The Wizengamot the next day was tedious, with people arguing about marginal tax rates and the amount of money spent on parchment each year. Several of the Sacred 28 representatives were annoyed at the amount of waste produced by the Ministry by their flying memos, which all the Department Heads took exception to. Even though it was amusing to see Era Hornbeam and Royce Fiddlewood banding together to snap back at Amycus Carrow, it was ultimately about something so inconsequential that Hermione didn't bother paying attention. Instead, she practiced condensing water onto her desk, making tiny, unnoticeable puddles of water, before evaporating them away again with heat from her fire magic.

The water elemental magic was still more stormy-feeling than Hermione had expected, but now that it had assimilated into her own magic somehow, it came as easily as any other element now. Hermione wondered what the sorcerers who wrote the spell-making book would think if they saw her. She rarely used spells to control her elemental magic – it responded to raw intent easily, naturally, without even the need for a wand much of the time.

The Dark magic on Cedric had been broken by overrunning it with raw magic as well, though Hermione suspected that if there hadn't been a ley line right there for her to use, that whole thing wouldn't have gone nearly as well as it had. But most of the time, magic required spells, especially when what you wanted to do required finesse.

Hermione sighed.

Spell creation was very difficult and very advanced work, she acknowledged. If she were going to try it at this level of learning, she was going to be at a distinct disadvantage. She couldn't come up with spells for everything she wanted – not yet, at least. She'd need to prioritize what she wanted to make spells for.

There was a short list in front of her so far, ideas she thought were worth prioritizing:

· Dark Mark detection spell
· Truth spell/Zone of Truth
· Healing spell for the goblins

Hermione looked down at her list, frowning. It felt incomplete.

If she could only make one spell, she thought; if she could only make one spell, what would be the most important spell for her to make?

A voice echoed in the back of her memory.

But one will be lost before the game is done…

Biting her lip, Hermione picked up her quill once more, scratching one more idea underneath the others:

· Healing spell that brings someone back from the Killing Curse

If she was going to try this impossible task of spell creation anyway, she might as well try for something impossible.

Draco and Tracey were intrigued and delighted to be invited to a secret plotting session after dinner one day. Blaise had secured an abandoned classroom, and he locked and hexed the door before joining them and sitting down with Hermione and the others.

"Hermione has a stupid idea," he announced.

"It's not stupid," Hermione objected. "Just—risky."

"Stupid," Blaise repeated, stubborn. "Our goal is to minimize the damage as she carries it out."

Draco looked between the two of them curiously. "What's this idea?"

Hermione sighed.

"Professor Vector's friend," she said. "The one dying of cancer? I think I can help him survive."

"Really?" Draco said, surprised. "You know that kind of healing magic?"

"Cancer?" Tracey said, her eyes widening. "I—I thought wizards were immune to cancer."

"Are they?" Hermione asked Tracey, surprised. "I didn't know that. Her friend is a muggle, though – part of what makes this whole thing so hard on Vector."

"Hermione does not know advanced healing magic," Blaise said firmly. His eyes cut over to Draco. "But she has the means of creating a… potion, of sorts, that has the potential to reverse damage done to DNA from radiation."

Draco looked puzzled for a moment, before understanding slowly dawned on his face.

"Seriously?" he asked, astonished. "Not that I know what DNA is, but that sounds important, reversing damage."

"Can someone please fill me in?" Tracey complained.

Hermione turned to Tracey.

"I have the Philosopher's Stone," she told Tracey, almost apologetically. "That's how we've been funding a lot of things, how I made all those diamonds. It can produce the Elixir of Life, too. And I think the Elixir could save Vector's friend."

Tracey's mouth fell open, and she was speechless for nearly a full minute. Hermione could see different thoughts racing through her mind behind her eyes, and she wondered which one would be the first one to fall out of her mouth.

When Tracey finally spoke, it wasn't a question Hermione had expected.

"Are you immortal now?"

Hermione blinked. "…what?"

"Are you immortal now?" Tracey asked again, her voice stronger. Her eyes were growing bright and alive, excited. "That's the whole purpose of the Elixir of Life, isn't it? To make you live forever? Are you drinking it regularly?"

"I…" Hermione faltered, thrown off entirely. "No. No, I'm not drinking it. I mean, I tried it at the beginning, so I could see if it worked, but I'm not drinking it regularly."

"Should you?" Tracey said emphatically, and Hermione gaped at her.

"I'm sorry, are you—"

"If you're going to be the leader of this big shadowy organization, it'd be good if you had some protection," Tracey argued. "Being immortal would help with that a lot. Can you imagine how awesome it would be if—"

"The Elixir only stops aging," Blaise cut in, stopping Tracey. "It doesn't make you immune to being killed."

Tracey faltered. "Oh."

"Hermione shouldn't risk it at this age anyway," Draco said, very matter-of-factly. He glanced over at her. "Something that suspends aging is likely to mess with other things in her body. At the very least, she should wait until she's 17, but ideally, until after she's done having children."

Hermione's jaw dropped open. "I'm sorry, what?"

"Isn't that usually the trade for immortality?" Draco asked, puzzled by her confusion. His silver eyes met hers, skeptical. "Your genetic legacy in exchange for an unending legacy of your own?"

"I don't know," Hermione said, astonished. "I didn't grow up on tales of people magically trading for immortality."

"Oh." Draco flushed a pale pink. "Um. Well…"

"Regardless," Blaise said loudly. "If Hermione is dead set on doing this, there is very little chance that Professor Vector isn't going to figure out what's going on. And she's an adult."

"And therefore likely to spill the secret?" Tracey guessed.

"…kind of," Blaise admitted. He looked at them all. "We need to come up with an iron-clad agreement for Vector to agree to before we do this. The risk of Hermione's secret getting out is too big otherwise."

"You're making me sound like I'm being foolish here," Hermione objected. "Vector's friend is going to die otherwise."

"And he still might," Blaise said firmly. He gave her a sharp look. "Do you think some information is worth dying for, Hermione? Information that might help save countless other lives and turn the tide of a war?"

Hermione's mouth dried. "I…"

"An Unbreakable Vow is out," Draco said, taking out a scroll of empty parchment and a self-inking quill. "None of us are old enough for that yet, and we can't trust a second adult to act as bonder for the first."

"And we can't trust a tongue-tying curse," Blaise said, giving Draco a look, and Draco obligingly wrote it down.

"What's another way to make sure she can't tell anyone?" Tracey asked, uneasy. "We could do a binding magical contract, maybe? Like a whole legal document she signs in blood?"

"I think one of us would have to sign it as well," Hermione said, sighing. "And then we run into the same issue – we're all underage, and it could potentially stunt our magic."

Draco looked like he was thinking something over.

"What if," he said, "she agreed to be Memory-Charmed?"

Hermione turned to Draco. "Would that work?"

Draco winced.

"It'd be a risk," he admitted. "There's always the potential she could recover the lost memories if she tried hard enough. We'd need to stack layers of protection – make her swear to not try to recover her memories as well, that sort of thing."

"Can you model that?" Blaise asked Draco. "The probability of the secret getting out if we go that route?"

"Sure," Draco said. He dragged over a chair to use as a desk, giving Blaise a smirk as he did. "Though, I feel obligated to point out that you're in Arithmancy too."

Blaise raised his eyebrows, unbothered. "I'm not second in the class either. If we're going to do this, we want it to be good."

Draco looked smug. "Fair."

"This changes everything," Tracey said, staring at the wall as she considered. "The possibilities of this – that kind of gold…" She shot Hermione a cutting look. "You never thought to tell me you had this ultra-powerful artifact before now?"

"To be honest, I forgot I had it for over a year," Hermione admitted. She winced. "It was rather embarrassing, really."

"Do you have any other super powerful magical artifacts that I should know about?" Tracy demanded. "Tell me now, or I'm going to be annoyed if I find out about others one by one."

"Umm…" Hermione considered. "The Philosopher's Stone, the Resurrection Stone, Ravenclaw's lost diadem," she said, ticking things off on her fingers. "I've got a goblin-made sword that's got basilisk venom embedded in it, and I've got a shield with transferable protective magic on it as well. I've got Tom Riddle's diary as well, which you knew. Oh, I've got a Time-Turner! That's probably important. And I've got access to Harry's Invisibility Cloak, which will probably come in handy, too."

"Wait, go back to the shield," Tracey said. She gave Hermione a quizzical look. "What's transferable protective magic?"

Hermione explained to Tracey about the goblin-made shield and all the enchanted gems within it, and how taking one gem from it to be in another's shield would make the protective magic extend to someone else. Blaise and Draco listened in as they bickered over the Arithmancy tree, Blaise offering suggestions as Draco sketched it out, making snide remarks to each other. When Hermione explained just how many gems were in her shield and the variation in size of them, Tracey's mouth fell open.

"You didn't think to mention this when we were brainstorming how to protect Harry in the tournament?" she demanded. "You have literal protective magic you could have given him, and then you just didn't?"

"He was only allowed his wand," Hermione snapped back at Tracey, defensive. "I think they would have noticed if he came in with a shield."

"You could have potentially given him one of the smaller gems," Tracey countered, and Draco and Blaise started snickering. Hermione and Tracy looked over to the boys, who were trying not to smirk.

"What?" Tracey wanted to know, and the boys exchanged a glance.

"Potter was only wearing fire-proof underpants at the end," Draco said, fighting a grin that threatened to spread across his face. "The only real place to put a gemstone…"

Blaise and Draco started snickering again, deeply amused. Hermione could follow their train of thought, and her face turned red.

"I am not," Hermione said emphatically, "going to tell Harry get a Prince Albert to help protect him in the tournament."

"You could at least suggest it," Blaise said, managing a straight face. "It should be his choice, right? If it's his life at risk?"

"And his knob," Draco added, and both boys broke into laughter again, making Hermione's face go even redder. Tracey had finally caught up, and she was snickering now too.

"That's the piercing on the head of the penis, yeah?" she asked for confirmation, grinning. When Blaise nodded, her smile grew wider. "Then I agree with Blaise. You should at least suggest it to Harry. He could wear it under his swimsuit."

"You can suggest it to Harry," Hermione said snarkily.

Tracey grinned, her eyes glinting. "Maybe I will."

"Now that Tracey's caught up on details of Hermione's small artifact emporium," Blaise said, calming his amusement, "let's focus here. Help us consider all the variables here. What's another risk?"

Hermione sighed, moving over to help with the chart. "Snape, for one. He and Vector are friends…"

They worked on the chart, adjusting the wording of a hypothetical vow they'd ask Vector to take and watching the probabilities of exposure change. When they got it to 90%, Tracey thought it was good enough, but Blaise wouldn't let up.

"1 in 10 isn't worth it," he told her. "We've got to be able to make it iron-clad somehow."

His mention of iron rang a bell in Hermione's head, and she bit her lip.

"What if we made her swear on a ley line?" she ventured. "And if she broke the vow, the ley line would pull her in and she'd be lost to the Fae realm?"

"Would that work?" Tracey asked, frowning.

"Does it matter?" Draco pointed out. "So long as Vector thinks it would work."

"Can you translate that into runes?" Blaise asked Draco. "Does that change the odds?"

"Give me a moment," Draco said, flipping through a reference book in his lap. "I don't exactly know the runes for 'ley line' or 'Fae Realm' off the top of my head."

Once he figured it out, Hermione helping with altering the equation, Draco tapped it with his wand, and they all watched the lines turn gold and the numbers fly around, changing. When they settled, Hermione gave Blaise a defiant look, and he sighed.

"I guess if we accepted 95% odds for Harry, I have to accept 97% for this," he said. He gave her a look. "For the record, I still think this isn't worth the risk."

"It's someone's life, Blaise," Hermione said, but Blaise just shrugged.

"And?" he said pointedly. "Hermione, people die every day. Muggles die every day from the flu because they don't have access to Pepper-Up Potion. You're under no obligation to try and save a random person who is nothing to you, especially if they only stand a 65% chance of surviving anyway."

It was a fair point. Hermione couldn't drain herself dry trying to save everyone, to save the world. This muggle wouldn't be any different from others.

And yet…

Hermione couldn't erase Professor Vector's anguished face from her mind, the tear-tracks down her cheeks. She imagined what she'd do if it were her friend, if it were her parents who were diagnosed, how many rules she'd be willing to break.

"Those who have the ability to take action have the responsibility to take action," Hermione recited to herself, faintly. She raised her head decisively, mind made up.

"We are going to attempt to heal this muggle," she declared. "Not," she said, cutting Blaise off as he opened his mouth, "just out of the goodness of our hearts, but out of the chance Professor Vector can be recruited to join the Shadows at a future date."

Blaise paused, closing his open mouth. His eyes narrowed as he considered, while Draco and Tracey both looked simultaneously excited and nervous from this idea.

"I mean, I know we're going to try and get adults, but a full professor?" Tracey said, biting her nails. "Is that wise?"

"Can you imagine?" Draco said, his eyes distant, not seeing as he daydreamed. "Vector's an Arithmancy genius. If we had her running odds for us, evaluating the optimal chances of success for our goals…"

"It'd be worth it," Blaise said begrudgingly. He sighed again, before giving Hermione a slight smile. "Okay. Fine. But I want to be there when Vector takes the vow."

"I wouldn't have it any other way," Hermione promised him, and she felt a tension in her heart relax at Blaise's genuine, relieved smile.

"I will be there too," Draco announced.

"And me," Tracey added. "In case she refuses, I'll need to Obliviate her real fast."

Hermione grinned.

"Excellent," she said. "All that's left is to talk to Vector about the plan."