Hagrid chuckled drily and brandished the emerald ring on his left hand. “’Course not. But I had to get Argus away from yeh somehow, din’t I?”
He reached for the partially open door to the subterranean pool, but it suddenly clunked shut of its own accord. A second later, the latch rattled and the door pushed open again, this time revealing the golden firelight of the Slytherin common room. Ralph bustled out, bumped hard into Hagrid, and nearly rebounded back inside again, dropping something as he did. It was a rubber duck, once bright yellow, now faded and dulled with fingerprints. He recovered, grabbed at it, and blinked guiltily up at the half-giant.
“Sorry I’m late,” he whispered, trying vainly to act nonchalant.
“Mind if I bring along a… erm, little friend?”
“What do you mean, ‘a little friend’?” James asked as the quartet hurried down the rough terraces of the subterranean lake. “That’s your Protean duck. Who do you need to send a message to?”
Unlike the last time they were there, the air over the waves was icy cold, misted with snow crystals. The cavern waterway was fringed with a brittle crust of ice, but the inverted lake above was frozen completely solid, forming a bulging black depth, dense and inky as onyx.
Hagrid’s blockade runner, Gertrude, rocked low in the darkness, moored to a stone jetty. Waves slapped restlessly at its long hull.
“Well, like you and Rose said,” Ralph huffed, his breath forming gray clouds, “we can’t afford to get caught, no matter what. So I sorta thought there’d be safety in numbers. And… well, I made arrangements.”
“Hold on,” Rose said, turning around in front of Ralph and stopping him, barely, with a hand on his chest. “You made ‘arrangements’?”
“What’s all this?” Hagrid called, distracted, as he uncoiled the ship’s rope from an iron bollard. “Yeh lot comin’ or what?”
Ralph shifted nervously from foot to foot. “I just felt more comfortable with the idea of having a little back-up is all…”
James narrowed his eyes. “Your Protean duck?”
Ralph tried to conceal the yellow rubber duck in his big hands.
“No, not the… look, it’s nothing. Can we just get on with it?”
“Let’s take a look, Ralph,” James said, reaching for the duck.
Ralph pivoted and pulled the duck away, inadvertently placing it within easy grasping distance of Rose, who plucked it from his fist.
“Don’t squeeze it!” Ralph warned, turning in alarm and raising both hands, but he was too late.
“Grotty blighter!” the duck’s squeaky voice declared.
Instantly, a burst of pale blue smoke exploded between Rose and Ralph. Out of it, a voice seemed to resolve out of immense distance, forming a single word: “GeronimooOOO!”
And a figure burst from the blue smoke as if in full sprint, plowing into James and knocking him clean off his feet. He landed on the cold stone floor with the figure atop him, knocking the breath from his lungs in a whoosh.
“Ooff!” the newcomer exclaimed in James’ ear. “Who’d I land on? No way the Ralphinator would go down that easy. Are you a bad guy? I was told there might be bad guys.”
“Zane Walker?!” Rose cried, her voice so high that it was barely audible. “How…! What…!?”
Ralph rolled his eyes and snatched the duck back out of Rose’s hand. “I asked him by floo to be ready if we needed any help,” he declared impatiently. “He was just supposed to be on standby in case we ran into trouble.”
“Brrr!” Zane shivered, clambering off James and dragging him back to his feet. “Cold here! Where are we? Antarctica?” He was dressed in his Zombie house uniform, but with the tie loosened and the sleeves of his shirt unbuttoned and flapping. “Good thing I wasn’t having a swim in the gymnasium, eh?”
James wheezed, “But… how are you here? No one can Apparate onto Hogwarts grounds!”
Zane straightened and hugged himself against the cold. “No Apparation required. It’s another Experimental Communications test project.” He raised his right hand and pushed back his sleeve. A yellow symbol was printed neatly on the inside of his wrist.
“Is that,” Rose squinted, and then pointed vaguely toward Ralph, “his Protean duck tattooed on your arm?”
Zane dropped his arm again. “Does the phrase ‘quantum chromodynamics’ mean anything to you?”
James merely stared at his friend.
“Me neither,” Zane agreed. “But old Stonewall’s been yakking about it for months. Quarks and gluons, freons and peons, I don’t even know. Point is, the ink in this here temporary tattoo is technomancically identical to Ralph’s duck. Squeezing it once causes the atomic waveform to collapse, bringing me here in an instant. I’ll need to warn Raphael about that re-entry. Phoo! You did explain it all to them, right?” This last he addressed to Ralph.
“This just goes to show,” Ralph said, glaring reproachfully at Rose, “Just because you see a duck, doesn’t mean you should squeeze it!”
“First rule of technomancy,” Zane agreed sagely.
From the jetty, Hagrid called quizzically, “Walker? Is that you?
What in purple blazes…!”
“Hi, Hagrid!” Zane said, turning and sauntering to the ship.
“Nice place you have here! You don’t happen to have a coffee maker aboard that thing, do you?”
Rose turned back to Ralph, planting her hands on her hips.
“What?” Ralph demanded, shoving the Protean duck into his coat pocket. “He was just supposed to be a back-up plan! I told him to be ready even though we probably wouldn’t need him.”
James sighed, “How much does he know about the plan?”
“Almost nothing,” Ralph said, sagging a little. “He said he preferred it that way, and quoted something about crouching lions and hidden dinosaurs.”
“That sounds like Zane,” James nodded.
“And what sends him back, then?” Rose asked, still glowering at Ralph.
“Two squeezes of the duck.”
Rose jabbed out her hand, palm up, silently demanding the duck back.
“Hold on,” James said, gently pushing Rose back a step. “Now that he’s here, he may as well come along. If he wants to. And of course he does.”
“Are you serious?” Rose demanded, turning her glare onto James. “Is there anyone else you want to invite along? The Minister of Magic? Rig Mortis and the Stifftones, maybe?”
“There’s safety in numbers,” James soothed, pressing Rose down toward the jetty, where Zane had joined Hagrid. “Besides, it’s Zane.”
He turned to Ralph and offered him a wink. Ralph nodded wryly.
“Hey guys!” Zane called up to them, pointing at the gangplank as Hagrid levitated it into place. “We’re gonna go rescue a dragon! By boat! Pretty wild and crazy stuff, eh?”