The hooting laughter choked to silence, followed by three messy thumps.
“Oh, this is bad,” Ralph said, his voice an octave higher than normal. He wrung his hands fretfully, glancing from Rose’s raised wand to James’ doubled form. “This is so bad! We’re doomed! We’re seriously, completely, totally—!”
“Ralph, get a grip,” Rose said firmly, pocketing her wand again.
“Go drag those three into a closet or something. Get them out of the corridor until they wake up again. I’ll…” She glanced back and forth between the two partial Jameses. He saw her glance at him twice from his two different perspectives. “I’ll go get help.”
“Not Twycross,” James said with his oddly doubled voice, struggling to keep his two forms standing on one foot each. “Odin-Vann.”
Rose nodded, understanding. Briskly, she turned and bolted through the door, her robes flying.
“Oh, man,” Ralph muttered again, his voice still unnaturally high. “Are you, like, OK, James?”
James rolled his eyes and felt a wave of dizziness at the doubled effect. “Never better. I love this. I can comb my hair without a mirror.
Mum would be so proud. Go move those three twits before somebody sees them.”
Ralph nodded briskly, as if suddenly remembering the stunned first-years in the corridor outside. He turned jerkily, his heels scraping in chalk dust, and hurried through the door, apparently relieved to flee from the disconcerting sight.
James steadied himselves. It was easier to stand on one foot each than he expected, and he realized it was because both versions of himself were still somehow connected through empty space. His consciousness was split between them, stretched across the centre of the room like a rubber band. And some small sliver of his mind, he realized, was still floating in the discorporated ether of the flux. There, the view was not doubled, merely blank. Except not completely blank, now that he focused on it. He could see the faint glimmer of his and Petra’s silver/crimson cord. It stretched off in floating curls, fading into distance. He could probably follow the cord if he wished, leaving behind the alarming split of his form. But he knew instinctively that that would be disastrous. If he fled from his doubled body, he might never be able to come back to it again.
He sighed harshly, fear and annoyance settling in his mind in equal measures. He tried to focus on the classroom again, looking from his strangely doubled perspective, and saw something lying in the centre of the practice floor between the lines of white rings. Bright blue shreds of wrapper surrounded a tiny scorched starburst. James shook his heads, realizing at once what it was. Edgecombe had thrown a Weasley Wizard Wheezes firecracker into the room just as James had attempted his Disapparation. The seemingly planet-sized explosion he had encountered in the flux was barely a crack of noise and puff of sparks from a harmless novelty.
Harmless under any other circumstance, of course.
Ralph came back a moment later, huffing, with figures clutched under both of his arms. Ogden and Heathrow lolled like life-sized ragdolls as Ralph flung them onto a desk each.
“Not in here, Ralph,” the Jameses sighed. “I don’t want to look at their stupid faces. Especially twice at once.”
“We have to keep an eye on them,” Ralph shook his head, hurrying back to the door. “Odin-Vann will know what to do, right?
He’s a teacher.”
“And you’re Head Boy,” James reminded him. “Use your, what do you call it, executive authority. Forbid them from talking about it.
Give them punishments. Promise to take away a hundred house points if they blab.”
“It doesn’t work that way!” Ralph said with sudden strength, turning to glance first at one James, and then the other. He shook his head with harried annoyance. “Just shut it for a minute. The two of you are giving me a headache.”
He disappeared through the door again. When he came back into view a moment later with Edgecombe’s chunky body heaved over his shoulder, he paused, looking along the corridor. He backed up a step as Professor Odin-Vann approached the door with Rose close behind.
“You,” the professor said, frowning uncertainly and pointing at the stunned boy slung over Ralph’s shoulder like a lumpy bag of sand.
“You didn’t…?” He glanced back at Rose for a moment, and then shook his head. “Never mind. First things first.”
He ushered Ralph into the room ahead of him, and then entered himself, stopping in the doorway and gripping the frame with both hands, as if for support.
“Son of a banshee,” he swore under his breath, his eyes wide, flicking back and forth between James’ doubled forms.
“We were practicing Disapparation,” the Jameses said.
“Failing spectacularly at it, more like,” Odin-Vann said, and gave a low whistle. “I’ve never seen a contrasection this complete. Do you… still think with a complete brain?”
“I don’t think he’s ever thought with a complete brain,” Rose sighed, approaching the Jameses with a shake of her head. She looked back and forth between them. “What can you do, Professor?”
Odin-Vann stood next to her, a studious frown creasing his face.
“Normally this would take a team of healers from the misapplied magic wing of St. Mungos,” he admitted thoughtfully. “But I see you have your wand with you, James. Did you, perhaps, use it to assist your Disapparation?”
“Rose said it was like training wheels!” James exclaimed defensively, his twinned voice louder than expected. “Ralph did it and only left a trail of pink exhaust across the room. I thought it was harmless!”
“It is harmless,” Odin-Vann nodded, his own voice almost eerily calm. “But if you used your wand to fuel your Apparation, I may know a way to undo it.”
The young professor glanced from James to James. James made eye contact with both glances.
“Which one’s the original?” Odin-Vann asked, and then turned to the James still standing in front of the windows. “That one,” he said, pointing. “Your wand made it across the room, to James number two.
That’s good.”
As the Jameses watched, Odin-Vann raised his own wand and pointed it at the James standing in front of the chalkboard, his wand fisted in his single hand. Odin-Vann paused for a moment as a look of doubt crossed his face, and then he cleared his eyes. When he spoke, the word sounded more like a command than a spell.
“Priori invortu!”
A bolt of white lightning connected Odin-Vann’s wand to James’, snaking and arcing for several long seconds. James felt the wand vibrating in his hand, but held on tight, unsure if the spell would work if he dropped it. The vibration built to a thrum that nearly numbed his fingers. Then, with a sound like a whip-crack, the second James flipped back through itself and merged back into the first, who stumbled backwards three steps, struck the window hard enough to rattle the panes, and collapsed to the floor in a clumsy heap.
Rose rushed to James’s side and grabbed his face in her hands, turning his head this way and that.