Kevin had noticed the shift the moment it happened.
He hadn't been watching Harry directly — he'd been watching the space around Harry, the way you watch a room rather than any one thing in it. And when the Harry still visible in his peripheral vision hadn't moved, while a second set of footsteps tracked quietly toward the office door, the conclusion assembled itself in under a second.
Polyjuice.
He catalogued it and filed it away. Let it run.
He caught fragments of the conversation in the corridor through the closed door — a man introducing himself as John Dexter, a smooth recitation of prophecy theory and the Department of Mysteries, the precise application of just enough truth to make the bait irresistible. Voldemort's work, without question. The architecture was recognisable: appeal to Harry's particular hunger for proof, give him something concrete to carry back, and have someone waiting at the collection point.
Kevin weighed his options.
If the endgame was simply retrieving the prophecy orb, Harry was never in real danger — the orb responded only to its subject, and whatever waiting Death Eaters Dexter had arranged wouldn't move until the handoff was complete. Harry would be rattled, perhaps, but fine. And an ambush survived independently, without rescue, would do more for Harry's confidence than ten training sessions.
Kevin stayed in the office, contributed three or four well-placed observations to the ongoing negotiation with Fudge, and tracked the retreating footsteps until they were out of range.
Then he excused himself, quietly, and followed.
The Department of Mysteries occupied the ninth level of the Ministry — deep underground, sealed behind a plain wooden door that opened onto a circular room lined with identical doors. It was the kind of architecture designed to disorient, to ensure that whatever happened down here stayed down here.
Harry moved through it with Dexter ahead of him and the Polyjuice-Sirius at his back.
The Hall of Prophecy stretched away in every direction — shelves running floor to ceiling, orbs ranked in their thousands, each one glowing or dark depending on whether its subject still walked the earth. Some hummed faintly. Some had gone cold and grey, their subjects long dead, the futures they'd held dissolved into whatever had actually come to pass.
Harry's was easy to find. A small metal tag, halfway down a shelf at shoulder height: Harry Potter.
He picked it up.
The light bloomed pale green against his palm, and Trelawney's voice — wilder than he'd ever heard it in class, stripped of everything performative — spoke only inside his head.
The one with the power to conquer the Dark Lord approaches... born as the seventh month dies... and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not... and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives...
The words settled over Harry like cold water.
"Well done, Mr. Potter." Dexter's voice had shifted — the warmth gone, replaced by something flat and deliberate. He stepped closer. "Now hand it over. Let's go see the Minister."
Harry didn't move. He stood very still, the orb warm in his closed fist, the prophecy still echoing.
He'd felt something wrong from the beginning. He'd felt it on the elevator — the easy answer to every question, the perfectly convenient proof, the complete absence of anyone noticing them leave. He'd done what Kevin sometimes called trusting the itch: play along, but don't hand over the thing of actual value until you know what you're handing it to.
Dexter moved behind him, reaching.
Harry spun, wand already out.
The tip pressed against Dexter's throat.
"To see the Minister," he said quietly. "Or to see Voldemort?"
Dexter went still. Something shifted in his eyes — the performance dropping, the person underneath it revealing itself as considerably less pleasant.
"When did you work it out?"
Before Harry could answer, the Polyjuice-Sirius surged forward — too fast, too purposeful.
"Stupefy."
The stunner hit clean. The figure flew back and hit the shelves, and when it crumpled, something happened to its shape — the Polyjuice had been running close to its limit, and the impact stripped the last of it. Black smoke drifted upward from where a man in a Death Eater mask had fallen. Not Sirius at all.
Dexter used the distraction. He caught Harry's wand arm and wrenched sideways, locking the joint, stepping inside the reach.
Harry had half a second.
He brought his knee up hard into Dexter's midsection.
The grip broke. Dexter doubled forward, and Harry put three feet of distance between them in one step.
"Incarcero. Diffindo. Expelliarmus."
Three spells, three seconds. Dexter hit the floor bound, disarmed, a long cut opening across his robe where the Severing Charm had caught the fabric instead of flesh. His wand skittered under a shelf.
Harry looked down at him, breathing.
"I knew something was wrong the moment you started talking," he said, with the flat composure of someone who has been through considerably worse. "You laid it on too thick. I caught three more red flags after that. And then I realised — you weren't trying to help me, you were trying to get me to carry the orb to you. So I let you."
Dexter's mouth curved. It wasn't quite a smile.
"Not bad, Harry Potter." He didn't sound defeated so much as reassessing. "But what makes you think you handle the rest of this alone?"
Four black-robed figures stepped out from between the shelves. They had been there the whole time, still as the shelves themselves, waiting.
Harry looked at them. Then he looked over their heads, past their shoulders, at the gap in the shelving where someone had been standing for the past thirty seconds without announcing themselves.
"Kevin," Harry said. "Obviously."
The crowbar came through the gap like a missile. It passed through one Death Eater's wand arm, clattered into the shelves, and knocked three orbs free — they hit the floor and detonated in small explosions of silver light, dead prophecies dissolving into nothing. Kevin landed in the resulting chaos and had two more Death Eaters by their robes before they'd processed that he was in the room. He drove them both into the floor with the brisk, almost bored efficiency of a man tidying up.
The last one standing looked at his three colleagues and made a sensible decision.
Kevin reached him in two steps. Took his wand. Snapped it.
Left him standing there with the expression of someone who had just rethought several major life choices.
The whole thing had taken under a minute.
"I underestimated you," Kevin said, turning back to Harry with a grin.
"You think I'm still that kid who needed rescuing from a chess set?"
Kevin laughed. It was genuine.
A minute later, the elevator doors opened and Fudge arrived with a Ministry Auror unit. The real Sirius was with them, alongside Kingsley and two other Order members. Fudge surveyed the Hall of Prophecy — the stunned bodies, the shattered orbs, the Death Eater who appeared to have simply given up on life — and his face went through several complicated expressions before settling on something like reluctant conviction.
The Polyjuice impersonator had been one of his own people.
"Well," Fudge said, in the voice of a man who has just had a considerable number of his previous positions rendered untenable. "Well."
Voldemort's reach hadn't stopped at the outer gates. It had been sitting at his door for months, wearing the right badge.
Kevin watched the realisation move across the Minister's face and said nothing. Some lessons were better absorbed without commentary.