The BHA’s assessment center had three floors of function and one floor of waiting, and on any given Monday, the waiting floor was doing most of the work.
Harry had been in Assessment Room 4 for six minutes when the first assessor looked up from his clipboard and said, “Right. So you understand why we asked you to come in person rather than doing this remotely.”
“Because my last registered assessment was four years ago and the medical records on file are inconsistent with my current presentation,” Harry said. “I’d have flagged it too.”
The assessor, a compact man in his fifties named Carmichael, according to his badge, set the clipboard down with the expression of someone who’d been ready for pushback and was now recalibrating. The second assessor, a younger woman with short hair and a tablet, didn’t look up from what she was typing.
“We’re not suggesting anything irregular,” Carmichael said carefully.
“I didn’t think you were. I’m just acknowledging it’s an odd file.”
The room was a standard assessment layout: a cleared combat space about fifteen metres square, monitoring equipment along one wall, a shielded observation window where two more BHA staff were presumably watching. The floor had scuff marks from years of combat tests, and the walls had taken a fair amount of punishment over the years and been repaired with the same cheerful indifference to aesthetics as everything else in the building. On the way in, Harry had passed a bulletin board still displaying a notice about September’s schedule adjustments.
“We’ll start with the physical baseline,” the woman said, still not looking up. “Standard protocol. Strength index, agility response, endurance markers. Then magic pool calibration, then the combat trial.”
“Fine.”
“You’ll want to remove your wand holster for the initial physical.”
Harry did. The woman finally looked up when he set the holster on the side table, glancing at the Shadowsteel Wand with a look that was meant to be professional but did not quite manage it. It was the wand. People always looked at the wand.
“Interesting piece,” she said.
“Gift,” Harry said, which was close enough to true.
The physical tests were first. He’d spent Sunday evening deciding exactly how much to show. The answer he’d landed on was enough to justify D-Rank solidly, maybe push toward the low end of C if the assessors were generous, and no more. His actual numbers at full effort would put him comfortably at C-Rank and potentially draw scrutiny he wasn’t ready for. E-Rank to D-Rank with a documented core injury on his file was unusual but explicable. E-Rank to C-Rank would be a different conversation entirely, the kind where people started pulling older records and asking about the months in between.
So he held back. Not obviously. Not in a way a trained assessor would clock as sandbagging. He let his strength markers come in at the D-Rank threshold and stay there; his agility tests landed in the upper D-Rank range. He paced his effort the way he’d learned to pace magic consumption in a long dungeon run: consistent, controlled, and calibrated to a ceiling he’d set in advance.
The endurance test was the hardest to manage. His stamina had improved more noticeably than his strength, and the markers were harder to fake than pure output. He ended up letting it come in slightly high, D-Rank trending toward C, and when Carmichael noted it with a slight raise of eyebrows, Harry said, “I’ve been running. Canal path, mostly. Daily.” Which was true.
“That explains the discrepancy,” Carmichael said, not sounding entirely certain it did.
The magic calibration was simpler. He drew from his pool at the level his original core architecture would have managed before the system rebuilt it, held that ceiling consistently through the standard spellwork sequence. The woman ran it twice, compared the numbers, and made a note on her tablet. He’d dropped his pool output to roughly sixty percent of its actual capacity, which still came in above the average D-Rank benchmark but not alarmingly so.
“Your magic signature is unusual,” the woman said, frowning at her tablet.
“The core injury,” Harry said. “The repair wasn’t standard, apparently. My healer at the time said it might read differently on monitoring equipment.”
“What healer?”
“She retired. Moved to the Highlands about a year ago.” This was entirely fabricated, and Harry said it with the comfortable ease of someone who’d learned that the most convincing lies were the ones you delivered without adjusting your expression. “I can try to track down a forwarding contact if it’s necessary.”
The woman looked at him for a moment, then back at her tablet, then made another note. “Not necessary at this stage.”
Stage. He filed that away.
He stood in the assessment room while Carmichael wrote something on his clipboard and thought about nothing in particular. He’d decided on Saturday evening that the time for second-guessing the approach was before you walked in, not during. During was for execution.
The combat trial was last. They gave him a standard opponent: a BHA training construct calibrated to C-Rank resistance, essentially a heavily shielded animated target with a basic self-defence routine designed to challenge D-Rank candidates without flattening them outright. He dispatched it in forty-three seconds using a combination of standard spellwork and one well-placed Reducto aimed at the joint in its shielding rather than the main body. Efficient without being showy. He kept the shadow energy entirely out of it, ran the whole fight on standard magic, and felt the absence of it the way you felt the absence of something you’d got accustomed to relying on. Manageable. He’d known it would be.
Carmichael watched without expression. The woman was typing again.
“Right,” Carmichael said, when the construct dissolved. “We’ll need about fifteen minutes to tabulate. If you want to wait in the corridor.”
“Of course.”
xXx
Remus was still in the waiting area, the travel mug now empty, talking to the teenager in the way he had of talking to young people in obvious distress, which was quietly and without making a performance of noticing the distress. The teenager was less stiff than before. Harry sat in his chair and looked at the ceiling.
They’d sat in companionable quiet for the ten minutes before the assessor came out to collect him. Remus had offered the travel mug, and Harry had taken a sip and handed it back, and that had been the whole of it. It was the most useful kind of company.
“How’d it go?” Remus asked, without breaking off the low-level conversation he was having with the kid about, apparently, what a Guild tryout actually looked like on the day.
“Fine. Waiting on the result.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It went fine.”
Remus looked at him with the patient expression of someone who had long since accepted that fine was the word Harry used when he meant everything from actually fine to catastrophically unresolved but currently functional. He let it stand and went back to the teenager.
The door opened fifteen minutes later, nearly exactly on schedule. Carmichael came out with his clipboard and the professional blankness of a man who did this three times a day, and said, “Potter. D-Rank, confirmed. Significant improvement from your previous E-Rank assessment, which we’ve noted in your file as consistent with core recovery and intensive training regimen.”
“Thank you.”
“We’ve also flagged your file for a follow-up calibration in ninety days. Standard procedure for assessments that show greater-than-expected progression.” He said it pleasantly, as if he were describing a scheduling courtesy rather than a monitoring flag. “Nothing to be concerned about. Just a check-in.”
“Of course. That’s fine.” Harry held eye contact and kept his expression neutral. “Happy to come back.”
Carmichael gave a small nod and went back through the door. The woman didn’t reappear.
Remus waited until the door had fully closed. “D-Rank.”
“Told you it went fine.”
“You were E-Rank three weeks ago, Harry.”
“Almost four.” He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair. “I’ve been working hard.”
Remus opened his mouth, closed it, and visibly decided that some things were true enough to let stand. “The jump will raise eyebrows.”
“I know. They’ve already scheduled a follow-up.”
“What are you planning to do about that?”
“Show up in ninety days and do the same thing.” Harry glanced at him. “The numbers are what they are. D-Rank is accurate. More than accurate.” That was also true, technically. “I’m not asking the BHA to believe anything that isn’t backed up by what they’ve just measured.”
“There’s a difference between what they measured and what’s true.”
“There usually is,” Harry said, and Remus gave him a look that was somewhere between exasperated and resigned, which was a reasonable response.
They walked out into the corridor, and that was when Harry nearly walked directly into the two people coming around the corner from the assessment wing’s far end.
xXx
The first thing he noticed was the hair.
It was bright pink. Not pink the way a dye job was pink, not a wig, not a glamour cast over something natural. Actually pink, the colour shifting slightly at the edges as the woman moved, alive in a way that dye couldn’t replicate. She was about his height, wearing BHA hunter gear in deep red and gold, and she was walking at the speed of someone running slightly late to something and refusing to acknowledge it. She almost walked into him and sidestepped at the last second with the ease of someone with very good spatial awareness.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said, already moving. Then she stopped. “Wait. Were you just in Room 4?”
“Yes.”
She turned around fully. Brown eyes, doing active work, cataloguing and curious at once. “You’re the E to D jump? Carmichael was just talking about you in the hall.”
“That was fast.”
“Assessors talk,” she said, with the cheerful confidence of someone who’d known assessors professionally for long enough that their habits were entirely predictable. “Was it a clean test?”
“It went fine.”
She grinned. Wide, immediately engaging, the kind that made you want to grin back. Harry didn’t, but it was a near thing. “Very diplomatic. I like it.” She stuck out a hand. “Tonks. Just Tonks, if you know what’s good for you.”
Harry shook it. “Harry Potter.”
The name didn’t produce the flinch of recognition that it still occasionally did from people who’d been paying close attention during the War. She was young enough that she’d likely been a student for the last part of it, and Hunter culture ran on different currency than old Ministry connections. She filed his name with a slight tilt of her head, like she was checking it against something, and apparently came up empty.
“Have heard of you, but don’t know you,” she said, which seemed to be her way of expressing this.
“That’s usually how first meetings work.”
“Fair enough.” She looked at him with the direct attention of someone who read people as a professional habit, and there was something in it, in the specific quality of that look, that went beyond ordinary curiosity. He had the distinct impression she was seeing more than one layer. He kept his expression neutral and let her look.
Then she tilted her head, and something crossed her face. Not confusion exactly, but the expression of someone who’d encountered a familiar word in a language they didn’t speak and was trying to work out the translation. It lasted about two seconds and then cleared, replaced by something curious and careful.
“Hm,” she said.
“Something wrong?”
“No, nothing wrong.” She met his eyes again. “Just interesting.”
The hair shifted at the edges when she moved, he noticed. Not the wind, nothing external. Just movement. Pink deepening slightly at the tips when she tilted her head, then evening back out. He watched it happen without entirely meaning to, and she caught him looking and smiled.
“Metamorphic ability,” she said, matter-of-fact. “It’s not a charm.”
“I figured it wasn’t a charm.” The pink shifted again when she moved her head, a ripple of colour that looked like nothing he’d seen in three years of Hunter work. “Does it cost you anything? Running it constantly like that?”
“Nothing at all. It’s just what my hair does.” She said it with a slight shrug, not embarrassed, not performing. Like someone describing their eye colour. “The rest of it takes a bit more effort. Facial restructuring, height, that sort of thing. But the hair runs on its own.” She tilted her head at him with the curious expression again. “Why, does it bother you?”
“No. I find it interesting, actually.”
She looked pleased by that in a straightforward way, no performance in it either. “Most people either find it creepy or don’t know what to say about it. The creepy ones are the boring ones. You can ask, if you want, I don’t mind.”
“Does the colour choice happen deliberately?”
“Mostly. Sometimes not.” She glanced upward in the direction of her own hair, which was a gesture he’d never seen anyone make before. “The mood ones happen a bit on their own. Pink’s usually when I’m in a good mood. Red when I’m concentrating. When I was a teenager it used to go orange when I was embarrassed and my mum thought it was hilarious.” She paused. “It still does that, occasionally. Very occasionally.”
Harry didn’t smile, but he nearly did.
He thought, briefly, about what it must be like to have an ability that reflected your internal state, whether you wanted it to or not. Useful in some ways. Inconvenient for others. He’d spent years keeping his expression neutral in difficult rooms, had made it into something like a skill. He wondered how much harder that was when your hair was doing its own commentary in the background.
As if to illustrate the point, the pink deepened slightly at the tips when she laughed at something she was apparently thinking of, then evened back out.
The other person who’d come around the corner had stopped a few feet back. Harry had clocked him there from the first and was letting the conversation run before turning to face it, which was a habit he’d developed in dungeons: finish the assessment you’re in the middle of before starting a new one.
Tall, roughly his own age, blond hair, and cheekbones that looked like they’d been specifically arranged to be noticed in a room. He was looking at Harry with an expression that was already tilting toward contemptuous, and the expression came easily to him, as if he wore it often enough that it came on reflexively.
“Tonks,” the blond man said, with the tone of someone addressing a colleague he found mildly tedious. “We’re late.”
“Two minutes.” She waved a hand at him without turning. “I was just talking to the new D-Rank.”
The blond man looked Harry over then, top to bottom, making evaluations quickly, and said, “Potter?”
Harry looked at him. “Do we know each other?”
“No.” The answer was immediate and flat, his expression unreadable. “Draco Malfoy. Serpent Guild.”
Harry was quiet for a second and let it settle. Draco Malfoy. He’d have been at Hogwarts at the same time, one of Voldemort’s circle’s second generation, though the post-War files had cleared his family of direct involvement. He’d been largely a child by the time the actual killing started. He’d apparently come out of it and gone into hunting, which was either making something of himself or running from something, and those two options had never been mutually exclusive.
“Serpent Guild,” Harry repeated. The same guild that the S-Rank Daphne Greengrass was from.
Malfoy’s chin came up slightly. “Problem?”
“No.”
Malfoy looked at him for a moment, having expected pushback. “D-Rank,” he said eventually. “Significant jump from E, according to Carmichael.”
“News travels fast.”
“It does, in certain circles.” A deliberate pause. “You were clearing C-Rank zones as an E-Rank Hunter. That’s in your BHA file.”
“As an investigation I assisted with. Nothing was confirmed about the zone classification.”
“The BHA’s language is always careful,” Malfoy said. “The implication isn’t.” He adjusted the cuff of his jacket. “E-Rank Hunters don’t clear C-Rank zones and post D-Rank numbers at reassessment. That’s an irregular pattern. The BHA will notice eventually, even if they filed it neatly today.”
“Is there a point in here somewhere?”
Malfoy’s expression sharpened, and for a moment something underneath the contempt was briefly visible: sharper, more alert, genuinely engaged. It lasted a fraction of a second before the other expression settled back. “The point is that irregular patterns attract attention. Attention in the Hunter world comes from directions that aren’t always helpful to whoever’s at the center of it. I’m noting it.”
Harry looked at him steadily. “That’s friendly advice from someone I met thirty seconds ago.”
“I said accurate, not friendly.” Malfoy held his gaze for a moment. “I don’t particularly do friendly. Keep your head down until you know what you’re dealing with. That’s all I’m saying.”
He didn’t wait for a response. He turned to Tonks, having said what he wanted to say and ready to move on.
Tonks had been watching the exchange with the expression of someone following a match and making private predictions about the outcome. “Right,” she said, unbothered. She pointed at Harry, one finger, quick. “Don’t be a stranger.” And then, in Malfoy’s direction: “And if you do the dramatic cuff adjustment thing in the meeting again, I’m changing your hair without asking.”
Malfoy said something under his breath and walked away. Tonks grinned at Harry once more and followed.
Harry watched them round the corner, and then the corridor was quiet again.
Remus had been standing a step behind him throughout. He waited, and then said, “That was Draco Malfoy.”
“I know.”
“He gave you useful information.”
“He did. Irritatingly.”
“And Tonks was reading you.”
“I know. I felt it.”
“And?”
“I don’t know.” Harry started toward the stairs.
Remus fell into step with him. “It could be a problem if it gets back to the wrong people.”
“It’ll get back to her Guild first. That’s already happening.”
“The Phoenix Guild.” Remus thought about that. “They’d be interested in you, and not in the way that’s useful to you.”
“It’s been one morning,” Harry said. “Let me get something to eat before I start worrying about Guild politics.”
They went down the stairs and out into the rain.
Outside, the drizzle was still coming down. They walked to the tube without discussing it, which was another thing about Remus that Harry had always appreciated: he didn’t fill the silence out of nerves.
On the platform, waiting, Remus said, “Malfoy was right, by the way.”
“I know.”
“The irregular pattern thing. You are going to need to manage that.”
“I know.” The train came in, warm air rushing ahead of it. “I’ve got ninety days before the follow-up. That’s time enough to work out what the story looks like.”
“What is the story?”
Harry thought about that as they got on. The story was: an injured Hunter with a documented fractured core spends three years at E-Rank, grinds hard after some unspecified motivating event, and recovers to D-Rank. It was true in its broad shape. The details inside it were something else, but the BHA’s follow-up would be looking at numbers, not details. His numbers would have to stay consistent, which meant continuing to run at below his actual capacity in every assessment for the foreseeable future.
“Recovery arc,” he said. “Consistent training, gradual improvement. Nothing dramatic at the next assessment.”
Remus looked at him with the expression that meant he was deciding whether this was good enough or whether he needed to say the thing he was actually thinking. He was quiet for one stop and then said, “You’re going to have to tell me what actually happened. Not all of it, maybe. But something.”
Harry looked at the map on the wall of the carriage. “I know,” he said. “When I’ve worked out how.”
“That’s not nothing,” Remus said, after a moment.
“No,” Harry said. “It’s not.”
They parted at the interchange, Remus going north, Harry going east, and the doors closed between them.
xXx
The letter arrived that afternoon.
He was making tea when it came through the slot in his door with the formal thud of a magically reinforced post. Harry looked at it from the kitchen doorway for a moment before picking it up.
PHOENIX GUILD RECRUITMENT DIVISION LONDON CHAPTER
He opened it.
Two pages on high-quality paper, the Guild’s crest at the top, the kind of professional language that costs someone’s time to calibrate carefully. He read it while his kettle finished boiling.
They were offering him a place as a D-Rank affiliated member. Standard monthly retainer of three hundred and forty Galleons against dungeon clearance earnings. Full access to the Guild’s equipment inventory and healing facilities. Team placement with structured mentorship from senior members, and what the letter called significant advancement opportunities based on performance. The salary figure was underlined, once, in a way that wasn’t quite subtle.
Harry folded the letter and put it on the counter.
He thought about Tonks and that two-second expression in the BHA corridor. Her coming back to her Guild, being asked what she’d seen, telling them something that had made the recruitment division move fast enough to have a letter through his door by afternoon post. They were efficient. He’d give them that.
He poured his tea and stood at the kitchen window. Below, Camden Market was doing its Tuesday evening thing: slow foot traffic, a few food stalls still open, and the canal reflecting the lights of the bridge.
Three hundred and forty Galleons a month. Before the last two weeks, that number would have made him sit down. It was more than triple what he’d been earning running E-Rank contracts. Before the system, before the Forbidden Forest dungeon, before the Job Change Quest and the Penalty Zone, and the Shadow Knight’s sword arm going down, it would have felt like an answer to something urgent. He’d have spent twenty minutes thinking about it and then written an acceptance before the feeling had time to cool.
The problem was that he’d spent the last fortnight being something else entirely, and he knew the difference now in a way he hadn’t before.
Solo work. His decisions, his timing, his targets. Wake up, check the system, move. He took the dungeons he wanted, left the ones that didn’t interest him, and stayed underground in the literal sense. He extracted shadow soldiers from creatures nobody in the BHA had a classification for. He ran Penalty Zone fights at midnight in his pajamas and leveled up three times by accident and came home and laughed about it in his kitchen, properly, for the first time in months. He answered to nobody. He was learning what he was capable of at a pace he couldn’t have managed inside a Guild structure, because Guild structures came with schedules and observers and the kind of collective expectations that had a way of becoming ceilings before you’d noticed they were there.
He was a D-Rank Hunter with C-Rank stats, a hidden class, twelve shadow soldiers, and a wand nobody could identify. If he walked into the Phoenix Guild as their new affiliated member, he’d be managing all of that inside an organization that paid close attention to its people. Tonks had been reading him on a first meeting in a BHA corridor. What would six months of professional proximity produce?
The retainer was flattering. He could admit that honestly. Three forty a month for D-Rank work was a good number, and a half-hour ago, he’d have been tempted by it. But he’d been running solo for two weeks and already clearing more than that from freelance contracts, working at his own pace, keeping the full clearance fee without splitting it. The money wasn’t the reason to say no. It was just the most obvious one to point at.
Malfoy’s advice was sitting in the back of his head, which was irritating. Keep your head down until you know what you’re dealing with. The man had been contemptuous for the entire conversation and still managed to say the one useful thing in it. Harry had met that type before. They were easier to deal with than people who were pleasant and said nothing.
He found paper and wrote back. Four drafts before the tone landed right. Appreciative without apologetic, straightforward without the kind of explaining that made refusals sound like negotiations.
He thanked them for the offer, said the Guild came with a strong reputation that was clearly deserved, and declined. He noted that he was currently pursuing an independent track and would likely be reassessing his long-term Guild options once his rank and situation were more settled. He wished them well. He signed it. He reread it and didn’t change anything.
Then he put it in an envelope, addressed it, and set it by the door.
He stood in his kitchen with his tea and the quiet of a Camden evening around him and felt, with a clarity that surprised him slightly, entirely settled about it.
What he’d had before was a career with a ceiling and a life that fit inside it and three years of careful adjustment to both. What he had now was something he was still figuring out. He needed room to figure it out.
The Phoenix Guild, with their efficient recruitment arm and their shrewd A-Ranks, and their interest was precisely the kind of organization that would close that room down on him professionally, with good intentions and a retainer with a double underline, and he wasn’t going to let that happen.
He finished his tea, rinsed the mug, and went to do the Daily Quest before midnight.
xXx
The following morning, he was in the Knockturn Alley branch of the Vault, an organisation halfway between a private bank and an archive that catered specifically to independent Hunters, when Tonks appeared at the other end of the reading room.
He noticed her because of the hair. It was dark red today rather than pink, pulled back practically, the colour chosen in a way that suggested she’d considered going sensible and then done it anyway. She was carrying a stack of BHA assessment records that she clearly hadn’t asked for help with and was paying for that decision in the form of a visible wobble every time she turned a corner.
She saw him about three seconds after he saw her.
“You,” she said. Then the stack wobbled dangerously, and she caught it and set it down on the nearest flat surface, which happened to be a desk currently in use. The Hunter at that desk looked up. “Sorry, one second.” She looked back at Harry. “You declined.”
“I did.”
“That was fast.”
“I didn’t need a lot of time.”
She pulled out the nearest chair at the occupied desk, sat in it without asking, and looked at him with the direct attention she’d had in the BHA corridor. The Hunter at the desk made a quiet noise, collected his papers, and moved. Tonks watched him go without apparent guilt.
“The Guild was genuinely interested,” she said.
“I could tell from the letter.”
“I mentioned you. I’ll be straight about that.” She said it without apology. “I sensed something about you. I told them it was unusual. They asked me to be more specific and I said I couldn’t, because I couldn’t.”
“Which made them more interested.”
“Obviously. Unusual is currency in Guild recruitment.” She folded her hands on the desk. “Can I ask you something directly?”
“You can ask.”
“Do you know what your magic is doing?”
Harry held her gaze. “I know it registers differently. I’m still working out exactly why.” All of that was true. He let it sit without adding to it.
Tonks studied him for a long moment, and he felt the same faint pressure of active perception from the corridor, the sense of something looking at more than one layer simultaneously. She’d gone still in a way she hadn’t been before, the same quality of attention she’d had in the corridor when the expression had crossed her face. He held it, didn’t move, let her look at whatever she was looking at. He was curious about what she saw. He didn’t ask.
“There it is again,” she said, mostly to herself. Then, to him: “It’s layered. Like there are two things running at once, and they’re not separate, but they’re distinct. The outer layer is roughly D-Rank standard. The layer underneath it is something I’ve never seen.”
“In years of magical reading.”
“In years of magical reading.” She sat back. “I’ve seen B-Rank Hunters hiding their output. Integration ability sets that don’t fit anything in the BHA catalogue. A bloke in Manchester last year who’d apparently developed something like temporal perception and the BHA’s got a whole file on him they’re very coy about.” She paused. “I’ve never seen something structured like yours. And I’ve been thinking about it since yesterday.”
“I can’t fully explain it,” Harry said. “I’m still working out the mechanics.”
It was the most honest thing he’d said to anyone about any of this since the conversation with Remus in the coffee shop. He watched her receive it and decide not to push, which was its own kind of intelligence.
“The Guild wanted you because they thought you might be at the beginning of something significant,” she said. “The aura structure suggests early activation, apparently. The kind of pattern that shows up in Hunters right before a major jump.” She paused. “That’s the part they’d find useful.”
“I know.”
“And you still said no.”
“I’m not ready for that kind of attention yet.”
She was quiet for a moment, and then she smiled. “Fair enough,” she said. She stood and recollected her stack of records, redistributing the weight mid-conversation. “For what it’s worth, I find the magic thing genuinely interesting. Not in the Guild-recruitment way. In the actual way.”
“What’s the distinction?”
“The Guild finds it interesting because it suggests capacity. I find it interesting because I can’t explain it, and that doesn’t happen to me often.” She paused at the end of the desk. “The offer stands for ninety days if you change your mind.”
“I won’t.”
“Probably not.” There was no challenge in it. “Don’t get yourself killed being independent.”
“That’s the plan.”
“Solid plan.” She picked up the stack and headed for the door, slightly too fast for the space, dark red hair disappearing around the corner. The Hunter who’d moved his papers came back to his desk, looked at Harry with mild reproach, and sat back down without comment.
Harry opened the research archive he’d come for and got to work.
xXx
He thought about the hair on the walk back to Camden.
Pink in the BHA center, dark red in the Vault, shifting slightly at the edges when she moved, alive in a way that wasn’t cosmetic. She’d described it as just what my hair does, the way you described your eye color, not embarrassed, not performing. He’d watched it happen and found it fascinating in a way that surprised him a little, because he didn’t, as a general rule, find things fascinating. He found them useful or not useful. He found some things worth understanding. Fascinating was a different category.
He’d wanted to ask her more questions. That was also unusual. Asking about someone’s ability set in a first conversation was bad Hunter etiquette, about as rude as asking their income, and he’d stopped himself once already. She’d offered, in the corridor, which had opened the door, and then Malfoy had arrived, and the conversation had gone somewhere else entirely, and now he’d spent two exchanges with her talking about his own magical aura instead.
He reached his door and let himself in.
The Daily Quest was already done, and he was looking through the gates.
D-Rank Hunters got a slightly wider selection than E-Rank, more zone variety, tougher ones, which meant better EXP scaling, access to the BHA’s flagged contract list that they reserved for registered D and above. He scrolled through them and picked a C-Rank mislabeled as D in Stratford, because the BHA was doing that more than they’d admit, and he’d learned to read the zone descriptions for the giveaways. More EXP, comparable risk. The work was the same.
He’d been at D-Rank for approximately eighteen hours. He had ninety days before the follow-up assessment and a class the BHA didn’t know he had, and twelve shadow soldiers in the pool and a monthly income already higher than the Phoenix Guild’s retainer because he was running zones solo and keeping the full clearance fee. Three hundred and forty Galleons had felt like a significant number until he’d done the arithmetic on what he was actually making, and then it had felt like a number designed for someone who wasn’t paying close enough attention.
He grabbed his holster, checked the Shadowsteel Wand out of habit, and went out.
The canal glittered on his left as he walked north through the evening. He didn’t think about the Guild offer. He didn’t think about Malfoy’s accurate advice. He thought, briefly and without meaning to, about Tonks saying I find it interesting because I can’t explain it, and that doesn’t happen to me often, and the matter-of-fact way she’d said it, like a person who was accustomed to having explanations for things and had decided, after a moment, to find the absence of one interesting rather than alarming.
He let the thought go before it became something he needed to categorize. She was an A-Rank Phoenix Guild Hunter with an aura-reading ability and quite a lot of experience, and apparently, the developing habit of showing up in the same places he was using. Those were facts, and they were enough for now. They didn’t need to be more than facts yet.
He had a dungeon to run. The Stratford gate timer was already counting down, and it wasn’t going to clear itself.