It had been discussed that making themselves available was a necessary step, but it was not without its conflicts. Voldemort still had a few jewels in his collection, and it seemed they had already attacked what was basically a refugee settlement. It was hard to determine the motivation; there was no explicit threat presented by the forty would-be political prisoners of Malaysia, who had fled to Britain following a coup against their government. While it was not really the DA's place to evaluate whether or not the rebels were right, they had been casually following it, primarily for ideas, and they could not find enduring and otherwise unfixable problems with the regime that had been overthrown. The primary magical Minister had been caught up in a raid while she was on vacation and beheaded, and her cabinet basically escaped the ensuing wave of revolutionary fervor. A few other countries that were closer turned them down, and the British government did not explicitly turn them away, but as soon as the day arrived insisted on creating a specific housing area on the islands of the British Indian Ocean Territory, 'a clime more suitable to the Malay', but technically within the Ministry's authority, even if there were no magical Brits living there.

"I can't think that this whole thing was intentional," Ginny said. She had been following the developments most closely out of anyone.

"The attack or the settlement?" he asked. They had discussed the whole thing in a meeting, but he caught her alone to hear her personal opinion.

"The settlement. I have an idea about why Voldemort might have sent someone to attack there, and he can't have gone all that way by accident, but I feel like Fudge was just too distracted to refuse to accommodate the refugees, and then someone had to cover for that by picking out a place that wouldn't put the population in danger if the rebels decided not to allow them to leave."

"It's not like he was going to declare them the legitimate government of Malaysia," Harry said after a moment of thought. "If all they wanted was a place to live out their days, then it's unlikely the rebels would have chased them across the sea. They're going to have their hands full with their new government."

"They might not have one, at least not at the federal level," Ginny said, sighing. "Basically, they live on two different islands, and the muggle cultures are different, so at some point they decided to have a multi-level system, and I think the territories are still running as expected." She looked out the window, and then back at him. "I couldn't tell you why Fudge would bother with this."

"He's not entirely heartless. A few years ago, he was intently concerned with my safety when Sirius escaped, and it wasn't something that would have been blamed on him if I'd been attacked in my home."

"That may be, but it just seems too disjointed. I think even if he chose not to block their request for asylum, he's not really making a safe place for them."

"If they thought that the territory in the Indian Ocean wasn't safe enough from the rebels, they would have gone with one of their other options." He thought for a moment. "I would think that by the time they applied for refuge with our country, they would have already gone to several other countries, and there's no way all of them explicitly turned them down. The only thing I can't figure out is if people are going to think Voldemort is seriously trying to punish Fudge for failing to keep his return secret."

"It's not that stupid of an idea," she said after a moment. "Most people might not know that he punishes his servants for failure, but it's an easy thing to guess for someone so absurdly evil. I don't think Fudge would ever knowingly work with him, though, even with as much harm as he's done. I'm sticking with the explanation I gave earlier."

In the meeting, Ginny had outlined her ideas of the most likely reason for the attack. Voldemort, in her view, was trying to see if he could start another conflict, and then back out of it if it did not end up helping him. They had talked the issue of his potentially escalating the situation to an international conflict to death, and he had never given any indication that he wanted to escalated it, because there was no way of knowing if he had more friends or enemies out there, and probably most other wizarding communities would not care enough to bother weighing in one way or another. Attacking a group of refugees in British territory, though, might prompt a response, but if it was a response he did not like, he could just wait for the current government to apologize for it and try something else. In that event, it would be nothing more than a stain on the reputation of the Ministry. If he liked the response, though, he could attack some other country directly; as long as he was quick about it, and they did not see it coming.

"Are we any closer to finishing the Dark Detector?"

"No. Blaise said it would never work. At this point, I'm inclined to agree. Maybe you could find traces of dark magic within a few miles, but never from this far away." She chuckled slightly. "Well, at least it might warn us if he finds us."

"Then we just have to keep baiting him into attacking us. He won't try to send someone else, this time. We've killed his units before and he knows he'll be wasting their lives if he sends them without backing them up. What we've been doing hasn't been pointless PR work. We're putting ourselves closer to our goal."

"I know, it's just- it's weird. I don't know how to explain it, but it's like things have been reset, a little. It makes it hard to tell how to feel about everything." She took a deep breath. "That probably doesn't make sense."

"I understand," he said, thinking of his own dreams. He was still not out of the woods, he knew. "It makes sense more than you know. I've told you about my dreams, right?"

"We've found out, Harry," she said, her voice lowering slightly. "It's especially concerning, believe it or not, when you don't say anything and just let us find out."

"I'm asking if I've told you." He shook his head. "We're not in a particularly good position right now; it just looks that way when you can't be allowed to know that Voldemort is trying something he hasn't tried before to control me. Hermione and Daphne don't have a clue what it is. It's like no matter what we do, and no matter what we say in public, we can't get any closer to winning. Sometimes I... Ginny, I know how it sounds, but sometimes I think the best thing is to go ahead and just... deprive him of all the Horcruces we can and then figure out what to do with the snake."

"Haven't we been concerned that he'll realize that he's down to one and then go and make more?"

It meant a lot that she understood him and did not simply insist on his survival, not acknowledging how little he wanted to die. Did she know that he had come to accept it, having put it together with Ron and Hermione? He had cheated death countless times; it was only fair at that point. Really, the closest he had ever been was when he was a second year, badly bleeding and poisoned with basilisk venom. It had not killed him, of course, the phoenix preserved him... to die later? Harry had a hard enough time wrapping his mind around the more spiritual mechanics of the strange religion that Dumbledore practiced without the fact that he had such a bird, apparently as a pet. How did that even work? Why would an instrument, or even a manifestation, of something with such power, that it could give prophecies to non-seers, sit on a perch in an office until needed for the healing properties of its tears? Why would it empower him to fight the basilisk instead of just destroying it through some absurd show of force?

"I'm getting a headache," he said after a moment.

"I know; I'm stressed too-"

"I'm really- I'm getting a bad one."

"Is it an attack?"

"If it is, I can't recognize it as one."

Not for the first time, it felt like all the Occlumency training had gone to waste, but he ha to remind himself that it was probably only because of it that the enemy had to adopt a new strategy, and most likely he was retaining more control over the situation than before, even as it was hard to see it. Taking deep breaths, he felt like he was being forced to the ground, as if a wave of fatigue was hitting him all at once. He wanted nothing more than to sleep, and he knew that the dark wizard had probably been waiting for him to fall asleep. Was he asleep too? Was that the trick of it?

"Harry, I'll knock you out if you don't get to bed," Ginny said. He was only vaguely aware of her words, but he supposed there was no point in trying to fight the onset of the dream; it was just a matter of whether or not he was going to make her levitate him somewhere he could sleep without hurting his back. In mere seconds, though, he felt like his back was already hurting. Trying to formulate a plan as she helped him to a nearby bed in the base, he felt like it was beginning before he was even asleep. Did he only have to be tired enough? Was it part of Voldemort's plan to make him stay awake longer to try to avoid the dream, only to take advantage of a poorly rested mind?

He was floating. The world was gone from around him. It was not that strange for dreams in general, but for the enemy's attempts to control him, it was a first. When Snape and later Hermione had been training his mental defenses, they had done so by going through his memories, and in essence the dark wizard had twigged some way of doing that without making him aware that he was being attacked. He thought it was because he was dreaming, but he had known the whole time, back in fourth and fifth year, that those dreams had not been normal.

Strangely, no one addressed him and light only appeared when a door opened, and he realized he had been in a broom closet. Still floating, he exited, and realized that he was a ghost. What happened? Where was Sir Nicholas? Hogwarts looked different, at least in some ways.

"Friar!" he called out, seeing a familiar face. "I've lost my memory," he admitted. "How did I get to be a ghost? What year is it?"

"I'm not sure about either of those, Harry," he responded after guiding a lost Hufflepuff down a corridor. "I can tell you that in general, a man becomes a ghost when he fails to go on to his eternal reward. Usually, I attribute it to cowardice, and in many cases it is, but in my case, it was because there was so much that I left undone... I took whatever chance I could get to stay around." He took a deep breath. "I no longer remember something so long ago, but I can only think that it was the same with you."

"Maybe," he said, still looking around. There were plenty of students, but he did not recognize any of them. "Is Voldemort still out there?"

"Oh, that's none of my business. I can't say if he did you in or not. It's the first time I've ever had a student ask about the hereafter, but I suppose it's not that surprising in your position."

"Really?" he asked. "No one ever asked you why you were a friar, or how you died?"

"Oh, they asked me how I died more times than I can remember, but how I died... no, it must have been fewer times than I remember..." He frowned. "To find an answer for your own question, you will have to ask someone living, I fear. It seems you do not know how to be a ghost just yet... forgetting all that seems rather strange."

He tried to will himself around following some basic instructions and found that he could fly. The school gave him some reason to have hope, but the further he flew away from it, the more unnerved he became. Everything seemed perfect. Could it be, though? What had to have happened for that to happen? As he flew over the country, increasing his pace by the second, he wondered if it was his conscious mind speeding up the dream, or if all ghosts could fly so quickly. There were no trains below him, no airplanes, and in the whole time he never saw a car on a road. Magical London was the only city he saw as he approached it, and it sprawled apparently endlessly; despite being much more dense than the muggle city he had come to know, it was larger than any he had ever seen.

"I can forestall the invasion no longer," a booming voice announced over the city, causing everyone to stop and look up. "The forces of the Magic Destruction Union will soon make landfall, and as many of you have suspected, we are not prepared to repel them with our limited resources. I cannot promise that there will be hope if we fight, but only that there will be none if we flee instead."

Cracks rang out around him and whether they were getting into position or getting the hell out, he had no idea. It was also impossible to figure out whether anyone was really out there intent on destroying magic, and whether that started before or after the land had started culling or otherwise getting rid of its muggle population. The world was completely unrecognizable and the panic started to set in. Even if there could be found some way of killing something and returning to his own time, what did that mean going forward? Could Voldemort just send him to any time at all, even if he had no recollection of it? Was it just his own mind coming up with some scenario? Was it something that might actually happen in the future, a prophecy, given by the Phoenix?

Had he simply lost it?

Harry woke up in a dark room. It was not until he got out of bed that he realized he was shaking. Not only did he not have the power to tell whether or not he was dreaming, it appeared that Voldemort was not going to run out of years, and was not confined to his memories. How much research did he have to conduct to find that out? Was it all because he failed to send him to his death running off after the promise of rescuing Sirius? If he looked back on it, that one event was probably the only thing that could be counted as a direct defeat by a teenager, and not some convenience or aid from someone more powerful?

"Phoenix," he muttered, still looking around. There was no response. He supposed that if his eyes were closed, though, they would have been opened again, as before. Holding his wand aloft, he realized he was in the same bedroom where he had fallen asleep, and Ginny was probably still somewhere nearby, at least if the time that ha passed in a dream had any bearing on reality. "Ginny?" he called out.

"Harry, you're all right," she said, opening the door. It was uncomfortably familiar, like déjà vu, as the door let light in and he caught it before it could close again. "Have you figured out some way to overcome the dreams?"

"No," he said. "No- I'm certain it's worse now. I just got off easy this time. I don't know what's going on, but I'm certain that sooner or later, Voldemort can get to me. I have to..." What? Kill him first? That was what they had been trying to do. So far, it seemed that if he did not want to be found, he could avoid it indefinitely and keep using the Death Eaters to kill people and continue try to escalate and spill out the conflict, but only in a way where they might be able to back out-" He shook his head. "They're attacking targets that we might have some obligation to protect, but we'll only draw more attention to ourselves in the process. We'll either get attacked by some other entity or they'll wait for us to show up and try to capture a few of us-"

"Why haven't they done that with my brother, then? Do they know that we wouldn't change our course of action, even though he's worth a lot to all of us?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "I can't say for sure that they haven't killed him. They could be waiting for the right time, or they could be trying to modify his memories and use him as a deep cover spy or something. We really have no insight on what might have happened." He had a thought. "We haven't told the public that Ron disappeared-"

"Voldemort's not going to pull a publicity stunt where he trots out my brother and tells everyone how awful you are. Maybe a few of the Death Eaters might have gone for that, but that kind of thing would bore him to tears. They're going to let him have the last word on what happens with any resource they capture. I don't think they'd try to convince him on the merits of changing public opinion. Besides, wouldn't he just die if they had him betray us like that?"

"Not really, not if they were clever about it. They would have to figure out how far they could push it, and he might die just giving out any information about the curse on us, but if they learned that expressing a difference of opinion doesn't amount to treason, then they could use him as a prop like that, but I can't see them just guessing that, and even if they did, they would probably think it would be much easier to use him as a hostage, even if they know we're serious and we're not going to give up the whole war for him."

Actually saying it seemed to make it harder. He had not had to give any orders to the effect that his first friend would not be rescued if it came down to that or winning the war, because everyone knew the rules. At the same time, they had all taken pains to save him from Hogwarts, even after he had been fine with it being a suicide mission- as much as he wanted to live and as intensely grateful as he had been when they found him, he had accepted being the first casualty of the war; he had never seen himself as being some kind of exception to the fact that it was going to take a lot of death and sacrifice to even get through the early stages of the war.

"What do we do now?" Ginny asked. "I just... we haven't even decided how to respond to the attack, except not to get provoked by it, and to recognize that it's a trick..."

"I've decided," he said after a moment. "We're going to announce what we think Voldemort's intentions are, and then we're going to see how he responds to it. Someone else might think it's cleverer to see if we can set the old guard up as a legitimate government, or remove them from our territory, or actually get involved with what Malaysia is doing, but it's a distraction. He's trying to show he can pull us out to the wider world when the conflict is actually on a much smaller scale."

"It's a conflict between us and the Death Eaters, then."

"No. It's a conflict between me and him."