The short version was that their defensive line was attacked, and fortunately, it was contained, but people saw them fighting over Diagon Alley. The fact that they had to retreat afterward was part of why they were so quick about getting everyone together to get apparated out. More than ever knew the technique themselves, but it was still convenient to coordinate an exit, though as long as they knew where everyone was, they could go and get anyone who was left behind. Harry was trying to contain his expression through the whole thing, but then, it could have been much worse. The fact that it was out in the open that they had a resistance group was not the end of the world. If anything, it might even draw more people to the cause. The only problem was that they had not identified their attacker.
"Is it that you didn't know or is it that they didn't give you any conclusive evidence?"
"There were more of us," Ron said. "Even though they were only wearing regular robes, the kind that wouldn't have been out of place on the street, we could tell that they were trained. We were forcing them back so effectively they couldn't do anything."
"That wouldn't tell us if they were Aurors or Death Eaters," Hermione said, sighing. "I would think the latter would be more inclined to use Unforgivable Curses. Could people on the street see anyone attacking us on the rooftops?"
"No, but they didn't need to," Blaise said, rolling his eyes. "The next headline will be 'Potter's band of terrorists attack random people in Diagon Alley'. We can all see why that's a problem. If we were seen fighting, and it wasn't a bunch of masked Death Eaters right when they were about to attack, it won't take much to convince everyone that we were the aggressors."
"That might be true, but they probably knew we existed already; they just didn't want to reveal that they knew," Harry said, sighing. "They were waiting for something like this to happen so that they can contextualize the group with the incident."
"Why do people have to be so stupid?" Michael asked. So far, it seemed like they had done all they could for Daphne, who had found herself in suspended animation. Ron gave the nod to his sort-of-girlfriend, who frowned as she realized she was being asked to check if anything was going on in there.
"It's not that they're stupid, they're just easily tricked," Terry said. "It's a moral failing, not an intellectual one. To be honest is to love the truth, and I think as a culture, we've forgotten that entirely. You can blame the liars for lying to you, but you can only blame yourself for not caring enough about the truth to figure it out."
"Many of them aren't close enough to the reality to see it properly anyway," Susan said. "I would say that they have an excuse, even if it's a weak one. This time, even the people who were there probably only saw a couple spells flying through the air before they took cover like they were meant to- even if they saw something that seemed inconsistent with what the Prophet is going to report tomorrow, they're not going to let that overturn everything else that's being said, and everyone else that's saying it."
"The Quibbler's not going to look like a terribly convincing counter argument," Blaise added. "Even if it offers an interview with one of the people involved, what are we going to say? We only started casting spells when they were up on rooftops with us, and they seemed to be attacking us? We don't have a clue who they were, and we can't explain why we were there."
"It's better to offer a strange-sounding explanation than none at all," Ernie said, getting ready to disapparate. "I'll take care of it."
Ernie Macmillan could be trusted to know how to put things, and he spoke nary an untrue word. Unlike with Neville, who would probably say he could not tell a lie to save his life, his was a deliberate honesty, ever conscious of how he might not be believed, the doubts and counter-arguments that might come up in the listener's mind. Members of the DA had asked him if he wanted to be a journalist at some point, and more and more, Harry thought he just might be cut out for it. As hopeful as it sounded, there was some chance he could even redeem the term.
"At the moment, we can do nothing more about how this will be perceived," Ron said, ending the moment of silence. He looked over at Hermione. "Do we have anything?"
"She's still alive in there. It's like she's sleeping, but can't wake up."
"Can you go inside her dream?"
"No, I've tried. There's brain activity; you can tell that even just from her rapid eye movement. I don't think that she knows she's dreaming. That's the problem."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, it's like she's keeping herself in a trap. She might even believe that she's dead, and that there's no way for her to come back."
The reality set in for everyone there. No one was outwardly blaming Harry, but it was really only a formality that he had taken responsibility; as the one giving the orders, he was responsible by default, and that included being responsible for informing the families of deaths. He could only wonder if Daphne was already like the Longbottoms, not exactly dead, but just lost beyond all hope.
"Is she using Occlumency to keep you out?" Terry asked, evidently still interested in the academics of it all.
"If it were that simple, I would have overcome her defenses already... at least I think I would have. I did not know she was working at it as hard as Harry was, but she was solid every time I tested her." She stared off into space a moment, an uncharacteristic expression. "Well, I think it's actually possible if she's using an active defense."
"That's not some other form of shielding your mind, is it?" Michael asked.
"No, not really. It's more like using Legilimency on your target. She's keeping me from getting through her shields by sending me the wrong idea of what I'm detecting. I can only think it was some desperate means to preserve herself."
Again, Harry's heart sank. It was so much worse than just losing someone in battle, even though that was something he never wanted to have happen again. Fortunately, the mind arts were only about as complicated as Hermione understood, so there was a chance that she could get through Daphne's defenses, but that meant she would not be available for anything else, and even then there was the chance it was all a waste of time. After getting mission reports from everyone involved, including the three ranking recruits who had been properly sworn to secrecy, he dismissed everyone for the evening. Despite the fact that not everyone had the privilege of waking up, they all needed to sleep, and that included their only other mind reader.
"You've done all you can for her right now," Ron was whispering, hand on her shoulder. There was no indication that she heard him. "I want you to come back to it tomorrow, when you're fresh. You burned yourself out studying with Terry and you need your rest."
The other Dragon Marshal had not even thought of that, but then, he supposed she hid her fatigue well. If Hermione had been pretending not to hear him, she gave up that illusion and levitated Daphne's unconscious form to the girls' tent. As the two of them walked back the other way, he had trouble raising his head.
"I'm not going to give it to you any worse."
"I know," he said. "You can tell that there's no need." He sighed, loudly. For his failings, he had never been one to wish additional suffering on himself out of guilt. Terry would say that it was because his heart worked properly that it pained him. "It's just... she's taken so many risks... everyone has, really... and I can't offer any kind of reward. It's like just telling everyone that your reward is that you'll get to die fighting for truth and justice or something."
"I don't know what I could say to make that better, mate. Well, there's the fact that it does matter to me. It matters to me that I'm doing something. I'm not chuffed a bit to see someone suffer for it, but it's a reminder that it's not a circus, and I'm grateful."
"Thanks," he said. "This will all be fixed tomorrow morning."
It was not his day for Divination.
Even during drills, with Hermione working on it without pause, as if oblivious to everything going on around her, there was no sign of any improvement. As long as Daphne devoted her full effort to keeping her out of her head, there was effectively nothing she could do; past a certain point, it did not run on strength of will, and the subject had more than enough of that. The more she explained it to him, the more he wanted to learn it himself, at least enough to use it to protect himself, even if he could not replace what they lost. He asked Ron to work on a drill in which they hunted down the recruits all across the island; it was something that they had planned without ever having the chance to do it before.
"Okay, so... the first thing that you have to understand is that the mind is like this ever-evolving landscape... maybe that's the wrong word. You won't see a landscape or anything in there, but I'm sure you know that," Hermione explained as soon as they were alone with the witch they were trying to help. "Put it this way, your memories aren't stored in cells. They aren't sitting there at any point, one memory in each cell. It's a network of electrical impulses that's always running. As of the nineteen seventies, there are competing theories for how it all works."
Her advice sounded terribly unhelpful, but it spoke to her experience with how he learned, in a direct, intuitive way, that he was already starting to picture it. It was more complicated than just going inside his mind to show him how to defend it, he needed to get into hers, and it was unreasonable to expect to make a lot of progress in an afternoon. Hermione had probably had something of a timely advantage when she was first learning, because barely anyone around her had even started with Occlumency. The sun was setting by the time that he managed to reach her.
"Harry? Hermione?"
They both looked over to see that Ernie had returned.
"Well, I might as well tell you how things went on my end."
It was about as bad as they had expected, at least to hear the editor of the Quibbler tell it from the other information he was getting, but it was about as good of a response as they could produce. The newsletter had to remain objective, even if it was permitted to entertain fantastically weird notions with very little evidence, like the existence of Moon Frogs- there was nothing that they could do to make the story sound better than it was. Whoever had chosen to attack the DA on the rooftops of Diagon Alley had worn the cleverest disguise of them all, the one that made them look just like everyone else.
Cracks of apparation sounded that the day was ending. Apparently, the recruits had been caught off-guard, but several of them had escaped during the exercise. They split up, forcing the ranked members to hunt them down, apparating to their houses, and other likely places. Several managed to get away for the entire day, and the rest were stunned. Just from what Ron heard, it seemed like none of them complained about any unfairness in the way they were being treated. Kirke came up to him as they were packing things up for the day.
"Dragon Marshal?"
"Sergeant?"
"I heard that our next operation would take us to a new hideout."
"It's more likely that we'll be defending again. There has to be something that's slipped our notice, even when we've been trying to keep everything under control. Either the Death Eaters or the Auror Corps- depending on how this next development goes- they're using whatever they've got to come after us. The best thing to do is just relocate before they're aware of anything. If today's exercise proved anything, it's that not leaving a trace is the best defense."
They finished gathering their things by wandlight and apparated out, taking refuge on the island with the tower that Malfoy must have thought would be a cool secret base. They had been certain that dark wizards would have put detection wards all over the place, but according to a few of the recruits, who had gone there to check, there was nothing of the sort. Unless someone guessed that they were there and went, no one would know. Voldemort still had quite a few forces at his command, and the same could be said of the Ministry, but they could not split up and search the whole island. When they wanted to attack someone, they had to come in force, and they had to know where they were going. Most likely, either of the entities would focus their search on Harry himself, especially after the failed hostage exchange.
"We're almost making fools of them," he observed the following morning, looking out over the sea as he took a break from practicing Legilimency with Hermione again. If if he could not do anything for Daphne, he could not quite let it go. The entire group would suffer if something happened to him.
"Sometimes I think that the Death Eaters are hamstringed by having to stay silent. They spent the whole last war terrorizing people. I know of a handful of assassinations that they probably engineered, but it's nothing like just burning down houses and leaving Dark Marks in the sky. After the Quidditch World Cup, they're probably only restraining themselves to make everyone think that they're afraid, that they don't have their master."
"The Aurors probably have bureaucratic problems," he decided after a moment. "I'd love to think that it's genuinely good, honest people in the Ministry hindering them and keeping them from mobilizing properly, or even just the appearance of going after a bunch of former Horgwarts students, but it's probably just different parties trying to figure out how to use the current crisis, different departments fighting for a budget and so on. The whole thing can come around to agreeing on an information policy with the Prophet because goose, gander, everything's brilliant-"
"Harry, do you actually want to learn Legilimency?" she asked.
"I thought we were taking a break."
"I mean, we can, but... are you afraid of what you might find in Daphne's head?"
"No. Are you?"
"Harry, there's something... experimental I can try. I feel like a hypocrite after saying that Professor Snape's high-speed Occlumency training was obviously not working for you, but this might work. Or, well, it might just sentence both of us to the same fate."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, one way of putting it is that I'm going to go down there and pull her out, and I'll need you to be... have you ever heard of Achilles?"
"I've heard of him."
"Basically, he was submerged into the River Styx as an infant. His mother held onto his heel, and that was his whole connection to the world of life. That was all that kept him from being swept away." She took a deep breath. "With what you know now, I feel like you could form that connection for me, but... I need you to promise me that you'll let go if there's no way out. If I tell you that I'm going to have to find out how to wake up on my own, then-"
"Hermione, even as a coordinator, I can't authorize-"
"Harry, please, I didn't tell her about the risks. I practically taught her how to do everything and she took to it so naturally that-" She shook her head.
"Even if you trained her, I was the ranking officer on the scene. That makes it my responsibility."
"Then take responsibility." Hermione breathed slowly. "I'm sorry. I know this isn't an easy decision, but this may be our only way to get her out. I think Legilimency isn't really something that comes naturally to you, not like Quidditch or rushing into danger, and I appreciate how much of an effort you've put into it in spite of that." She looked around. "I didn't want to say this in front of the others, but there's a chance that we only have so much time."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, most coma patients never wake up. I know this is a magic coma, and I'm not really a neurologist, but it's not like she doesn't have to rest. If her mind is consciously active, and has been the whole time, without a moment of rest, she's getting severe brain damage and has no way of healing." She sighed. "It's not strange to go a day or two without sleep, but..."
"I know. If she keeps going like this, not waking up might be the least of her concerns." He thought for a moment. "We might as well get started."
"Get started? I only just finished my research with Terry about the context for the prophecy that concerns you. Before we go through with this, I need to-"
"You're going to be fine," he said. "You don't get a backup plan."
"That's ridiculous. I can't just-"
"You need a reason to come back. This is it."
"Harry, I don't need to emotionally manipulate myself, besides, Terry, in my absence, can surely-"
"Come back for Ron, then."
"I beg your pardon," she replied, cheeks turning pink. "That is an entirely unrelated discussion-"
If she thought it was less awkward to just get it started, he supposed he would be okay with that. It was the best attempt they could make, realistically, and their chances would only worsen over time; he was not exactly making exponential progress with Legilimency, even though he understood the concept, somewhat. Had Snape been right about repeated forced exposure being the best?
In a space between his own and Hermione's memories, they were, of course, at Hogwarts. The glittering gems of the hourglasses by the Head Table were very much real and mined from the ground, centuries ago, at least according to the book she always referenced. Daphne was passed out on the table next to them.
"I need you to understand that this isn't like going into her dream. She's not dreaming. That's something that the others don't understand."
"She's in one of her own memories, then."
"She can't find her way out and she's become convinced that she really lives back then."
"Does she not remember anything more recent than that?"
"Harry, has there ever been a time you would have jumped at the chance to do over?" She shook her head. "I won't really know until I look, but there's a good chance that she thinks she was taken back through time, or that she died, and she's only reliving something. I only need you to help me break her defenses, and hold onto me. Maintain your mental connection to me."
"When am I going to know?"
"Technically, almost instantly... but you'll need to stay on the outside, where you can still get out. If nothing else, you'll at least know what the problem is. If I can establish a mental link with both of you at the same time, we'll... at least know if there's a way back for her."
There was nothing else to establish.
"Let's not waste any time, then."