October 3rd, 2012 — New York
Arthur found out the exact way he found out most things these days. Quietly, over a cup of tea, while the rest of the house was still sound asleep.
It was a crisp, grey autumn morning. Out the large kitchen window, the sprawling garden stood still in that early light that had not yet decided whether to truly be day.
"You will want to see this, Master," Eve said softly over the speakers.
She projected it smoothly up onto the dark window glass. Forty-one seconds of shaky, vertical footage, clearly a smartphone held tight in a child's hand.
A small boy crouched nervously over a stone. A ring of demanding, expectant children. A bigger boy aggressively lifting the first one clean off his feet by his collar. Then, the soundless, violent shove that scattered them all perfectly into the brush. Finally, the cloaked figures stepping cleanly out of thin air to sweep the field completely clean of memories.
Arthur watched it once. Then again.
He set down his tea very carefully.
"So. Is this the final spark?" Arthur said to the empty kitchen. "After London. This is the one that finally puts it all out into the open."
"It is highly probable, Master," Eve replied.
"How is it being handled?" Arthur asked.
"They attempted to suppress it quickly. The German Ministry's Obliviators were back on the scene within minutes and cleaned up everything they could find. The mundane side moved nearly as fast. Every intelligence service with a magical desk, the British among them, hit the platforms at once. The original upload was gone from every major site within ten minutes."
"I hear a but."
"It spread much faster than anyone could pull it. By the time the originals came down, it had been copied past counting. It is gone from the public platforms now. It lives everywhere else. Private messages, encrypted groups, offline hard drives... corners no Ministry has ever known how to search." A pause. "And it isn't spreading on its own. Something is pushing it. Dormant networks, woken all at once, forty places, twelve countries, inside the same ten minutes. Someone built a machine for this and left it idling. They've been waiting a long while for a spark this good."
Arthur was quiet a moment, staring at the frozen image of the frightened boy on the glass. "Can you trace who?"
"No. The routing bounces through dozens of proxies, heavily encrypted. State-level or corporate intelligence, by the shape of it. This was a deliberate leak. Someone wanted this exact video in front of this exact frightened world."
Arthur looked back at the glass. The spark had caught the dry wood at last.
For months the public had been fascinated by the mysterious broom riders who saved London. People had gone digging for their trace, their origin, and come up with nothing. Arthur had almost let himself believe the world might be eased into the truth slowly, gently, on both governments' careful, coordinated terms.
This was not that.
This footage showed no heroes fighting aliens. It showed shadows in black coats appearing out of thin air to reach into the vulnerable heads of crying children and quietly, brutally wipe their memories. It confirmed every paranoid, midnight suspicion the mundane world had ever held about the things operating in the dark.
It was exactly the nightmare the anti-magic radicals had been praying for.
"I can attempt more aggressive measures," Eve offered. "Crash the servers hosting the encrypted copies. I could even go deep and wipe the video entirely from every private account, every device, and every server that contains the file's signature."
Arthur looked at the boy frozen on the glass and did not say the word.
A few short months ago, he would not have hesitated. He would have already called Amelia to ask whether she wanted it buried, or wanted it used. Whether she needed his hands to fix it.
But that was a few months ago. The situation in the wizarding world had changed drastically since.
For one thing, Amelia Bones was no longer the Minister of Magic.
She had handed in her resignation a month back. After years of dragging the British wizarding world out of its own past, fighting its corruption, prosecuting its monsters, holding its fragile peace together with both hands… she was simply tired.
But the tiredness was not the reason she left. The reason was the people.
The very people she had spent herself entirely protecting had turned on her the moment her proposals for cooperation with the Muggle government made them afraid. The old families in the Wizengamot smelled the fear and fed it.
They loudly called her a dictator. Power-hungry. A traitor to magical blood, selling ancient secrets to the mundane world.
Amelia had looked at a public that refused to be saved, and decided she had given it enough of her life. When the new bloc moved against her, she did not fight for a chair she had never wanted for its own sake. She stepped down, handed the reins to a successor, a younger man with the right surname and none of her spine, and walked out lighter than she had felt in twenty years.
Sirius had been less gracious.
He had told the assembled Wizengamot, in considerable detail, where they could shove their opinions. Then he had packed their bags, taken Amelia's hand, and carried her off on a long trip around a world that had stopped deserving either of them, and left the rest to sort out its own coming storm.
Even Harry had felt the ground dangerously shift beneath his feet.
The Boy Who Lived, the man who ended Voldemort, watched his vast public goodwill thin in the cold of the new fear. They still respected his power. They had simply started to fear how close he stood to the Muggle world. He had been asked, exactly once, to step into the gap Amelia left. When he said no, they stopped asking almost at once, with something insultingly close to relief.
Because in peacetime a hero is an awkward thing to keep in the room. He reminds people of a heavy debt they can never repay. They had raised statues to Harry and then quietly come to resent the shadow they had to stand in.
He saw it happening long before they did. So, he went happily to Hogwarts, to a chalkboard and a roomful of noisy students. By every account he was happier doing that than he had been in his entire life.
It was an old story. Older than wizards. You carry a people through their worst night, and in the morning they cannot quite meet your eye, because you are the one who saw them when they were afraid.
Even Aurora had felt the cold of it on the Muggle side. Without Amelia heading the magical side, the quiet enemies she had made over the years found their moment, and MI6 moved her sideways into a posting with a long title and no teeth. They had not dared sack her outright. They had simply made certain that the next time the world caught fire, she would be standing too far from the water to do anything about it.
And with all of it, Arthur found that he did not much care whether the Statute of Secrecy held or broke today.
The people he loved were no longer the people sitting in the seats of power. No one was going to call him for help today, because the ones who would have called were resting on a beach, or teaching at a chalkboard, or boxed quietly out of the way.
He owed the greedy, frightened rooms of power absolutely nothing. Let them work it out.
He had given humanity and wizardkind every advantage a man could give. He had shown them alien technology. He had shown them alien threats. He had laid a clear path to the stars and stood back from it with his hands open.
If they would rather spend the gift fighting each other in the mud over paranoia and prejudice, that was entirely theirs to choose.
So Arthur did not say the word. And Eve, who had asked only to give him the choice, did not ask again.
Arthur reached up and brushed two fingers across the glass, and the boy frozen mid-fall went dark, and the window was only a window again, holding the grey garden and the slow arrival of an ordinary morning.
He picked up his tea. It had gone cold. He warmed it instantly with a thought, settled back into the chair, and opened his book to the bookmark.
Outside, a world he had decided to stop carrying went on cracking quietly down the middle without him.