Hogwarts did not look quite the same since he last saw it.

The witch from the clean-up crew had less information than he had thought she would, which was inconvenient, and it suggested that she was being knowingly sacrificed so that he would have some way of getting to his destination, but they could not afford to worry about it. They had not found out how they had been found, but based on everything they knew, they were not actively being monitored as they killed her and tossed her body in the remains of a fire. The fact that she did not return would raise a red flag, obviously, but they made it look like she had gotten too close to Neville's Venomous Tentacula, which did not burn easily. If they thought that she was poisoned, perhaps when they investigated it, they would think that her death was accidental.

Getting to the school had been the hard part. It was too obvious to warp to Hogsmeade; there was no way that the village had not basically been converted into a honeypot, if not some kind of open-air prison where all comings and goings were strictly monitored. The place to go, therefore, was the place where Ron had run when he went off the grounds and buried a Horcrux before being found and extracted.

"We said we'd never come back here," he reminded them as they stared through the trees. Technically, there was nothing different about the castle, and there were not even dementors roaming the place like there had been in their third year, but it certainly did not look like home. Blaise looked unperturbed, but then, he always looked like that. "Guess there's nothing for it, though."

"We decided to tell everyone about the Horcruces," Harry said. "Before that, they decided to figure it out. We also thought we had a consistently secure way of hiding. They must have used some form of Divination, or something else we couldn't have predicted. It doesn't matter, though. We'll have to get everyone back and decide what to do from there."

"If they're hiding them anywhere in the castle, most likely they chose the dungeons," Hermione said. She was still frowning about how they had all decided that they were going to the most likely target. "The higher floors would be harder to secure against broomsticks."

"We wouldn't have enough broomsticks for everyone, but I'll take your word for it," he said. "We need to get in on a lower floor anyway. We'll use the secret passage that gets you through Honeydukes- no, the one that goes through the lake. That's our only shot."

"Which one is that?" Hermione asked. Ron groaned.

"Fred and George were lying about that one," he said. "They must have messed around with the map. They showed me that it didn't work."

"They did? When?"

"First year. I went over to the statue of Gregory the Smarmy and I couldn't quite hack it, so I asked them about it and they said it wasn't a real secret passage, and they'd only been pulling my leg."

"My father transfigured this map; he put the finishing touches on it in his last year of schooling. There's not a chance in hell your brothers tampered with it when they were third years. They must've been lying to you when you were a first year so that you wouldn't get their secrets exposed. We're heading for the lake."

He knew he probably should not have put it like he did, but it really struck him as annoying, and there would be time to apologize later, if it was at all necessary. They stayed out of sight as they went through the trees to the water's edge, where Blaise put bubble head charms on each of them, something he had learned almost as a break from everything else. He was always decent at academic things, evidently, and whenever he had his nose in a book, it seemed like fewer people bothered him about more difficult things. The last several months had been something of an adjustment between the previous way he saw his life and his role in the ongoing conflict. Harry was almost surprised he had never really talked with Blaise until they walked back to back underwater, the bubbles intersecting as they kept a lookout for merpeople. By contrast, it looked like Ron and Hermione were quiet the whole way.

"Here we are," he muttered, having reached the approximate place in the lake, based on the perfectly accurate scale model on the map. For its faults in terms of how it invaded everyone's privacy, the map was a wonder, a work of art. The four of them were looking at something that looked a lot like a glass portcullis embedded into the lakebed; they might have missed it had the lake been any dirtier, but it seemed like either everything else was avoiding them, or they were just lucky for a change. "Charybbosa."

He looked around and saw that they were on the other side, like they had been there the entire time, and were looking up at the lake through the glass.

"Weird," Ron observed. "Maybe Fred and George never actually used this one."

"They might not have had a good reason to get to the lake," Harry said by way of compromise. "I suppose we'll have to ask them if we were want to settle it."

"It's not important either way," Hermione said. "We should keep moving while we don't know that this is a trap."

Technically, if they were lucky, it was a trap that was still being set up. The hostages had most likely been secured already, but if they could arrive before the threat had been sent out, then they could catch their enemies before they had really jumped the mental hurdle of thinking they were in the calm before the storm. As they walked, casting detection charms, their resident Legilimens was getting a mental block.

"Bad news," she muttered. "I'm blind. Well, technically only as blind as everyone else is. There's a form of the mind arts that basically works as an active defense, and they've decided that's how secure they want this place to be."

"They know we're coming," Ron said. "At least they expect intruders." He shrugged. "It's not all that hard to find this place, not if you can get to Hogsmeade or somewhere you know is close. I reckon they're doing something secret here if they think that someone like Hermione is coming after them."

It was hard to disagree with that. When they reached the statue of Gregory the Smarmy, which was on the first floor, they split up. The Parselmouth would be going to the Chamber, the Slytherin would be going to the dungeons and checking his old common room, and the other two would look for the Room of Requirement, which would take them further from the exit. They parted ways quietly; it was not customary to say goodbye or anything when they were on a mission.

Harry certainly hoped it was not the last he would see of them.

Taking the stairs to the second floor was easy, and the detection charms did not fail him. It was a bit weird to be on his own again, but at least he was going somewhere he would probably not need the Invisibility Cloak; Blaise had been the one who needed it the most and that decision had been easy enough to reach. The second floor landing featured only one target, an older Ministry official that he stunned before searching his person and finding a wand he recognized as Ginny's. Had someone else lost one and he needed to replace it with something similar? It was a shorter yew, but he had no idea about the core, just that it had not been a hand-me-down like her brothers'. Sighing, he decided that the old man was probably just a regular official taking advantage of a convenient situation, and that even if there were a point in levitating him over the stairs, it would probably make too much noise for the others. He moved the unconscious body to an empty room, which he locked after subtracting both wands.

Ducking into the girls' loo, he told the chamber to open just like he had before. There was probably no point in checking for the hostages, but it would give him the chance to check if the body of the basilisk was still down there, and he had a good feeling that it would be if no one had used the place for anything else. Sliding down the pipe like he had years earlier, he found the place effectively untouched, cursing as he realized he would much rather have his friends back. As big of a space as it was, the Chamber had nothing else going for it, so he left the way he came after summoning some fangs to his position and getting his Firebolt off his back. It had been a long time since he had the opportunity to fly, and it was a shame that his only chance was going back up a pipe. From what he understood, Salazar had designed the pit to be a one-way trip for anyone the monster found unworthy. Effectively, unless a potential heir could impress the basilisk, he or she would just end up being dinner rather than being carried out, and he found himself grateful that it was always effectively banned to even carry a broomstick in the castle, so such creative solutions as that would never have crossed the founder's mind.

"Harry," Blaise said as soon as he got down to the dungeons. It was fortunate that he had not seen anyone on the way there. "Get in here." Following the disembodied voice, he went into a Potions classroom. "The place is crawling with targets."

"Did you overhear anything?" he asked. "If they're all down here-"

"They're here because of something else, I think. I'm pretty sure this is where all the other hostages are. This is where they're keeping all the kids who were stupid enough to come here."

"They weren't stupid, just trusting," Harry said after a moment. "Their parents thought their kids' education was more important than ducking the effects of a regime change. Many of them probably had no idea that this was coming."

"I know," Blaise said, sighing. "I had to lie to my parents about much of what I was doing last year, and now I'm here because I effectively just ran away. I just don't want to do anything stupid like try and rescue them."

"We obviously can't do that," he said. "Even with all four of us, we're drastically outnumbered. There's no way we could keep stunning them or killing them and hiding the bodies without anyone ever noticing. Probably part of the reason there are so many of them is because they work around the clock." He frowned. "How many prisoners can Hogwarts even hold?"

"Probably not that many. I would expect they were evaluated for their loyalties and some were sent back in exchange for gold, or some magical contract obligating the parents to work tirelessly for the Ministry. The new monitoring programs need people to run them, and they can't keep confiscating house elves."

"They're doing that?"

"They wouldn't have let them keep working here at Hogwarts, not with nothing for them to do. Most likely, the rumors about confiscating them out of houses are only rumors for now, or it's only happening at a small scale. You don't need one whole set of eyes for every single person you want to monitor, but the more you have, the more closely you can survey people, and the more quickly you can find the interesting targets. They've probably already found out that some of the recruits aren't showing up to work as often, and it won't be long before they realize that most of our parents don't know where their children are."

Harry found himself grateful that the two of them barely fit under the cloak as a dozen red-robed witches and wizards went up the stairs; Blaise had the same somewhat slight frame that he did, and they were about equally tall. What reason could they have possibly had to all go upstairs at the same time? Had they been called there? Had Ron and Hermione been spotted? Without the mind arts, they had no idea how the rest of the team was doing; he just had to trust their ability to check their corners together, and they had always been able to do that.

"We need a distraction," he whispered as soon as they were away. "The others have a chance of finding someone. We don't know how many enemies there are here."

"They won't think we're here if it's the other hostages."

They silently made up their minds as they went back down the stairs. Blaise was decent at the Imperius, but there were simple signs to recognize, especially when the victim was being manipulated at a range. Their best bet was following the target closely and keeping up the detection spells. They came across a pair of Aurors escorting a young kid and had their targets immediately.

"Imperio."

"Avada Kedavra." Harry was grateful that he managed to bring down the target, but even more so that Blaise made it look to anyone around that the other red-robed witch had done it, drawing and turning. Someone called out from the other end of the corridor and they had her run off. The kid, a black hood over his or her face, just looked confused, and was largely ignored as the enemies ran after one of their own. The idea was just to have her get as far as she could, then change targets. It was not important to kill each target, just to cause confusion. Their enemy would still vastly outnumber them and probably figure out that there was an intruder, somewhere, but they would not necessarily know where to look, or where it started. In an ideal case, the enemies would start attacking each other without their intervention, but they were probably too well-trained for that. The most likely result of any trash tier trick like that was just getting led to believe that the enemy was falling for it, only to get surprised moments later.

The cleverness to a more general case strategy was, in essence, that they would have already accomplished what they wanted by the time that whatever next step of their plan was supposed to have happened. It was a pure distraction; they could get the kid out while they were at it, but that was not really the point. They were back at the secret passage by the time a general announcement came out.

"If I may have your attention, please note that there is a disturbance among the Aurors." It was the cool, female voice from the street entrance to the Ministry Atrium. "It is a rare thing, but let it be known that Aurors cannot be trusted."

"That's a trick if I've ever heard one," Blaise muttered. "What are they doing here in the first place?"

"It might be a training exercise. They might be teaching some of the newer bastards to interrogate prisoners."

"Who joins?" he asked as they got the kid into the tunnel. Unfortunately, there was no getting the bubble head on him or her before getting to the end of it, so the two of them used the Firebolt to speed things up.

"No idea," Harry admitted. "There were sixth and seventh years who would need work this year- might have figured the only way to get to use magic again was to work for the other side." They removed the hood off the kid's head so that she could breathe and saw that she was probably a second-year. The previous year would have been her whole understanding of how things worked at Hogwarts; she never would have known what it was like before that.

"Do you have anywhere you can go?" he asked.

"I... my parents are muggles. I just want to go home... I don't know how to get there, though..."

"If we got you to Edinburgh, would that be close enough?" Blaise asked. "I'll warp her out of here and then I'll come back for you. You need to see about Ron and Hermione."

"I can't disagree with that." He turned around almost immediately. The Aurors in the castle would not be able to locate the hostage they were only just leading around, and they would not be able to eliminate the chance that someone had come for that hostage specifically. Unfortunately for them, the next most likely possibility was that there was no intruder to trick, but that was assuming they had not already found the others, who had not the benefit of the cloak. He took the Firebolt back, but right as he was in the middle of the tunnel, he heard a rumbling in the earth around him and turned back right before a jet of water burst forth through the wall. Either someone had used the human revealing charm or their enemies knew more than they were letting on the whole time. When he reached the water again, Blaise was already gone, so he could only use the broomstick to try to get to the water's surface, but quickly found that it was not working at all. He swam for it, reminding himself of a few years ago, all the way down to the desperation from oxygen deprivation.

He took a deep breath and held his broomstick over his head, where it started to move again, and he managed to avoid a killing curse as he fled, using the Firebolt to pull himself out of the water and blocking a much faster-flying jinx with a hasty shield. The moment he got to the edge of the boundary, he was about to warp when he remembered his friends were still inside. As much as he liked the fact that they had saved the random kid, there was no way she was strategically worthwhile, not in reference to everyone else. There was even a question as to whether or not Blaise could get out, because he would have to cross exposed terrain before he could apparate out. Harry apparated to the other side of the ward barrier and went back inside, hoping against hope that at the very least the Aurors would not expect him to turn back. There was a single target on the roof near the headmaster's office, and it looked like he had not been noticed yet. Looking in through the window, it seemed that there was no one inside. Had the school some trick that the new occupants had not worked out yet?

His knuckles were white as he tried to think about what he needed to do. The two enemies from the clean-up crew had appeared, exactly as they had thought, but they knew virtually nothing, other than that they were meant to return to Hogwarts after delivering the threat. They had not even heard whether or not the enemy had an estimate on how long the four of them would be before showing up. The wiser move would have been to have him contact the Ministry himself while his friends went to rescue the others, but he could not have brought himself to leave it all to them, and he definitely would have been caught on his own, or that was what his gut was telling him.

"What are you doing there?" someone called out, and he realized it was the old witch on the roof, and Harry realized he had seen her from somewhere.

"Expelliarmus," he incanted without thinking about it long. He stunned her a moment later and grabbed her, throwing her over his shoulder, which was more difficult than he would have hoped, even with all the weight going through him to the broom. Seeing spellfire from elsewhere, he decided the quickest way out would be straight up, and he climbed, avoiding a killing curse as he found it harder and harder to breathe. When at last he could be sure he was beyond the barrier created by the anti-apparation jinx, he got out of there, warping to a former hideout spot near Mount Maw, which would put him close to Edinburgh. Per well-reviewed procedure, that was where Blaise was going to rejoin him, because that was the last place they had discussed before splitting up.

He took a deep breath before dropping the old witch on the ground, realizing she was none other than Mafalda Hopkirk.