Harry was grateful that Terry had studied the book, the collection of ancient prophecies within, but at the moment they seemed no more helpful than the more recent examples. More than anything, he wished he could have talked to Dumbledore about everything, but it seemed like if anything was in the cards, that was not it. Even when they had a chance that he had appeared somewhere, he did not grace them with his presence. What was the problem with that, though? He and his friends were effectively on the run; maybe there was not a warrant out for all of their arrests, but in practice it seemed to make very little difference. Why could he not just stop by and tell them something, anything?

"Dragon Marshal?"

He got out of bed, grateful that there was at least no rain, and emerged from the tent. Without a watch for the night, he had been looking forward to uninterrupted sleep, but it would not find him, so perhaps it was best that someone else did. He was surprised, though, to see Luna of all people out at night.

"Do you need something?"

"I... I just want to know if it's all right to erase my own memories," she said after a moment. "I know that they might be useful to you."

To him? Was it really a matter of their practical purpose?

"Well, what is it?" he asked. "I... er, I guess I can't stop you if you would rather forget something, but can you tell me what it is?"

"I've killed people," she said. It was almost harder to respond to that than something about nargles might have been. "I know. We all have. I just... every time I change someone's memories, a person dies."

"Does it really work like that?" he asked. "Do you think we killed Malfoy when we hit him with a memory charm?"

"The person he was no longer exists. He is no better off than those who were with him when we fought." She frowned. "I've used the memory charm in live combat too, and... it's easier to forgive myself, but..."

"Luna, I wouldn't have ordered you to use it if I thought..." He shook his head, realizing he was just blatantly lying. The entire DA was under the same order; they had justified their escalation. "I'm sorry. I didn't know it was causing you pain."

"Do you struggle with it?" The night felt especially cold all of a sudden.

"It's... it's not that consistent. Some things I remember vividly, and other times I just knocked people off their brooms or something and I didn't think about it. I never thought about changing my memory, though." He tried to think about how to word things. "I never really thought about souls before, but I know we have them. I don't really know, but I think that for someone to be dead, they would have to lose their souls, not just forget things."

"What if their souls were just changed, though?" she asked. "Should it be against the rules of war to use that kind of magic?"

"I don't think so," he said after a moment. "Lockhart- you might not have interacted with him much, and you wouldn't have seen him in St Mungo's, but... he's clearly forgotten everything, and yet, at the same time, he's not that different of a person. I didn't read about it like you did, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the memory charm is designed to ignore certain things even when you don't put a limit on it, and that's why he can still communicate, but if everything about your personality was completely indebted to your memories up until that point, then he would have behaved differently when we saw him." He took a breath. "As he is, I don't think he deserves to go to Azkaban, because he can't really do anything now that his credibility's been shot, and he can't really learn any kind of lesson." He thought for a moment. "Do you think that if you killed him, it would make no difference?"

"No. No, he has a life now, even if it's not the life he was living before. I think I see what you mean, Harry."

"Luna, I'm going to be honest; I'm still having trouble working out what you mean. You thought you were killing people and you wanted to kill yourself?"

"It's not exactly like that. I can accept killing people, actually... comparing that to using memory charms was probably a mistake. It was like I was taking the person that they were and turning it into something else, something more convenient for my purposes. If I just killed them, then there wouldn't be anything left, but it's... it's like making them into Inferi, and... can you imagine if someone you love were made into something like that?" She turned away before he could put an arm around her. He had not known that she was reminding herself that someone loved their enemies, even though that was likely enough to be the case with each one of them. If no one else did, though, did she love them, in a sense?

"Why would you want that to happen to you, though?" he asked, not wanting to address anything else about what she had said. "Do you think you've made yourself into a bad person and you're going to reset yourself? Luna, if you've really turned them into something inhuman..."

"Not inhuman, just... a perversion of what they were. It's like using a love potion."

He had heard of them, though not in terribly great detail. Apparently, they were used in small doses as pranks in Hogwarts, sometimes. Students had to brew them in their last two years, and rather than just tossing them out, they would take a small amount and make their classmates make fools of themselves. It was the third in a series of comparisons that did not quite work, but he could see what she meant. He could only imagine that if someone were committed enough, he or she could keep dosing a victim with love potions, and if kept up for the rest of the victim's life, he supposed it would be a terrible thing to do.

"What if you've murdered one person when you eliminate their memories, and then you've murdered another person when you kill the person who replaced that original person?" she asked, coming up with another way to approach it.

"I get that way of looking at it, but I just don't think that the new Lockhart is really a different person. He's even still got this dream of being an author, and he started work on a book called Who Am I? because he's obsessed with himself- even when he doesn't know who he is. He might not be able to reflect on any memories of his crimes, but I don't believe he's any less guilty of him. It doesn't matter if he used the killing curse; his actions stained his soul. Luna, if you're no more likely to twist other people's minds to your will because you've done it in combat, then your sense of guilt is misplaced."

"I understand," she said, sighing. "I'm sorry to have woken you up in the middle of the night."

"You didn't wake me up." What made him wonder, though, was why she went all the way over to the other tent. Had it been her turn to keep watch, leaving her without the option of asking those inside the tent? "I should get to sleep, though. You should too. I hope I've made it easier for you to get to sleep."

"I think so," she said, deciding to depart without explaining anything else. "Apparently you see Spinning Scorchtongues more easily, but I don't think it's worth it."

"I'll keep that in mind."

It was hard to tell how much time passed before morning, but he knew he had been shortchanged. Strangely, he had not yet seemed to accept that he was going to die, because he still hated the way that he felt, and a cessation of feeling, however imminently looming, offered no comfort. Hermione found him right as he was about to go over to the others, where they were apparently discussing an attack in hushed voices.

"Good morning. I just wanted to tell you that technically, we still are not sure," she said. "It could be that your life does not preserve that of Voldemort because he never went through the proper Horcrux ritual with you."

"I honestly wouldn't know where to begin with that," he whispered back. "Honestly I should have seen it all coming, though. I was discussing with Neville what makes something impossible to vanish, and I'm starting to think it has to be a suitable container for a soul. We were saying that they have to be completely destroyed to lose the soul fragment before." He shook his head. "Of course an actual living human would be the best container."

"Well, except for the fact that you have a soul of your own," she said. "I can't begin to imagine the kinds of complications that could cause."

"Maybe... maybe you're right," he said, sighing a bit. "I want you to have a chat with Luna at some point. She's revealed to me that she's struggling with something and I think she came to me because she thinks it's my decision, but honestly the concept is a bit beyond me." He told her what had happened the previous night.

"I can see how that would trouble you," Hermione said when he was done. "For the record, I agree that..." She took a breath. "I agree that the soul is what makes us what we are, but I would caution you about how you apply that to your case. As you saw with Riddle's diary, the soul is shaped by the memories through which it has lived thus far, so there is a sense in which Luna was right. There's also, however, a sense in which you were right. Professor Lockhart's soul has been shaped by memories that are no longer there. It's impossible, however, for him to reflect on his actions, as you say, which is to say that his old memories can no longer influence his soul. He will never one day look back on his memories of his crimes and regret them."

"I see what you mean," he said. "Unfortunately, we're going to have to save the contemplation for later."

"If it's confirmed, then, we don't have a choice," Ron was saying. It seemed like everyone had learned to leave him to his private conversations and bring their concerns to the next marshal available. "There's been an attack on civilians."

Harry had never wanted less credit for being among those who had called it. It was not as if killing civilians was a goal that would definitely accomplish something for Voldemort, but they were such easy targets most of the time and it was an easy way of provoking a response out of the other side. As he listened, he learned that the whole thing had been made to look like an accident, but the muggles were baffled by it. Their newspapers were saying that there was no way a petrol station should have exploded, not the whole thing. It was the stuff of action movies, not real-life incidents, where a dropped cigarette butt might cause a small fire.

"He's risking Secrecy, then," he said. "Even those who don't care about the lives of muggles have to respond to it."

"Well, we know we can't just go in there and set all the facts in order," Michael said. "We're not here to get rid of the Statute."

"Wait, how do we know he did it in the first place?" Harry asked. "I missed that bit. If there's any way that the Ministry can act like it was just a handful of Death Eaters getting their kicks with another episode of muggle baiting-"

"That's probably how he's hoping they'll play it," Ron said. It was rare for him to interrupt his old friend, but everyone could tell he was being perfectly serious. "They're hoping to split us apart from the authorities. They'll be going one way, and we'll be going another."

"That makes this prohibitively dangerous," Hermione said after a moment. "If we can't effectively just hide behind the Aurors, then we would be facing Voldemort himself without anyone to even draw fire." She took a breath. "We have already acknowledged that we can't go after him directly, and this would be walking straight into his trap. We want him confident in the Horcruces, not thinking that there's some secret advantage that we have. It's better to be seen to run from the challenge."

The idea did not sit well with anyone else, least of all the Gryffindors. It was only through years of hearing her ideas and being able to tell that this one was not motivated by deference to authority that he was able to stand it himself. Was it so hard to listen to reason, though?

"There's a problem with that," Susan said. "We can't communicate that he can just attack muggles and get away with it. We should at least make it harder for him to do the same in the future."

"The authorities are already going to be doing that themselves," Terry said after a moment. "They may ignore some obvious sign that it was Voldemort himself and not simply disgruntled minions of his, but even with that explanation, they will be required to go through those kinds of procedures. With just as much reason to think that the muggles may be attacked again, we can reasonably assume they would prepare for it."

"That works," Harry said. "I don't like it, but it works. He's expecting us to act impulsively and against the Aurors, maybe even in a way that's deliberately contrary to them. If we just leave them there to intercept the next attack, he won't be able to do it himself, or he'll risk getting seen. He doesn't want to lose the advantages of operating in silence. He'll only do that if he thinks he can get something that would be worth it. There's not a lot that would be worth it, because most likely, he sees himself as having all the cards."

"This means what we tried earlier didn't work," Daphne said. "I find myself relieved, actually. If too much of what we tried worked, I would have to wonder if we were being led around by the nose."

"What was that?" Blaise asked.

"Oh, you might not have been there," Ron said. "After the attack on Eleazar Higgen's 'campaign office', we came up with this idea that we would leak a rumor through the Prophet that Harry was working with the Aurors, basically trying to get the switcheroo option to backfire. If he's come up with a way of forcibly separating us from the authorities, then he's called our bluff, or he's just making sure. By now, I reckon he's figured it out."

"Most likely." He took a breath. "We want to make another move, but we don't necessarily want him to know we made it. I think the best option is to go to a Death Eater's house and look for a chance to kill him. They've attacked the campaign office thinking they were going after a civilian, so this isn't really an escalation. We'll want someone strong enough to make a difference in the war, but not so strong that we couldn't kill him before he got away. We also don't want someone who could be persuaded to dump Voldemort if things start going badly for him."

"Then you want the Lestranges," Neville said. "They're fanatically loyal."

"That's the impression I had from a memory I saw once." He took a breath. "Wormtail doesn't have anywhere else to go either. I want to clarify that I'm not saying we should do this for revenge. The fact that he betrayed my parents is my problem, not a reason for an escalation. The problem with him, though, is that he's not really much of a duelist, at least I think, and I don't know where we would find him."

"Well, we can't just stand around here planning it. We should go after them," Ginny said "We've already been to where the Lestranges live; we should get out there before they figure out what we're doing. If they're not there, that's fine. We'll leave the place so full of traps that a mouse couldn't scurry through without getting eviscerated."

"I cannot help but agree," Hermione said. "I would only say that we should sincerely hope that they are not there. Even with their years of their skills going to rot in Azkaban, they should be good at working together, but no less unpredictable and violent. The last thing we want is for all three of them to be there." She took a breath. "One way or another, our enemies are going to stop having names and addresses, soon, so we had better take advantage of the opportunity while we can."

There were only a handful of arrangements to make, since as had been said, they had already been there once before.

"I've mastered apparation," Hannah told him as soon as she got him alone. It was not hard; he had a way of walking off after he had said his bit. "I thought it would make it easier for me to get to patients and then get them where they need to be."

"Evidently I've picked up the killing curse," he said. "How's Michael at it?"

"He's getting better- technically he started on basic healing charms after I did. At least he can triage patients now."

"Triage?"

"It's jargon I never thought I would be using. It's how you assess patients to decide what to do about them- green is basically fine, yellow is critical, and red is basically dead. If I were working for St Mungo's, I wouldn't be allowed to decide someone was beyond saving unless he didn't have a head or something like that."

Harry knew what she had been doing; she was fishing for him to say that he had improved; she wanted him to be strong enough to lead the others, by fear if nothing else. He could give her that trivially if that was what she wanted. At the same time, something she said had him interested. What was it, exactly?

"I'm allowing you to make the call," he said. "We don't have anyone else on hand who could do a better job of it."

"I'm honored," she said, the corner of her lip turning. Did she figure out what he was doing, establishing his authority by allowing her to do something she was already doing. It was not as if only Slytherins valued cleverness. "I might as well say it. It's nice to see you taking control."

"Demonstrate your appreciation, then. Catch Michael up to where you are and we'll see about the recruits after that." He paused. It was hard to let the idea go. "When would you consider someone to be beyond saving? What does it mean to have no hope of living?"

"I'm something of a literalist on the subject," she said after a deep breath, perhaps in lieu of a drag on a cigarette she might have had in another era. "It comes with the job. If a patient is beyond my abilities, then I have to move on to another. I don't really allow myself to think about what happens to the ones I leave behind until I have to process the bodies, and that's only if it falls to me. If I find a corpse, nothing's really changed. It's still beyond my abilities."

"It all depends on your knowledge and skill, then."

"You could say it's a non-answer, but really, there are countless different things that could go wrong, and then I don't know until I do an in-depth analysis. If someone has been burning for even a few seconds, then there would be too much damage for me to fix. If a patient suffers a spinal injury it might be more merciful to put them down-"

"Don't put them down," he said, interrupting an explanation of which he had already gotten the gist. "As long as the patient has a soul, he's still alive."

With that, he turned to the group to find the preparations were complete.