Chapter 15: The Break

The knife was old and did not shine. Tom had found it in the Room of Requirement three weeks ago, wrapped in black cloth at the bottom of a chest that had not been opened since the Founders' time. The blade had a curve to it like a question, and the handle was bone—not ivory, not horn, but bone, the kind that had been part of something once and remembered it.

He sat on the edge of the narrow bed in the little room they had given him, the room that smelled of soap and old mops. The diary lay open on the mattress. The single candle made the pages look yellow, hungry. He had written in it for months now, filling it with himself—his thoughts, his memories, the small cruelties of the orphanage, the shape of his mother's name, the anagram that had become his. He had given it everything he was willing to lose.

Now he would give it something else.

The book had been clear on this point. The vessel must be fed before the anchor can be set. Blood opens the way. Blood is the door and the key and the hinge.

He rolled up his sleeve. The skin of his inner forearm was pale, almost translucent in the candlelight. He could see the faint blue lines of veins beneath, the evidence of his own mortality. He put the edge of the blade there, in the soft hollow below his elbow, and pressed.

The pain was immediate and clean. He had expected worse. He had expected the kind of pain that made you cry out, that unmade you. This was only a cut—deep, yes, and bleeding freely now, the blood welling up dark as ink—but bearable. He had borne worse at the orphanage. He had borne worse from his own hand when he needed to practice not flinching.

He held his arm over the open diary and let the blood fall.

The first drop hit the page and sat there, round and perfect, like a seal waiting for wax. The second joined it. The third began to spread.

And then the page drank.

Tom watched, very still, as the paper absorbed his blood. Not the way paper absorbed ink, wicking outward in feathered lines. This was deliberate. Purposeful. The blood sank into the page as if the paper had opened a thousand tiny mouths and swallowed. The words he had written there—a memory of the orphanage, of the day he had made the cave give up its secrets—remained visible for a moment, dark letters swimming in red, and then they too were drawn down, pulled into the paper as if they had always belonged there.

He felt it then.

It began as a pressure in his chest, just behind his sternum, as if someone had placed a cold hand there and pushed. He kept his breathing steady. The book had warned him. The soul does not wish to be divided. It will resist. You must be stronger than your own instinct to remain whole.

The pressure became a pull.

It was not pain, exactly. It was—he did not have a word for it. It was like watching something precious slip from a high shelf in very slow motion, knowing you could not catch it, knowing you had chosen not to catch it. It was like the moment in a dream when you realize you are falling and you cannot wake up. It was like standing in a doorway with a cold wind at your back and a warm room ahead and knowing that if you step forward the door will close behind you and you will never be able to go back.

He stepped forward.

The diary's pages fluttered though there was no wind in the room. The blood had vanished entirely now; the paper looked clean, cleaner than before, as if it had been made new.

And then the tearing began.

It was not pain. Pain was too simple a word. It was—disassembly. As if the part of him that knew how to want things, how to hope for them, how to imagine futures where he was warm and fed and safe—that part was being peeled away like skin from fruit. He felt it go. He felt the exact moment when it stopped being his and became the diary's.

He tried to scream and found he had no voice for it. His mouth opened and closed like a fish, and the only sound was a wet, clicking noise in the back of his throat.

The diary drank him.

Not his blood—that had been only the door. It drank his memories now. His mother's name. The cave by the sea. Billy Stubbs's rabbit. The first time he had made something hurt on purpose and felt the sick, secret joy of it. All of it flowed out of him and into the paper, and the paper took it greedily, hungrily, as if it had been waiting for this meal since the day it was made.

He saw his own handwriting on the pages, but the letters were moving now—shifting, rearranging themselves into patterns he did not recognize. His life was being edited. His self was being compressed into something that could fit between leather covers.

For one terrible moment he thought he had made a mistake, thought he had misjudged the spell or the intent or his own strength, thought he was going to die here in this little room that smelled of mops and no one would know what he had been trying to do—

And then it was done.

The pressure vanished. The pull ceased. He was sitting on the bed with his arm bleeding sluggishly and the candle guttering and the diary lying open before him, and he was less than he had been a moment ago.

He could feel it. The absence. It was not large—he had been careful, he had given only what he could spare—but it was there. A small hollow place where something had lived and did not live anymore. He pressed his hand to his chest and felt his heart beating, steady and ordinary, and knew that part of him was now beating in the diary instead.

There was a tiny click inside him, neat and final, like the sound of the latch when Mrs Cole turned the door to the linen cupboard at the home. It did not hurt. It made him feel, for a blink, exactly correct in the world—as if he were standing on the only unbroken flagstone. Then it went away and left a thin papery feeling between him and his skin, like the film that sits on milk if you leave it too long.

He looked at the cut on his arm. It was still bleeding, but slower now. He would need to heal it properly, but not yet. Not until he was certain the ritual had worked.

He lifted the diary in both hands. The leather felt different—warmer, somehow, as if it had a pulse of its own. He pressed his thumb to the first page and felt, very faintly, something press back.

Hello, he thought, and did not know if he was speaking to the diary or to the piece of himself that now lived inside it.

He reached for his wand to heal the cut, and the magic came—but slowly, reluctantly, as if he were pulling it through gauze. The thin papery feeling tightened across his skin. He would need to adjust. He would need to practice. He would need to learn how to be this new thing he had made himself.

But he had done it. He had anchored himself. He had taken the first step toward the only kind of immortality that mattered—the kind you made with your own hands.

The water in the chipped teacup on the nightstand quivered when he breathed on it, though he kept very still. There was a dark thread, thin as ink from a cheap school pen, folding through the pale surface where he had rinsed the knife. It turned once, twice, and then went straight to the bottom as if the cup had remembered it.

Tom lowered the diary and set it closed on the bed. The little room they had given him still smelled faintly of soap and the old damp of mops; the hooks were on the wall proper, iron flowers where the bristles had hung. If he leaned out across the foot of the bed he could see the thin skirting of the corridor floor outside, and he kept catching himself glancing at it, because it would be both stupid and ordinary for the wrong set of shoes to stand there.

He wiped the rim of the teacup with a rag from his trunk. The rag came away pink, then clean. He could have cleared it with his wand faster, but the thought made something under his ribs move, entertained and ugly. He set the cup down and reached for the wand anyway, because not doing so would look like fear even to himself. The wood was warm at his grip; he had always liked that.

Scourgify, he said in his mouth without sound, and drew the flick he had been taught. The charm went, but with a drag as if he were pulling a plaster off damp skin. The rag whitened too slowly. He felt the delay. It was small. He did not look at the diary to see if it had noticed.

He closed it, careful, making the cover meet the cover without smudge or grit under the seam. The pages whispered against one another the way cheap paper did when new. Outside, water hissed in the pipes; the castle was breathing the way it did when everyone was nearly in bed.

He tucked the diary into the little wooden box that lived in his trunk under his shirts. The box had been a puzzle once, the kind you tip to make the pin fall out of the way. He had rubbed the varnish thin in two places with his thumb. The lid closed like a mouth that had found the right place to bite.

He tilted the trunk lid down and heard — not heard, only thought he did — the soft sound of the book not moving. He waited a count of four and then turned to the little washstand. He had to get his hands properly clean. It would not do to leave anything on the tin basin, the way you might leave jam and find a child with a finger through it.

The water from the jug ran cold. He rubbed the soap to a lather and scrubbed until the knuckles went red. He looked at them, not because he liked the sight, but because he knew that looking harder made things go away. He did not look at his face. The mirror was a poor one, and the glass always made him want to push at it with his thumb to see if the silver would give.

When the crack came, it had the wrong sound — too sharp for the room’s softness, too neat for the old hooks and the scuffed skirting. He did not start; he allowed his shoulders to lift and his head to turn, the way you did when someone came in who had every right to. The house-elf stood where the corner of the narrow bed shadowed the wall, ears flat to the skull like bat-wings left to dry.

“Mr Tom is being awake,” said the elf. It kept its eyes on his hands, and he could not tell if that was shame or politeness or habit. Its voice went up at the end as if it could be made a question if he wanted.

“Is there a rule against it?” Tom said, and had to make his mouth say it slow. The first words had tried to come out too fast, all tidy edges and no air, and it would have sounded like he was telling it off. He smiled instead, small and true only at the corners. “Mipsy,” he added. He thought that was the one. You always remembered names. Names were always pleased to be remembered.

“Mipsy is being Mipsy, sir,” the elf said, rubbing at one bare heel with the other foot. “Mipsy is doing the night rounds for the dungeon corridor. Professor Slughorn is saying the little rooms is to be checked because of…” It broke off and sniffed, face scrunching; the ear tips twitched as if at a draught. “Because of things being brewed when they is not to be brewed. Mipsy is smelling soaps and… and… ink.”

“I write here,” Tom said. He let his hand flick towards the table without actually pointing. “I like to work undisturbed. I’m careful.” That last came out a touch hard, a child’s sharpness pushed flat. He made himself shrug. “Of course I am.”

“Mipsy is not saying Mr Tom is not careful,” the elf said quickly. Its hands wrung one another as if they had always been doing so. It sniffed again. “It is a small room,” it said, and sounded almost apologetic, which was interesting.

“There’s nowhere else free,” Tom said. “You know how it is with firsts and seconds shoved in together. The older boys don’t like it when I stay up with a lamp.” That much was true. Perseverance came with quiet, and boys with breath that smelled of milk and wood-smoke wanted to talk until they fell over.

Mipsy’s big eyes were fixed on his shirt cuffs. Tom had already rolled them down, once he had scrubbed, and the linen was clean. He resisted the flick of the fingers that would have gone to neaten a button. Neatness was a habit, but fussing was something children did in front of teachers, and he had no wish to be seen doing it by a thing that could go anywhere in the castle without opening doors.

“Would you like me to pour away the water?” he said, tempted, for half a second, to perform what he could without a wand to see if the elf would mark it. He lifted the teacup with his left hand and held it out. “I might spill. You know where to put it.”

The elf hesitated; its nose wrinkled deep, and its throat bobbed. It took the cup with a quick bow, both hands. Its fingers brushed his, chilly and a little rough, like string that had been used too many times.

“Mipsy is being good to the rooms,” it said. “Mipsy is keeping them tidy. Professor is liking tidy. Mr Abraxas is liking tidy.”

The name went past him like a draught. It was not new. Abraxas liked things that folded the way they should. Abraxas liked shirts that did not show the seams of the stitches. Abraxas liked people to sit straight. Tom had counted these likes almost as soon as he met him. They were useful. “Tell Mr Malfoy I am very tidy,” he said, with a calm the elf could take away and repeat.

“Mipsy is not telling Mr Malfoy things that Mr Tom is saying in his own room,” Mipsy said, shocked, as if Tom had accused it of stealing the jam pot and hiding it under its pillow. Its ears flapped. “Only when Professor is asking for Mipsy to do so.”

“Then don’t let Professor ask,” Tom said, and smiled in a way that was meant to make itself small at once, a boy’s request, obedient to his betters. He stepped so that his shoulder was almost between Mipsy and the trunk. It was nothing; the lid was down. The key lay under the mattress, a strip of cold along his wrist when he had slid it there. He felt, briefly, the thin paper feeling lay over his arm like a glove.

“Mr Tom is nice,” Mipsy said. Its mouth pursed as if there were a taste to this that ought not to be there. The elf blinked, stiffened, and then snapped its fingers. The teacup vanished without the sound of it having gone. “Mr Tom must be sleeping now. If Mr Abraxas is hearing that he is not, Mr Abraxas is telling Mr Tom so.”

Tom laughed, softly. It came without warmth but it sounded like something you could put by and take out again. “Let Mr Abraxas tell me,” he said.

When the elf had gone — not a sound on the boards where its feet had been — the room felt over-large. That was foolish; it was hardly longer than the bed. He shut the door because if someone came and found it open they would have made it a thing, and he didn’t want this to be one. He slid the bolt. It slid quietly, well-oiled. Someone was careful here, too. He was not the only tidy person in the dungeons.

He moved to the bed and sat on the edge with his feet braced on the stone. His hands lay palm up on his knees. He watched them until they settled. The thin paper across his skin lay quiet as well, harmless if he didn’t push at it.

He folded down, took the key from under the mattress, and left it in the crack of the trunk’s handle where his fingers could find it without skittering about. He lay back. The mattress was lumpy; a bit of straw ticked under his shoulder blade. He stared at the ceiling and saw the places the paint had bubbled when the damp had come up, little round things like blisters on porridge. He disliked porridge. It clung to the spoon and went to paste in the throat. He thought of the Great Hall and of the owls and of Abraxas Malfoy lifting his cup with two fingers like a lady. He smiled, sharp, where no one would see.

He shut his eyes and counted back from twenty. At seventeen he lost the numbers and found sleep waiting at the bottom of them like a stone.

The smell of the Great Hall the next morning made his stomach go a way he did not care for. There was bacon, and damp wool from cloaks drying at the door, and the sweet staleness of pumpkin juice poured before the children came in. It had always been too bright in here, the candles in the sky doing their trick and the plates shining at him as if they wanted to see their own faces.

Tom took toast because the toast looked the same no matter how anyone felt. He put butter on it because not doing so made the matron at the home tut and he had kept the habit for the way it had trained his face to hide dislike. When he bit into it, there was that thin papery thing again, this time inside his mouth, as if someone had put tracing paper over his tongue. Taste came through, but dull, as though everything had been boiled too long.

He ate anyway. He spread marmalade because the peel caught, and the catch told his mouth where it was. The jam dripped on his fingers. He licked it away and felt nothing particular. He did not look at the staff table.

“Morning,” Abraxas said, sliding onto the bench with the slight sideways turn of the shoulders that meant he did not wish to be touched by anyone by accident. His fair hair had been parted and combed with water. It lay like a design in a book of Roman floors. “You kept Mipsy up last night.”

Tom kept his mouth easy. He buttered another piece of toast and set it down on the plate as if he were a person with such a life that he could leave toast uneaten. “So did you,” he said.

Abraxas’s mouth did not move. He lifted the coffee-pot and filled his cup. “I sent him,” he said. “You slept,” he added, as if that were something that he had thought proper to notice.

“I did,” Tom said, and drank pumpkin juice because children did that and he was supposed to look like a boy with a lot of good years coming, and men with cups seemed further away. The juice tasted like the smell of autumn in the courtyard when the gardeners burned the last of the leaves. “Eventually.”

Abraxas lifted a piece of bacon with his fork and looked at it as if it were a letter he did not entirely trust. “Slug said you’d be in the library,” he said. “After lunch. He wants to look at something he says you found —” He paused, then gave Tom the smallest look. “— the other day.”

“I often do,” Tom said. A fourth-year across the table knocked over his tea; the tea went everywhere and the boy looked to Tom without meaning to, mouth open like a fish. Tom set his napkin down and did not turn that way, because if he did he would be prefecting at breakfast and he disliked theatricals before he had had to.

Abraxas drank. “He’s pleased with you,” he said. “He will puff and call you clever and you will look demure and we will not have to listen to him talk himself to death about you later.”

“Is that jealousy?” Tom said, amused, and was pleased to hear it sound like he had meant it. He kept his shoulder against the bench and made himself sit a fraction more lax than usual in case anyone wanted to believe he was only grand when he remembered to be.

Abraxas turned his cup. “No,” he said. “It is boredom. Do you plan to do that trick you showed me on Tuesday or are you reserving it for girls and men with cigars?”

Tom’s teeth set for a blink; he let them loosen. “What trick,” he said, limp as string. It was a courtesy, not an evasion. He had shown Abraxas a little neat bit of Transfiguration, no more than the sort of thing you could teach a child who would later be proud of it. It had pleased them both for different reasons.

Abraxas reached into his sleeve and brought out a match. He set it on the table, flat on his palm. “The pin,” he said. “You made it neat.”

Tom’s bread sat on his plate and he could not remember how hungry he had been. He drew his wand under the table, curved a finger to hide the tip. The papery feeling brushed his hand again, like the skin of onions. He rolled his shoulders and made them settle.

He looked at the match. He thought pin, he thought white, he thought the shine of a hat-pin he had seen once near Woolworths in a window, thin as a scream. He drew the motion with the wand in the space between his thighs and the table’s edge and murmured the word in his mouth, small as if it could escape.

The match held out for exactly as long as it might if you told it to stop being itself and it did not believe you had the right. It jerked, and he felt, not heard, a tiny rip in that paper that lay between his skin and the air, as if he had pushed his hand through tissue to reach sweets underneath. The spell went, late and a little skew. The head of the match thinned; the wood stretched, wavered, and then settled true. A pin lay across Abraxas’s palm. It was not quite the same white as before.

Abraxas lifted an eyebrow. He could do that without his face doing anything else, which was a skill Tom admired in a quiet way. “A fraction off,” he said, as if observing that Tom’s tie had slipped. “Have you got a cold?”

“Must be the damp,” Tom said. He reached to take the pin back and pricked his finger as if by accident. He did not have accidents. He held his hand under the table while he pretended to brush a crumb. The place the pin had gone had no feeling in it for a half-second and then came back with a clean sting. He lifted his finger to his mouth in the old way, a small boy’s way, as if to lick it, and did not. He reached for his napkin.

Abraxas watched the napkin. “Do stop,” he said, too soft for the second-years opposite to hear. “Slug will be insufferable if you fall on your nose.”

“I never do anything if I can help it,” Tom said, to the napkin.

Tom said nothing because it would amuse Abraxas if he protested and because he did not mind. He was good at being in places when people did not expect him. It was a skill he had paid for with time and quiet. He sat until his plate was empty and then he sat a while longer, as if he had the luxury.

When they rose to go to class, Slughorn blobbed to them on his soft shoes with a sound like a pudding collapsing. “My boy,” he said, holding out both hands as if Tom might be a cake he had ordered and which had turned out perfectly. “The library, after. Not long. Just a little thing. He’s the talk of the common room, this one,” he said to Abraxas, as if Abraxas might have somehow missed it.

Tom inclined his head, a shade too formal for a boy of any year, and then remembered and dragged up a lopsided grin that had served him when priests spoke and wanted you to show willing. Slughorn dabbed at his forehead and rolled away in the scent of old spice and boiled sugar.

Transfiguration after breakfast. McGonagall’s classroom smelled of chalk and the polish she used on her desk, which bit at the eyes if you got too close. Tom had his pen and he had his wand and he had that thin paper thing between him and everything else like cheap greaseproof over a dish. He disliked it. He did not touch it with his mind. He wrote the date at the top of his parchment. His writing sat like it always did; the ink went where he put it. That was something.

“Matches into pins,” said McGonagall, as if the world had arranged itself according to Abraxas’s breakfast joke on purpose. “Neatness is your friend. Do not, Mr Avery, do not. I will not have peacocks. The day has not yet come.”

She set one of the matches before Tom with a practised drop that made a small tap on the wood of the desk and no mess. He held it. It felt exactly like a match ought to. He put it down and looked at it looking back at him. He drew breath, held, and let it out.

His wand felt like his wand, which was a comfort. He raised it. Pin, he thought. Hat-pin in the shop window. Needle in Mrs Cole’s mending tin, a thing that passed through thick things and was never seen. He moved and said and the matchshank shivered.

The paper held. The matchstruck and sat and refused. He blinked, not in startlement but to wash his eyes. He threw the wand movement a little harder as if pushing a door with a shoulder. The magic went through the papery layer with a reluctant give. The pin came. It was clean. He set it on his book and, because no one was watching his face, he closed his eyes for the time it took to count to two.

“Better,” said McGonagall, passing his desk without slowing. She was not looking at him. It was worse.

He went to Charms and the papery thing did not go. He lifted his wand for a simple levitation to make Featherlight of a slate and the slate rose as if the air were syrup. He lowered it and the boy beside him did not notice his breath go a fraction ragged. He smiled, and the boy smiled back because he had learned to do so for boys who were older and had nice shoes.

At lunch Abraxas did not look his way and that was a good thing. Tom ate what was put in front of him and felt the taste only when he pressed the crust to the roof of his mouth and made the scrape catch the nerves. He thought to himself that he could do without taste for a time. One could do without a great many things if better ones came. He kept his hands very still on either side of his plate.

Afterwards, the library. It sat as it always did under the high arched windows, sleepily disapproving. He liked it for that. Madam Pince glanced at him and away as if she had learned he would not put jam on his books. He found Slughorn in one of the back tables, a little sweaty with the short walk, patting at his tie as if it were the only thing keeping his throat up.

“There we are,” Slughorn said, as Tom sat. “Look at this. Found! — well, mislaid, I suppose — in the cupboard of my old classroom, would you believe. I tell you, Headmaster Dippet is no businessman, no, no — he ought to let me have a clear-out…” He slid something across the wood. It was a rusted tangle of brass and greenish copper. Somewhere deep beneath the corrosion there were shapes that felt like letters if you looked too long.

Tom let his fingers brush it. He gave it exactly the amount of attention you gave any old thing a master put before you to show that you had value without being hungry. “Charming,” he said. It was. In the way of anything broken that still held lines of the thing it had meant to be.

Slughorn beamed at him as if Tom had pushed him along on a cart. “Ha! Very good. Well, very good.” He looked round as if for witnesses to his good find and then back at the boy who made such finds seem better. “There, my boy, there. Off with you, off with you. Homework! Busy! Eh? Eh?” He tapped the brass and left it there like a kitten to get underfoot.

Tom left it. He went between the shelves that smelled of hide glue and dust and old ink that had turned brown. He slipped down the row where the books on Arithmancy sat without saying Charms in their titles. He did not reach for anything. He stood and made his breath go the way he wanted.

When he took the diary from the inner pocket of his robes, his hand made a smaller shape round it than usual. The leather warmed under his palm almost at once, like a stone the sun had touched. He laid it on the shelf and looked at it. He did not open it. He did not need to. It was his, and it was a thing now in the way he had planned. He thought of the weight of it in the box under his shirts. He kept his fingers off the cover because he wanted very much to drag the pad of his thumb along the edge of it to see where the page was inside, and he disliked wanting things where anyone could walk by and see it on him.

He slid the diary back. It went in against his ribs and sat there like it was part of him, and the thin papery feeling across his skin seemed to pull tight for a second, as if it did not like the touch. He had put the door the way he wanted. Doors did not always like to be shut.

“Mister Tom?” Mipsy stood in the gap between Divination (Old) and Runes (Worn). It held its hands together as if it were keeping them from doing something improper. “Professor Slughorn is being very pleased,” it said breathless. “Mipsy is being sent because Mr Abraxas is saying Mr Tom must be reminded that rounds are his at nine.”

Tom inclined his head. He wondered if Mipsy had been standing there long enough to see the short way he had looked at the diary. There was no way to know. Elves were. They were like air in rooms you were not supposed to go in, everywhere at once and never without knowing you were breathing them.

“Of course,” he said. “Tell Mr Malfoy I shall be perfectly on time.”

“Mipsy is telling Mr Malfoy,” the elf said, and then seemed to gather itself. “Mipsy is being told also to say that…” It faltered; it looked down at its feet and then up at Tom. “That Professor is not liking smells in the lower corridor,” it said in a rush, as if speed might be modest. “Professor says no brewing. The walls is complaining.”

It had brought the words like a little present it did not want to carry. Tom kept his face bland as bread. “One should always listen to walls,” he said. “Thank you, Mipsy.”

He watched it go until the last of the bat-ears vanished behind a shelf. He stood there longer than he needed to. Listening to the library breathe was nearly a habit. It was useful to know how long you could stand still before anyone troubled you.

In the afternoon he went where he had to and did what was asked. He took notes. He answered when called on, once with his voice coming too quickly and then more slowly when he heard it. He did not reach for the sort of question that made professors smile and then frown when they went away. He could afford to be dull for a day. It was almost a luxury to sit in the body and feel the thin papery veil between him and the world and not reach through it for anything except what he absolutely had to.

By the time the lamps in the lower corridors were lit, he had made his hands forget themselves. The warmth of the torches got under his robe at the throat and at the hollow where his collarbones met. He liked the dungeons lit. He liked the lights making the green water in the glass of the window wells move as if it were alive. He liked footsteps to be his when he chose and no one else’s. He liked ownership. You could not always have it, but you could pretend, and practice.

“Move along,” he said, and two second-years scattered like chicks. “No running,” he said to a fifth-year with big shoulders and a thin mouth that made trouble when it had nothing better to do. He paused where the wall went in a little, where once a door had been and was not now, and listened because listening told him where shouting might be before it began.

The shouting began in the next corridor; something hard and bright went off with a crack and a scream. Filibuster fireworks; idiots. He turned the corner at a walk and flattened his mouth at the three boys with their hands shoved into their sleeves as if setting fireworks off from inside a robe made you clever. “Put it out,” he said.

“Sir,” said one, and laughed. The spark climbed the wall like a clever thing, looking for a curtain to speak to. Tom drew his wand up, let his wrist settle, and threw water.

The charm went as if he had tried to push a bucket through a letter slot. The water came, but it came thin, veering, and hit the stone where the spark had been a moment before. The firework squealed in his ear like a kettle. He stepped in and stamped, heel down, hard. He had good shoes; they took it. The spark went to nothing under leather.

The boys stared. Tom looked at the mark his heel had made on the flagstone. It would wipe. It would all wipe. “Detention,” he said, very mild. “All of you. After supper. Bring your own scrubbing brushes. I will not provide them. Write your names.”

“Sir,” one said, sullen, as if he had a right to keep his name to himself. Tom waited. The boy wrote it, badly, and then smiled in a way he did not know left him open everywhere. Tom filed the smile on the shelf in his head where smiles went, to be used later in their proper places.

He went on. He said the things prefects said when they were doing what they were told and not thinking three steps ahead. He allowed himself one small test alone in the alcove where the green water showed like a rim of bottle glass high up. He held his wand above his palm and whispered. The ball of light should have sat there, weightless and steady. It came, and it came the size of a nailhead, and it shivered like a moth that wanted out. He shut his hand on it. It smelt faintly of hot dust. He opened his hand and there was only the line across his palm where the tiny heat had been, no burn, no mark. He smiled at his own hand because it was stupid to smile at your hand, and then he stopped because the stone breathed and he could hear the echo of his own breath now and that did not please him.

At nine he made the rounds again because Abraxas had very gently not done them and because Tom said yes when the world offered him order and he could still carry it. He sent three boys to bed with all their books and their faces long. He turned the corner to the staircase that curled like a shell down to the Slytherin common room and ran almost into McGonagall.

She stopped so abruptly that her tartan swayed. “Mr Riddle,” she said, and the way she said it wiped clean the last of anyone else in the corridor. “A word.”

He shifted the angle of his shoulders so that the prefect badge caught the torchlight with a white wink. It had pleased her before, the remembering of little things. It did not now. “Of course, Professor,” he said.

Behind him, somewhere, someone sniggered. He did not turn his head; he did nothing so much as breathe with care. McGonagall did not either. She looked at his face the way she looked at toadstools you brought to class when you were not quite sure if they were poisonous.

“Your work this morning,” she said. Her voice was level. “Adequate. Not up to your usual standard.”

“I suppose not, Professor,” he said. He did not say he had made changes to himself and the changes had cost dear and she could go and— No. He did not say anything but that.

She glanced down at his hand where his wand lay against his fingers; his hand had moved without his asking it, as if to show itself. He tucked the wand away as if he had only just realised. The paper-thin thing brushed his skin, lifted like it meant to go, and then lay down again. McGonagall’s mouth went a shade thinner.

“Do be advised, Mr Riddle,” she said, “that one does not win one’s way by cleverness alone. It is a habit with bright children to think so.” Her eyes, which were almost pretty when she smiled, were not pretty now. “If you are tired, go to bed earlier. If you are unwell, go to the hospital wing. If you are doing anything else,” she said, almost softly, “stop.”

He let his jaw loosen. “Yes, Professor,” he said. His voice came out a touch too clear, like the way he spoke when he wanted people to hear and think him kind. He felt that thin bit of nothing between him and everything else stretch until the air seemed to hiss as it rubbed it.

“Good night,” she said, and stepped past him. She was not small, McGonagall. He stood where he was until the sound of her shoes on the stone had gone to a whisper and then gone.

“Pleasant,” said Abraxas behind him, flat, because he had a gift for arriving where it helped him and standing still there as if the world owed him the view. Tom didn’t turn. Abraxas came to stand at his elbow and looked along the corridor where McGonagall had been. He smelt of cold and something lemon that you put in bath water. “Don’t show it,” he said. “Whatever game you are playing. You have the wrong audience for it.”

Tom breathed out through his nose. “Do not fret,” he said, and meant it as a kindness. He had no wish to pull Abraxas into his work. He had been careful. He had been very careful. He had only that papery thing to mind and his own face to keep straight and it was not more than he had done before.

“I never do,” Abraxas said, and he smiled without humour. He tapped a finger to Tom’s arm the way one might tap at a shop window to point out what one intended to purchase later. “Eight-thirty. Slug’s little party. Try not to make me sit through him praising you in front of that Rosier girl for three-quarters of an hour.”

“Of course,” Tom said. The paper skin on his nerves crackled once at the thought of a room full of light and talk. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Abraxas went away, footsteps neat as tally marks.

Tom stood where he was. The corridor breathed. A boy ran past at the far end and the sound of him came and went like a gull. The door had shut. He had shut it, and he had chosen it, and now there was a thin something between him and everything else that he would have to push his hand through whenever he wanted so much as a small trick to behave, and it would not do to let anyone see him do it.

He set off down the stairs into the green light. Above him, from the shadow where McGonagall had been, came a voice he had expected to hear tonight and would have chosen not to. “Mr Riddle,” Slughorn called, cheery, oily. “Two minutes? Just two. Don’t run off.”

Tom looked up. He made himself smile the way that pleased old men and made them see boys where men were standing. Between his teeth and the room, the thin film rustled like paper against paper.

“Coming, Professor,” he said. He went up into the light.