeah, they're building a new Ministry in a bigger place that will have all of the different departments in it," said Frank. "It's supposed to be better protected and a lot less vulnerable to attacks like this."
"But where?"
"I heard from the Kinkaids a while ago that it's being built above a place the Ministry has had underground for hundreds of years. These days it's called the Department of Mysteries."
"How can you be joking like that at a time like this?" Polly said, appalled. "The Department of Mysteries is just some dumb story you read about in The Quibbler."
"No, it isn't," Alice said seriously. "My mum's best friend is a sister of one of the Unspeakables - the people who work there. It's true. Nobody really knows what goes on down there because the Unspeakables can't talk about it."
"The most anybody knows is that they conduct rather dodgy experiments and studies down there," Frank said. "I've heard that's where the Time Turner was developed, as well as some extremely dangerous magical objects that nobody even knows about, completely by accident."
"Well, if the Unspeakables can't talk about what it is they do there, then where did these rumors come from?" Polly asked skeptically. Frank went silent.
"Just look at them," Sirius said suddenly, surprising them all. They followed his gaze over to the Slytherin table, which at the moment mostly consisted of small groups of students huddled around newspapers looking genuinely fascinated as they read the cover article. Some of them were whispering very covertly to each other, and some especially bold and proud ones like Bellatrix Black were not even making an attempt to hide how they really felt about this incident. She and Rodolphus Lestrange were talking animatedly as if it were a normal morning.
Lily turned back around and shook her head. "Never mind them," she said bitterly.
But Sirius kept looking over in that direction for a moment, and he privately noted that Sophia was not there. He certainly didn't blame her for not wanting to sit with the Slytherins today.
The group noticed Professor Marlewe approaching the back of the Hall where the teachers ate. He clapped his hands twice and called, "May I have your attention, students?"
The talking died down to a low buzz as the student looked up toward him.
"May I first offer my condolences to all who this tragedy has hurt," he said. "As you may have been told already by your Head of House, there will be no classes today. Professor Dumbledore has left the school to meet with members of the Ministry in London. He has left instructions that no students are to leave the school for now. Please stay only in supervised areas of the castle. Dumbledore wanted me to tell you not to be alarmed by these precautions he recommended we take; Hogwarts is much more safe than most other places you all could be right now, and it is quite protected from an attack like the one on the Aurors office that happened last night. However, until it is clear that last night was not just the beginning in a series of attacks one after another, your parents will probably feel better knowing that extra efforts are being made to keep you all safe. It is recommended you write to your families and tell them of the situation here. Please pass this information onto your friends who aren't here. Thank you."
As he left the platform, Lily looked at her friends with a realization. "My parents won't hear anything about this. I better go write to them right away."
James nodded and turned to kiss her, but she pulled back as he leaned forward. "Oh, you better not. I've been feeling a little sick since last night. Don't want to give you anything."
"Alright. Maybe you should go back to sleep."
She shook her head. "Do you really think I could sleep?"
He shrugged and gave her a look that said, I suppose not, and she got up and walked away. A moment later Sirius noticed there was something white on the seat where she'd been sitting, and leaned forward to look at it. "She left her sweater."
James looked down at the seat next to him, picked it up, and looked toward the Great Hall entrance, but Lily was already gone. He folded it up neatly and put it in his book bag to give back to her later.
They were all silent again until James let out a long sigh and said, "I guess life after school isn't going to be exactly how we thought."