Cartography

cartography

Ten years after the war and England's ley lines are still snapping, and you can't do magic unless you want to blast your fingers off. Ron Weasley explains it to the new first years at Hogwarts, holding up his old broken spellotaped-together wand from his third year as evidence. "It's like this," he says. "England's like this broken wand, so if you say one thing something else happens, and you can't really predict what."

Except you can. Maybe.

That's what Hermione and Padma think, anyway. The Dungeon belongs to them, now, and it's strange and hollowed out like some dead animal; taxidermically prepared. Neither of them had been inside before they moved in for good, and there's an air of conquest about the way that they sweep aside the old portraits and pull down the green lamps from the walls. Except the tapestries won't roll up and every time they charm the walls a comforting mauve or taupe or sterile white they wake up the next morning to find them the same shade of Slytherin green. The walls remember things, and Hermione wishes she could find out why the magic embedded in them still works.

It's a whole different reality now, a completely academic grounding in magic. No more silly wand waving. No more wand waving, really. They study Transfiguration and Charms and those sorts of things for when, and if, magic comes back but really the focus is on Potions and Divination and Arithmancy, because even if they can't actually drink the Potion or scry they can at least make the motions, but all they do in Charms is feel the weight of an imaginary wand in their hands. But most of the kids are used to doing magic in their minds and being Muggle in reality. It's the adults who have the problem; not Padma and her generation but the one just before, which is why they have 36-year-olds teaching at Hogwarts. Most of them just sort of faded away, and Padma's sure that if they looked for them they could find them, somewhere, but what's the use really? And it's better they don't congregate, all the old-timers, because unlike the kids they don't know how to assimilate, how to get by the in the Muggle world without concealment hexes and Memory Charms, and most of them just end up giving in, giving in and trying their wands and blowing themselves to pieces and if you ask Padma it's all the better if she doesn't ever find out about that.

Much easier if she can just imagine them somewhere, learning how to make tea and bake cakes from scratch and read Muggle newspapers and get used to unmoving photographs or something equally benevolent.

Nobody really knows what happened to Voldemort and Harry Potter either, and nobody asks, though Padma's quite sure that Hermione knows. When they're doing those careful and dangerous experiments under layers and layers of stone and charting the consequences of spells and looking for patterns, patterns it's like her face holds a secret under the lamplight. Just between her lips, to the edge, when she's concentrating hard; the tiniest bud of a secret that glimmers and then disappears, and Padma half-fancies that if she kissed her right there it'd just slip into her mouth. She never really confronts Hermione about it, maybe because it's much easier if she imagines that it's true. Harry Potter somewhere, working to restore everything to how it was before, slowly splitting the magic from the bone.

You'd think that Hermione would revel in this words-on-a-page world. When she gets up her skirt crinkles like an old library book, and her hair smells faintly of mildew, and Padma's quite aware she shouldn't really know these things about Hermione but what the bloody hell. You've only got this life, but Hermione seems to think that this isn't the life that was meant for her, and she spends all her time trying to change it. It's a Gryffindor trait, Padma thinks, because there's something foolish and reckless about the way she sits up night after night and forgets to take her classes and abandons everything but their Dungeon. Their Dungeon and their books and Padma, of course, but only Padma-in-the-Dungeon, Padma-the-scholar.

She can remember that one time when they met at the first postwar Quidditch match, the Hogwarts field converted into a concrete bowl so that the players can move faster, sitting perched on the edge and looking down through binoculars.

They could never give up Quidditch, not really, so they just hacked at it and changed some rules and started it up again. A group of professional players and enthusiasts and a few influential Muggles; no brooms, it's just roller-skates and oversize bats and instead of the snitch they've introduced a random triple-score penalty. A computer program hooked up to the microphone in the referee's ear sounds off at a randomly chosen time and in favour of a randomly chosen team. So instead of the snitch and Seeker what you have is a computer-generated whistle.

People will tell you that this is a metaphor for what's wrong with the Wizarding World today.

Pretty much the entire Wizarding World's at that first match, and Hermione's shaking hands and accepting congratulations and trying to wrangle grants from the black market profiteers and criminals and all round bastards that floated to the top of society during the war. It almost makes Padma miss the old Pureblood society set, and just as she's thinking that Draco Malfoy blows on the back of her neck and hands her a glass of pinot noir. "Hello, gorgeous. Wasn't I marvellous out there?"

Padma empties her glass on his white shirt before dropping it, and Draco looks at her properly, from head to close-toed shoes before mumbling an apology. "Er. Thought you were Parvati, sorry."

"Excuse me?" She says, freezingly, and out of the corner of her eye she sees Hermione looking at them, looking at them and it makes her suck in her stomach and stand up a bit taller, and the next thing she knows Hermione's peeling Draco from her side and actually smiling and telling him about their project. Gold is gold is gold, Padma supposes, and the Malfoys have enough in their vaults to ride out three wars in comfort. Later on, Hermione asks, "Why don't you speak to your sister about convincing Malfoy to fund us?"

Hermione really should have been a Ravenclaw, or even a Slytherin, for all her ambition and ruthlessness. But there is something Gryffindor about how fervently she believes that she is right.

You'd think Hermione would revel in this words-on-a-page world, but she doesn't. Padma couldn't care less, if you really want to know, she's just there because it's fucked up and amazing and beautifully intricate, their little problem. She'd be happy spending her life picking at the knot and never unravelling it, maybe even a bit more happy if they didn't. And not just because that would mean an eternity with Hermione in the Dungeons that still rattle with Salazar Slytherin's ghost.

Hermione, though, is convinced that there is a way things should be, that there is a template and a fixed reality to which they can return only if they find a key. That everything makes sense, secretly and in the darkest places of the mind, only they have to figure out the pattern, the code, but there's often times when Padma's not even sure that there is one. Hermione says words like "chaos theory" and Padma's sure she knows all about absurdism, doing the things she does, the absurdism of magicians without magic and words that have been stripped of meaning and relation, because a language is a set of symbols and words are just signifiers tacked to reality but reality has shifted and the maps in your hands lead to you different places than they did yesterday.

They're trying a Summoning Charm today, the same kind that killed Dean Thomas and Lavender Brown and Terence Boot; the supreme irony, really. You survive ten years of Death Eater attacks and Muggle riots and murder and you die because you couldn't be bothered to just open the cupboard and reach for a pot of jam for breakfast that morning. Padma zips up Hermione's specially engineered magic-repellent suit and pauses before she pushes on the visor; Hermione's hair is scattered over the floor in clumps because it wouldn't fit under the helmet and she looks strangely bereft without it. She starts to say something and then decides against it, and snaps on the visor with a grimace. She places the wand in Hermione's fingers.

Hermione squeezes her left hand over Padma's, and that's the go-ahead signal.

Except.

Padma leans in close to the visor so that Hermione can hear and asks, "Are you sure about this Hermione?"

Asks, "Is it really worth it?"

And to Hermione, it is. And so Padma pulls the steel doors of the Dungeon closed and plasters her face to the triple-reinforced, bombproof glass and watches as Hermione most probably kills herself. But it's all worth it, all worth it to find out the new destination the old path leads to, and maybe if they find enough of the new destinations they can write a new map and instead of abandoning magic they can just shift it slightly. Experiment and extrapolation. But of course, someone has to brave the monsters that crowd around the spaces-yet-to-be-filled-in and what sort of Gryffindor would Hermione be if she didn't offer her own blood first?

Though, there's no blood.

Just a fizzle and a pop, like one of Filibuster's wet-start fireworks but without the sparkly colours and grand finale, just a little pop and the suit drops to the ground and Padma opens the visor and unzips the back but there's nothing inside. Theoretically speaking, anything could have happened. Hermione could be dust or air or she could have been Apparated to the centre of the earth, but Padma doesn't think about that.

Maybe because it's much easier if she imagines Hermione with Harry somewhere, still figuring out how to set everything right, or sitting on the beach on some nice warm little island where they've never heard of Voldemort, or even invisible and still around. And sometimes, when she comes back to the laboratory, Padma half-fancies that things have been moved around, and Hermione was there, still referencing books and writing out theories in cramped handwriting that took hours for her to figure out herself.

She disappears, and Padma locks everything up but she still comes down to the Dungeons a few times a week. Just for old time's sake, really, and sometimes just to talk to the space in which Hermione used to sit and not smile. If she were a Gryffindor, she'd probably lock herself in and never stop looking for a way to change everything back until she succeeded or wasted to a skeleton, but she's not. If you really think about it, Hermione was sort of like the old-timers, the generation that came before that couldn't give up the taste of magic and the adrenaline in their veins. The way that they created maps with a flick of their wrists, pressed together symbol and object until they became indistinguishable. You'd think she of all people would be able to live like a Muggle.

Instead: she disappears.

They have a funeral for her three months later, and instead Padma goes to a Quidditch game. Two of the new Muggle-Wizard mixed teams that have cropped up of late, and really, you can't tell the difference between them in the bowl. Except for the fact that sometimes the older Wizards just stand there and look at the Quaffle and expect reality to bend for them instead of the other way around, but the kids are all used to it. They tie, or something like that. Padma never really followed Quidditch, and she doesn't even identify Viktor Krum when he takes off his helmet and deigns to sign a few autographs. She leans towards the man sitting next to her in scuffed shoes and an overcoat and says, "People will tell you that this is a metaphor for what's wrong with the Wizarding World today."

"Oh really?" He says, kind of raspily, and Padma realises only viscerally that she doesn't know if he's a Muggle or a Wizard.

She nods. "Yeah."

She nods and says, "I guess we'd better get used to it, though."