“Granger is my mother, and I’m not her. Too bad for you, because she’d never even think of doing the things that I’m considering.” She took a step forward, brandishing her wand meaningfully.
“That great lunk-head behind you is the Weasley of the threesome,” Polly wrinkled her nose and pointed at Ralph. “The incompetent clod who’s only along for comic relief. ‘Head Boy’ my grandma’s knee-length knickers!”
“The Golden Trio, reborn!” Ogden sneered. “Potter, ‘ the chosen one’; Weasley, the bumbling prat; and Granger, the insufferable know-it-all. Think they can do whatever they want. Even curse a bunch of precious first-years.”
James raised his own wand now and took three brisk steps toward the door, opening his mouth, not even sure which hex or jinx was going to come out, hoping distantly that it wouldn’t be something too awful.
“I’ll tell you what, Potter and Granger, ” Edgar Edgecombe interrupted James, still smiling nastily. “You pocket your wands and do a little Disapparation demonstration for us, and we won’t run off to the library to tattle on you for breaking into the classroom and performing illegal magic. Professor Heretofore’s on duty, and she’s in a detention sort of mood, I’d wager. Your call.”
James still had his wand out, pointed at Edgecombe. He bit back the spell that had been forming on his lips (the Dancing Feet jinx—he’d been a bit too careful, perhaps) and glanced aside at Rose. She was still glaring at the three, her wand raised but tilted slightly up at the ceiling. Suddenly she shrugged and dropped her hand to her side.
“Fine,” she said breezily. “I think you were up, James.” She turned to look at him, her face carefully composed to display no emotion at all. James knew his cousin, however, and recognized that this was her most dangerous expression of all.
He nodded slowly. “Right. Fair enough, I guess.” He glanced back at the three in the doorway. “But look, I don’t know what you lot are on about, but you’re completely mental. We’re not anyone’s ‘Golden Trio’.”
“Yeah,” Ralph nodded. “And besides, if you count Zane, we’d be more of a… what you think? A silver rhombus?”
Rose shrugged. “A trapezoid, I imagine. And let’s go with platinum.”
James blinked rapidly at Rose and Ralph. Ralph was simply nervous and blabbering, mostly worried about getting caught. But Rose was fuming with fury. It came off of her in palpable waves, despite her carefully blank face.
Lowering his wand, James turned and retraced his steps back to the white rings under the windows, stepping into the one in the middle.
He turned around and tried to ignore the grinning glares of the three younger students in the doorway. It was impossible, of course. He could feel their eyes like hot little beetles, crawling all over him. He focused instead on Ralph and Rose, who stood in the shadows next to the chalkboard, near the matching three rings. Ralph offered him an encouraging nod, but his face was taut with worry. Rose’s mouth was pressed into a tight line now that she’d turned away from Edgecombe and his crew. Her eyes sparked like flints, although James couldn’t guess what she was planning.
He closed his eyes, fisted his fingers on his lowered wand, and realized with a cold shock that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing. All the confidence and assurance had leaked right out of him.
Destination, he recited to himself, Determination… and…? He couldn’t remember the third one.
Eyes still squeezed shut, he conjured a mental image of the classroom. He imagined the desks and chairs pushed together in neat rows on one side, overlooking the practice floor. There, he pictured three rings beneath the rank of windows, with him standing in the middle. Across the dim floor, three more rings lay in a neat row, powdered with chalk dust from the board above. James chose the middle ring, and concentrated on it, willing himself to go to it.
Something flexed deep in his mind. It didn’t happen instantaneously, as he’d imagined it would. Instead, the world seemed to slow down all around, to grow insubstantial, to shrink away, taking all sound and sensation with it. Silence like the first snowfall pressed against his ears. James remembered enough technomancy to understand that he was entering a sort of flux-state now, becoming momentarily incorporeal, unfocusing from the here-and-now and refocusing on the there-and-then.
But then something startled him. There was an explosion of light and sound, illuminating the emptiness behind his eyelids and buffeting him with waves of force. He retreated from the noise and light, and his concentration faltered. His mental image of the classroom cracked, shattered, and he sensed his discorporated form falling back into himself. It happened too soon. He felt the wrongness of it even before his feet stumbled to the floor again, disconcertingly far apart.
He came back to himself with a shock and a gasp.
TWO gasps.
He tried to open his eyes, and realized that he was seeing double.
Or rather, he was seeing the classroom from two entirely different perspectives, each perfectly overlaid over the other, obliterating each other into nonsense. He swayed and clapped a hand to his heads.
Somewhere nearby, Ralph yelped and stumbled backwards, slamming his shoulder against the chalkboard, which rattled and rained bits of chalk to the floor. Rose gasped in shock.
From the doorway, Edgecombe’s voice was thin with mingled awe and laughter. “Look at that! Will you look at THAT!”
“James!” Rose said, moving urgently into the middle of the room, between the rings, and looking back and forth swiftly. “Are you… all right?”
“What happened?” James asked, and heard his voice twice, echoing from both sides of the room. Dimly, he saw himself. It was like looking in a funhouse mirror, one that both distorted your shape into something inhuman and doubled the view. In one view, he saw his own head and shoulders, one arm, one leg, standing before the chalkboard, wobbling slightly. In the other view, perfectly overlaid atop it, he saw an exact duplicate of himself still standing one-legged in the ring beneath the windows.
There were two of him, but only almost. He was stuck in mid-apparation, half-duplicated, with neither part completely whole.
“Holy hinkypunks!” the two Jameses cried thinly, staring at each other across the dark and dusty floor. “I’m still over there!” The two versions of himself pointed at each other with their single arm each, one an empty left hand, the other a right hand still fisted on his wand.
“Well,” Rose said with a helpless shrug. “At least now you know what contrasecting is.”
There was a hiss of hysterical laughter, followed by a thumping of footsteps as Edgecombe, Heathrow, and Ogden scrambled and ran from the door. Their laughter turned to mean hoots, echoing back from the corridor as they hurried away, surely eager to tell everyone what they’d seen.
“Stop them!” James said twice, but Rose was already striding to the door, her wand snapping up in her hand. She leaned economically around the door frame and fired three red bolts in quick succession.