Cruisin’ ‘Neath A Broken Sky

The woman’s name was Allison.

I learned this the way I learned most things in this broken world— sideways, from someone else’s grief. She was a small, weathered woman, perhaps sixty, and she stood in the middle of the encampment with both hands pressed flat against her sternum as if holding herself together, staring at the dog tags laid out across the table in front of her.

Her lips were moving but no sound came out. Around her, the rest of Bob’s people had gathered at a careful distance, the way people gathered around pain they recognised but could not touch.

Bob had cleared a space on one of the folding tables— the kind that had probably come from a school gymnasium, years and a lifetime ago— and I had laid out what we’d gone back to retrieve from the burnt auditorium in Arnold. It wasn’t much. A handful of dog tags. A wallet with the leather cracked and swollen from damp. A ring that had been removed and tucked into a breast pocket rather than worn, which told its own story. A compass. A child’s drawing, folded so many times the creases had gone white, depicting a house with four figures in front of it in the particular bold scrawl of a six or seven year old.

Allison’s hands moved from her chest to the dog tags and she lifted them very slowly, as though they might dissolve.

“Bradley.” She said. Just the name. Nothing else.

I stood back and said nothing, because there was nothing adequate to say. Draco had positioned himself at my shoulder, arms folded, jaw set in the particular way that meant he was feeling something he had no intention of showing. Draco Malfoy had apparently become very good at that particular expression. I suspected I had developed something similar.

The woman pressed the tags against her mouth. Closed her eyes. Around her, nobody moved or spoke.

After a moment, one of the other survivors— a heavyset man with a grey beard who had lost three fingers on his left hand to something I hadn’t asked about— stepped forward and put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him, and that was that. Grief acknowledged, grief absorbed, grief carried. The people of this encampment had become very good at that too.

Bob watched all of this from beside the table. 

“You did right by them.” Bob said quietly.

“We got there too late to save them.” I said.

“That’s not what I mean.” He picked up the child’s drawing and looked at it for a moment before setting it back down. “Plenty of people would have left them there. Left their things there. You didn’t.”

“We did.”

“And then you went back, when it was safe.” Bob countered. “No fool would remain in a burning building.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. Draco, unhelpfully, also said nothing, though I could feel him silently agreeing with Bob in a way he would never admit out loud.

That ‘evening’, we feasted.

The word feast was generous, though.

It was thin vegetable soup and flatbread cooked on a hot stone, supplemented by a rabbit that someone had caught that morning and which had, mercifully, not been corrupted— the meat would have tasted awful. There were dried beans reconstituted with careful water, meagerly seasoned with their dwindling herb collection.

There were hard biscuits that were not quite stale and a tin of peaches that someone had been saving for a significant occasion and had apparently decided, tonight, qualified. Bob even produced a wine bottle with the ceremony such a thing deserved, holding it up so the candlelight caught it. It was a Bordeaux, the label faded and water-damaged, vintage indeterminate. He opened it with a corkscrew and poured it into whatever vessels were available: chipped mugs, a teacup, two proper wine glasses that had somehow survived intact, a jam jar.

It wasn’t much. By any standard I could remember from before, it was almost nothing.

And yet, it felt like a banquet.

“Brightest day we’ve had in a very long time.” Bob said, and raised his jam jar.

The room raised back.

I raised the chipped mug they’d handed me and drank when everyone else drank. The wine was warm and slightly oxidised and it was the best thing I’d tasted in recent memory.

Around me, the encampment shed something it had been wearing. Not armour exactly— these people kept their armour on, all of them, because taking it off entirely was how you didn’t survive. But some outer layer of maintained tension released, and for a few hours the room was full of sounds I hadn’t realised I’d been missing: laughter, actual laughter.

Draco sat beside me on an overturned crate and ate his soup with the controlled manner of a man who had been raised to have table manners and was absolutely not going to abandon them now, whatever the circumstances. He held his mug of Bordeaux in both hands and watched the room with the expression he wore when he was cataloguing something.

The evening went on. Allison sat with her husband’s dog tags closed in her hand and let a younger woman talk to her, and somewhere in the middle of the second hour she laughed at something— a small, startled sound, like she’d forgotten she could— and the younger woman’s face broke into a relieved smile.

I watched this and felt something I didn’t have a precise word for. Not happiness, exactly. Something older and quieter than happiness. Something that had to do with the particular stubbornness of people who refused to stop being people even when everything around them was trying to make that impossible.

Bob appeared at my elbow at some point, refilling my mug without being asked.

“You’re going north.” He said. Not a question.

“In a few days. When we’re healed up.”

He nodded slowly. “Leeds?”

“Scotland. Or, what’s left of it.”

“People say it’s completely gone.” He paused. “People say a lot of things.”

“Yes.” I said. “They do.”

He looked at me for a moment with that steady, measuring expression.

“You’re not what I expected.” He said finally. “Either of you.”

We stayed for a week, and the encampment was generous with everything it had, which was not very much and which it gave without hesitation. I let their medic redo the bandaging on my burns with proper supplies, and I submitted to this without complaint because

Draco had said, flatly, that I was going to submit or he was going to physically hold me down, and I had believed him. The burns were slow to respond even to my own magical treatment— something about the nature of controlled cursed flame left traces that resisted conventional healing— but they healed, gradually, and stopped pulling every time I moved.

I mostly slept.

On the last morning, the encampment gave us supplies: hard biscuits, mostly, and that was honestly far more than enough.

We said our goodbyes at the entrance. Allison was there, and she took my hand in both of hers and held it without speaking for a moment. Her husband’s dog tags were around her neck. She didn’t say thank you. She didn’t need to.

Bob shook both our hands with the firm, no-ceremony grip of a man who had said goodbye to too many people to invest excessive emotion in any single parting.

“Come back through if you can.” He said.

“We will if we’re able.” I said.

He nodded. He knew what that meant.

ooo

The village of Bestwood appeared on the map as a small cluster of roads between Nottingham and the open country to the north, and we nearly walked through it without stopping.

It was me who slowed first. Something about the street we’d turned onto felt different from the others we’d passed through— less ransacked, somehow. The destruction here was older and quieter, the kind that came from abandonment rather than violence. Windows broken by weather rather than rocks, bullets or even fists.

The houses on either side were detached, with small front gardens that had gone entirely to seed, lawns swallowed by waist-high grass that nodded in the cold wind like something half-asleep.

“This one.” I said, stopping in front of a house without being entirely sure why.

Draco looked at it. It was a semi-detached, modest, with a small driveway running along the left side. There was nothing particularly remarkable about it. “What about it?”

“I’ve got a feeling about this one.”

Draco looked at the driveway again. Then at the gap between the houses.

“This is the fifth feeling you’ve had.” He said.

“Work with me here!” I complained.

We went around the side with much grumbling from Draco, though the noise ended when we got there.

The garage door was closed, which was itself unusual— most garages we’d passed had been left open, rolled up or hanging off their hinges, the contents stripped or scattered. This one was shut with a simple lock, stiff with disuse but not rusted through. I snaked a chain in there and twisted it while Draco stood at the corner of the house watching the street.

The lock snapped. We lifted the door and the smell of oil and dust and closed air rolled out at us.

Under a tarp that had once been green and was now the greyish-brown of something that had given up, there was the unmistakable long low silhouette of a car.

“Bingo!”

I grabbed the edge of the tarp and pulled.

It was a Jaguar convertible. The car was dark red, or had been— the colour had faded unevenly, deeper red in the sheltered places, bleached toward a dusty rose along the roof and bonnet where some light must have reached it. The top was up. There was a long scratch along the passenger door that someone had clearly intended to have repaired and never gotten around to. The chrome was tarnished but intact.

I stared at it for a moment.

Then I looked at Draco, who was regarding the car with profound suspicion, as though it had done something to personally offend him.

“No.” Draco said.

“We haven’t even discussed it yet.”

“It will be empty of fuel. And before you suggest otherwise— I don’t know how to operate these Muggle contraptions, and I am not going to learn in the middle of an apocalypse.”

“I know how to drive.”

“You know how to do an alarming number of things for someone supposedly raised in an orphanage.”

“What can I say, I must be that talented.”

I went back into the house while Draco scoffed and remained in the garage. I heard his voice from behind me observing that the petrol tank was almost certainly dry, that even if it wasn’t, then the contraption would be seized from six years of sitting, that the tires were probably flat, and that this entire enterprise was a waste of time we didn’t have.

The house was dim and still. The front hallway had a coat rack with two jackets still hanging on it and a pair of wellies standing neatly by the door, waiting for someone who hadn’t come home.

The kitchen was at the back. Someone had been tidy, once. The surfaces were dusty now but the mugs were still on the mug tree, still arranged by size. There was a calendar on the wall open to October 1993, and I didn’t look at it for long.

I checked the obvious places for keys. Hooks by the back door— nothing. Counter by the kettle— nothing. I pulled open the kitchen drawer nearest the back door and found the ordinary archaeology of a lived-in kitchen: batteries, rubber bands, takeaway menus for places that no longer existed, a birthday card, a small torch, several mystery screws.

No keys.

I crouched and looked at the kitchen floor.

They were lying near the base of the counter, half under the toe-kick, glinting faintly in the dim light. Fallen, perhaps, in the chaos of whatever had happened on that night in October. Or set down hurriedly. Or simply dropped by someone who had been in the middle of something ordinary when ordinary stopped being available.

I picked them up.

The key fob was standard, Jaguar branded, the rubber worn smooth with use. Attached to it by a short chain was a small oval locket, the kind sold in gift shops and jewellers in the years when those were things that existed. It was silver-plated, rubbed down to brass at the edges. I turned it over in my fingers.

I opened it.

On one side, a photograph. A young woman, perhaps late twenties, with long red hair and a smile of the particular variety that looked like it was the default setting of her face rather than something she’d put on for the photo. She was squinting slightly against what must have been a bright day, one hand raised to push the hair out of her eyes, caught mid-movement by whoever had taken the picture.

On the other side, engraved in small careful letters: Claire.

I looked at the photograph for a moment longer than I needed to.

Rest in peace, Claire and whoever had this locket.

I closed it and put the keys in my pocket before going back to the garage without explaining any of it to Draco, who was seated in the car already.

“You’re in.” I said.

“I was curious about the tires.” Draco said, with dignity. “They’re not flat, so maybe this can work… But probably not.”

“Imagine that.”

“Don’t. You’ll hurt your head trying.”

“Very funny.” I took my seat and started the car.

Or, I tried to.

The engine turned over with a sound like something being dragged unwillingly from a very long sleep, coughed twice, and died. Draco, who had by this point installed himself in the passenger seat with his arms folded and the expression of a man attending his own execution with composure, said nothing, which was somehow worse than if he’d said something.

I tried again. The same protest, the same two coughs, the same silence.

“As I said.” Draco began.

“Once more.”

“The petrol alone—”

“Draco.”

A pause. Then, with the tone of a man making a formal record for posterity: “I want it noted that I gave reasonable counsel.”

I turned the key a third time.

The engine caught. A deep, slightly unsteady rumble that evened out over three or four seconds into something that sounded almost like intention. The dashboard lights flickered to life. The fuel gauge needle swung upward and settled with extraordinary improbability on the far side of the dial, hovering just below the three-quarter mark.

I stared at the fuel gauge.

Draco stared at the fuel gauge.

“That.” Draco said, after a moment. “Is not possible.”

“And yet.”

“Six years. It’s been sitting for six years. How has no one emptied it?”

“It’s too out of the way for anyone to bother with. The whole street’s been mostly untouched, too.”

Draco made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite disagreement.

“Well.” He said. “Are you going to pull out of the garage or simply admire yourself?”

I pulled out of the garage.

Slowly, because I was recalibrating— acquainting myself with the weight and width of the car, the sensitivity of the accelerator, the distance between intention and movement. The Jaguar nosed out into the dim light and I took a breath and felt the engine idling under my hands.

“This is fine.” I said, mostly to myself.

“You’ve gone approximately three metres.” Draco said.

“I’m aware.”

I eased us forward along the side of the house, out onto the driveway, and then with growing confidence onto the road. I struggled slightly with the first turn, but my driving smoothed out as we rolled forward.

Draco sat very still in the passenger seat with both hands flat on his thighs, watching the road with the careful attention of someone who had decided that if they were going to die in a Muggle vehicle they were at least going to see it coming.

The street was wide enough. I navigated the first corner at a pace that could generously have been called cautious and emerged onto a slightly larger road, and the car rolled forward, and the ruins of Bestwood opened up around us.

The wind came over the windscreen and hit me in the face. My hair immediately went sideways.

“Hat.” Draco said.

“Yes.”

“Now, I would suggest.”

I took one hand off the wheel long enough to pull the hat from my jacket pocket and drag it over my hair, and the wind turned from a problem into merely a presence, pushing against us as we rolled through what had been Bestwood and was now a street of empty houses and overgrown gardens and abandoned cars left at angles to the road, like punctuation in a sentence that had stopped making sense mid-thought.

We slowed for the obstacles. Draco handled the ones that needed moving with his wand— a brief gesture, the abandoned cars nudging aside with a scrape of metal on tarmac. We found a rhythm in this without discussing it: my hands on the wheel, his wand at the obstacles, both of us reading the road ahead with the practiced attention of people for whom inattention had become very expensive.

I tried the radio.

It came on immediately— I’d half expected nothing, but the dial lit up and the speaker crackled to life, and for one suspended second there was almost a sound, something that might have been music at a very great distance, like hearing a song through three closed walls. Then it collapsed into static, steady and grey and empty.

I turned it off.

Neither of us commented on this.

We drove north through Bestwood’s edges and out into open road, and the ruins fell behind, and ahead of us was the long country between here and wherever we were going— purple-stained sky above and the aurora ribboning overhead in slow, indifferent curtains of light. I hit the accelerator and the Jaguar, with what I would have sworn was something like satisfaction, picked up speed.

The wind pushed at us steadily. Draco unfolded his arms. He didn’t say anything, but I noticed in my peripheral vision the precise moment he stopped bracing for impact and simply sat back, and let the motion of the car carry him, and looked at the ruined countryside rolling past with an expression that I couldn’t quite place.

I kept my eyes on the road and my hands steady on the wheel and said nothing.

We found a place to stop a while later. I pulled over onto the verge and killed the engine, and the sudden quiet was loud in the way that quiet always was after sustained noise— a ringing absence rather than a true silence.

I pulled the map from my jacket.

It was a road atlas, salvaged from Bob’s encampment. Someone had marked it already in pencil, careful notations in a small neat hand: settlements circled, roads crossed out, a cluster of question marks over a section of the Midlands that I had found ominous without being able to explain precisely why.

I spread it across the steering wheel. Draco leaned over from the passenger seat without comment. This was, I had come to understand, how Draco engaged with problems he was interested in— he simply oriented himself toward them and waited to be useful, which was more efficient than it sounded.

“Leeds.” He said, after a moment. His finger traced the route. “We can be through the centre and out the other side in just a few hours of driving, if the roads hold. It’s direct.”

“It’s direct.” I agreed. “That’s the problem.”

Draco looked at me.

“Leeds is the largest population centre between here and Newcastle.” I said. “Large population means large numbers of corrupted creatures. More infrastructure damage, more obstacles, more likelihood of running into something we can’t simply drive around.”

I paused, tracing the alternative with my finger. “If we go northeast from here and pick up the A1 corridor, we stay between the cities. Cross-country. Less direct but thinner on the ground.”

“My choice still involves a major road.”

“Yes, but the A1 is a road that runs between things rather than through them. There’s a difference.”

Draco considered this with the particular expression he used when working out whether to agree with something or to disagree with it on principle. I had learned to wait through this expression without filling the silence, which had taken longer to learn than it should have.

“The corruption tends to cluster.” He said finally. It wasn’t a concession exactly— more an observation that happened to align with my argument. “We saw it in Arnold. The Veela drew things to them, held them in orbit. Aside from London, large cities function the same way— a concentration of prey means a concentration of predators.”

“And whatever’s been twisting the wizards.” I said.

“I thought the Veela did that.”

“I did too, at first.” I said. “But I’m starting to think there’s something else out there.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t know yet.” I said, shaking my head. “Point is, the corruption was spreading outward from a centre. Arnold was a node. Leeds could be something much larger.”

Draco was quiet for a moment, looking at the map. His finger moved, tracing the A1 line north— through Newark, through Doncaster, passing by Leeds and York, angling toward Darlington and then Newcastle beyond. It was longer. Considerably longer. But it threaded the gaps between the cities like a needle through fabric, keeping to the spaces where things were likely emptier and, with luck, correspondingly quieter.

“Newcastle.” He said.

“And then we assess from there. See what the northeast looks like before we commit to the final push northwest toward Scotland.”

“Scotland.” He said the word the way people said the names of places they weren’t entirely certain still existed. “Hogwarts, if it’s still in one piece.”

“If it’s still in one piece.” I parroted.

Draco looked at the map for another moment. Then he sat back, the decision made, wearing it the way he wore most decisions— without ceremony, without second-guessing, simply folded into the next thing.

“How long?” He asked.

I looked at the route. Calculated distance against the speed we’d been able to manage through Bestwood, against the likelihood of obstacles, against the craters and the corrupted creatures and the hundred other variables that the old world hadn’t required you to factor into a road trip.

“If the roads are clear? A few hours of driving.”

Draco looked at me with an expression of profound patience.

“A few days.” I amended.

“Thank you.”

“Possibly more, depending on what we run into.”

“Yes.” Draco said. “That does tend to be the variable that matters.” He reached over and tapped the map, a precise, decisive gesture. “Northeast, then. A1 corridor. We avoid the cities and we stop wherever we can find somewhere defensible.” He paused. “Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

He nodded once, the matter settled, and I folded the map back along its creases— imperfectly, because road atlas creases never quite went back the way they came, one of those small irreversible things— and tucked it back into my jacket.

I started the engine.

The Jaguar woke with the same rumbling reluctance as before, catching on the second attempt this time rather than the third, which I chose to interpret as progress.

I pulled back onto the road and turned us northeast. Bestwood fell away behind us, and ahead the road opened into country that had once been ordinary English midlands— fields and hedgerows and the occasional farmhouse— and was now something quieter and stranger, the landscape of a world that had been left to its own devices for six years and had begun, slowly and without permission, to become something else.

The hedgerows had grown into each other across stretches of the narrower roads, forming low green tunnels that the Jaguar pushed through with occasional scraping protests. Fields had gone to whatever they wanted to go to, the geometry of cultivation dissolved back into something older and less organised. I saw, at a distance, what might have been deer moving through what had been a wheat field.

I didn’t mention them to Draco. They seemed like a thing that should be allowed to exist without commentary.

We drove.

Draco cleared obstacles when they appeared, which they did with the irregular frequency of things left where they fell— an overturned tractor here, a cluster of abandoned cars there, once an entire section of road where something very large had walked through it and left prints pressed three feet deep into the tarmac, each one filled now with standing water that reflected the aurora light in shifting purples. We stopped at that one and looked at the prints for a moment without getting out of the car.

“Stone giant.” I said.

“Going which direction?” Draco asked.

I looked at the orientation of the prints, the way the tarmac had crumpled at the front edge of each one, the direction of the displacement.

“East.” I said.

A pause.

“Close direction to where we’re going.” Draco said.

“Yes.”

“Well… I don’t think we’d catch it. And I don’t think it’s moving toward anything in particular. They seem to wander.”

“You seem.” I said carefully. “Relatively calm about the fact that there is a creature the size of a small building wandering in the general vicinity.”

“I’m calm about a lot of things now.” Draco said, which was true, I supposed.

A stone giant was dangerous. It was not the darkness between moments of existence. It was not a predator made of stolen memory and pure negation. It was very large and probably indifferent and, crucially, it was ahead of us, not behind.

I drove around the prints where the verge allowed and kept going.

The towns we passed through came and went quickly enough that they were impressions more than experiences— a high street with its windows dark and its doors long since blown open by weather, a roundabout with the central island completely overtaken by something flowering and aggressive in yellow, a petrol station whose canopy had collapsed onto the forecourt in a tangle of metal and old plastic that had grown a covering of moss so thick it looked almost deliberate.

I looked for signs of people in each of them, the way you did— a light, a curl of smoke, the particular arrangement of obstacles that suggested deliberate placement rather than random collapse. I didn’t find any, which was either because there were none or because anyone still surviving in these places had become very good at not being visible, which amounted to the same thing from the road.

Two hours in, I tried the radio again.

Static, the same as before. But I left it on for a minute this time, listening to the texture of it, the way it shifted and breathed. There was something almost rhythmic in its depths if you listened long enough— probably just the particular frequency of the aurora interference, the electromagnetic consequences of whatever had torn the sky and never quite closed again. Probably.

I turned it off.

“You keep trying that.” Draco said.

“Can’t help myself.”

“What are you expecting to find?”

I thought about this.

“I don’t know.” I said, which was honest. “Something. Someone. A broadcast.”

I paused. “Evidence that communication is still possible.”

Draco was quiet for a moment.

“If someone were broadcasting.” He said, with the careful neutrality of a person making a point he didn’t want to make too forcefully. “We’d need to know the frequency. And have a receiver capable of picking it up through aurora interference. And be within range.”

“You know your radios?”

“Had to learn the basics of them when the world fell apart.”

“I see.” I said. “Well, I understand all you’re saying and agree with you.”

“Then why—”

“Because it costs nothing to check.” I said. “And occasionally things that shouldn’t work do.”

Draco considered this. He glanced at the fuel gauge.

“Fair point.” He said, and didn’t mention the radio again.

We reached the A1 corridor as the aurora was cycling through one of its brighter phases. The road here was wider— four lanes, central reservation, the infrastructure of something that had once moved a great deal of traffic between a great many places. It was empty now in both directions as far as I could see, a long grey ribbon running north through country that rose and fell gently on either side.

I pulled onto it, straightened the wheel and off north we went.

The Jaguar settled into the wider road with what I could only describe as relief— less negotiation, less adjusting, just the clean forward motion of a car doing what a car was built for. Draco noticed it too, I thought, because he shifted slightly in his seat and the line of his shoulders dropped a fraction.

“Better.” He said.

“Better.” I agreed.

We drove north on the A1 under the violet aurora, and the road was empty, and the engine ran, and for a while there was nothing required of either of us except to keep going.

The locket pressed against my hip through my jacket pocket.

I thought about Claire for a moment— not the girl in the photograph specifically, just the idea of her, the life that had arranged mugs by size and kept a calendar and driven this car through an ordinary world— and then I thought about Harry, somewhere north of here, and Sirius, somewhere north of here, and Helena, who may no longer exist here.

We drove on.

Draco beside me read the atlas with the focused attention of a man who had decided that if he was going to be in a car for an indeterminate number of days he was going to be useful in it.

He called out the towns before we reached them. Gave me time to slow, to read the approach, to decide whether to push through or to thread around. We developed a shorthand for this without discussing it— a certain quality of silence from him meant he’d spotted something and was watching it, a particular tilt of his head meant he’d decided it wasn’t a threat, a single word meant it was. We’d been traveling together long enough that the shorthand had its own grammar, and I found I trusted it the way I trusted my magic— not blindly, but on the basis of evidence accumulated over miles and fights and close calls that had refined it into something reliable.

The first town we passed through was Blyth. Small, quiet, thoroughly empty in the particular way of places that had been emptied rather than abandoned— not the organic emptiness of somewhere people had gradually left, but the abrupt kind, as though the population had been mid-sentence when it stopped. A child’s bicycle lay in the middle of the road, tires long since flat, handlebars rusting. Draco moved it with his wand without comment and I drove past it without looking back.

The second was Barnby Moor, barely a village— a pub, a cluster of houses, a church whose spire had partially collapsed inward and been left that way. Something had taken up residence in the pub, I thought, because the windows were dark in the specific way of spaces that contained a presence rather than an absence. I didn’t slow down to investigate. Whatever it was, it didn’t come out, and we left it behind in thirty seconds.

Between towns, Draco cleared the road.

This was the thing I hadn’t fully anticipated— how much debris six years of abandonment had deposited across four lanes of motorway. Not just cars, though there were those. There were other things too. A lorry on its side spanning two lanes, its cargo of something that had once been food long since rotted and scavenged into nothing. A section of motorway sign that had come down across the carriageway, the green metal sheeting buckled and strange. Once, inexplicably, a caravan that had been deposited in the central reservation with no vehicle attached to it and no obvious explanation for how it had gotten there— I slowed and looked at it and decided not to speculate.

Draco dealt with all of it. Wand movements economical, the debris shifting aside with the minimum force required. I watched his technique in my peripheral vision when I could and noted, not for the first time, how well his casting had become— it was tight, deliberate, the instinctive showmanship of his Hogwarts years stripped away entirely and replaced with something that prioritised outcome over elegance. The world had been an effective teacher in that regard, even if the lessons had cost more than they should have.

“Doncaster coming up.” He said, at some point in the fourth hour.

I looked at the atlas page he was holding toward me. Doncaster sat on the A1 like a knot in a rope— unavoidable if we stayed on the road, large enough to be its own category of problem.

“Around.” I said.

“There’s a B-road that skirts the western edge. It’ll add time.”

“Less time than whatever’s in a place that size.”

He nodded and directed me off the A1 at the next junction, and we threaded west and then north through country roads that had gone almost entirely to nature— tarmac cracked by root systems, hedgerows collapsed across the lanes in places, the occasional farm building half-consumed by the particular aggressive greenery that seemed to thrive in the absence of people. The car complained at the rougher surface, the suspension working harder, but it held.

Stubborn old car.

We gave Doncaster a wide berth and I didn’t look toward its skyline, because from what I could see of it, it had the quality of a place that had been very thoroughly dealt with, and I didn’t need the details.

North of Doncaster, we rejoined the A1 and the road smoothed out again, and the rhythm resumed.

It was somewhere past Wetherby, with Catterick on the map perhaps an hour ahead, that Draco said: “There’s smoke.”

I’d already seen it. A thin column, darker than the aurora, rising from somewhere ahead and to the east. Too thin and too steady for a fire— more like the remnant of one, the last exhalation of something that had burned itself out hours ago.

“Settlement?” I asked.

“Wrong kind of smoke for a settlement.” He was quiet for a moment. “Settlement smoke is managed. This is… aftermath smoke.”

He was right. I knew the difference too, by now.

But the aftermath of what?

We drove toward it anyway, because the road went north and north was where we were going; thirty minutes later, the reason for the smoke became visible well before we reached it.

The road ended.

Not tapered off, not deteriorated into impassability— it simply stopped, at the edge of a crater so large that I had to slow the car to a crawl and then to nothing, pulling up perhaps twenty metres from the rim because the tarmac before that point had cracked and tilted at angles that I didn’t trust the car’s weight on. I killed the engine. We sat for a moment looking at it through the windscreen.

The crater was perhaps two hundred metres across and deep enough that the bottom was in shadow, a rough circle of raw earth and fractured stone that had been blasted downward with something that hadn’t cared about leaving clean edges. The road simply ceased at its western rim, the tarmac sheared off in a clean line as though someone had taken an enormous blade to it. On the far side, visible at the crater’s eastern edge, the road continued— a straight grey line heading north, picked up again exactly where it had been interrupted, as if the crater had been inserted into the landscape as an afterthought.

I got out of the car.

The air smelled of old burning, the particular mineral scent of blasted earth that had cooled and rained on and cooled again many times. There were no bodies, no vehicle wreckage, nothing to indicate what had been here when this happened. Just the crater and the edge and the smoke we’d seen, which was coming from somewhere further east and was already thinning to nothing.

Draco stood beside me at the rim and looked down.

“Military ordinance.” He said. “The shape of it.”

He pointed to the slight asymmetry of the blast pattern, the way the earth had been thrown more heavily in one direction. “Dropped from above, not placed.”

“They bombed it.” I said.

“Someone did.”

I looked at the crater for a long moment. The scale of it— the sheer commitment of the decision to drop something this size on a road in the English midlands— was hard to hold in the mind all at once. Someone had looked at whatever was here and determined that the correct response was to remove it from existence along with the surrounding geography.

They’d gone down fighting. Whatever came through here, whatever poured out of the darkness on that October night and kept coming in the weeks and months after— they’d tried to stop it with everything they had. Carpet bombing. Artillery, probably. Conventional weapons turned against things that conventional weapons weren’t built for.

It hadn’t worked, in the end. The world had still broken.

But they had tried. They had picked up the tools they had and used them, knowing probably that it wasn’t enough, and I found I couldn’t look at the evidence of that without feeling something that sat in the chest like a fist— not grief exactly, and not pride exactly, but something between the two that didn’t have a clean name.

“We levitate the car over.” Draco said, practically.

“Yes.” I said, still looking at the crater.

He gave me a moment. Then: “Adam.”

“Yes.” I said again, differently. “Let’s go.”

We levitated the Jaguar across the first crater with Draco on one side and me on the other, the car suspended between our combined magic at a height that cleared the rim with perhaps three metres to spare. It was heavier than it looked and the magic required more concentration than either of us had expected, which I filed away as information about how much the world’s damage had affected the straightforward physics of spellwork. We set it down on the far side without incident and got back in and drove on.

The second crater appeared twenty minutes later.

It was smaller than the first— perhaps fifty metres across— but it had taken out a bridge along with the road, which complicated matters. We stood at the edge of the gap, looked at the river below, looked at each other, and levitated the car across without discussion. This one was easier. We were getting the technique.

The third crater stopped us for a different reason.

It wasn’t the size, though it was large. It was what was in it. The bottom of this one wasn’t in shadow— it was lit from below, faintly, by something that pulsed with a dim amber light at irregular intervals, slow as breathing. Neither of us could identify it from the rim. We looked at it for longer than was probably wise, the light pulsing its slow patient pulse.

In a tone that invited no debate, Draco said. “I’m not going down there.”

“No.” I said in complete agreement, and we were about to levitate the car before Draco stopped me. He moved towards the car and took a look at the map.

“The A1 continues north, but looking at this—” He traced a route with his finger. “There have likely been more of them. And we’ve spent more magic on those three than I’d prefer.”

I knew where this was going. I’d been running the same calculation. The car had served us well— had shaved time from the journey that I didn’t want to think about in terms of days, because the arithmetic of days without it was grim. But the craters were going to keep coming, the road was going to keep breaking, and each crossing cost magic that needed to be available for things that might want to eat us.

“Darlington is east of here.” I said. “On the map. Maybe a few miles.”

“Close enough to walk.” Draco said. “And large enough that there might be something useful. Shelter at minimum.”

I looked at the road ahead, the A1 continuing north through country that I couldn’t see clearly in the aurora light, potentially intact, potentially cratered every twenty minutes, probably some combination of both.

Then I looked at the Jaguar. It had carried us from Bestwood to somewhere north of Catterick without complaint, through debris and craters and cross-country roads, the engine running on precious fuel that most people would kill for.

It had been, for the past several hours, the closest thing to an uncomplicated good thing the world had offered.

“It’s done its job.” I said.

“It has.” Draco agreed, which was as much of an eulogy as either of us had time for.

I turned off the engine.

The silence came back, different now from the silence at Bestwood when I’d first killed it— heavier, with more miles in it, carrying the specific quality of a thing that had reached its natural end. I took the keys from the ignition and held them for a moment, the fob worn smooth, the locket attached by its short chain.

I unclipped the locket and put it in my jacket pocket, separately from the keys. The keys I left on the dashboard.

Maybe if someone finds this car, they can get some use out of it. Assuming it’s not destroyed.

We got out and took our packs from the back seat before closing the doors.

“Right.” Draco said.

“Right.” I agreed.

We walked east toward Darlington, and the Jaguar sat behind us on the empty road. I didn’t even glance back. It would likely still be there, if we needed to come back.

ooo

We heard Darlington before we saw it.

Not the town itself— the town was as silent as everywhere else, the particular total silence of a place that had stopped producing the ambient noise of human occupation and hadn’t started again.

What I felt was something underneath that silence, a wrongness that I’d learned to recognise over the past weeks the way you learned to recognise the smell of rain before it arrived. A pressure at the base of the skull.

I slowed.

Draco noticed immediately. He’d learned to read my pace the way I’d learned to read his silences. “What?”

“Something’s off.” I looked at the street ahead. We’d come into Darlington’s outskirts from the west, following a road that had once been lined with the particular mix of residential and light commercial that characterised the edges of mid-sized English towns— takeaways, a tire garage, a betting shop with its sign still hanging at an angle, a row of terraced houses with their curtains still drawn. The street was empty. It looked exactly like every other empty street we’d walked through since Nottingham.

Yet, it felt different, like Arnold had.

“You’re getting a feeling?” Draco asked quietly.

“Restless.” I said. “Not threat-response. More like… interference. Something nearby that I’m registering without being able to classify.”

Draco absorbed this. His hand had moved to his wand without visible decision. “Corrupted creature?”

“Maybe. Or something else.” I scanned the rooflines, the doorways, the gaps between buildings. Nothing moved. “Stay close.”

We kept moving, slower now, both of us reading the street with the full attention it had earned. The aurora overhead was in one of its dimmer phases, the violet faded toward a pale greyish-purple that gave the light a flat, directionless quality that made distances hard to judge and shadows ambiguous. I didn’t like it.

The street opened into what had been a small commercial area— a cluster of shops around a modest junction, a cash machine with its screen long dead, a supermarket whose windows had been smashed inward.

That was when she came around the corner.

She was running flat out, the particular sprint of someone who had stopped thinking about their legs and was operating entirely on the signal that said faster and nothing else. She was perhaps thirty, dark-haired, wearing layers that had been practical once and were now just worn— a coat with one sleeve torn away, boots that had been resoled with what looked like electrical tape. She was looking behind her as she ran, which was why she didn’t see us until she was nearly through us.

She hit Draco shoulder-first.

He’d seen her coming and started to shift his weight, which meant the collision didn’t knock him down but it wasn’t comfortable for either of them. She bounced off him, staggered, found her footing with the reflexes of someone who’d been falling and catching herself for years, and looked at him with eyes that were making very rapid calculations.

“Get out of—” She started.

Draco, to his credit, was already reaching out a hand to steady her. “What’s behind you?”

This was, apparently, the wrong approach. She looked at his hand, looked at his face, and drove her knee upward with desperate intensity.

Right into his— poor Draco made a sound I had never heard from him before and went down to one knee.

The woman was already running again.

I stepped around Draco, caught his shoulder briefly to confirm he was functional— he waved me off with the expression of a man cataloguing an injury for later— and looked in the direction she’d come from.

The overturned lorry was at the far end of the street, half-blocking the junction it had died in. Something was behind it. I could hear it— a sound like the grinding of heavy mechanisms, rhythmic and deliberate, with an undertone of something organic that the mechanics couldn’t quite cover.

Then it came around the lorry.

My first thought was ‘ant’.

My second thought was that the word ant did not begin to cover it. An ant was a thing you could step on, a nuisance at a picnic, a creature that appeared in nature documentaries in manageable numbers doing things with leaves. This was something that shared a body plan with an ant the way a cathedral shared a body plan with a garden shed— the same basic principles, the same number of legs, the same general arrangement of parts, scaled up past any reasonable interpretation of what an insect should be permitted to be.

It was perhaps four metres at the shoulder, chitinous and segmented, moving with the particular deliberate certainty of something that had never needed to hurry because nothing had ever been fast enough to matter. Its mandibles were the size of doors. Its exoskeleton caught the aurora light and threw it back in fractured fragments— hard, dense, layered, the kind of surface that didn’t care about most things you could throw at it.

It had six legs, each ending in a point that had left marks in the tarmac as it walked.

It wasn’t looking at us. It was looking at the woman, who had made it perhaps fifty metres further down the street before the sight of its emergence had registered and slowed her involuntarily, the way certain kinds of fear bypassed the legs before the brain caught up.

The creature’s attention tracked her with the predatory focus of something that didn’t have expressions and didn’t need them.

I moved without deciding to.

My chains came out ahead of conscious thought, responding to the urgency my body had already processed while my mind was still catching up— six long tendrils of silver-black metal uncoiling from my arms and hands and arcing forward through the air with a sound like a whip taken to a bell. They hit the creature across its thorax and two of its front legs simultaneously, and I pulled, hard, the way you’d pull on a rope attached to something you needed to stop.

The ant stopped.

It didn’t go down— nothing that size and density went down from being grabbed—but it stopped its forward motion and turned, slowly, to look at what had a hold of it.

I held the chains taut and looked back.

Up close, its eyes were compound and enormous, faceted like gemstones, and they caught and scattered my image across a hundred tiny surfaces. It processed me for a moment with whatever passed for cognition inside its armoured skull. Then it decided I was an obstacle and moved to remove me, all six legs driving forward against my chains’ resistance with a force that dragged me two steps forward before I locked my heels in and held.

The woman had recovered herself. She was running again, away from us this time, which was correct— I couldn’t spare attention to be relieved about it.

“Draco.” I said, through my teeth.

“Working on it.” He said, from somewhere to my right. His voice had the focused, slightly elevated quality it got when he was angry and channeling the anger into something useful.

The ant surged forward again and I lost another step, my boots scraping the asphalt. The chains held but the creature’s legs were stronger than anything I’d encountered that wasn’t void-born, the exoskeleton giving it mechanical advantage that pure physical force wasn’t going to solve. I shifted my grip— mentally, the chains responding to intent rather than movement— and changed the angle, wrapping two more tendrils around its rear legs and pulling them outward, trying to compromise its stance rather than arrest its momentum.

It stumbled.

“Now would be good.” I said, gritting my teeth.

The Blasting Curse hit the creature’s left flank with a crack that I felt in my sternum from fifteen metres away. The impact didn’t penetrate— the exoskeleton absorbed it, or most of it— but the sheer kinetic force threw the ant sideways, all six legs leaving the ground briefly before it crashed back down in a tangle of limbs, the momentum of the impact spinning it nearly ninety degrees.

It righted itself with disturbing speed.

But the stumble had told me something. The exoskeleton was hard; the joints between segments were less so. The places where the plating had to accommodate movement were the places where movement was possible in more than one direction.

I reshaped the chains, pushing the image of blades through the links, not randomly but at the points that would make the chain ends into cutting surfaces, and when the ant surged forward again I let it come and drove two bladed tendrils into the joint where its foremost left leg met its thorax.

The exoskeleton resisted.

I drove harder.

The blade-chain found the gap between the plates— a centimetre, maybe two, of softer material beneath the armour— and pushed through.

The leg came off at the joint.

The ant made a sound I hadn’t been expecting, a high frequency vibration that came from its entire body rather than from any single point, like a struck tuning fork scaled up to a volume that resonated in the fillings of my back teeth. It lurched to compensate for the missing leg, its movement suddenly uneven, its gait disrupted into something that looked almost like distress.

“Freeze it.” I said. “Left flank, where the Blasting Curse hit. The exoskeleton’s already stressed there.”

I heard Draco move. A Freezing Charm at combat scale took time— not much, but enough that I had to hold the creature’s attention, which I did by driving another bladed tendril at its front right leg joint, making it deal with the threat to its remaining limbs rather than whatever secondary objective it had been pursuing.

The cold hit the creature’s left side and I felt it through the chains— a change in resistance, the material under stress becoming brittle, the micro-fractures that the Blasting Curse had already introduced into the exoskeleton surface spreading and deepening as the temperature dropped and the material contracted against the already compromised integrity of its structure.

“Now.” Draco said.

I brought three chains together and hit the frozen section simultaneously.

The exoskeleton shattered.

Not all of it— the creature was too large for a single strike to end it— but the left side of its thorax collapsed inward, the plates fragmenting, and whatever was beneath the armour was abruptly, catastrophically exposed. The ant went down on that side, the remaining legs on the left scrabbling for purchase that the compromised body couldn’t provide, its movement reduced to a horrible, determined dragging.

We didn’t wait to see if it would recover.

We attacked it continuously, with the brutality of people who had learned that ‘stopped’ did not mean ‘finished’, and that pausing to assess was how you got killed by things you’d thought were dealt with. I drove chains into the exposed sections. Draco hit it with everything that wouldn’t cost him more than it cost the creature. We kept going until the vibration stopped, until the legs stopped moving, until the compound eyes went the particular flat and absent way that eyes went when the thing behind them wasn’t there anymore.

Only then did we stop.

The street was quiet. The woman was gone. The ant was in several more pieces than it had started with, and the light from above played across the ruin of its exoskeleton with complete indifference.

“That girl… She kneed you pretty hard.” I said.

“I don’t want to discuss it.”

“We saved her life.”

“I’m aware.” Draco said, with dignity. “I would do it again, though I may have a few choice words for the stupid bint afterward.”

I almost smiled. Then the sound reached us from three directions at once— a high, grinding screech, the same frequency as the dead creature’s distress vibration but multiplied, coming from the north, the east, and from somewhere above us that I didn’t understand until I looked up and saw the shapes moving along the roofline two streets over, silhouetted against the aurora.

More of them. Many more.

“Run.” I said.

We booked it, falling back east through the commercial streets, trading space for time, keeping the creatures channelled where we could and breaking contact where we couldn’t. The ants were fast on open ground— faster than their size suggested they had any right to be— but they were also large, and large things had problems with certain kinds of terrain, and I used this where I could find it.

A narrow alley between two buildings that forced them to queue. A section of collapsed shopfront that they had to climb over and gave us a few precious seconds. A car park entrance with a lowered barrier that they could breach but not quickly.

Draco was brilliant. I could say it without qualification because I was watching it from close range and there was no other word for it— his marvelous aim, the economy of his spellwork, the way he’d picked up my tactical instincts over weeks of traveling together and integrated them with his own into something that functioned as a coherent whole. He didn’t waste magic. He didn’t waste movement. He hit the things where they were weakest with exactly enough force and moved before they could adjust.

He and I killed six in the first ten minutes. I counted without meaning to.

The problem was the buildings.

I noticed it before Draco did— the creatures flanking us along the rooflines, climbing the walls with the ease of things whose legs ended in points, repositioning above us while we focused on the ground-level threat. I understood what they were doing a moment before they did it, because it was what I would have done if I were trying to neutralise an enemy in a bottleneck.

“Shields.” I said, already pulling my chains into a dome overhead.

The rubble came down.

Chunks of masonry and roof tile and the accumulated structural debris of six years of neglect, dislodged by the ants above us and dropped with the practical intelligence of creatures that had learned something about how to deal with prey that fought back. The chains caught most of it. Draco’s shield charm caught the rest. But the force of it drove us both to one knee and the magic cost was significant.

When I looked up through the settling dust and saw that the creatures on the ground were advancing again, the ones on the rooflines repositioning for a second drop, the arithmetic of the situation had stopped looking favourable.

I reached for the Drake essence.

Not all the way— I didn’t need to go all the way, not yet. Just the edge of it. The outer boundary of what the predator inside my chains had become. Enough to feel the darkness seep into the tendrils, enough to make them heavier and hungrier and capable of things they hadn’t been a moment ago.

I held it there, at the edge, and waited.

Come and get it!

The lightning came from the east.

Three bolts in rapid succession, each one hitting an ant on the roofline with the specific, targeted precision of something that wasn’t a weather event. The creatures didn’t shatter— they were too dense for that— but the electrical discharge interacted badly with the conductive properties of their exoskeletons and the three that were hit spasmed and fell, two of them landing on the ground-level ants below and crushing them into paste. The third got impaled on some rebar, screeching in agony.

The ants began to flee as Draco and I looked east.

A man walked toward us through the settling dust, picking his way over the rubble and the dead ants with the unhurried pace of someone who had made a decision and was comfortable with it. He was perhaps fifty, lean in the way of people who’d spent years eating carefully and working constantly, with grey at his temples and the kind of stillness in his movement that came either from great confidence or great exhaustion.

I kept the chains coiled and ready while I worked out which it was going to be.

He stopped perhaps twenty metres away, with the wall of dead insects between us, and looked at the scene with the expression of a man conducting a rapid inventory.

“That.” He said, in a clear, unhurried voice. “Was more complicated than it needed to be.”

Draco and I said nothing. We were both still breathing harder than normal and reading the man the way you read anything that appeared without warning after a fight— for threat, for.

The man didn’t seem troubled by the silence. He looked at the dead ants. Then at me— specifically at the chains, still half-extended, which I hadn’t fully recalled. His expression didn’t change in any way I could categorise. Then he looked at Draco.

“You’re hurt.” He said.

“I’m fine.” Draco said, which was mostly true. The rubble drop had caught his shoulder and he’d been holding that arm slightly differently since, but he wasn’t going to mention it, and I wasn’t going to mention it and apparently we were both going to wait and see what this man did next before we decided what he was.

“The ants retreated.” I said. “The lightning, that was you?”

“Yes it was.” He said. “The retreat was their decision. They make them occasionally when the calculation stops going their way.”

He paused as he stared in their direction. “They’re not mindless beasts. It would be a mistake to assume otherwise.”

“We’d noticed.” I said.

He looked at me again with that same quality of focused assessment. Up close, he had the kind of face that had probably been unremarkable before the world broke and had since become something more— weathered into specificity, the bones of it more visible, the eyes carrying the particular steadiness of someone who had been alone with their own judgment for a long time and had made peace with the arrangement.

“I don’t recognize you.” He said. Not unfriendly. Simply factual. “Not from around here, I take it?”

“No.” I agreed. “I’m not.”

“You’re travelling. From the south, by the look of you.” His gaze moved to our packs, our boots, the particular accumulated wear of people who’d covered significant ground on foot. “The road or cross-country?”

“Both.” I said. “Depending on what the road offered.”

“Which was occasionally craters.” Draco said.

The man’s mouth moved in something that wasn’t quite a smile.

“The RAF.” He said. “In the early months. They did what they could.”

He looked at the dead ants again, and something in his expression suggested that what they could had not, in his assessment, been quite enough. “I’m Henry. Henry Maldrow.”

He said it the way people said their names when they weren’t sure the name still meant anything.

Draco went still beside me in a way that wasn’t visible but that I felt, the almost imperceptible shift of someone whose internal catalogue had just flagged something. I didn’t look at him. I kept my eyes on Henry and waited.

“Maldrow.” Draco said, after a moment. His voice was careful. “You worked with the Ministry.”

Henry looked at him with the first real surprise he’d shown.

“I did.” He said. “Among other things. You have the advantage of me.”

“Draco Malfoy.” Draco said.

A pause. Henry’s eyes moved over him— the white-blond hair, the bearing, the face— making connections. “Ah, Lucius’ son, is it?”

“His son.” Draco said, with the particular inflection that acknowledged the fact without endorsing the definition. “Yes.”

Henry was quiet for a moment. Something had shifted in his assessment, though I couldn’t tell yet in which direction.

“I dealt with your father on several occasions.” He said. “Funding arrangements. He was generous to certain… research ventures when generosity served his interests.”

“He usually was.” Draco said, evenly.

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“I’m not.”

Henry looked at him for another moment, then apparently decided this was sufficient and moved on. His eyes came back to me. “And you?”

“Adam.” I said. “Adam Black.”

The name landed differently than I expected. Not the recognition I sometimes encountered— the martyr’s name, the boy who’d bought the wizarding world its extra years before everything collapsed anyway— but something more specific. He turned the name over visibly, as though testing it against something.

“Black.” He said. “Sirius Black’s ward.”

“His son.” I said. “Adopted.”

“You fell through the Veil.” He said. It wasn’t a question. “Did you not?”

“Yes.”

“At Stonehenge. On the night of—”

“Yes.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked at the chains, which I still hadn’t fully recalled, which were coiled at my sides in their dormant state, void-dark and quietly present. His expression was the most readable it had been since he’d appeared— not fear, not awe, but the focused interest of someone encountering a data point they’d been theorising about for some time without expecting to meet it in person.

“You’ve been in the beyond.” He said, and there was something in his gaze that unsettled me.

“For a while.” I said.

“How long?”

“Long enough.”

He blinked, and the look was gone. Henry accepted my words without pushing, which told me something about him. “And yet, you came back through it. On your own.”

“Yes.”

“That.” He said. “Shouldn’t be possible.”

“So I’ve been told.” I said dryly. “And yet, here I stand.”

He held my gaze for a moment longer, then looked away— not uncomfortably, but with the deliberateness of someone choosing not to press a point they intended to return to later. He looked instead at the dead creatures, and his expression changed.

“You wouldn’t have happened to see a young woman running around here, would you?”

“We might have.” Draco said, though he looked guarded.

“Good, good.” Henry said. “I’m glad she isn’t dead, though she’s created a right mess to clean up.”

“The ants?”

“I warned her about them.” He said, nodding. “Three days ago, when she came through. Told her the centre of town was compromised, that the infestation had taken hold there and the approaches weren’t safe to travel alone.”

He paused. “She said she knew what she was doing.”

“She might have.” I said. “Until she didn’t.”

“Yes.” He was quiet for a moment. “That’s how it usually goes.”

None of us said anything for a long moment.

“You saved our lives.” Draco broke the silence. He said it the way he said things he’d decided to say despite finding them uncomfortable— directly, without preamble, as though the discomfort was irrelevant to the accuracy of the statement.

Henry looked at him. “I arrived when I did. You were managing.”

“We were about to stop managing.” I said, shaking my head. “The rubble drop compromised our position. Another few minutes and we might have had some real trouble. So. Thank you.”

Henry nodded once, receiving this without ceremony.

“The lightning takes time to prepare.” He said. “I saw the swarm mobilising from the eastern quarter and moved as quickly as I could.”

He glanced at Draco’s shoulder. “I should have been faster.”

“You didn’t know we were here.” Draco said.

“No.” He looked between us. “I wasn’t. Which raises the question of what you are doing here, specifically, rather than anywhere else.”

He paused. “And where you’ve come from. And where you’re going.”

“That’s several questions.” I said.

“I have more.” He said it without apology. “As I imagine you do.”

I looked at Draco. He returned the look with the specific neutrality he used when he was leaving a decision to me— present, attentive, withholding his own opinion until I’d given mine. I turned back to Henry Maldrow and took stock of what I had.

This was a man who’d arrived without warning and saved our lives, which was either genuine or the most elaborate approach to gaining our trust I could currently imagine, and elaborate approaches required resources that the world no longer readily provided. He’d recognised Draco’s name, known my name, and known about the Veil— not from rumour, but with the specific quality of someone who had prior knowledge of the relevant facts.

A man who’d implied working for the Department of Mysteries, in the context of Lucius’ funding arrangements, without clarifying his own role in it. A man whose presence made giant corrupted ants retreat, which was information I didn’t yet know what to do with but intended to keep.

None of this told me he was trustworthy. None of it told me he wasn’t, either.

What it did tell me was that he was worth talking to, that we were in a street in Darlington with an ant retreat that might not hold, and that the practical requirements of the situation had their own logic regardless of what I thought of the man in front of me.

“We’re heading north.” I said. “Scotland. Hogwarts, or what’s left of it.”

Something moved behind his eyes at that. Not surprise. Something more like confirmation— the look of a man whose model of events has just been updated with a piece of information it had been missing.

“That’s a long way.” He said.

“Yes.” I agreed.

“And you’ve come from the south.”

“London, originally. With stops.”

“The settlement in the ruins?” He said it carefully, the way you said things you weren’t sure still existed.

“Still standing.” I said. “As of a few weeks ago. Remus Lupin is there. Scrimgeour.”

He absorbed this with the focused attention of someone filing information carefully for later use. “And Arnold? There was a settlement there, before—”

“Gone.” Draco said. “Corrupted Veela. They drew the wizards in and unmade them. We dealt with it.”

A pause.

“You dealt with it.” Henry said.

“The three Veela are dead.” I said. “The settlement wasn’t recoverable. We notified the nearest encampment.”

Henry was quiet for a long moment. Not processing, I thought— he was processing rapidly, I could see it— but choosing what to do with what he’d just been given. His expression had the quality of a man revising a map in real time, updating his understanding of the terrain he’d been navigating with significant new information.

“Communication broke down some time ago.” He said finally. “The southern settlements— I’d assumed the worst, for most of them.”

“The worst is accurate, for quite a few of them.” I said. “But not all.”

He nodded slowly. Then he looked at us both with an expression that had resolved from assessment into something more direct— not warmth exactly, but the particular directness of a person who has decided that the situation warrants honesty and is prepared to offer it.

“I have shelter.” He said. “Not far from here. It’s defensible and it’s dry, which is more than most of what’s available in this city.” He paused. “I’d like to offer it to you for a day or two. In exchange for information— what you’ve seen in the south, the state of the settlements, the nature of what you’ve encountered on the road.”

Another pause. “And in exchange for that, I can offer you information of my own. About the road north. About what’s been happening in this part of the country. Things that would be useful to people travelling to Scotland.”

“Useful how?” Draco asked.

“Useful in the sense of keeping you alive.” Henry said. “Which I imagine is a priority.”

Draco and I shared one last look.

“Lead the way, then.” I said, nodding.

He nodded once and turned north, picking a careful path through the rubble and the dead ants, and Draco and I fell in behind him with our wands in our hands and our eyes on the street around us, because gratitude and caution were not mutually exclusive and we hadn’t survived this long by assuming that people who saved your life had no other reasons for doing it.