Chapter Text
"Miss Weasley. Mr Longbottom. Mr Finnigan."
The three of them turned from the edge of the Great Hall, where they had been standing without quite meaning to, caught in the awful rhythm of the place. People being carried in on conjured stretchers. People being counted. People being wrapped in blankets and pressed into chairs while Madam Pomfrey and a handful of frantic volunteers moved among them with bottles of dittany and murmured charms. The long house tables had been shoved to the walls, and the enchanted ceiling above showed a sky going slowly grey at its eastern edge, indifferent as ever. Smoke hung in the air that no one had found the time to clear, and underneath it sat the smell of singed stone and spilled potion and something coppery that nobody named.
Somewhere behind them a healer called for clean bandages. Somewhere else a woman shouted a name twice before it was answered, and the relief in the second voice was so raw that Ginny had to look at the floor.
McGonagall's mouth was a thin line. There was soot streaked across one cheekbone and a long scorch in the hem of her tartan dressing gown, which she had not changed out of, because there had been no hour in this night to change anything. Her hat was gone. Without it she looked older, and also, somehow, more dangerous.
"There are students unaccounted for," she said. "Younger ones, mostly. When the east wall came down, some of them ran rather than gathering here as they were told, and I cannot fault them for it." A muscle moved in her jaw. "But I will not have children hiding in the dark of this castle wondering whether anyone is coming for them. You will go and find them. You will bring them back."
She lifted a lantern from the table beside her. It was an old brass thing, the sort that usually hung outside Hagrid's door, but the flame behind its glass burned a clean steady white, and it did not so much as flicker when she turned it in her hand.
"I have charmed it to stay lit," she said. "Wind will not touch it, nor water, nor a draught from a broken window. It will burn until I lift the charm, and it will not give you away to anyone watching for wandlight." She held it out, and after the briefest pause she gave it to Neville. "Keep your wands free. The light is so you do not have to choose between seeing and casting."
Neville's fingers closed around the handle. Carefully, as though it were something alive.
"You will stay together," McGonagall went on, and now her gaze moved over each of them in turn. "You do not split up, not for anything, not if you hear someone calling and think you can be quick. The castle is not as it was. Staircases that were there an hour ago are not there now. If you find injured students, you bring them straight here. And if you should meet a Death Eater—"
She stopped. Let the quiet do some of the work.
"—you do not engage. You turn around and you come back, and you let the rest of us deal with it. I would rather have three of you standing in front of me having found no one at all than—" She did not finish that either. "Do you understand me?"
"Yes, Professor," Ginny said.
Seamus let out a short breath through his nose that might have been a laugh, on a different night. "Understood."
Neville swallowed. "We'll find them."
McGonagall looked at him a moment longer than at the others — at the boy who had spent the whole ruinous year keeping the rest of them alive when she herself could not, who had the marks of it under his collar where the Carrows' lessons had landed. Whatever she might have said, she didn't. She had a castle to hold and four hundred people to keep breathing.
"Very well," she said. "Go. And mind the stairs."
They went out through the side archway, where the Great Hall had been broken open and the stone scorched black around the gap. The corridor beyond had taken it worse. One side had folded inward, leaving jagged ribs of masonry standing exposed like something out of an anatomy lesson, and the portraits along the intact wall hung crooked in their frames. Some of the frames were empty — their occupants had fled to safer canvases deeper in the castle. The ones who remained pressed themselves into corners and watched the three students pass in silence, which was its own kind of wrong, because Hogwarts portraits were never silent.
The lantern carved a tidy white circle into the dark ahead. Everything past its edge stayed undecided.
Seamus broke first. He usually did.
"So that's the job, is it." His voice came out lower than its ordinary register, as though the broken wall might be listening. "The three of us and one lamp, wandering round a castle that's actively trying to fall on us, rounding up first-years like they're escaped Pygmy Puffs."
"If you say it like that," Ginny said, not looking at him, "it stops sounding like a rescue and starts sounding like a really grim game of hide-and-seek."
"That's because it is hide-and-seek. With the small added detail that the ceiling's a player now."
"They're scared, Seamus. They ran and hid because that's the sensible thing to do when the world's coming apart." She stepped over a fallen beam. "We'd have done the same at twelve."
"I did do the same at twelve," Seamus admitted. "Different reasons. Mostly things I'd set on fire by accident."
That pulled the corner of Neville's mouth, just for a second, and Ginny was glad of it. Neville hadn't smiled in a while. He kept his eyes ahead and the lantern steady, though the light shivered when he stepped across a crack that ran the full width of the floor.
"We just need to find them," Neville said. It had the sound of something he was repeating to himself.
The corridor opened into a wider junction where part of the ceiling had come down. A great slab of stone leaned against the far wall at an impossible angle, held there by nothing Ginny could see — old magic, probably, the castle's own bones refusing to give all the way up. The air past it was sharper. Dust, and that metal tang again, the one that lived at the back of the throat now no matter where you went.
Ginny stopped and tilted her head. "Listen."
Seamus frowned. "To what?"
"That's the thing. There's nothing." She was quiet for a beat. "The shields stopped. You know the noise they make when something hits them — like a wineglass you can feel in your teeth. They've been doing it all night." She looked up, as though she could see through the rubble to the broken sky. "They're not doing it now."
Neville understood before Seamus did. "It's the hour," he said softly. "He's given us the hour."
Nobody answered that. They all knew what the hour was for, and what was meant to happen at the end of it, and so they did the only useful thing there was to do, which was keep walking and not say it out loud.
"Classrooms down that way," Ginny said, nodding left.
"Then that's where I'd be," Seamus said. "Twelve years old, terrified, no idea what's happening — you don't run toward the noise. You find a corner with a door on it."
Neville adjusted his grip on the lantern. "We check them. All of them."
They moved more carefully now. The sounds of the Great Hall thinned behind them until they were only a muffled heartbeat carried through stone, and the corridor narrowed enough to force them into single file. Neville went first, the lantern lifted higher, the light catching on fractured edges and throwing shadows that refused to hold still. A broken staircase loomed on their right, half of it simply gone, the remaining half hanging in the air like it had forgotten the rule about falling.
The first classroom stood with its door open. Inside, desks lay overturned and ink bottles had burst across the floorboards, dried now into long black stains that looked, in the lantern light, almost like scorch marks. No voices. No movement. Only the small settling creak of wood that has been hurt.
Seamus went in with his wand up. The lantern light followed him, stretching the shadows of the chair-legs across the wall like reaching fingers.
Empty.
"Next," Ginny said.
The second classroom was worse. The door had been blown clean off its hinges and lay splintered across the threshold. One wall had cracked almost the whole way through, and the ceiling bowed downward as though it had taken a blow it hadn't recovered from. Absurdly, a row of chairs at the back sat perfectly upright and untouched, as if waiting for a lesson that would never come.
Neville stopped just inside the door. He passed the lantern to his left hand and lifted his wand.
"Homenum Revelio."
The spell went out of him soundlessly. For a moment nothing — and then a sensation passed back through the room, a low sweep like the air moving when someone walks behind you, and Neville's eyes went to the far corner.
"There," he said quietly. "Three of them."
Seamus turned fast. "Where?"
Neville didn't answer with words. He angled the lantern toward the corner, where at first there seemed to be only debris — broken slats, a heap of fallen plaster, the dark wedge of an overturned desk.
Then the heap moved.
Ginny crossed the room without hurry, keeping her steps soft and her wand low at her side, and when she spoke she pitched her voice the way you would to a horse that had spooked, or to a child who had been alone too long in a place that was supposed to be safe and had stopped being safe. She knew that voice. She had once been the thing it was meant for, far underground, with the cold pressing in. She didn't say any of that. She just knew how to do it.
"It's all right," she said. "We've come to take you back. You're safe now."
A small sound answered her. Not a word. Just a breath that had been held too tight and let go wrong.
Neville lowered himself, getting the light closer without rushing it. "We're Hogwarts students," he said. "Professor McGonagall sent us to find you."
A pause. Then a head rose from behind the desk — a boy, second year perhaps, his face grey with dust, his eyes too wide and not quite focused. He looked at the three of them the way you look at something you're afraid will vanish if you blink.
Behind him, two more came slowly into view. A girl about his age, cradling one arm against her chest, her sleeve dark and stiff at the elbow. And a third, smaller than either, curled tight against the wall with her knees drawn up to her chin, watching everything and trusting none of it.
Ginny's whole face softened. "Hey," she said. "There you are. You don't have to come out fast. Just when you're ready."
The smallest one shook her head, once and hard, as if a sharp enough no could change what was happening outside these walls.
Seamus took a step in and stopped the moment Neville lifted two fingers off the lantern handle — barely a gesture, but it said slow plainly enough. Seamus stopped. For once he didn't argue.
Neville crouched fully, set the lantern on the floorboards so its light pooled out across the room rather than into anyone's eyes, and looked at the boy.
"You're not in trouble," he said. "Nobody's cross with you. We just want to get everyone in one place, that's all."
The boy's gaze flicked to Ginny, then back. "There were loud noises," he said, very thin. "In the corridor. Right outside. We didn't know which way to go, so we — we just stopped."
"Stopping was clever," Neville said, and meant it.
"That girl's hurt." Seamus had crouched too, by now, and he nodded at the one holding her arm. "Can I have a look? I'll not touch it, I'll just look."
The girl hesitated, then turned her elbow toward him. There was a cut across the forearm, not deep but ugly, the kind glass makes. Seamus glanced at Ginny.
"Episkey'll close it enough to get her down the hall," Ginny said. "Pomfrey can do the rest properly." She moved over, touched her wand to the air just above the wound, and murmured the charm. The girl flinched at the brief hot-then-cold of it, then looked down in surprise as the edges of the cut drew together into a thin pink line. "There," Ginny said. "Better?"
The girl nodded, and something in her shoulders came down an inch.
It was the smallest one who hadn't moved. And it was only as Ginny turned back to her that she saw what Seamus, crouched the wrong way, hadn't yet — the glass.
It covered a wide stretch of floor between the corner and the door, glittering faintly in the lantern light like a sheet of ice that had no business indoors. Some pieces were the size of fallen leaves. Some were the length of a hand, edges up, and would open the sole of a shoe like paper.
Seamus saw it the same moment, followed her gaze, and his wand came up on instinct. "I can clear that. Reducto, knock it to du—"
"Don't." Ginny said it gently, but it landed. "You'll bring the ceiling the rest of the way down, and you'll terrify them doing it."
Seamus lowered the wand. "Right. Fair. Vanish it, then. Evanesco's cleaner—" He pointed, muttered it, and a patch of glass near the door faded out of the world. The next patch he tried only half went, leaving a smear of grit and one stubborn shard sitting upright in the middle of it. Seamus scowled at his own wand as though it had betrayed him. "It never takes properly for me, that one. I'm grand at the blowing-up. Less grand at the tidying."
"I noticed," Ginny said, almost fondly, and crouched lower so she was level with the smallest child instead of looming over her. "Okay. New plan. We're not going to wave any more wands around — I think you've all had quite enough of that for one night." She got a flicker of something, not a smile but the place a smile comes from. "We're going to walk through it. Slowly. And I'm going to go first the whole way, and you put your feet exactly where I put mine. Can you do that?"
The child stared at the glass. Then at Ginny.
"I won't let you step on anything," Ginny said. "I promise you that. You just have to stay with me."
A nod. Tiny.
Neville picked up the lantern and brought it down low, almost at his knee, so the light ran flat across the floor and lit every edge of every shard. "I'll lead with the light," he said. "Follow it. Where it's dark, don't put your foot."
"I've got the little one," Ginny said.
She rose just enough to move, kept her body between the child and the worst of the floor, and started across — one foot set carefully into a clear space, weight tested, then the next. The child followed in her exact prints, small hands fisted in the back of Ginny's jumper. Behind them came the boy and the girl with the mended arm, with Seamus bringing up the rear, his earlier jokes set aside entirely now, glancing back twice to be sure nobody slipped on the way out.
Halfway across, the smallest child stopped dead.
Ginny turned at once. "What is it?"
The child pointed. A long shard lay across the line of clear floor ahead, too big to step over cleanly without changing direction.
Neville stopped too, lantern already swinging. "We can go round—"
"No." Ginny shook her head. "Straight's better. Round means turning, and turning's when feet slide." She gentled it for the child. "We're going to take one big step over it. A proper stride. I'll go first, then you copy me — exactly the same, no smaller. All right?"
"How do you know all this," Seamus said, half to himself, "like you've spent your life walking over broken glass."
"Six older brothers," Ginny said, without missing a beat. "You learn what happens when you don't watch where you put your feet." She stepped over the shard, turned slightly sideways to keep her balance, and held out her hand. "Now you. Big step. I've got you."
The child stepped. Wobbled. And Ginny's hand was already there, closing round a thin arm before the wobble could become anything, steadying without yanking, so it didn't feel like being caught — only like being held. Seamus had shifted close in case. He wasn't needed.
Then they were across, and the held breath went out of the whole room at once.
Neville let out a slow one of his own. "You're doing brilliantly," he said, and it wasn't quite clear whether he was telling the children or himself.
They brought the three of them out into the corridor, and the lantern stretched its white circle ahead once more, catching the dust still turning slowly in the air. Behind them the broken classroom folded back into the dark.
For a while no one spoke. The smallest child kept close to Ginny's hip, and Ginny kept one hand hovering just over the thin shoulder, ready, not touching.
It was the boy who broke it, the one who had hidden behind the desk.
"Are there more of us?" he asked. "Still out there?"
Seamus looked down at him. "Probably, yeah."
Ginny wouldn't soften it. The child deserved better than a lie. "Yes," she said. "There are."
The boy swallowed. "Are they scared? Like we were?"
For a moment none of them said anything. Then Neville, eyes on the light:
"Yes."
The word stayed in the air longer than a single syllable had any right to.
They kept walking. As they came round the next bend the distant sound of the Great Hall grew a fraction louder again — voices, the scrape of chairs, the whole stubborn noise of people keeping each other alive — like the castle reminding them where safety was meant to be. Neville lifted the lantern a little, checking on the flame out of habit, though it had not so much as guttered and would not, not until McGonagall lifted the charm.
Seamus glanced sideways at him. "How many more of these corridors do you reckon there are?"
Neville didn't look away from the light.
"As many as there are children in them," he said.
And they kept going.