"What… what are you doing here? How did you—"
Malfoy stood in the middle of the vast, shelf-lined room, rooted to the spot, staring in terror as a crowd of young wizards, no older than himself, walked in one after another.
"Have you come after me?" The words came out thin and high. "Did you follow me?"
Malfoy backed away a few steps. The light at the tip of his wand shook with his hand, sliding across the shelves in nervous arcs, and what it showed him were grim faces ghostly in the pale glow. His voice trembled.
By now, Harry no longer wanted to say anything to Malfoy.
There was nothing left to say. Malfoy had made up his mind to throw in his lot with Voldemort; expulsion from Hogwarts was his certain fate, and it would be the gentlest part of it.
If the two of them ever had the chance to meet again after tonight, it might well be at Avalon Prison.
Harry could see it: flat grey fields beneath a low, wet sky, rows of prisoners in coarse clothes bent over the furrows, and Malfoy among them, swinging a hoe, his pale hair no longer sleek, his hands cracked and blistered.
And Harry himself would be standing on the edge between the plots, his heart full of tangled feelings, watching this "old friend" who had been so entangled with him for so many years at Hogwarts.
"Where's Sirius?" Harry asked softly. "Where is he, Malfoy?"
He had clung to one stubborn thought all the way down in the lift: that Elune might be wrong. Although she had been a great help to him tonight, Harry was unwilling to believe this particular judgment of hers.
"What… who?" Malfoy blurted back on reflex.
His face was so full of bewilderment that it could not possibly have been faked, and Harry's heart lurched.
He had watched Malfoy sneer, smirk, bluff and lie for years, and he knew every one of those faces. This was none of them. This was plain, naked confusion, the look of someone who had been asked about a country he had never visited.
Something was wrong!
Hermione looked around, taking in the dim room, tall as a cathedral. The shelves climbed away into the darkness on each side like the walls of a canyon, and the ceiling, if there was one, was lost far above the reach of any light.
On every shelf, in endless rows, sat dusty little glass orbs, and in their surfaces she saw her own face repeated a hundred times, small and pale and stretched out of shape, with fear running out of control across every one of them.
There was one thing she agreed with Harry about.
Much of what had happened tonight had been arranged.
This seemingly peaceful room was a trap—it just hadn't been sprung yet.
"Never mind Malfoy, Harry. Listen to me—it's too quiet in here, and I don't like it. I think we'd better get out of here, fast!"
Hermione glanced at Malfoy, then looked away, leaning in at Harry's ear, her words were anxious and thin.
"No… Malfoy's lying. He has to be lying. I… I have to go and see for myself…" Harry murmured, somewhat dazed, struggling to suppress the guilt that had begun to churn inside him.
Harry walked forward unsteadily, Ron and the others close behind him.
As for Malfoy—he still thought Harry and the rest had come to hunt him down.
For the first time, he made no effort to hide his panic in front of Harry and the others. With every step Harry took, he took one back, like a reflection moving in a mirror, until the shelves closed around him and he was gone from the edge of Harry's sight.
Harry paid Malfoy no attention at all. He moved forward with great care, peering down the dim aisle between two rows of shelves, his wand held out in front of him. He strained his ears. He couldn't hear anything, and couldn't see any movement.
"It's row ninety-seven, isn't it?" Hermione urged him, keeping her voice low. "Let's check that row, just that one, and then we go. Please, Harry."
She could guess what Harry must be feeling now… She only wanted him to take one look, then hurry and have Elune take them back to Hogwarts—or, failing that, at least back up to the hall above, where there were lights, and lifts, and other people.
Harry still kept his ears pricked for the slightest sound, but the hall was utterly still, with only the faint sound of their footsteps, and even that seemed to be swallowed by the dust.
Maybe Sirius had been gagged, or knocked unconscious, or… a presumptuous voice in his mind said he was too late, that Sirius had very likely already—
No. If that had happened, I'd have felt it… I'd have seen it—
"Ninety-seven! This is the one."
Hermione raised her wand and held it up to the silver plaque at the end of the row they had reached, speaking in a low voice, as if afraid of disturbing something. The light slid across the engraved numerals and made them gleam.
They gathered at the end of that row and looked into the aisle beside it. No one was there.
"He's at the far end of this one," Harry said, his lips had turned slightly dry. "You can't see from here. It isn't far—come on."
He led the way through the tall shelves lined with glass orbs. As they passed, a few of the orbs flickered with a dim glow, as though stirred in their sleep by the warmth of living things going by.
"It's right around here… I remember it clearly—"
With a tangled, conflicted heart, Harry took each step.
He wanted to see Sirius's ragged figure, to be proved right, to be in time. And yet he did not want to find him here, in that state.
"It's here… very close now… just past this last shelf…"
They had come out at the other end of the shelves and into dim candlelight again, but there was no one here—only row upon row of glass orbs, sealed in dust and forgotten.
"He might…" Harry's voice was hoarse. "He might have been moved. Maybe—"
"Harry—" Hermione stepped forward and took hold of his arm.
"What?" Harry's tone was not friendly.
"I think Sirius isn't here, Harry," she said softly.
Nobody spoke. Harry only stared at the place where, in his memory, Sirius had fallen, searching the floor, the shelves for any trace that a struggle had ever happened.
There was nothing. The dust lay as thick and undisturbed as snow that no one had walked on.
"Harry!" Ron called out to him too. "Harry, mate—" But this time Harry didn't want to answer; he only kept his head down and made a small sound in his nose.
He didn't want to hear what Ron had to say—didn't want Ron to tell him he'd done something stupid, or to suggest that they all go back to Hogwarts.
But his face really was burning, and he wished he could hide in this pitch-black place forever.
The advice from Professor Watson that Hermione had cited hadn't been wrong… He shouldn't have trusted so blindly—the images he'd seen in his dreams.
"Harry—" But Ron called again, his tone heavier now. "Come and look at this. Do you see this orb?"
An orb?
The orb Voldemort wanted Sirius to get his hands on?
Harry, who had been standing with his head bowed in self-reproach, whirled around. He saw Ron, his face grave, pointing at an orb on the shelf beside them, and Hermione, Ginny and the others, following Ron's lead, had already looked over, every one of them wearing a look of shock and unease.
The orb sat among its neighbours as quietly as an egg in a nest. On the little yellowed tag below it, a date had been written in cramped, faded ink, and under the date, two lines:
Dark Lord and (?) Harry Potter
Harry stared at it blankly.
Beneath the orb was a label. After a date sixteen years in the past were written his name and Voldemort's.
"What is this?" Ron looked at Harry, timidity in both his voice and his face. "Why is your name on it??"
Then Ron began scrutinizing the other orbs, leaning close to read tag after tag… Perhaps everyone had an orb; perhaps this was really just the Ministry of Magic's archive or something… every underage wizard had an orb.
Hermione, Ginny and Luna also searched around as Ron did, bending to the shelves and wiping the dust from the labels with their sleeves, to see whether they could find any other familiar names.
Draco appeared without a sound at the far end of row ninety-seven. He stared blankly at this group of his schoolmates—at Harry.
Judging from how Harry and the others were behaving, he had realized that they probably hadn't come after him at all.
They had come looking for Sirius?
To risk so much, slipping out of Hogwarts in the dead of night, to come to the Ministry of Magic's Department of Mysteries looking for Sirius…
Draco's pale grey pupils trembled.
A conspiracy… the whole thing reeked of conspiracy.
Who had led Potter here? This was no Quidditch boutique on Diagon Alley, a place you could stumble into by accident!
"If I'm not mistaken…"
Elune bit her red lower lip; she seemed to come back to herself and looked around at the shelves, her face was pinched in thought. "This… should be… yes, it must be the British Ministry of Magic's Hall of Prophecy…"
"The Hall of Prophecy?" Hermione's voice tightened as she raised it in question. "I've never read a word about a hall of prophecies. Are you sure?"
"I really did hear about it somewhere…" Elune's tone grew steadily more confident. "In the British Ministry's Department of Mysteries, there's a room set aside just for storing prophecies, you know! These glass orbs are all prophecy orbs!"
"But aren't you American?" Ginny, for her part, eyed Elune with distrust. "How would you know about a room in the British Ministry, when we didn't even know it existed?"
"I'm not a little kid like you lot!" Elune said huffily, lifting her chin. "I've been around a lot longer than any of you, and I know a lot more of the world than you do!"
Prophecy orbs…
Harry drew his gaze back and looked at the orb marked with his name and Voldemort's, then slowly raised his hand. "The prophecy has my name on it," he said to himself. "And Voldemort's…"
"Don't touch it, Potter!" Draco suddenly jolted out of his daze and cried out in alarm. "—it's a trap! Get back to school, now!"
But it was too late. Harry had already touched it.
He had expected the orb to be ice-cold, but it was just the opposite: it felt as if it had been roasting under a blazing sun for hours, its glow baking the glass warm against his fingers.
For an instant there was silence; nothing happened.
Harry thought Malfoy was only bluffing, but—
The next second, ripples spread through the air.
Many figures appeared out of thin air, blocking the way out at both ends of the shelves. A dozen or more wands pointed at their hearts, and cold light shot from the narrow slits of their hoods. Ginny sucked in a sharp, terrified breath.
"So, you fell for it after all, Pot—what are you doing here, Draco?!"
From behind the line of Death Eaters came a startled and furious voice.
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