The next few days of training flew by and they were on another mission. It was like hardly anything had happened, and their unit movements became tighter and quicker. Did Ron's presence have that much an effect? Harry found it difficult to nail down what all was being done differently.

"Mate, 's most likely the fact you lost one. 's fine, really, everyone loses here and there. Only problem is when you've lost, you've got another chance, and you don't learn from it. Most of the time, you don't get another chance like this, so it's a shame not to take it."

"It's a shame either way," he said. "I don't normally say stuff like this, but... we're all chuffed to have you back."

He could say that it must not have been easy to decide to keep living, when there were risks involved with that. If he had time to run, he had time to end his own life, even when he was being chased by an unknown force, he chose to keep running. It seemed like the opposite of a vote of confidence to praise his friend for something like that, though.

"Glad to be back. I'd like to tell myself I held out hope because someone had to keep you lot in line, but really I just didn't want to die."

"That's a good enough reason." He smiled a little, facing forward to the mass of their members. Already, they were assembled and ready for deployment, but Hermione was not back yet. "Was there something about almost dying that made you confront the essential facts of life or whatever that tripe is?"

"Wouldn't worry about it, mate. I wasn't going to catch you on it."

"Sorry I'm late," Hermione said, carrying a piece of equipment whose use she had not explained, though he had a guess. Basically, if they were limited by the number of wands they all had, then it stood to reason the device, which looked something like an astrolabe, added the their offensive capabilities. He looked around. They had not left yet, but their destination was just outside of a small town where they believed a Death Eater meeting was going to take place, but there could be a way to test it without anyone noticing.

"Can we have a demonstration?" he asked. "I think everyone would be better off knowing what this thing does."

"No problem," she said, frowning. It was enough to suspect there really was a problem. "Okay, I'm going to put it on his lowest setting." There were no manual controls; she simply rotated one of the wheel things with her wand, exposing different runes on its outside edge. "I'm also going to put it on its lowest range, so it should only have any effect if you're right no top of it. And now... I'm going to back up, because it might be a bit dangerous. Terry helped a lot with the research for this, so I want to give him some credit, because it can be activated wandlessly."

A blast of cool wind emanated from the device and frosted the underbrush around it. An insect dropped out of the air. Everyone watching seemed to share this expression of concentration as all the eyes passed over all the bizarre symbols on the ring, and tried to estimate exactly how powerful it would be running at full blast. Susan in particular looked shocked.

"Hermione, that's a Secrecy violation."

"That's correct."

"What's the maximum capacity?" Michael asked.

"I'm not sure; I haven't tried it."

"Can we please go back to how it's a Secrecy-"

"Everything that we're doing is against the law," Ron said. "Won't be long before there's a general ban on wands. Won't catch me getting fussed about it, but it won't be long."

"We admit," Terry said, more diplomatic. "-that we were aware that the Statute of Secrecy does not allow for private ownership of weapons of this magnitude. I was made aware by my direct superiors, however, that we have no intention of actually revealing the existence of magic to the nonmagical, and to resolve this apparent discrepancy, we intend to use this device more carefully than the law trusts us to use it."

Harry supposed the DA had not stated a position on most things, but he had thought it was obvious that they were better off without the complication of the muggles finding out about everything. It was hard to see how it would improve their situation, and most likely it would be a nightmare for anyone in charge. Could that, though, even in itself, be a weapon against the system? Could they distract all the enemy's investigators by getting them involved with something pointless? It seemed like his luck would not be such that a massive enemy would fail to realize at some point, if not early on, discern a pattern, and then make it seem like they had no idea while slowly setting a trap on him.

"Well, if it makes anyone feel any better, I'm certain the Death Eaters have something on this level. The only reason they they're not fussed about it is because they're already arming up with things like this. I wouldn't be surprised if even the Ministry has something." It seemed like they listened to Harry's work, at least. At some level, of course they were a resistance group, so it was not always that they had all sorts of plans in the works for what was next, but they had to have some kind of ethos, if only to define their rules for escalation. His expression changed in the middle of everyone's mostly quiet time of reflection. Would he still have the same question if he had allowed Terry to read the rest of the book he had been loaned?

There was nothing more to do but get everyone to the battlefield, and he was grateful that Hannah had started to learn how to Apparate, making one less person for him and Blaise to have to move. Soon enough, everyone would know how to perform a relatively simple trick of the adult world. Even though he had said he was not worried about someone trying to take his job, and he never had been, with the ranking system, there might be someone down the line that knew a fair few more tricks, and would demand to be in charge on those grounds, potentially causing a split. There was no way he could reward people with ranks for practice and study if there were no way of working at it long enough to outrank him.

By the time everyone was there, the detectors, Ron and Ernie, had already cleared the place. They were in a field dotted with wildflowers in the outskirts of a small town, a wizarding settlement as far as he knew; its nature was not germane to the mission. The two Slytherins were out of Death Eater intel, because ever since they were declared missing, and it was not because Voldemort's minions had them, all their connections had been severed, but there was a good chance that what they had heard from their parents would lay one last golden egg. They had deciphered subtle hints that there was a facility they were setting up for their own recruitment purposes.

"It would be nice if we had a direct mental link with the Dark Lord, but I suppose this is the next best thing," Blaise had said when it came up in a planning meeting. He had been invited as a witness.

"They chose this location because there's no way of tracing it back to any of them," Harry said. "What's there for us to find? We can't trust any information they're using to recruit people, and we can't turn over every stone."

"I suppose not," Daphne said. "At the same time, there should be something that you were never meant to know." Rather than try to decode that, he moved on.

"What do we expect to find there?" he asked. "We can't infiltrate them. They have an even tighter security system than we do."

"We'll find something better, just trust me. The problem is, we'll also find a fight."

Whether they were trying to protect someone or they had some other reason, the intel was coming from both of them, so he had little reason to doubt its accuracy, and they were incapable of trying to betray him. The possibility that there was some loophole had been raised, but he could not think of how that would happen, so it was pointless for him to divert resources to it; he had no way of telling anyone he assigned as a mole hunter what he expected. Even though they could all still die from something totally unexpected, he could not ask someone to do something without any instructions and expect a positive result.

The goons from the Ministry that they took down around the Lovegood Residence had only known the minimum to get the job done, but circumstantially had been able to inform them more about that side of the conflict, and as a result their training and intelligence gathering improved. What they were missing, ever since the proxies had been the last bit of information they had out of their two Slytherins, was insight on the Death Eaters. They knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that each one was more magically capable than the foes they had faced so far, but they had no idea where they were or what they were it all about to change, though? If it did, would it put their team on the proverbial radar?

The house was magically protected, making it an obvious target for their investigation. They had only known of a general area, but had come with the presumption that there would be some structure; it was not like their enemies to meet in some random place in the wood. If the DA succeeded, though, would they change their ways of doing things? Would they know?

"Standard clearing procedure," Ron muttered on the tail end of a detction charm's incantation. "Take no prisoners. Don't risk your lives."

Hermione gave a signal to establish that the charms had been bypassed and they moved, first levitating the mechanism she built through the window, then taking positions to cover all entrances and exits. There was nothing so convenient as a freezing explosion that would not harm anyone in the process; if those hit protect themselves from the magical wave, they would die in a matter of seconds. Right after another signal, they breached all the entrances, just like they planned, familiar with each other's routes through the building, such that they could hit anything that moved without fear of hitting an ally. The interior was a bit more posh than the outside, by the standards of the wizarding world several years earlier, but no one was terribly focused on the decor. In the middle of the main room, there was a boy in a rather small cage. They made sure they were not being watched and took it as a rare sign of good fortune that they had come upon the property at such a time as it was mostly unoccupied.

"Who are you?" he asked the kid.

"I'm Sibelius," he managed. There was no way of telling why he was in a cage rather than having run of the house.

"Sibelius who?"

"Does that matter?" Susan asked him, frowning. "You must be starving, let's-"

"We should see why he's here," Blaise said, echoing his thoughts. It seemed Neville disagreed, but was not going to do anything for the moment. "We need a someone who can get into his head."If nothing is wrong, we can see the whole thing quickly and cheaply." Before the older wizard had made an end of speaking, already could he decide, and their minds could not be changed at their current stage. Mere moments passed before we were together, and after that some daily amusement. There are worse things, I suppose."

"It makes no difference at the end of the day. Don't worry about that, though. Cleverer men than myself have fallen to their hawkish, watchful eyes, but I'll say this. The war has gone on far longer than I have lived. Our predecessors were always able to use it as an excuse for why they had not eliminated," a portrait on the wall said. It was strange how it had gained the attention of everyone in the room, even though it had to have been talking about some previous conflict.

However soon it was for such a thing, it appeared they were all counting their chickens already. In fairness, it seemed he had won entirely too much, and that his success was only a trap. To win without even fighting is a rather remarkable thing, though the numbers were such that we still would have been impressive, even had their enemies known. It was a waste, though, to have all of the traits that might have brought that victory to the realm of possibilities brought up; they could not afford to grow content with their early successes.

"Harry?" a voice asked. He looked and saw Hermione.

"Sorry. I was just... thinking about something."

"Well, the boy is the son of a Death Eater, Rosier, who died during the last war. It seems he was under the care of several different families before being cast out from each one. Eventually, they settled on locking him up in this cage in a spare property."

"What did he do?"

"He was a wild child. You wouldn't know just by looking at him, but apparently there was little he didn't do. He pulled hairs out of Crabbe's sister's head until she cried, he used accidental magic to create messes that would not simply 'scourgify' away, and he interrupted every meeting."

"Unless he absorbed some valuable information in that meeting, then I don't think we can use him," he said.

"Well, maybe not, but he's seen us, and we can't just kill him. He's nine, and a non-combatant. We might be able to get him to cooperate with us if we only treat him better than the Death Eaters did."

"We can't teach him Occlumency. There's high-level theory involved. We have to either erase his memory or kill him; we can't have the enemy know we were here."

"They'll know someone was here if he's no longer living. I don't think trying to sell them on an idea that he wasted away would work, even though he looks rail-thin. The cage has him in suspended animation, which is most likely why he didn't freeze to death."

"We were prepared to kill people when we tossed that thing through a window."

"I didn't think there would be children here... Harry, is this at all because of the way you were treated as a child?"

"I wasn't starved or kept in a cage, I was underfed and kept in a cupboard. Why would I go in wanting to kill another abused kid? I just said that I would have killed anyone who had seen us-"

"Yes, which would leave a hole," Hermione said, sighing. "If there had been adults here, the Death Eaters would have known immediately that we were here, because communication with them would have been severed. We might have come here expecting to kill people, but we also came here expecting for there to be a sign that someone was here. So, before you ask if I'm only talking about sparing him because he's a child-"

"It's not that I want to kill him. I don't blame you for not wanting to kill him. That's not what this is about. We can make it look like he broke out on his own."

"Harry, I..." She shook her head. "That's better than just leaving him here to suffer. We could apparate him to a foreign country and hope he gets by after a year or so in an orphanage, but in all likelihood, he'll do something else and end up in another cage. I'm not going to lie; his prospects don't look good, especially if he can fake being a decent child when someone who might let him out shows up, but there's a point where the results are on him. I don't know how to use a Memory Charm or a False Memory Charm, and we should have someone who does, but that wouldn't have been a good thing to do either; he's being tortured."

They ended up buying some regular muggle clothes, burning them, and breaking the cage open. Basically, the clothes were a false lead. There was no specific thing that the Death Eaters were supposed to think, like the kid broke out when some muggles randomly wandered in and helped him, or that he managed to produce them through accidental magic. They would not be able to take the clothes back to local stores and ask who bought them, so the investigation would go nowhere.

"Have you ever wanted to go to New Zealand, Sibelius?"

That was the beginning of an uncomfortable conversation, for everyone. It was a wonder if they could afford to relocate every non-combatant, but while no one really knew who they were, they had an advantage that they would never be able to get back later. Magical Britain had an arrangement with the Commonwealth to where it was easy to apparate at least to and from certain places. At length, the kid agreed to it, though it seemed he was disappointed he had not managed to fool them at all.

The safehouse did not have a lot of documents in it, and what they found did not seem terribly recent, but there was a good chance that it was still useful, and it would give them something to read while they took care of getting the hostage out. When Blaise disappeared, volunteering for the whole venture, apparently, it seemed that Ron found something he felt the need to stuff in his coat. Did he think no one would notice?

"They're going to come back here," he said. "We went through some trouble to make it look like we were never here; we should stick with the bit. Just read whatever you can and get out."

"Trust me, mate, we'll want this down the road. They're also not going to think anything of it if they can't find some odd bit of parchment; they'll just assume they lost it." He seemed to think a moment. "Say, we could steal everything if we just burned the place down. I'll bet Hermione would love some of these books."

"We don't want anyone coming through here."

"Why not? The Death Eaters'll have that much harder of a time guessing who did it."

"They might just go around killing everyone who might have seen something."

"Wouldn't be anything left to see if the whole place was burned down. They wouldn't have any reason to think most of the rubberneckers would know anything."

Harry took a deep breath.

"We still wouldn't have a charred corpse for the kid. He wouldn't have a reason to set the place on fire when he was trying to get away, because that would alert the owner of the house. It would be obvious that someone took him and set the place ablaze."

"He wouldn't. Doesn't mean someone else wouldn't. We don't need them to think anything specific, just get 'em as far away from the truth as we can. Speaking of, didn't we leave a lot of footprints outside? How about we use the rubberneckers to our advantage?"

"You might be right," he said after a moment. "I'll ask if someone can fake the remains. It seems like the kind of thing you could transfigure, but I don't have a clue how to do it."

"Those are just details. Did anyone want to off him?"

"I thought it might have been the only way. If we can transfigure a corpse-"

"Mate, that doesn't really matter. You just weren't thinking of a way to spare the kid. Are you practicing dark stuff with Ginny?"

"It's not that simple. I've killed people before-"

"Yeah, those were enemy combatants. The kid is just a witness. All he could have ever done was tell people we've been here, and they already know we're a thing, probably. You said in the last encounter, some enemies got away."

He took a last look back before walking off as Harry wondered what else they were keeping from him. It was clear enough why.

"If all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," he muttered to himself.