'Ginny!' There were hands on her, turning her over. She saw Blaise's frightened face looming overhead like a white balloon. She was speaking, but Ginny couldn't make the words out over the roaring in her ears.
Blackness danced at the edges of her vision. She wanted nothing more than to shut her eyes and sink down into it, lose herself in oblivion and a quick end to pain. There was something, though. Something important.
Something she needed to tell Blaise, to remember…
'The wall,' she said, dragging the words up out of a throat raw from searing heat. With the words came a quantity of blood that spilled down her chin; she wiped it away with the back of her hand.
Blaise looked horrified. 'Don't talk-'
'The antidote,' Ginny said. 'It's in the wall.' She raised her hand to point, and saw that it was covered in blood. She stared for a moment, uncomprehendingly. Is that my blood?
The darkness was reaching for her again, with long, curved claws, sinking its talons in, dragging her down. There's something important I have to do, she told it, pleadingly, but it came on with the inevitability of nightfall, drawing a curtain of blackness across her eyes.
'Harry!' Hermione had slipped to her knees and was gripping his hands; she looked ghastly, Ron thought, as if she were imagining that this was somehow all her fault. 'Harry, that's enough, wake up, please wake up!'
Harry didn't move. Blood seeped slowly, evenly, across his chest. Sirius and Charlie were looking over now from across the room, as if noticing that something was wrong. On her cot, Narcissa stirred restlessly.
'Hermione,' Ron said softly. 'Move aside.'
She didn't move. She was still clutching Harry's hand, whispering rapidly under her breath as if he could hear her. Ron knelt down next to her. 'It could be an old wound,' he said, 'something he got in Romania, opening up again-'
'It isn't,' Hermione said, her voice breaking on a sob. 'it's my fault- I sent him into Draco's mind and now they're dying together, he's being dragged down into it-'
'Don't talk like that,' Ron said sharply, wondering if she'd gone mad.
With a quick movement, he pulled up the side of Harry's shirt. Blood seeped from the edges of a thin gash along his chest, but to Ron's relief, it looked neither deep nor serious. 'Look, it's just a shallow cut, nothing to be-'
'What's going on?' It was Sirius, looming over them, Charlie beside him.
In the corner of the room, Lupin and Madam Pomfrey were in whispered conference. 'Is Draco all right?'
'It's Harry, actually,' said Ron, and saw Sirius' eyes widen in surprise.
'He-'
A shrill, horrific noise split the air. It sounded like the shrieking of damned souls in Hell. Narcissa sat up on her cot with a start, gasping, and Hermione's head flew up. Her face was wet with tears.
'The library-' she said. 'Ginny-'
Ron sprang to his feet and dashed towards the door of the infirmary, Charlie hot on his heels.
Blaise looked up as the door to the library opened and Ron and Charlie Weasley burst in, both out of breath. She was standing amid an enormous pile of flung books- she'd yanked down almost every volume in the Restricted Section, and they were howling and shrieking around her feet in a massive pile of indignant, enspelled pages. She reached for another one to throw, half-hysterical, even as Ron came towards her and grabbed her arm. He was shouting something, but she couldn't hear him over the din and only shook her head at him, her red hair flying wildly around her face.
He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. This time she could see the words his mouth was shaping: Where is Ginny? Before she could get her hands free to point, Charlie drew his wand from his sleeve and waved it, shouting a frantic spell.
The noise subsided. 'Thank God I'm a professor here,' said Charlie, sliding the wand back. 'Blaise, what's going on?'
Her voice caught at she replied, wrenching herself out of Ron's grip to point. 'Ginny. She's over there-'
Ron and Charlie turned. One of the long study tables nearly blocked their view of her, but the edge of an outstretched hand was just visible there on the floor, the flutter of a sleeve-Charlie reached his sister's side first, Ron and Blaise just behind them.
Ginny lay where she'd slumped, her hair straggling raggedly out of its braid, a pool of blood spreading across the floor beneath her head. More blood leaked from her ears, eyes and mouth.
The Time-Turner, resting against her chest, was pulsing feverishly, like a separate, living heart.
Charlie made a terrible gasping sound and went down on his knees to lift his sister up in his arms; her eyes were shut, blue veins visible through the etiolated lids. Her chest rose and fell with shallow breaths. 'What happened?' Charlie asked tightly.
'She was using the Time-Turner,' Blaise began, but Charlie cut her off.
'Tell me later. We have to get her to the infirmary.' He turned to go, but Ginny had moved, reaching out her hand to catch at the front of Ron's shirt. Her fingers left bloody marks.
'Ron,' she whispered, beckoning him, her eyes shut. Very pale, he leaned down over his sister, listening as she whispered in his ear. When he drew back, there was a scarlet mark on his cheeks where her lips had touched, like a macabre lipstick stain.
'Five up from the floor, ten over from the wall,' said Ron, looking bewilderedly at Blaise. 'What does that mean?'
Blaise sucked in a breath. 'She pointed at that wall earlier,' she said, indicating the west wall of the library. 'I think she's trying to tell us where the antidote is.'
Charlie's voice was terse. 'You look for it. Meet us in the infirmary,' he said, but as soon as he made as if to leave, Ginny began to struggle. The struggling brought on a fit of coughing; blood splashed up and onto Charlie's shirt, wetting it with scarlet. He blanched.
Blaise whirled and ran to the wall, scrabbling feverishly at the stones — five up from the floor, ten over from the wall, five up from the floor, ten over from the wall, she repeated to herself-until she seized on the correct one.
Indeed, it felt as if it sat almost loosely in its mortared space. One of her fingernails broke off as she pried it out; another time she might have mourned, but not now. She dropped the stone, which might have crushed her foot if Ron, silently on hand, had not caught it, and felt around in the dark space it left behind.
The walls of the space were cool and rough. In a moment, her hand closed on something: something cylindrical and smooth. She drew it out, and recognized instantly the vial with its golden stopper that Snape had given to Ginny in the Potions dungeon. Suddenly terrified that she might mishandle it, she thrust it at Ron in a blind panic. 'It's the antidote,' she said, in a shaking voice. 'To Draco's poison.'
Ron backed away. 'Great Wizards,' he whispered. 'No-don't hand it to me, are you mad? I might drop it.'
'Ron!' barked Charlie. 'Blaise!' He sounded as if his temper hung on a frayed thread; the antidote recovered, Ginny lay limp in his grasp, her face turned into his shoulder. 'To the infirmary. NOW.' He spun on his heel and stalked towards the door.
Blaise scuttled to obey, the precious vial cradled like a baby against her chest, her heart pounding in rhythm with her steps. After a moment, Ron followed them, pausing only to use the sleeve of his jumper to wipe his sister's blood from his cheek.
Harry found his voice. 'Why are you telling me this now?'
'I wanted you to know.' Draco's voice cracked slightly on the last word, like a delicate fissure in glass. 'What you're fighting so hard for.'
'Malfoy…' Harry took a step back. He was intensely conscious suddenly of everything around him: the gray of the Manor, translucent as a shell through which winter light shines; the gray of Draco's eyes, the color not of water but of the memory of water, not of tears, but of the sorrow that brings them forth. 'God, Malfoy. What did
