The word still rang in Mahmoud’s ears. Coward. Jeremiah’s footsteps could still be heard as he thundered down the stairs. They were supposed to be together, but Mahmoud could not bring himself to stop looking at the pale, contorted face of the man that had uttered that word. Emmett had gone too far. He always went too far, but Mahmoud had seen something break inside Jeremiah this time. He hoped it was just patience.
The building door slammed loudly from below.
Mahmoud grabbed Emmett’s skinny arm and pulled him along, hurrying after Jeremiah and picking up his lamp along the way. The only way to make this man understand was to force him to witness a battle. He was supposed to be a scientist, when he saw things first hand he would understand that the missing link that they needed to solve this problem was not weapons, but normal, everyday things like flashlights and ovens and refrigerators. It was Emmett that was shrinking from his duty, not Jeremiah.
The bespectacled scientist was making feeble, but continuous complaints. He didn’t actually resist being dragged along by Mahmoud, he just kept on a constant stream of childish whining as they avoided upturned trash cans and stepped over large, bloody pools in the roads. Finally, Mahmoud could not take it any longer.
“How did you two get to be roommates anyway?” he asked, gesturing to the darkened road ahead with his lamp. Jeremiah’s heavy footsteps could be heard up ahead, but they still couldn’t see him in this blinding dark.
Emmett began a long-winded story about how he had found the supposedly ‘dead’ soldier completely drunk at a bar one night and dragged him home before he could seriously injure himself – or before anyone else recognized him. Mahmoud shook his head at Emmett’s description of Jeremiah’s completely helpless state… with every passing day since the murders of his parents he was beginning to understand the wisdom behind their many limitations and feel more and more grateful that they had protected him from some of the things that he had, stupidly, been dying to experience.
“It was disgusting,” Emmett continued. “He couldn’t even get up off the floor by himself after he fell down… I’ve never had a drop since.”
“Seriously?” Mahmoud asked; his shattered respect for Emmett rising again – just a little bit.
Finally, they stepped into an alleyway that had been lit with several torches. A couple of men strolled back and forth in front of the houses, holding large clubs in their hands. Jeremiah was now clearly visible up ahead and Mahmoud quickened his footsteps. Beside him, Emmett seemed to be torn between being impressed with and afraid of these men. He watched them eagerly, but shrunk closer to Mahmoud.
One of them men nodded at Mahmoud as they passed and Mahmoud raised his lamp in greeting. He wondered what the man’s reaction would be if it was light enough for the slightly darker tone of his skin to show… for him to be recognizable as a Mahmoud and not just any English boy helping to patrol the streets.
He shook his head and moved on. Jeremiah must know they were following him by now, but he was not slowing or waiting for them. Coward. Mahmoud shook his head. If there was anyone in the world who did not fit that description it was Jeremiah.
…
“Diffindo!” Ginny yelled as she ducked behind a nearby rock. She took a deep breath and then sprang back up immediately.
“Stupefy!” She shouted, ducking a strange new spell of Blaise’s that was purple with little specs of red in it. She cast a silent Levicorpus! It missed, but Theo stumbled on a rock trying to avoid it and she followed it quickly with a barrage of arrows that came soaring out of her wand. Theo was hit. He cast a shield charm around himself and waved for them to continue dueling.
Something that resembled a lightning bolt hit Ginny’s left leg and it began to jerk back and forth, stinging painfully every time. She rounded on Blaise, shouting five very powerful spells in succession. A weird mist was suddenly obscuring her vision, so most of her spells missed. The mist slowed them both down. The most powerful spells Ginny knew were verbal spells, but if she shouted one out now it would reveal her location. She turned on the spot in a circle, muttering the Levicorpus spell over and over. Blaise was hoisted into the air by his ankle, but not before hitting her wand arm with a boil charm.
Ginny fought hard to keep hold of her wand. She fired magical ropes at the still-suspended Blaise before allowing him to drop, rather painfully, to the floor. She looked down at her arm in revulsion. The boils had crept all the way up to her elbow now. She took the wand in her left hand and preformed a freezing charm, and then an Impediment Jinx, on the boils. They stopped spreading up her arm, but they began to ooze a disgusting grey fluid.
Something hit Ginny in the legs from behind, bringing her down to her knees and making her feel very suddenly dizzy and lightheaded. Theo was back in action.
She tried to turn to face him, but she stumbled back and landed painfully on a sharp rock. Her left leg was bleeding. Her wand arm was very painful now; apparently the gooey stuff from the boils was burning away at her skin. She would have to learn that charm. Ginny expected to be hit with more spells, but the boys seemed to be equally impeded.
She knitted her eyebrows together and squinted in Theo’s direction. His face looked very pale.
“I think we’ll call it a day!” Blaise said, still struggling with the ropes that bound him.
“Yeah,” Ginny said, trying not to fall unconscious. Someone needed to tend to Theo. She lifted her wand in her left hand again and, brought herself up on her right elbow just high enough to see, and aim, towards Blaise. Ginny managed to mumble the counter-curse and see the ropes around Blaise begin to dissolve before a boil burst near her elbow and all was black.
She was woken seconds later by Blaise, but she was in the patient wing now. Ginny found that the boils had mercifully disappeared and her other injuries had been bandaged and cleaned, but she still felt slightly light-headed. Theo would have been able to cure her of that. She reached for her wand and tried to pull herself up to her feet. “Is he alright?” she asked Blaise urgently. “I didn’t mean… those arrows.”
“Were excellent,” Theo said from a nearby bed. “And I know you could’ve cast a stronger spell if you hadn’t been too soft!”
“Soft!” Ginny muttered angrily, letting Blaise push her back down on her bed. “You know bloody well that all three of us could have been killed today.”
“Blaise is getting better at Healing, though,” Theo continued conversationally. “He cast a blood-replenishing charm on me and my wound’s almost closed now.”
“Yeah, well, my head’s still spinning,” Ginny countered, hanging onto the injured tone of voice for a little longer, although she had a sudden, inexplicable urge to grin.
Theo raised his wand and pointed it at a cupboard, silently summoning a small vial and floating it towards Ginny. “Drink up!” he said. “It’s good for headaches and it’ll help restore your energy too.”
Finally, Ginny allowed the grin to break through. She looked around at the cozy, clean hospital room. One day soon, when they had mastered the protective charms needed and figured out how to bring people here without arousing unwanted Death Eater attention, they would be able to treat people here – to save lives. Meanwhile, all three of them were becoming very good at both dueling and healing.
“I was thinking,” Blaise said. “If we manage to somehow combine the Freezing Charm and the Impediment Jinx without causing adverse effects that could be really useful for curing lots of different kinds of injuries… I practiced it on your arm a couple of times, but I still haven’t figured out how to get rid of the grey puss and I ended up having to use a-”
“Zabini!” Ginny interrupted, “Are you trying to tell me you cast that disgusting curse on me without knowing how to reverse it?”
Blaise’s handsome face broke into a mischievous grin. If only he wasn’t content to stay here away from the thick of battle Ginny might just fall in love with him. She shook her head and drank another large gulp of Theo’s head-clearing potion.
…
Fires had broken out everywhere. Mahmoud had lost his gas lamp ages ago. He had also lost his hold on Emmett, who was wandering, too slow and open-mouthed, in the shadows of buildings.
“Help!” a woman was calling from somewhere to his left. Mahmoud changed direction quickly and followed her voice. She was pinned underneath a large chunk of concrete that had broken off a nearby building. A metal pipe was pressing down on her leg. Mahmoud scrambled around in the rubble until he was in the right position to assess her situation without injuring her further. Something exploded down the alley, sending dust and debris and hot air at them. He had to get her out fast. He removed the pipe first, using his spare rope to pull it off. Finally, he saw a way to get the boulder-like piece of concrete off of her.
She screamed out in pain and Mahmoud prayed that the approaching footsteps belonged to friends, not one of the black-clad figures. Finally, the woman was free to move around. One of her arms looked broken. When Hannah took that First Aid course Mahmoud was going to ask her to teach him. The fire was spreading dangerously close.
He pulled a bandage out of his pocket and tied the woman’s arm firmly to her upper body so that it would, at least, stop moving around painfully. She did not complain, and then, with a hand from Mahmoud, she was able to get to her feet. They stumbled out of the burning alleyway and he began to lead her towards the Hospital, but she shook her head and scanned the battle-site.
“Whoever it is,” Mahmoud said urgently, “my friends and I will get them to safety and you’ll see them soon…”
The woman shook her head obstinately. “I won’t leave without her. She’s just a little girl.”
Mahmoud nodded understandingly, leading the woman into a half-sheltered alcove from which they could safely look for her daughter. The screams and fires were almost overwhelming, but they were nothing to the mad, cackling laughter of one of the hooded figures; a female. Mahmoud shook his head, wondering how anyone could reach this level of cruel insanity.
Finally, the injured woman called out, pointing towards a crying, dust-covered little girl. She was younger than Mahmoud’s sister Yasmine. She was standing cornered, her back to a wall, and her eyes fixed fearfully on one of the black-clad figures. Mahmoud ran. So did the girl’s mother.
He could no longer see anything, except the tiny girl he had to save. In his mind, over and over, the images of the people he had not been able to save whizzed by. He stepped in something hot. Someone screamed. Something heavy pulled him down.
Emmett’s voice penetrated Mahmoud’s hazy mind, but his words were incomprehensible. Someone pulled Mahmoud back to his feet. He looked around and saw the bespectacled man supporting the mother as she struggled to remain standing, to move forward.
Jeremiah got there first. He had a few seconds in which to act. He was much bigger than the black-clad figure and had taken her by surprise, if he struck now he might have a chance of killing or seriously injuring her. But the little girl was shaking in fear now. She would not survive a confrontation.
Jeremiah lifted her up into his arms and, completely ignoring the hooded, black-clad woman, he tossed the girl to Mahmoud. Mahmoud stumbled back a little; the warning cry dying in his voice as, in a flash of green, his friend fell to the ground, dead.
People still screamed all around. Things were exploding. Black-clad figures were laughing and children were running wildly for cover. Firefighters had arrived. The little girl in his arms was sobbing. Noise and light and pain all around, but to Mahmoud the world had come to a grinding halt. He could not move or react. He saw Emmett throw himself on Jeremiah’s body, yelling like an animal in pain.
Someone tugged at the girl in his arms. Mahmoud looked up to come face to face with a familiar looking firefighter. He loosed his hold on the girl and the firefighter took her gently into his arms, allowing her to put her arms around her injured, frightened looking mother, before he led them both away to safety.
Stumbling across the rubble, Mahmoud came to stand over Emmett and Jeremiah. “I’m sorry,” Emmett was sobbing. “I didn’t mean… I didn’t understand. You were right. You were right. You were right. I’m so sorry, Jeremiah.”
Many minutes later the battle died down and more people were on hand to help clear away the rubble and take the injured to hospital. To take the dead away. A few men were picking their way through the rubble towards the boys. Emmett allowed someone to pull him away and they measured a long piece of wood against Jeremiah’s body to see if it would do for a stretcher. An old man that Mahmoud had bandaged earlier tonight was eyeing him with a frown.
Emmett grabbed Mahmoud’s arm. “I’m sorry, Mat,” he whispered.
“Mahmoud,” the boy corrected him, for the first time. No matter what he did to disown that foreign sounding name, to fit in, no matter how often they saw him helping others and doing normal things, people would still frown at him. His parents had given him that name and they had died. Little Liam had loved to say it, pronouncing it carefully and perfectly every time, and he had died. Jeremiah had known, and befriended him, by that name, had told him to be proud of it, and now he was lying there dead. Mahmoud was not going to pretend to be anything else now, just himself.
“We should say something,” someone said. There was a circle around the body.
“We can’t wash him,” someone else whispered.
“It doesn’t matter,” Mahmoud spoke up, “he died a hero, saving a little girl’s life. He should carry the blood and ash and dirt of this battle to the next world proudly.”
Emmett was looking searchingly at him now. “They don’t wash martyrs in your religion, do they?” he said, more than one question in his voice.
“No,” Mahmoud agreed, a little taken aback that Emmett knew this, that he knew anything, about Mahmoud’s faith, “they don’t.”
“What do they say, then, when someone dies a martyr?”
Mahmoud looked around at the many faces that stood attentively around him now. The frowning man was still frowning, but he was only one, the others were too overwhelmed by the enormity of death to have to time to frown at the living. The boy took a deep breath and began to recite the few verses that he could remember of the Quran, letting his voice wash over the pain in his chest and making an effort to sing it as beautifully as he possibly could, for his friend.
He saw the frowning man shake his head and leave the circle, but Mahmoud focused his eyes on his dead friend’s body, trying to remember what he looked like before they carried him away to be buried, and soon there was nothing left except the scarred face of his fallen friend and the words he was sending out against the dark.
