Chapter 1: Rule Three
The rules were pinned to the wall between their desks, on a sheet of parchment that had gone soft at the corners from four months of being jabbed at.
1. Malfoy does not touch Granger's desk. 2. Granger does not reorganise Malfoy's desk, however much it needs it. 3. Neither partner asks the other about the war. 4. Tea is made by whoever lost the last argument. 5. Margin notes are permitted if initialled.
Rule two had a margin note in green ink: It does not need it. D.M. Beneath it, in Hermione's small upright hand: It has a sandwich in it. H.G. Beneath that, in green again: The sandwich is load-bearing.
Rule three had no margin notes at all. It was the only one they had both written, a line each, on her first morning in the Time Room when Saul Croaker had walked her through the door, said "Your partner," and left before either of them could object. Draco Malfoy had looked at her for a long moment across the glittering room, then pulled a fresh sheet of parchment towards him and written the first two rules in silence. She had taken the quill and added the third. He had read it, nodded once, and that had been the end of the conversation they were never going to have.
It worked. That was the irritating thing. Four months in, Hermione could say with professional certainty that Malfoy was the best partner she had ever had, including Harry, who was brave and loyal and could not be trusted to read a footnote. Malfoy read footnotes. Malfoy read the footnotes of footnotes, and then wrote in the margins of them in green ink, which was a crime against archival practice she had decided to let go.
This morning he was making the tea, because yesterday she had won an argument about whether Gamp's Law had a sixth exception. He set her mug on the one corner of her desk he was allowed to approach, which was the corner nearest his desk, which he insisted was neutral ground.
"Croaker wants us," he said. "Something's wrong with the bell jar."
"Wrong how?"
"Stopped."
She looked up. The bell jar did not stop. That was the whole point of it. It stood at the far end of the Time Room, a tall crystal dome full of glittering current, and inside it a jewel-bright egg rose and hatched and became a hummingbird, and the hummingbird drifted upward and grew old and sank and became an egg again, over and over, as it had since before either of them was born. It had survived a pitched battle in 1996 that had smashed every Time-Turner in the Ministry. It had survived Harry, which was harder.
She took her tea with her.
The Time Room was always too bright first thing, every surface ticking and winking. Clocks hung on every wall and stood in every corner, grandfather clocks and carriage clocks and a long-case clock that ran backwards on alternate Thursdays. Usually the sound of them together was a single soft roar, like rain. This morning it had a hole in it.
Croaker stood in front of the bell jar with his hands behind his back. He was a narrow, grey man who had been an Unspeakable for forty years and spoke as though every word was being charged to his personal account.
The hummingbird hung in the middle of the jar, half out of its shell. One wing was free. It wasn't moving.
"When?" Hermione asked.
"Three minutes past seven," said Croaker. "Every clock on the north wall stopped at the same moment." He paused, which meant he was about to spend something. "And that appeared."
He nodded at the north wall. Between a carriage clock and a cuckoo clock carved with grinning owls, where there had been bare panelling for as long as anyone had kept records, there was a door.
It was small and black and had no handle. Someone had drawn a circle in the dust on it with a fingertip, then thought better of it.
"That was me," said Malfoy. "Before you ask."
"I wasn't going to ask."
"You were going to ask in that voice."
"Partners," said Croaker, which was his whole management style, and walked away.
The door opened for Malfoy's wand and not for hers, which he was smug about for nearly a minute, until it became clear that it had not opened for him either. It had simply been waiting for two of them.
"Paired lock," Hermione said, running her wand along the frame. "Old work. Look at the spell-weave on the hinges. It wanted two people with Unspeakable clearance standing within arm's reach."
"Romantic."
"Practical. Nobody could open it alone." She stepped through. "Lumos."
It was a vault, and it went on further than the Time Room's walls had any right to allow. Shelves ran away from them in long aisles, floor to ceiling, and on every shelf stood hourglasses. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Each was the size of her palm, plain glass in a brass frame, and each was full of something that was not quite sand. It was paler than sand and finer, and it caught her wandlight and held it, the way dust holds a sunbeam.
None of it was falling. Every hourglass sat with its pale gold settled in the lower bulb, as though it had finished long ago.
Malfoy let out a low whistle. "Well. Nobody tell the Prophet."
Hermione picked up the nearest one. A slip of yellowed parchment was pasted to the base, written in a sharp, slanting hand.
A. Weasley. 9 March 1989. 18:00 to 19:00. Level Two, Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office.
She turned it over. The gold slid slowly to the other end, and as it went she heard, so faint she might have imagined it, a man humming. Then the scratch of a quill. Then a voice she knew as well as her own father's, muttering, "Now what does a rubber duck do, exactly?"
She set it down very carefully.
"Granger." Malfoy's voice had lost its drawl. He was three aisles in, holding one up to his wand. "These are all Ministry. Every one. Level Six, Level Four, Level Two. Different years." He read another. "P. Weasley, Level Three, 1999. And here, Percy again, 2000. And again." He moved down the shelf. "There's a whole row of Percy."
"He works late."
"He works late," Malfoy agreed, "and something has been taking an hour off him every time he does." He put the hourglass back with a care that surprised her. "Do you know the joke? Everyone in the building knows it. You stay past seven, you lose an hour. You look up from your desk and it's dark and you can't account for it. The Ministry eats time."
"I've always assumed that was just the Ministry."
"So had I." He looked down the aisle, then back at her. The light caught the side of his face, all sharp lines, the way he looked when a problem had him by the collar and he was enjoying it. "Granger. I think it's literal."
They spent the morning on it. That was the job, after all; that was why they had been hired. Hermione cast every diagnostic she knew and four she invented. Malfoy walked the aisles with a clipboard and a Self-Inking Quill and called out names and dates, and she wrote them down in her own notebook because she did not trust his clipboard, and he knew it, and called them out slower to annoy her.
By lunch they had a shape.
The earliest hourglass was from 1981. The latest was from April 1998, which was a date neither of them said aloud. After that, nothing for nearly a decade, as if the thing had gone to sleep. The labels were all in the same slanting hand. The magic in the glass was one Hermione had only ever read about in a footnote, in a book Croaker kept in a locked drawer: a skimming charm, illegal in most countries and theoretical in the rest, that lifted an hour cleanly out of a person's life, memory and all, and bottled it.
"You'd never know," she said. They were sitting on the floor at the end of an aisle, because there was nowhere else to sit, eating the sandwiches Malfoy had fetched from the cafe on Level Eight. "That's the genius of it. It doesn't take anything you'd miss. Just an hour at the end of a long day. You'd think you'd dozed off."
"And then what? Someone collects the hours?"
"Spends them, I'd think." She brushed crumbs off her robes. "An hour's an hour. If you could unbottle it into yourself, you'd live a little longer. Ten thousand hours is over a year."
Malfoy was quiet for a moment.
"Rookwood," he said.
She looked at him.
"Augustus Rookwood was an Unspeakable for twenty years before anyone knew what he was," he said evenly. He was looking at the shelves, not at her. "He'd have had clearance for this room. He'd have known the joke. He'd have been the kind of man who'd find it funny." He paused. "And he died in Azkaban three weeks ago. Croaker sent round a memo. Tuesday."
"So he dies," she said slowly, "and three weeks later, at three minutes past seven, every clock on the north wall stops, and a door appears that's been hidden since 1981."
"Because the man holding the seal stopped holding anything."
They sat with that. It was the closest they had ever come to rule three. Rookwood belonged to the war; his name was part of it, the way certain rooms and certain dates were. She could feel the shape of the questions she was not asking pressing against her teeth. Did you know him. Did he come to your house. Did you sit at a table with him.
Malfoy stood up abruptly and offered her his hand.
She looked at it. In four months he had never touched her. Rule one was about desks, but they both knew it was about more than desks.
She took it. His fingers were cold from the vault and he pulled her up without effort and let go immediately, and turned away, and said, "I'll take the far end. You take the middle. We want anything after 1998. Anything that says the thing's still running."
It was half past five when she found it, and she nearly didn't. It was on a low shelf, pushed to the back behind a row of hourglasses belonging to a Gringotts liaison named Trimble, as if it had rolled there.
H. J. Granger. 21 November 2001. 21:00 to 22:00. Level Nine, corridor.
She read it three times. She had not been an Unspeakable in 2001. She had been at Magical Law Enforcement, writing legislation nobody read, staying late every night because her flat was too quiet. She had never had any reason to be on Level Nine.
She tipped the glass, and the gold slid, and for a moment she heard rain on a window that did not exist down here, and her own voice, younger and sharper, saying, "You don't get to—"
Then nothing. The hour went quiet, the way a shell goes quiet when you take it from your ear.
"Granger."
Malfoy was standing at the end of the aisle. She had not heard him come. He was holding an hourglass in one hand, and he was very pale, paler than usual, which she would not have thought possible.
"I found mine," he said. "Thought you'd want to log it." He held it out to her without coming closer.
She did not need to take it to read the label. She could see it from where she stood, the same sharp slanting hand.
D. L. Malfoy. 21 November 2001. 21:00 to 22:00. Level Nine, corridor.
Neither of them said anything. Behind them, the hummingbird hung in its jar, one wing free, waiting to find out what happened next.
"I don't remember it," he said at last, very quietly. "Do you?"
She shook her head.
"Then we spent an hour together," said Draco Malfoy, "that somebody thought was worth stealing. And neither of us knows what we said."