One of the guards saw her.”
Lily shrugged uncertainly. “He could have been mistaken.
Petra’s posters are up everywhere. The guard might have just seen some woman in the dark and assumed it was her.”
“It was her,” Albus replied with unexpected conviction, still staring into the corner. James watched his brother, narrowing his eyes.
“Well then,” Scorpius said briskly, sitting up again in his seat.
“That does bring us to the point.” He glanced around the room, looking from face to face. “Have any of us seen or heard from Petra since last we met? Any word at all?”
Every eye in the room turned silently to James. It was Zane who prompted him from the Shard. “What do you say, James? You’re the one with the magic mind-meld to our favorite misunderstood villainess.
How sure are you that she’s still out there? And that she really is the new Crimson Thread?”
James drew a long, deep breath, and then looked down at his right hand where it still lay on the table. He opened it, palm up.
“She’s blocking me, somehow,” he said reluctantly. “I can feel it.
But I don’t know why.”
“Really,” Scorpius said sarcastically, rolling his eyes again. “You have no idea, do you?”
“And I suppose you do?” James challenged, looking Scorpius in the eye.
“Now, now. Don’t let me steal your thunder. Although I am rather curious how you can be so certain of Morganstern’s plans if she has apparently turned off your mysterious third eye into her thoughts.”
James deflated a little. “I could never read her thoughts, you know that. I just got glimpses into her dreams sometimes, through the cord that connects us. I don’t understand it any more than you do. But up until recently, no matter how far apart we were, if I concentrated on that cord, I could sort of send my thoughts out on it, to wherever she was, and get an inkling. A mood, maybe. Or just a sort of fuzzy image.
No words. No complete thoughts, unless she’s very close. Usually just… feelings.”
Zane frowned from the Shard. “But not anymore?”
James shook his head slowly. “No. She’s still there. I know that much. But she’s shutting me out. She’s blocking her end. She doesn’t want me to know what she’s doing.”
Lily furrowed her brow. “Well, that’s rather worrying. Don’t you think?”
Albus made a scoffing noise and studied his own hands on the table. “Petra’s shutting James out because he’s a nervous busybody who’s all besotted with love, not thinking about whatever’s best for the whole world. Just his poor little ‘Astra’.”
“It was him that said it,” Scorpius observed quickly, raising an eyebrow. “Not me. I only thought it.”
James flopped forward and rested his chin on his crossed forearms. “You’ve said it enough in the past, I expect.”
“I think it’s very sweet,” Rose smiled. “Even if it is perhaps a bit hopeless and tragic.”
“It’s not tragic,” James said, pushing back in his chair again.
“You’re all daft. I care about Petra, yes. But I’m not just thinking of her. I’m thinking of the whole world. In fact…” He paused and drew a deep breath, considering what he was about to say. In a lower voice, he went on. “I think her plan is probably for the best. Even if it does mean… that she’ll leave our world forever.”
After a long, silent moment, Scorpius looked around the table.
“Well, then. That is rather a change of heart.”
James refused to meet anyone else’s gaze. “There’s just too much going wrong. Too much at stake to worry about just one girl’s life.”
Even if, he thought, but didn’t say, that one girl is Petra Morganstern.
“That does leave one lingering question, though,” Rose said on the heel of a reluctant sigh. “If Petra is blocking your connection to her, how do you know that this is still her plan? To replace the other version of herself, the Morgan version, from that other dimension? How do you really know that Petra has become the new Crimson Thread?”
James finally looked up. Without a word, he raised his right hand, palm up, fingers splayed. Slowly, he half-closed his eyes and began to concentrate.
He imagined Petra. In his mind and heart, he felt the ephemeral cord that bound him to her, that had connected them ever since that fateful moment on the Gwyndemere, when Petra had asked James to let her fall to her doom in the waves, and James had refused. The cord was a cool ribbon that rooted in his very heart, ran down his arm, and condensed on his palm like a ball of ice. From there, it wafted away into the space between them, extending and thinning, to wherever Petra was at this very moment.
She was blocking him. He could sense the pressure of her pushing back against him. It was frustrating. But it also meant, if nothing else, that she was thinking of him.
James opened his eyes again and looked down at his open hand.
The others in the room did as well, eyes wide, speechless and spellbound.
The cord was transparently visible in the darkness, brightest and thickest in the centre of James’ palm, fading and thinning upward in a shimmering ribbon, a thread that drifted up into darkness, not ending, just falling from sight.
In the still shadows of the Room of Requirement, the cord was no longer merely the pale silver of moon-glow. Now, the silver pulsed and flickered with traces of burnished red, the color of deepest sunset, forming a grey and scarlet ribbon that ascended and swirled up into dimness.
There could be no question. Without a doubt, the silver cord was slowly, gradually, becoming a crimson thread.
For James and Ralph, the first day of classes was like reacquainting with an old friend for the last, raucous time. James knew the entire castle by memory now. He could navigate the corridors with his eyes closed. He knew which shortcuts could be counted on to be too well-known and crowded to save any time between classes. He knew which bathrooms were prone to have their pipes clogged after lunch, requiring the blackly grumpy ministrations of Mr. Filch and a large rubber plunger. He knew when it was safe to cut through Professor Heretofore’s empty classroom, and the potions closet beyond, to cut several dozen yards off an otherwise wearying trek through noisy, cramped corridors.