Reduction

Reduction

Chapter One

"Tom."

Hermione Jane Granger's eyes snapped open. Her fingers clutched the mattress convulsively, cold iron pulsing beneath her fingers.

"It's Tom." A voice shivered in the dark, tickling Hermione's left ear. Her eyes flicked over the edge of the bunk. Yes, there it was, not three feet away. A boy, a jumble of pale flesh and even paler shift, slumped bonelessly on a mattress as thin as Hermione's.

Slowly Hermione twisted her head on the pillow, careful not to rustle the cloth. She shut her eyelids once, and then smiled, keeping her teeth hidden. At that, the boy grinned, enamel flashing like lightning. Hermione squinted, trying to piece the wisps of face and form into something human. A smooth black thatch of hair brushed his pillow. Something stirred in her chest, and she was suddenly very aware of the pricking in her scalp. He'd been here about as long as she...Their eyes met.

Then the boy's head flicked back to the pillow with astonishing speed. Hermione's heart started in her chest as what little light there was in the chamber died. The cold bit at her fingers as darkness swallowed Tom's pale form. She snapped her eyes back to the planks over her head and slammed them shut, trying not to breathe, trying to ignore the tendrils of cold skittering through her mind like spiders. After what seemed like hours, the shroud lifted. The screaming stopped. Her mother's face faded.

Hermione did not dare look across the way again. The veins in the boards above her head were interesting enough. And much safer.

The next night was more of the same. Hermione lay on her back, springs digging between her shoulder blades. She gazed blankly at the boards, her tired mind still flicking from crack to crack, whipping the dark veins into eerily familiar forms. Inside she wailed, struggling to quiet her mind. The last thing she needed was the dementors getting a taste of her anguish. She did not want another neighbor.

Neighbor. Hermione squeezed her mind tight against the memory. But her eyes rested on the empty pillow. Her fingers curled in the empty hollow in the mattress.

Neighbor. No names, she'd said. The first night was still so sharp Hermione's mind. Clear as day she saw the line of shaking, white-clad figures snaking across the stone. Hermione remembered being shocked at the sheer mass of all those children, and horrified when she saw where they were going to live. She remembered her first sight of the freezing stone chamber, lined with hundreds of long, low bunks stacked like crates on top of each other. She'd craned her neck, but the gloom swallowed the top layers. She had no idea how bunks there actually were, how many children huddled in the dark, too scared to move or cry.

But there was no time to speculate, or wonder just how far underground they were. The redrobes flicked their wands and Hermione shot into the air, white cloth flapping around her body. Before she knew it she was dumped unceremoniously into the very last spot in a bunk, her robe jumbled around her waist, and her arms pinned to her sides. She thrashed in frustration for a few moments, trying to pull her robe over her thighs, but the girl next to her smacked her shoulder.

"Nobody cares," she said, her own robe perilously close to slipping off her shoulders. And it was true. When you spend enough nights in a cattle pen breathing air that's already passed through eleven pairs of lungs, and the only way to have any sort of space is to tangle your legs with your neighbor's, modesty tends to disappear. Of course, everyone in 21-46 said she was a lot better off then they were. She got the best air and could watch something other than the rise and fall of her neighbor's chest, at night when sleep was her most pained desire. Hermione would have traded if she had had any choice at all.

Every night, when she managed to sleep at all, she dreamed of warmth. It would be worth the sweat, the smell, the confinement to have two neighbors. It would be worth the rustling, the suffocation, and the fevered, despairing voices in her ear. It would be worth it when the dementors came. It was far easier for the things to swallow her happiness. There was nothing between them and the fragile threads of her sanity but air. So Hermione lay alone in the dark, trying not to notice how quiet and cold bunk 21-46 had become.

Now, of course, the breakfast line barely spanned the gap between the bunks towers. Hermione wondered what lapse of common sense inspired Lucius Malfoy to build so much storage space when product demand was so low. When she had first arrived, every bunk had been full. The first levitation, the air was filled with white flapping robes. It was like being caught in a cloud of gulls. Now four girls slept in 21-46. Some bunks were down to two, or one. It was whispered that tower 19 was deserted.

But perhaps there was a method to the madness, she thought. This was probably their intention all along. And it was Lucius Malfoy. Her jaw clenched as she thought of his little welcoming speech.

Even now Hermione had to admire his gall. Standing tall and fine in black velvet dress robes, silken hair swept back in an even silkier ribbon, looking like he was on his way to a ball, smiling graciously at the sea of terrified children. Hermione had been lying facedown on the stone floor, grit pressing into her face, her scalp stinging with souvenirs of a bad shave, a clump of coarse brown hair still clutched in her fingers. Her hair. Dimly she had thought that at least she wouldn't have to worry about it falling in her eyes. Her neighbor had been busy stuffing clumps of her own hair under her manacles, the skin already rubbed raw. She didn't jump to attention when Malfoy raised his hand for attention, and bit clean through her lip as a rod struck the base of her skull.

Hermione didn't remember much of the speech. But one line echoed hollowly between her ears long after the redrobes marched them off to the bunks.

"Everything has its place," he'd said. "Some of you will find it here. The rest of you..." He smiled horribly. "I'm sure we'll find something to do with you."

Knowing Malfoy, they certainly had. Hermione didn't need to listen in the shower. The water drowned most noises, so the girls of 21-46 could talk if they needed or dared. She had drawn her own conclusions a long time ago. Her short-lived foray into the restricted section at Hogwarts had filled her imagination with more uses for the human body than she cared to think about. She smiled grimly. Several of her classmates had 'expressed concern' over her independent study project. As in verbally assaulted her in class, and physically assaulted her in the corridors. She supposed that most felt that there were certain subjects good wizards were better off not knowing. Eventually Professor Lupin, the recently re-appointed Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, had told them off on the grounds that he had needed to study the same texts to better acquaint himself with the theory of defense. 'Know Thy Enemy' was the maxim followed by Aurors and defense instructors worldwide. And it was NEWT Defense Against the Dark Arts, after all.

And Hermione had always preferred the truth to lies. At any rate she'd been unable to tear her eyes from the stark illustrations of agony and power on the faces of victim and perpetrator. If Albus Dumbledore had discovered the twelve uses of dragon's blood over decades of furtive, volatile study with Nicholas Flamel, Hermione wondered how many dark wizards had poured over how many corpses, peeling away the mysteries of the flesh and extracting secrets from the still-smoking veins. Terrible, she had thought. Yes, but terribly delicious. She supposed it was the horrified fascination that claims the mind when faced with horror it is unable to rationalize. She'd spent many an hour in her favorite corner of the library, bent over a spotted, dusty page until her neck ached and her eyes turned pink and fuzzy with sleep. She had tasted tantalizing hints of a dark world, another reality hazy with secrets, hidden beneath her fingers, yet forever out of reach, trapped in a book.

Fat lot of good it was doing her now. But at least she had a somewhat clearer idea of what she was facing than her bunkmates. One by one they had succumbed, drowning in their own uncertainty, starting at every footfall, every creak of a hinge, every cry in the night. She remembered standing with the remains of 21-46, chained to her neighbor, at the top of a flight of stone steps. The redrobe in charge had pointed, smirked, and leaned against the wall to wait. Hermione had peered down into the dark, shifting from foot to foot to get some feeling back into her legs. She had spent the day digging on Level Four, and her back was on fire. But no one else moved. Seven pairs of eyes stared into the air, as blank and glassy as dolls' eyes. Hermione felt her chains shake slightly from side to side as her neighbor swayed like a bough in the wind. She reached out tentatively, and met frigid, shivering skin. Her neighbor's eyes flicked to hers for a moment. Then the screaming started, and Hermione found herself unable to look away.

But she had the facts locked in her skull, tangible, reality. Horrible as it was, it was something to fight. There had been something oddly cathartic about immersing herself in the restricted section, after all. Ever since she was a little girl, she had always found that her imagination could realize horrors far, far worse than what the real world offered her, as terrifying as that could often be. Even when she watched slasher movies during the holidays, safe and warm in her living room, she still peeked around her fingers, dreading what was about to unfold on the screen. But every time the sheer mundanity of the situation had stopped her cold. She'd watch, cool as paint, matching it up against what she'd seen in the most basic of Dark theory texts.

Yes. She knew what was waiting in the dungeons, should she step a hair over the line. She knew what happened to Neighbors assigned to Levels Seven and Five. But every day the redrobes marched them from station to station, up a level here, down a level there, sometimes through passages so dark she couldn't see her hand when she held it in front of her face. They'd stop, and 21-46 would polish a mirror as long as the wall, dark with dust and age. Then they'd move on to some grimy ebony panel and polish and scrub until it shone. Interestingly enough, the third stop was usually the kitchen. A short redrobe kept an obsessive eye on their work. Nothing but the best would suffice. Appetite ruled, after all.

But anything involving food was a moment to be treasured. Sometimes she managed to swipe a root or crust when the head cook's back was turned. Her Neighbor had been the best, her fingers darting after choice morsels, always one step ahead of the cook's knife. And then she was gone, and Hermione found herself alone at the counter, a pile of vegetables in front of her and gaping holes at her right and left, the bare air and boards mocking her. She kept her eyes on her work, her fingers flicking mechanically from pile to bowl.

It was around the time that Hermione was given a knife while she worked in the kitchen that new faces began to appear in 21-46. It was quite sudden. She was bent over the cutting board, her eyes watering with onion smoke. The break bell sounded, and she laid the knife carefully beside the remaining white orbs. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and froze. White-clad shoulders rolled straight, and a pale face topped with a thin black scratch of hair perused the remaining onions grimly. He would have been handsome if weeks in the strange almost-chaingang hadn't sucked the life from his face. The skin was pulled tight under his already prominent cheekbones, casting his face in the likeness of a skull. Deep shadows around his eyes did nothing to remedy the situation. Yet Hermione found herself unable to look away from the shell of a boy, a boy who seemed to be about her age, if the level of degeneration that most of the girls in 21-46 experienced was any method of judgment. Her eyes slid from his bowed head to the stark clavicles ringing his neck, to the tendons springing up and down like piano keys in his ivory hands as he reduced the last onion to oozing cubes. Then the fingers stopped. The knife clattered on the countertop. Black eyes met brown.

Nothing was said. He smiled a half-smile, and stepped back from the counter so the cook could collect the knives. As always, narrow stools popped into existence under the counter as dry bread and lukewarm broth appeared on it. The boy cleared his throat and cocked his head to one side, studying her. Hermione sat and suddenly found one of the cracks in her bowl quite riveting. He leaned forward, so slightly it would only be visible to the one sitting in front of him.

"Tom," he said.

Hermione looked up.

"Your hair grew back," she said. "Faster than mine."

It was true. Tufts of crispy brown peeked out from behind her ears, and from the center of her forehead in an absurd cowlick. The rest of her head was covered in a patchy, thatched stubble that could only be called hair in the strictest sense of the word. She wondered vaguely what Lavender and Parvati would have said.

Tom nodded, but his eyes flashed with annoyance.

"Yes," he snapped.

He tore into his bread with the elegance of the starved. Hermione followed suit.

All too soon, the broth was gone, the last drops licked from the cutting board. Silence passed, relatively unnoticed. Hermione sat very still. She studied her hands and the odd angle they made with the cracks in the table. But something pricked her through the haze, and the angles shattered. Her brow wrinkled with annoyance.

"What?" she bit out. Tom was watching her, his fingers folded neatly next to his bowl, smiling that half-smile. "What are you looking at?"

"You," said Tom, unnecessarily.

"Well, stop it! I think the cook is coming back." She glanced warily over her shoulder.

"No, he's not," the boy said, his eyes catching hers. "And I was wondering..." He trailed off expectantly. Hermione grimaced.

"Wondering what? I am 23-21-46. Your partner in vegetable-processing."

"I know," he said. "Your bunk's right across from mine." He lowered his voice. "I assume you've noticed that we're nearly the last ones left?"

Hermione nodded. Old news.

"I'm all that's left of 21-28," he said dryly. "Eleven months, three weeks, two days and counting. You?"

"Then how come I've never seen you before?" Hermione said, ignoring the question.

"They started moving us around a couple of weeks ago," he said. "I'd wager they wanted all the rotten eggs in one basket."

"What do you--" THWACK!

Hermione cried out. She fell to the floor, her back burning.

"No talking on the job!" The cook stood over her, brandishing his rod, his face as red as his robes. He hauled her up by the throat and threw her against the table. Feeling her knees give way, she scrabbled at the edge of the table. Scattered white-clad bodies turned to stare. The other redrobes stalked in from the kitchen.

"What is it this time Raiker?"

"Just a little glitch," said the cook politely. The rod twirled between his fingers. The newcomers snorted.

"Well, get this lot out of here. It's almost dinner time." Raiker nodded.

"Line!" he bellowed. Hermione scrambled to her feet and fell into step behind the blonde who slept three spaces away. She dropped her head warily when she passed the cook, who was hitting his palm rhythmically with the rod, smiling balefully as the girls passed beneath his eyes. She ducked her head and headed out into the dank corridor, but not before her eyes darted back to the table. Tom was at the end of a much shorter line of boys, standing straight as a board, his eyes a study in blank indifference. And as Hermione floated into her bunk for what seemed the thousandth time and she locked her mind to the wood above her head, she remembered what she'd seen out of the corner of her eye. The kitchen, a table as long as the room, lined on both sides with stools. Two lines of bowls parallel to the stools. Her bowl, broken on the floor. And the bare stone where the pieces should have been.

Tom...She grinned. They'd catch him within the hour.