"You're telling me he's immortal," Harry said flatly.
Dumbledore was silent for a moment. "As long as he has a single surviving horcrux, he can return. Sapphire has been looking into futures where we successfully sought out the locations of the horcruxes, and we have been going there directly."
"How many did he make?" Harry asked.
"We believe he has split his soul into seven parts," Dumbledore said.
In front of Harry were five objects. He recognized two of them- the Diary that had been destroyed by Ginny Weasel with the basilisk's fang and part of the spine of a large snake. There was also a ring, a locket and a kind of crown. All had been destroyed.
"It surprised me that Steven's Patrons was able to destroy his snake," Dumbledore said. "Under ordinary circumstances, destroying one takes something extraordinary, like Fiendish, or basilisk venom, or objects of great magic."
He was talking about Lion.
"I don't think it's an ordinary patrons," Harry admitted. "It existed on the other side and it can do things..."
He hesitated. "Are we going to get Steven back?"
He had a bad feeling that Dumbledore was revealing these secrets now as a way to distract him. Adults did that kind of thing, when they didn't outright lie. Of course, if he had known about the horcruxes as a first year he might have given up entirely.
"Preparations are being made as we speak," Dumbledore said quietly.
"Sapphire is just floating there." Harry nodded toward the blue gem. "And I've seen her kiss several people, including Hermione, which is a little weird."
"She can share her gift that way," Dumbledore said. He looked down at his right hand, flexing it self-consciously. "She's already saved my life."
Harry purposefully kept from asking again why she hadn't seen what was going to happen to Steven. Apparently some futures were less likely than others, and she couldn't look through all of them. He wasn't sure just how useful that made it, although the objects in front of him certainly suggested it might be useful.
"She's searching the future now, or sharing the future with others, seeking out the way to free young Steven that will result in the fewest casualties."
"Where's he being held, then?" Harry asked.
"He's in the Ministry," Hermione said. She looked pale.
Harry knew he should ask about the two remaining horcruxes, but at the moment he didn't particularly care. All he cared about was making sure his friend was returned safely.
"Sapphire says it's your turn," Hermione said. She didn't look at him.
"Sirius!" Harry bolted upward, only to realize that somehow he'd fallen to the ground.
He'd never realized that Future Vision was like that; it wasn't like anything Professor Trelawny had taught. There was no gazing into crystal balls or tea leaves, no making guesses based on patterns that likely didn't mean anything.
There was no shouting out true prophecies you didn't remember later.
Instead, it was like the Muggle movie he'd seen Dudley watching on videotape while he was cleaning, the one involving a groundhog. He'd lived the day over and over, but unlike in the movie, things changed sometimes even when he didn't do anything differently. People made decisions that took a split second, and there was no way to predict them.
This wasn't predicting a teacher's unhurried path down a hallway, or Harry's entirely too predictable tendency to be disrespectful to teachers he thought deserved it. This was something else entirely.
A real battle involving real adult wizards was chaos.
He's thought he was good; compared to most of his classmates he was. But the wizards in the Ministry were professionals, and they were ready and willing to kill.
Worse, Voldemort's people were there, and Bellatrix was almost as fast and accurate as Voldemort. She was a monster, and three out of the five futures Harry had seen had involved her killing someone he cared about.
Even Voldemort didn't have that kind of impact, probably because he was too busy fighting Dumbledore. They were titans, but they canceled each other out, leaving Bellatrix to dominate the battlefield.
"This isn't another future, is it?" Harry asked.
Hermione looked at him, her face grim. "We're about out of time. Future vision takes real time to go through, even if it's just a fraction of the future we look through."
This was why she and Steven had looked so exhausted before every meeting of the defense association. They'd gone through the future over and over, looking for times when they were betrayed, or when someone was stupid and got caught.
Every time Hermione had kept him from getting a detention with Umbridge was a time when she had gone through the futures multiple times.
Steven had done the same thing, running himself ragged for Harry and his friends. This wasn't even his world, really, and he'd sacrificed so much for all of them.
"All right," Harry said, even though he would have liked to go through the battle at least a dozen more times so he could find some way of protecting everyone. He thought he had a chance, but he'd seen just how much of a role luck played in everything.
"It'll be all right," Hermione said.
"I keep feeling Ron should be here," Harry said.
"We checked the future to see how good a student he'd be at Occlumency," Hermione said. She scowled and shook her head. "He never took it seriously enough."
Harry could understand that. Ron didn't have people trying to kill him all the time like Harry, or a family to protect like Steven. He didn't even have an...interest in someone else or a crazy drive to succeed like Hermione.
He was smart enough when he understood how important things were, but this wasn't something he'd have seen as important. After all, who'd go rummaging through his mind?
The fact that Harry was now having to hide things from his best friend was painful, but there wasn't any helping it.
"It's probably for the best if we keep him out of it," Harry said. "His dad works for the Ministry...having a son attack it would likely get him sacked."
"He's a known associate of ours," Hermione said dryly. "It's not as if the Ministry cares about guilt or innocence."
"It's why we're going in disguise," Harry grinned. "One of the good things about Steven is that he's made enough friends that no one will be sure exactly who is trying to spring him."
"They'll know Dumbledore," Hermione said. "He's too powerful for it to be anyone else."
They'd know who the gems were too; there was no way to disguise their powers or even their looks. They'd be fugitives from the Wizarding world after this, although Harry suspected that they didn't really care. All they cared about at the moment was getting Steven back.
"You guys need to get ready," Peridot said. "We're moving out soon."
She was wearing some kind of stilts to extend her legs, and some kind of body armor. She looked a little like a Muggle soldier, wearing camouflage pants and carrying some kind of futuristic rifle obviously built out of junk, with wires leading to a backpack.
On the good side, no wizard would know what to make of it. Harry certainly didn't; he hadn't seen Peridot fight in any of the futures he'd been through.
Peridot looked determined in a way harry hadn't seen before. She looked like she was willing to take on the world. It was a look mirrored on the other gems' faces, and even on Hermione's.
Sirius was more impassive, as was Dumbledore. Sirius looked a little pale, probably because of what he'd seen in his own visits to the future.
Harry had died once in one possible future, so he knew how he felt. Sirius had died three times, though, probably because Bellatrix was targeting him in particular.
"This is a trap," Harry said to Peridot.
She'd gotten her own glimpses into the future, so she had to know it as much as he did, but she just nodded and then grinned. "It'll be a trap for them. I've got a few tricks up my sleeve nobody has seen yet."
Harry hoped so, because the futures he'd seen had been pretty bleak.
"They'll never know what hit them! Primitive screwheads!" She grinned, and her expression wasn't pleasant. "Show them not to take Steven."
Harry had a feeling that Peridot cared the least about humans of all the gems. From what Steven had said, she'd never really lived among humans until she'd reformed in this universe. In his own universe she'd had limited contact. That meant that of all of them, her mindset was the most alien.
Grabbing a set of robes from a nearby table, she thrust them into his hands. She gave another set to Hermione.
"Get dressed," she said.
Harry blinked as he recognized the robes from his visions. They had hoods and would magically create the appearances of masks; at first it would look like a Death Eater attack on the Ministry. It helped that Snape, having actually been a Death Eater knew how to copy their outfits.
Once Voldemort's forces attacked, they only had to tap their wands to the robes once and they'd be transfigured. The star symbol that adorned the crystal gems would appear on their breasts; according to Hermione, it was actually the sign of Rose Quartz.
Since Rose Quartz was in some way Harry didn't understand actually Steven, the star was his sign as well.
In the heat of battle they needed to be able to identify each other, or they might run the risk of attacking their own people. Still, Harry couldn't help but feel that the star was going to be like wearing a big bulls-eye right on his chest.
Harry slipped the robes on over his regular clothing. He pulled the hood up and slipped the mask on. To his surprise, it wasn't like wearing a Muggle mask. He'd secretly tried on a mask Dudley was going to wear for Halloween one year; he'd known he wasn't going to spend Halloween anywhere but inside his cupboard but he'd wanted to try it once.
He'd had trouble seeing, and the heat and moisture of his breath had made his glasses fog up. He hadn't cared for it at all, and he'd wondered how Dudley was going to see well enough to not get run over by a lorry. The fact that Dudley was practically the size of a Lorry might have helped.
This mask, though seemed to be different. He could see out of it almost as well as if he wasn't wearing it. He didn't have an unpleasant rubber band strapping it to the back of his head. Somehow it seemed to attach on its own.
His spectacles weren't fogging up either.
It made sense, though. The Death Eaters had to wear masks like this during the last war, and they'd had to fight in them. Ordinary Muggle masks simply wouldn't have done the job.
Harry hoped these would; if their identities were discovered, his schooling at Hogwarts would be over for good, and he'd be on the run as a wanted fugitive.
The knotting in his stomach wouldn't go away; he'd seen too much in his glimpses of possible futures to think that everything would go wonderfully. Battle was ugly, especially when it had three sides.
All he could hope was that no one he cared about was permanently hurt.
"All right," he said to Hermione, who had dressed in her own outfit. "Let's go."