„We're moving. "

"Moving? But...where?"

"To Britain."

"...what?"

This dialog took place a very short time after my fifteenth birthday between me and my mother. As you can see, my mother was not exactly good at breaking things gently to people. There were many adjectives one could use to describe my mother, but 'gentle' was certainly not one of them. Flamboyant, perhaps. Passionate, sometimes. Gentle? No.

The dialog did not, of course, take place in English. It took me many years to learn the language well enough to pass for a native speaker at a cursory – well, not glance, but hearing. No, we were speaking Czech at the time. Prague was my home then.

"But, mum," I was confused, "why?"

She looked at me for a moment and said: "I think Dad would do much better job at explaining this."

I had to agree with her. The thing was, my dad would do better job than her at explaining anything – well, anything that wasn't art, but you can't explain art anyway, so I don't suppose that really counts. But I guess this was one of those occasions when his book wisdom took over and he decided a mother was always the best person to talk to a daughter. Duh.

So I knocked on the door of my parents' bedroom, which my father used as his study, too, and after his muffled "come in," I entered.

"Er...Dad?"

"Yes?" He raised his head from whatever book he was reading right now.

"Do you think you could perhaps explain why you and mum decided now was the time to move to Britain?"

He sighed. It was a very deep sigh. "Voldemort," he said then. Neither he nor my mum were people of many words (well, except for when mum was angry). That was one of the few things they had in common.

"I'd think that's rather a reason not to move there right now...?"

"We want to fight him, naturally." Oh. Yes, that was the other thing they had in common. This insatiable need to fight the biggest menace of a wizard that was currently in store.

"Naturally," I repeated. "But what about the resistance here?"

Because it wasn't like I was living in my own little paradise. Just after the Grindewald war, which left severe marks on our country, The Others, Russian wizards who originally came because they helped people in the east of Czechoslovakia fight Grindewald's followers, took over. Which was bad enough in itself, but worse because their way of doing magic was different. They didn't use wands. After Grindewald and his obsession with the Elder Wand, that was something that gained easy support, and together with some of their other traits, they won many people for themselves, at least for a while. But there will always be some who are discontent. In this case, it was us. My family and tens of other wizards over the country. Keeping the remaining wands between us as a valuable treasure, teaching each other the old way of doing magic...that's the resistance I was born into.

My father sighed deeply again. "There isn't going to be any great change here, not unless something happens in Russia first. And the crew can go on holding the fort without us. In Britain, however...the country has never been really ruled over by enemy forces. I believe they will need our experiences. They have Dumbledore, of course," there was a respectable pause, which we always made after his name to imply how much we owed him for defeating Grindewald (even though my mum liked to say that he was British, after all, so it was only right they should clean up after themselves), "but not even he has experiences with leading organized resistance. So, do you see my point?"

That was perhaps the thing I hated most about dad. That when he made an argument, it was impossible not to see his point. Which was damn irritating when you didn't want to see it. Like me at the moment.

I didn't want to move. I had friends in the resistance, and colleagues, their cause was my cause...I didn't know anything about Britain. And yet...I saw my father's point.

And I wasn't the only one, apparently. Basically the entire Czech resistance spent the following months by plotting a way to get us abroad. The borders were magically protected on all levels of the Twilight,* but using the western magic, they managed to find a way.

As for me, I spent the year by frenetically studying English – I did have soma basics, but I was far from being able to take classes in the language. And my work in the resistance continued, of course, so all in all, I didn't have much time left to be sullen about us moving.

My parents had been a bit unsure about whether they still remembered how to Apparate properly, since it was impossible in Other countries, but fortunately, it's not a thing you forget easily. So once we crossed the borders to Western Germany, going to Britain was easy enough. I can't really say that I enjoyed this new method of travel – a heretical thought even occurred, that The Others might have had something there with banning it – but the sightseeing was nice. Because you see, after so much time, Dad had to pick places he remembered really well, and those were usually some sort of monuments. So we travelled in Twilight, appearing here before the Cologne cathedral, there under the Eiffel Tower...and finally we reached the moors which, apparently, were our goal. I'll tell you one thing: it looked pretty gloomy to me. It was a large, open space, stretching from horizon to horizon, and we were looking in all directions, trying to figure out where was Dumbledore going to appear, since he promised to meet us in person. He Apparated about twenty meters away from us. I must say I was rather startled. With Apparating impossible and Portkeys being difficult to create without the government knowing, we mostly travelled the Muggle way at home, or on broomsticks.

Dumbledore approached us and bowed his head respectfully. He turned to my father: "Mr. Brabenec, I presume?" My father nodded. "I'm Albus Dumbledore. I know this is very impolite, but safety demands it – could I please see your Resistance Mark?"

My father raised his eyebrow. "I see you've read up on us, Mr. Dumbledore, but I'm afraid you lack one crucial information. It was unavailable to you, of course, since we never share any details about our Mark. But, you see, only the people who have the Mark, too, can see it."

It has always been very strange for me to imagine that some people out there couldn't see the lion tattooed over half of my face. Now I was in a country where no one except for my parents could.

"Oh," Dumbledore paused. "Well, at the very least, you can tell me what the place you originally suggested for our meeting was, I believe."

"Certainly. I have been so bold as to suggest we called on you in your own home."

"Indeed," Dumbledore seemed to be deep in thought. "Well, I will have to trust you, I dare say. I apologise for all this, but you know how it is."

"So I do. And precisely because of that, I'd like to ask you to call your phoenix."

Dumbledore smiled. "That is a very good one, Mr. Brabenec, if I may say so. Yes, I will call Fawkes presently." And apparently he did, because we all stood motionless for some time and then the bird appeared. It was a magnificent thing – I had never seen one before, and I was amazed. My father nodded his head, and smiled. Dumbledore returned his smile and outstretched his hand: "Call me Albus, please."

"Joseph," my father replied, shaking his hand, and then he turned to my mother. "This is my wife, Hannah," Dumbledore kissed her hand, "and this is my daughter." He repeated the same process with me. It made me nervous. His eyes stayed at me and he addressed me seriously: "You are the person with whom I want to talk the most right now. I need you to agree to one thing. I want to keep Voldemort in the dark about you three arriving as long as possible. He doesn't need to know we have an experienced help from Grindewald and Other dissent. But you are going to Hogwarts, and if you just went there under your real name, and your real nationality, he'd hear about it, and he'd immediately know something was off – he knows well enough that people can't just leave countries under the rule of The Others. We don't know how tight the ties between him and The Others are, but we are afraid there are some, so your name would be an immediate give-away. Therefore, I need you to accept a false identity we've created for you. I understand you know some German?"

"Yes, I do, I've been studying it for two years," I replied, slightly nervous. Would I be able to handle this? I'd never been really undercover before – I'd been known to be a resistance member by mostly everyone around me.

"Very good. Your new name will be Belinda Schwartz from Hamburg, Western Germany – we want as little connection with any Other country as possible. You will say that you have been sent to Hogwarts for a better education and that your parents are still living in your homeland. For the summer holidays next year, you will pretend that you go back to Germany. Instead, you will be in hiding. You will be assigned a German tutor to be more persuasive in the matter of your German origin. After you graduate, you may choose to do whatever you wish. Is this acceptable for you?"

I looked at my parents. It wasn't going to be a walk in the park, that was certain. But I was willing to do it, naturally. They both nodded their approval. "Yes," I replied simply.

"Very good," Dumbledore repeated, and turned back to my father. "Now I can explain why I couldn't have allowed you to meet me at my house just like that. I live at Hogwarts, and when I'm not there, I'm at the headquarters of the Order. This is the lodging I have planned for you, too, unless you object, of course?"

"My dear Albus, we could hardly object, could we? We came here as beggars."

"You came here as volunteers to help us, and as such, you are our guests. I was merely asking whether you don't mind living in the same place where the Order would be meeting. I think it would be good if somebody was staying there, but if you don't want it that way, I can arrange something else."

My parents looked at each other for a moment. "No, I think that would be very convenient," my father said in the end.

"Excellent. So, if you could all just hold on to my arms..." And he Apparated us away.

My parents decided to become full-time Order members. Their experiences were valuable and their help would be needed, and Dumbledore had enough money to be able to keep them at his expenses. They would have never suggested this, of course – their original plan had been to stay at the lodging Dumbledore would supply just until they could find a job and later a flat of their own – but when Dumbledore mentioned the need for some members like that, and his complete willingness to support such people, they quickly changed their plans.

To my great irritation, they forbid me to join the Order, explaining (well, my father explained – my mother merely shouted "no" and "out of the question" repeatedly) that this was far more dangerous than the Czech dissent and that they didn't want me to die. And the pity was that while according to the British magical law I would be an adult in the summer of 77, according to the Czech – and German, by the way – law I had to wait another additional year. So instead of doing some actual work, I studied English and German, trained Western magic, prepared for my first British exams, the OWLs, which I passed quite successfully, and I worried about my parents, who, of course, got to be in the front lines right from the start.

*For those of you who haven't read Night Watch: Twilight, as per Lukyanenko's definitions, is sort of parallel dimension which has 7 layers and which you can enter by entering your own shadow. Time moves slower there, and one can't stay there long, since it drains one's power. Each layer is more difficult to enter than the previous one.