Returning the other hostage would not be so easy. As soon as they spoke of it, they found out that something had happened to her while in captivity, and she was not saying anything. Hermione went through her memories, but it seemed someone had changed them. With everyone else back from the training exercise and the recruits at the other base confident that they could take on recruits of their own, it seemed that basically everyone had decided to handle it at once. All eyes were on the captive, tied to a tree trunk and hunched over. It was hard to recognize her as Pansy Parkinson.

"Malfoy was with her the whole time. Did we see anything in his memories?" Ron asked.

"He wasn't with her the whole time, and we didn't look before we erased them." No one was saying as much about what they thought had happened to her, but for her to go into a totally nonresponsive state, it narrowed the list down substantially. It had crossed his own mind, but he knew why no one wanted to be the one to cry out 'she's faking it'.

"Is there any way to tell what happened to her on the outside?" Michael asked. "Do we have any-"

"Are you asking if we have a rape kit?" Hannah asked. "No, we don't have one of those on hand because no one thought that it was a possibility. No one thought that when we literally swore obedience, binding our lives to this cause, that we'd also agreed to just-"

"It's a good question," Ginny said, interrupting. The silence of the grave passed between each speaker. No one dared to murmur in the back ground. "Our first concern should be how to catch whoever did this and if we have the means on hand, let's not waste any time."

"I don't know any spells like that," Hermione said. "Someone else look it up. I'm busy."

"That's a good point," Harry said, taking it from there. "Luna, go through our resources and see if there's anything that could help."

It seemed like the most shocked out of everyone was Neville. Constantly about to ask a question he only shook his head. It seemed prudent to set everyone to a task, including him, before he started pacing back and forth.

"For the record," he started, turning to the whole crowd. "When we swore never to betray the group, that doesn't mean any of us has the right to do anything like this and get away with it. None of us saw this coming. If we did, then we would have included it in the agreement."

The parchment they signed was quite binding. Unlike the first one, which only punished them after the fact if they betrayed the DA, the new agreement would kill them in the process of betraying it. He had not seen the boils form on Marietta's face, but he would imagine that they started the moment she turned to Umbridge and started talking, at least from the way Hermione explained it at one point. If the curse had allowed her to provide more than enough information for the old toad to figure it out without actually saying it, then it would have been pointless, so what was important was the intent.

Everyone seemed to accept their assignments as soon as they were handed out. Suspicious eyes stared all around. Three of the girls went together though no one had ordered it, but that was no surprise. He was left with Ron, the captive, and the amateur Legilimens still trying to go through her memories.

"I mean... it had to be recent, right? Did anyone see her acting like this before?"

"Even if it was recent, it wouldn't be easy to know who did it," Harry said. "While we were off on that mission to give Malfoy back, everyone else was working with the recruits or on planning. It would have been easy for someone to apparate back."

"Are you saying it was Ernie?"

"Someone else could have figured out apparation already, without telling the rest of us," he said. "That's only if it was recent, anyway."

"I really hope we don't pick the wrong suspect," Ron said, running a hand down his face. "I just... I don't get it. Why isn't she saying anything?"

"I don't get it either. We'll only really know why once we know what happened." He frowned. "I hate to say it, but it would make perfect sense if she was faking it."

"Yes, I suppose it would," Hermione said, looking up from her task. "Someone's wiped out a portion of her memory, though, so she's not entirely faking it."

"When was it?"

"It was several days ago. We were all here, but we would have been in the middle of training exercises and planning meetings, so most of us would have been here."

"Did she just wake up with no memory and get all nonresponsive because of that?"

"I can only think that she must have guessed what happened to her and fell into a depressive state. She hasn't been eating since she lost memory."

"Well, the food's not that great and she hasn't really been moving around," Ron said. "Is that why no one said anything when she wasn't eating?"

"No one's terribly sympathetic to her case and they might have figured we'd be rid of her sooner or later," Harry said. "I think it's safe to assume something really happened to her. She couldn't have erased her own memories."

"Who all knows the spell? D'you reckon Luna could have been using her as target practice?"

He almost certainly did not genuinely mean anything by it, but the way he said it made it sound infinitely worse in context; they were talking about a girl tied to a tree. Hermione gave him a look.

"Technically, we don't know who can use Memory Charms. I've been wanting to learn them myself, but I've been run off my feet."

"Right," he said. "It's the same problem as the apparation. We could at least ask Luna what you have to do to learn it."

"She'll help us," Ron said. "I reckon she'd have admitted it earlier if she had done it herself just to practice the spell. I'll talk to her."

"It's better if the rest of us go as well," Hermione said. "I don't want to lose track of anyone."

"Are you worried someone might think it was one of us?" Harry asked.

"No, not really." She sighed. "You should know what I mean about this more than most of the others. Magic seems to be on the side of the trickster rather than the truth seeker, or the rebel rather than the authority. There seem to be more ways to hide the truth than there are to find it. We have Pensieves and Veritaserum, even Unbreakable Vows, and none of that helps against False Memory Charms. It's not even a dark/light distinction. It's magic as a whole."

"I thought there had to be some way to overcome the Polyjuice."

"I'm sure there is, but what if we're not in Hogwarts surrounded by kindhearted experts in their disciplines and instead running around in the woods with a bunch of teenagers? The only reason society functioned in the magical world was because no one rocked the boat too much." She sighed. "It's true that the average person bears some amount of guilt for not intervening sooner. People should have been more concerned about what the Ministry was doing. They should have paid more attention in Defense rather than waiting around for desk jobs to open up. There's a reason, however, that they just decided to have faith in society."

He could see what she meant, but there were still some pieces missing. Obviously, if everyone decided to deceive everyone else at every turn and never did anything honestly, everything would collapse. There was only so much the authorities could do to sort out what was really going on. What guarantee, though, was there that no one would just hold the entire magical world hostage by...

"Oh," he said after a moment. "We're on a time limit."

"That's correct. If this goes on long enough, there won't be a legitimate government to overthrow- for anyone. There will be no trust or reason for trust anywhere in the world, and authorities will rise, claiming to restore the truth, but only ever for their own purposes, and those in favor of utter chaos will tear them down before they can even oppress anyone. If it ever stops, it will only be after magical education has collapsed for so long that no one remembers enough of the theory to accomplish anything, and honesty becomes the best policy again."

"I'm amazed you've thought this far ahead," Ron said as they approached Luna, who was with the captive.

"It comes with the territory," she said. "Honestly, sometimes I think that I bury myself in research just so I'll have something else to occupy my mind when I'm trying to sleep. Who knows; I might even have a productive dream one of these days."

"Hermione, if anyone ever has a productive dream, it'll be you."

"Hey, we were wondering something about erasing memories," Harry said, crouching next to the strange girl to match her own posture. She regarded the captive with a casual interest. "Could you tell us what all you had to do to learn it?"

"Oh, there was a book Hermione gave me. It's the only one we have."

"Do you still have it?"

"Of course; it's with my stuff." She rose to full height and walked off, and they followed her. So far, it seemed she had no concern whatsoever about what they were doing with the information. Did she think that someone else wanted to learn it? She might as well.

When they arrived at the girls' tent, she and Hermione went inside and took an unexpected amount of time to come back out. The other tent, as with any location, was out of earshot and not within a direct line of sight, so it was odd they were so close, but probably no one cared if they just waited around outside.

"Sorry," Luna said when she surfaced. "It must have been taken by a Flare Blitz."

"Did any of the other witches express an interest in learning the spell?" Ron asked, ignoring her.

"No, and they would not have, if this was their intent," Hermione said, frowning. "At least we know who the culprit should be, unless we're dealing with someone who already knew the Memory Charm and used that as a red herring."

"Could it have been a bloke?" Harry asked. "If you knew about the book, you'd think you could summon it-"

The two witches looked at each other before looking back at him.

"There actually aren't any gender specific charms on the tent. No one ever bothered to learn them or collect the resources for them before leaving. We figured that if we said there were charms, no one would come over here."

"That makes sense," Ron said. "Summoning it wouldn't have been a good idea. You wouldn't know if anyone was watching, and then it would fly straight at you."

"I also handed the book to her in the tent. The only people who would have seen it were Hannah, Daphne, and Ginny."

"Have any of them spent a lot of time around the captive?" Harry asked, not knowing who would know. He certainly had not been watching her.

"No," Luna said. "I was in charge of feeding her, and I never saw them go over there. I did warn them of nargles in the wood, though, so perhaps I bear some responsibility."

It was hard to know how to look at the case. If it had been an assault, was the book thief into girls, or just working with someone who was? Was it just a matter of revenge? For his own part, he certainly hated Malfoy back when they had all been in school, but even when he had been a servant of Umbridge, it was really only the old toad that he wanted gone- as his problems got bigger, his school rivalries seemed less important. It was hard to even remember why they had fought other than the comments that he would get directed at himself, or his friends. Reappearing seemed to accomplish little to fan the flames of his past anger; the group had a decidedly lower level of combat proficiency, as should have been expected for those who practically skipped a year of Defense and never had a reason to get more invested in it in fourth year. Even if they had trained hard every day since school let out in fifth year, they would not have been able to catch up to the DA, and the numbers when they fought were about the same. Really, Harry could only see them as a group that wasted a lot of time building up defenses in the ivory tower for a reason that he still could not believe.

"Did she say anything to you?" he asked, trying to build off that thought. "I can't believe that they were really trying to fix Hogwarts. That had to be just a line that they thought would appeal to us."

"She was quiet, but she listened to me. She would always seem interested in the things I said to her."

It was a strangely sad picture, like when he found out she was getting bullied the previous year. Luna was probably talking about mad things that were not in any way real and Parkinson was listening just to see if anything useful came up. Without her wand and tied to a tree, there was little else she could do. He squinted.

"Wait a minute, where's her wand?" he asked. "Accio Pansy's wand." Nothing came flying toward him.

"We put it with my things for safekeeping, Harry," Hermione said, her brow furrowing slightly. "Why?"

"Priori Incantatem. Someone might have stolen it just to avoid having the memory charm on their regular wands."

"We don't have a list of wands," Ron said. "Do you know how to do that priori- what now?"

"No, I mean, I've seen it done, but it might be more complicated than it looks. I just thought someone might think we know it. If we did, it would have been easy; we could have just taken up all the wands and kept the one that had been used for a memory charm." It seemed like the idea landed among his friends, and he was grateful that they were not the type to make him wait before deciding how they felt about something, else informing him.

"Well, if we can't summon it, then someone's charmed it," his friend muttered, blowing a strand of red hair out of his face. Everyone had more or less let theirs grow long, though some had done something about it for practicality's sake if nothing else. "We should order a general search."

"Yeah," he said after a moment. "We haven't moved bases since the ivory tower, so it's either on one of us, it's over where we're training the recruits, or it's been destroyed. I just can't think that's likely. We'll take the blokes."

"Harry, the last thing I would want is for you to be biased, but... it might be a good idea to have Michael followed."

"I'd only raise his suspicions more," Ron said. "I'll get Neville to do it."

It did not take them long to get all the young wizards assembled. They ranged from being rather annoyed about being suspected to indifferent, whether that was a trick or not, but most of them had found out something in the time they had to poke around. Terry had discovered that there had been water on the ground near the captive, when it had not once rained in the time that they had her tied up to that exact tree. Ernie saw a girl moving around in the woods one night while he was on watch, and he thought it was Parkinson herself.

"When was that?" he asked as soon as they were divested of their clothes. He and Ron suffered the embarassment as well, more as a show of solidarity than because anyone suspected them. The way Michael was looking at him, though, he supposed it was a serviceable precaution.

"It was two nights ago. I thought I must have been seeing things." He only spoke in such short sentences when embarrassed. Harry wanted to reveal to everyone that they at least knew that a witch was involved, but the actual perpetrator could still be among them, and could make use of that information. When they were satisfied that no one had the wand on them after a basic inspection, and the clothes they were wearing had been searched, the two of them turned their attention to the tent.

"Mate, I really don't want to look, even if I'm right, but do you think someone could've-"

"Blaise beat us to it," he muttered back as they went to the tent. "I heard him telling Michael that the wand had a decent curve to it. Wouldn't have gone up or down."

"Really? I thought they were all pretty straight."

"So did I, but apparently he saw it himself multiple times. You can't transfigure a wand and get it back the same way, so anyone who knew this was coming would've been smarter to just destroy it or vanish it." They searched the tent quickly and carefully. Though it was upsetting to go through everyone's things, and he knew he was imposing on their willingness to go along with the investigation, it had to be done for the sake of fairness. There was nothing of interest to the case in the tent, though there was something they had not expected to find.

"What the hell is Neville doing with an unmarked potion?" Ron asked, holding up a crystal vial.

"It might just be a project he finds interesting. It might also be someone planting evidence."

"What if that's what's happened? What if there's loads of false leads?"

"I don't know. For starters, we don't really know what someone's trying to accomplish. It seems like a lot of trouble to get away with assault." They left the tent. "I can't say I have any experience, but it's got to be easier to just ask."

"Search me." He shook his head. "I reckon he might've figured nobody would care. He had to have taken precautions just in case."

It was almost a little surprising that everyone seemed to immediately rally around the captive, when she had been an enemy only recently, but it was probably a dangerous game to allow enemies to get felt up; when they got traded back, who was going to be next? So far, it did not seem that anyone was shaking with fear, so he doubted that a false memory of having done the crime had been planted anywhere.

"If one thing's certain, Hermione was right. There's... infinitely more ways of hiding things and covering things up than there are of finding things out. It might be good for us that magic seems to be on our side, as long as we're the rebels and not the authority, but once that changes, we're going to have a... I don't even know; we're going to have a totally different problem on our hands."

"That's prob'ly why the Order's moving so slowly. They don't want to tear too much down or they won't be able to build it back up again."

The search of the girls had gone about as well, which was to say that none of their friends had anything suspicious, but it gave them no more clarity than they had before. Hermione was shaking her head over the detail of the unmarked potion, agreeing they were probably right about it being irrelevant.

"Well, I don't like it, but we're going to have to find out who could have learned the Memory Charm without telling us," Ron said. "We line everyone up, we ask them if they know it, and we see if they're lying one by one."

"I have to do a full dive to find out even basic things," their Legilimens said. "It's not as easy as just asking a yes or no question. We were all trying to avoid this... but it's time for an Occlumency test."