The spell hit the stone dummy so hard its head came clean off.
Harry didn’t stop. He whipped his wand sideways and sent the next one into the practice target at the far end of the Room of Requirement, and the impact cratered the chest of it in a way that no training dummy was supposed to crater. The room had conjured sixteen of them when he’d walked in twenty minutes ago. Thirteen were already rubble.
Lord Slytherin will take his seat.
He threw another curse. The dummy’s arm flew off.
He hadn’t eaten his breakfast. The plate had still been in front of him when he’d folded the paper, stood up from the Gryffindor table without a word to James or Sirius, and walked, very steadily, very carefully, out of the Great Hall. He’d been walking that way ever since — steady, careful — and his hands hadn’t stopped shaking since the corridor.
Ancient Bloodline Returns to British Magical Governance After Centuries of Absence.
“Confringo!”
The silent curse hit the fourteenth dummy, and it exploded at the midsection. Harry stepped over the rubble without looking at it.
He’d known Tom would adapt. He had always known that. You didn’t spend a lifetime thinking about Voldemort, studying him, preparing for him, without understanding that the man’s greatest weapon was not any single spell or any army. It was his mind. His willingness to flip the board when the game stopped working in his favor. Harry had planned for adaptation. He had planned for new alliances, for escalation, for darker magic, for a dozen things.
He had not planned for this.
“Reducto! Reducto! Reducto!”
The fifteenth dummy shattered in sections. Stone chips skittered across the floor and struck the walls. Harry barely felt the debris glancing off his robes.
The article had been thorough. Nauseatingly thorough. The journalist had interviewed six Wizengamot members who had all said some variation of the same thing — remarkable man, very well-informed, a moderate conservative presence, a constructive voice — and every single one of those phrases made Harry want to put his fist through something. Tom had walked into the Wizengamot and within an hour had made Barty Crouch feel assessed and approved and apparently not minding it. Had made Bagnold feel like she’d agreed to something she hadn’t caught. Had made all the rest of them feel, for the first time perhaps, that they had a purpose and a plan and a future.
He is performing moderation with the precision of a master craftsman.
Harry stopped moving.
That phrase hadn’t been in the Prophet. That had been his own thought, formed in the five minutes he’d spent standing in the corridor outside the Great Hall re-reading the article until he’d memorized it. He’d recognized the strategy the moment he’d seen it. That was almost worse. Recognizing it didn’t help. Understanding it completely did not give him a single workable counter, because the counter to a perfectly executed long game was another perfectly executed long game, and Tom had just moved first and established himself in a position that Harry could not attack without evidence he didn’t have.
He breathed out through his nose. His wand was still up. He lowered it slowly.
The Room of Requirement looked like a demolition site. Fifteen destroyed practice dummies, cracked stone across the floor in a rough semicircle in front of where he was standing, and the sixteenth dummy standing intact at the far end of the room looking faintly apologetic about it. Harry stared at it for a moment. Then he raised his wand again.
“Bombarda Maxima.”
The sixteenth dummy ceased to exist as a coherent object.
The sound of it was still echoing off the walls when he heard the door.
He didn’t look. The crack and rumble of settling debris filled the room, and he kept his eyes on the wreckage at the far wall. He knew, distantly, that someone had come in. He didn’t particularly care who. If it was Dumbledore, he’d deal with it. He’d deal with anything right now. That was the problem. He wanted something to deal with that he could actually deal with, and instead he had Tom Riddle sitting in the Wizengamot wearing a name like a mask and shaking hands with the people who ran the country.
Narcissa and Bellatrix stood in the doorway.
They had stopped just inside the entrance. He didn’t need to look at them to know they were there — he could feel them, the same way he always could in a room, that particular awareness that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the fact that they were the two people in the world who paid the closest attention to him. For a moment neither of them moved. He could feel them taking in the room. The rubble. The scorch marks on the floor where the Confringo had gone wide. The fact that he was standing alone in the middle of all of it, completely still, with his wand at his side.
He heard Bellatrix exhale. A small sound, almost inaudible.
He heard Narcissa’s robes shift as she moved.
He still didn’t turn around. He was watching the far wall, where the last of the dust from the Bombarda Maxima was still drifting down through the air. He was being, he knew, completely unreasonable. He knew that. He was also standing in a room he had just systematically dismantled because he’d needed somewhere to put the thing in his chest that had no other outlet, and he wasn’t quite ready to stop being unreasonable yet.
They were almost at him before he registered how close they’d gotten. Narcissa’s hand touched his back — gentle, between his shoulder blades — and Harry spun around.
His wand came up before he’d made the decision to raise it.
He pointed it directly at them. Both of them. Neither of them flinched. Narcissa’s hand was still slightly raised, outstretched, where it had been a half-second ago when it was on his back. Bellatrix had one hand loose at her side and was watching him with her dark eyes completely steady. They both just looked at him. Not afraid. Not backing up. Just watching, with absolute patience. He knew they had decided they were going to wait as long as it took.
Harry looked back.
His hand was still shaking. He could see it. He could feel the tension in his own wrist, in his forearm, and he could see the wand trembling faintly and he knew it had nothing to do with them and everything to do with the thing he’d been doing for twenty minutes before they walked in. He was breathing hard. He hadn’t noticed that either.
Slowly, Narcissa lowered her outstretched hand. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t look away from his face.
Harry let out a long breath and lowered his wand.
He didn’t get much further than that before Narcissa stepped forward and put her arms around him. Bellatrix came in from the other side, wrapping her arms around him as well, and for a moment he just stood there between them with his wand hanging from his fingers and his forehead pressed to the top of Narcissa’s head and breathed.
Bellatrix’s arms tightened around him from behind. “You’re an absolute menace,” she said into his shoulder, quiet and without any real heat in it. “Do you have any idea what this room looks like?”
“I have some idea,” Harry said, and it came out rougher than he intended.
Narcissa pulled back just enough to look at his face. She searched it for a moment. Whatever she found there made her expression soften in a way that she mostly kept reserved for very private moments. “Come sit down,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re going to come sit down,” she repeated, with exactly the same tone, and it was the tone that brooked precisely no discussion.
She took his hand, and the room shifted around them. Harry felt it more than saw it — the quality of the light changing, the cold stone floor warming underfoot, and the air becoming less sharp. He looked up and the demolition site had given way to something else entirely. A deep, comfortable sofa had appeared. Low light. A small fire going in a grate that hadn’t been there thirty seconds ago. The scattered rubble was simply gone. The room had remade itself entirely around Narcissa’s want, and it had done it without him asking or directing anything, just because she had willed it.
He sat. They arranged themselves on either side of him, and nobody spoke for a moment, which was exactly the right thing.
“The article,” Narcissa said finally. It was not a question.
“The article,” Harry confirmed.
Bellatrix let out a breath from beside him. “We saw it at breakfast. Couldn’t get to you fast enough.” She paused. “Figured you’d need somewhere to break things first.”
“That’s not—“ He stopped. “You’re not wrong.”
“Never am,” she said, and under any other circumstances it would have made him smile.
Narcissa’s hand found his and held it. She waited.
Harry stared at the fire for a moment. He felt the words trying to organize themselves and mostly failing, which was itself an irritation. He was not, generally, someone who had difficulty organizing his thoughts. He had been doing it since he was very young, because there had never been anyone to do it for him, and the habit had stuck. Except apparently not today.
“He walked into the Wizengamot,” Harry said. “Sat in the Founders’ Seat. Spent an hour working the room and left having established himself as a moderate conservative with legitimate credentials and a perfectly reasonable agenda.” He paused. “Barty Crouch liked him.”
“Merlin,” Bellatrix muttered.
“Bagnold is already halfway to thinking he’d be a useful ally. He complimented her on a speech she gave fourteen months ago. He had it memorized.” Harry’s jaw worked. “He’s been planning this for a long time. This is not improvisation. This is Tom doing what Tom does when he decides the current approach isn’t working.”
Narcissa was quiet for a moment. “And Dumbledore?”
“I bet he knew who he was and couldn’t say a word about it.” Harry’s voice was flat. “Perfect documentation. Legitimate claim. The seat recognized him. What’s Dumbledore supposed to do, stand up in front of the full Wizengamot and say ‘that’s actually a Dark Lord’ with no evidence? Tom made sure of it.”
“Of course he did,” Narcissa murmured.
Harry leaned back against the sofa. The fire crackled in the grate. Bellatrix’s shoulder was warm against his, Narcissa was still holding his hand, and he let himself feel those things for a moment before continuing.
“He’s not coming at us the way he was. He’s done with battlefields, at least for now and at least directly. He’s going to take the Ministry apart from the inside and rebuild it in a shape that suits him, and he’s going to do it through committee appointments and legislative positions and procedural maneuvering, and every Auror and every Ministry official is going to be completely occupied by Silver Fangs and Lunar Liberation Front attacks while the real work happens quietly in meeting rooms.” He said it all very evenly. “Most of the lords are practically grateful to be in his presence. He’s using the old pureblood houses now as if their job is to play the politician and inherit the wreckage left by those who will do the dirty work, not do the dirty work themselves. He’s right. That’s exactly what they’re built for. He’s finally figured out how to use them properly.”
There was absolute silence in his wake.
Bellatrix shifted beside him. “That’s a bloody elegant plan, actually.”
“I know,” Harry said.
“Hate that I’m saying that.”
“So do I.”
Narcissa turned toward him slightly, her eyes calm and focused. “You’re frustrated because you didn’t anticipate this specific move,” she said. “Not because you can’t counter it.”
Harry looked at her sideways. He didn’t confirm or deny it.
“There’s a difference,” she continued. “You know there’s a difference.”
“I know,” he said again, quieter this time.
“Good.” She didn’t say it unkindly. “Because feeling blindsided is not the same as being beaten, and you’re sitting here treating it as if it is.”
Bellatrix snorted. “She’s right, you know. Although I’ll say it with less class.” She turned to look at him directly. “So what if he pulled a fast one? He’s clever, we all know he’s clever. So are you. He shifts strategy, we shift strategy. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.” She jabbed him lightly in the ribs with one finger. “Stop brooding like the war’s over before it even began. It’s not.”
“I’m not brooding,” Harry said.
“You blew up those training dummies like they were nothing and then you were pointing your wand at us when Cissy touched your shoulder.”
“That’s… a fair point.”
Bellatrix gave him a look that said she knew she was right and found it faintly satisfying. “You’ve beaten him before. In ways he never saw coming either. You managed that situation with Malfoy and his goons and permanently crippled his support base in a way that he could’ve never imagined. You’ve been building something, putting pieces in place, and none of that disappears because he walked into a room and charmed a few Ministry officials.” She paused. “He can play the long game. So can you. And you’ve got something he doesn’t.”
Harry looked at her. “What’s that?”
Bellatrix gestured between herself and Narcissa. “Us, you absolute idiot.”
Despite himself, Harry felt something loosen in his chest.
Narcissa squeezed his hand. “She’s right. We adapt. We always have.” There was no performance in it, no attempt to make it sound larger or more certain than she felt. She just said it as a fact, because to her it was one. “We know what he’s doing now. That’s more than we had this morning. We use that. We figure out who in the Wizengamot can be worked with, who can be warned, who won’t be susceptible to his approach. We start that now, not tomorrow.” She paused. “And just because he’s now chosen the diplomatic route, it doesn’t mean he’ll abandon his previous approach entirely. If he is taking the political route, it means he’s pulled the purebloods from the field of battle.”
Bellatrix hummed thoughtfully. “Which means if he does intend to attack and cause chaos, he’s chosen fodder.”
“People who will cause chaos for him, yes,” Harry nodded. “And if I’m not wrong about him, he will want to press his advantage immediately.”
“Which means he’s already got people who will cause chaos for him.” Narcissa muttered.
“Exactly,” Harry nodded. “Of course, this is all guesswork, but knowing him as much as I do, this is what I see happening. His fodder servants will begin attacking soon and he will use those attacks to consolidate power in the Ministry. The question is who…”
“Well, we’ll have to keep on the lookout for that. And when we do identify those people, their actions, what they do, where they go, and when… all of it will tell us something about his larger plan.”
Harry exhaled slowly. He looked at the fire.
“I know you feel like you’re behind,” Narcissa added, very quietly. “But you’re not. You know his mind better than anyone in the world. Use it.”
She and Bellatrix exchanged a look over his head, quick, almost imperceptible, and Bellatrix gave a small nod. Then she leaned against him properly, comfortable and calm.
“Right, so,” Bellatrix said in a more ordinary tone. “What’s the first move?”
Harry looked at the fire for another long moment. Then he looked at both of them.
“We find out what he promises various lords,” he said. “He will have to give them something specific, something with teeth. We find it out and we figure out how to complicate it.” He paused. “And we need a voice on the Wizengamot now. Now. Before they make their first move, if possible. If not, right after.”
Bellatrix gave him a sharp, satisfied smile. “That’s more like it.”
Harry felt the tight thing in his chest ease a little further.
He still wasn’t happy. He doubted he’d be happy for quite some time. But he looked at Narcissa on one side and Bellatrix on the other, and he thought about what she’d said — you’ve got something he doesn’t — and he decided she wasn’t wrong.
He took a slow breath. “Right,” he said. “Let’s work.”
-Break-
The Silver Fangs moved at half past nine on a Thursday morning, which was deliberate. Not night, not a dramatic hour. Morning. While children were at school and adults were at work and the muggle high street in Leicester was doing the ordinary midmorning shuffle of pensioners and parents with pushchairs and delivery men with trolleys.
There were fourteen of them. They had come in twos and threes over the previous hour, from different directions, wearing muggle clothes and looking like nothing in particular. Aldric’s orders had been specific: no robes, no wands visible, nothing that would catch the eye. The eye would be caught soon enough. There was no point in catching it early.
He was standing at the window of the coffee shop across the street when it started. His hands were wrapped around a cup he had not drunk from. Across the road, a general store sat at the corner of the high street, the kind of unremarkable shop that could be found in half the streets in Britain. Bricked front. Glass windows. A small queue at the counter inside.
The witch closest to the entrance looked back at him through the window. He gave a single nod.
She turned and walked through the wooden doors.
The others were already in position. The spell work started from the inside, cast quietly and precisely that hit the building’s structural supports on two levels simultaneously. The wooden doors banged shut. The windows frosted over, then cracked. Nobody inside could see out. Nobody outside could see in. The muggle passing the building on the street paused, confused, and two of Aldric’s people standing nearby cast a directed disorientation charm that sent him walking in the wrong direction, puzzled and vaguely unhappy, until he was fifty meters away.
Inside the store, Aldric knew, things were significantly less quiet.
That was the first part. The second part was his own job, and he moved to it now.
Three blocks north, a council building sat behind a small car park. It was also a muggle building, of no particular significance, except that it held a local planning office that had, nine months ago, in a decision that Aldric’s intelligence told him had been routed through the office of a man who worked for the Ministry of Magic’s Muggle Liaison department, approved a redevelopment project that had displaced seventeen wizarding families from a previously unplotted community in the city’s eastern quarter. Seventeen families who were now, on paper, nowhere. Their homes were luxury flats. Their community was a construction site. The Ministry had done nothing, and the Muggle Liaison official who had arranged it had quietly retired to the south of France.
Aldric was not there because he cared about seventeen wizarding families.
He was there because it was the assignment, and because his Lord had been right: the aurors would have to respond to the store first. That was the louder problem. It was the obvious problem. The council building was three blocks away, invisible from the high street, and by the time anyone connected the two locations, his team would be long gone.
He raised his wand.
What he cast was not a flashy curse. Instead, it was something thorough. Something that went through walls.
The windows on the ground floor of the council building blew out simultaneously, the lights inside went dark, and the building’s gas main did something that buildings’ gas mains should not do. He could feel the heat of it from where he was standing. Aldric watched it for exactly three seconds, long enough to confirm the job was done, and then he turned and walked away.
The aurors arrived at the store at nine forty-two. There were four of them, which was already fewer than the situation warranted. They had been spread thin for weeks after the whole werewolf fiasco and everyone in the Ministry knew it. They came in hot, shields up, and found a building full of terrified muggles and six of Aldric’s people who were not there to fight. They were there to keep the aurors busy long enough.
The four aurors, faced with panicked civilians and six opponents, did what trained responders do with panicked civilians. They prioritized containment and protection. It was the right call. It was also exactly what Aldric had expected them to do.
The aurors sorted the situation at the store only when his people decided to take leave, and by the time they got the call about the council building, it was ten fifteen. Three of the aurors went north. They found a building that was structurally compromised, a group of dead muggle council workers, and no one from the Silver Fangs. The fourth auror had stayed behind at the store. She was sending her report to the Ministry and trying to cast sufficient Memory Charms on a queue of twelve very shaken muggles, alone.
It was, Aldric reflected, exactly as efficient as he had promised their lord it would be.
He disapparated from an alley with a clean crack and left Leicester behind.
-Break-
The Lunar Liberation Front had chosen Cardiff, and they had chosen it for a different reason entirely.
Sarina had grown up an hour from Cardiff, in one of the villages that didn’t appear on tourist maps, where her mother had worked two jobs to keep them housed after her father stopped being able to work. He had been a good man. He had also been a werewolf, and in the year after he was bitten, the combination of Ministry restrictions and potion costs and the sheer administrative machinery of being classified as a Dangerous Being had ground him down until there was nothing left to grind. He never became violent. He never hurt anyone. He lost his job because his employer found out, lost his income, lost the ability to leave the house three nights a month without risking prosecution, and eventually lost the will to do much of anything at all.
He died when Sarina was thirteen. The Ministry logged it as a non-incident. No follow-up. No inquiry. A werewolf had died; the file was closed.
She had been planning this particular location for two years. Not because of the building — the Cardiff central benefits office, where her father had stood in queues for hours at a stretch and been turned away more times than she could count — but because of what it represented. The machinery. The apparatus. The ordinary bureaucratic indifference that had a face and an address and operating hours.
Her group was smaller than Aldric’s. Nine people. But they were organized differently — not a simultaneous multi-point strike. She did it in sequence, because the sequence was part of the message.
First: every record in the building, physical and magical both. Sarina had someone inside for this, a Ministry-trained records clerk who had been a believer for three years and who had spent the last two months preparing. The records went in under three minutes. Not destroyed — copied, with a modified Gemino variation, and then corrupted. Every case file. Every flagged werewolf registration. Every document that meant the Ministry could look at someone’s name and immediately classify them as less-than.
Then the structure.
Then, as the building was coming down, three members of her group cast the largest light projection charm Sarina had ever commissioned. It bloomed from the roof of the adjacent building in gold and white — a wolf’s head, unmistakable even in daylight, visible for six blocks in every direction — and held for ninety seconds before she brought it down.
There were no civilians in the building. She had made certain of that. The clerk had spent a week ensuring it — minor magical inconveniences that resulted in the building being unusually empty on this particular Thursday morning. A broken boiler. A scheduled fire alarm test that kept getting rescheduled. A general unease that her Muggle-born colleague had seeded through the staff room’s social dynamics over several weeks.
Sarina was not interested in killing ordinary people who happened to work at a desk. She was interested in the system. The infrastructure. The message that the system was not untouchable.
The auror response came at ten oh eight, four minutes after the projection went down, and there were three of them. She watched from the adjacent rooftop as they scrambled the perimeter. Three. When they had responded to the last Liberation Front action in Edinburgh, there had been nine.
She felt a brief, complicated thing at that — satisfaction and something else. Something that she couldn’t quite place.
They were stretched thin. She had done that. Her group had done that, and Aldric’s group, and whatever else was happening across the country that the Ministry was trying to keep hold of. The machinery was starting to groan under its own weight, and she had her hands on several of the levers.
She disapparated before the aurors reached the roof.
-Break-
Aldric stood at the window of the safe house in Derby. His wand arm was at rest. Outside, the suburban street was ordinary and quiet and completely unaware. He was looking at it without really seeing it, thinking about the next two weeks, mapping deployments in his head, working the problem.
The thing was, and he understood this clearly, the way he understood most tactical realities, that none of this had anything to do with the causes people were nominally fighting for. The old pureblood houses didn’t actually care about blood purity the way they used to; they cared about position and power. The Silver Fangs, his Silver Fangs, were full of people with grudges and nowhere else to put them. And the Lunar Liberation Front was full of people who had been wounded by a system so many times that dismantling it felt like the only clean thing they could do.
What none of them understood was that they were all instruments. Every one of them, himself included. The board was bigger than any of them could see from their individual squares.
He was fine with that. Being an instrument that understood its own function was considerably better than being an instrument that didn’t. He knew exactly what he was doing and exactly why, and that knowledge was the only real advantage he had in a world full of true believers.
He turned from the window and began composing his report.
In Cardiff, at approximately the same moment, Sarina sat on the edge of a narrow bed in a rented room and stared at her forearm. The Dark Mark sat there, permanent and quiet, and she looked at it the way she sometimes looked at her father’s photograph, with a feeling that was too complicated to fit inside any single word.
She had not lied to herself about what she was doing. She was very careful about that. She had made a choice with open eyes and she would own it. But she also thought, sometimes, about what she would tell her father if she could. Whether she would be able to explain how you get from ‘I want the world to be better for people like us’ to ’Here is what I’ve done in its service’. Whether the distance between those two things was a straight line or something more crooked.
She decided she would probably tell him the same thing she told herself: that the world had offered her very limited options, and she had chosen the one that gave her the most room to move. And she would hope that he would understand, even if he didn’t agree.
She pulled her sleeve down over the Mark, stood up, and went to write her report.
-Break-
The Members’ Dining Room at the Wizengamot was never particularly full on weekday afternoons, which was one of the things Thomas Marvolo Slytherin had identified as useful about it.
He sat at a corner table with a cup of tea he was actually drinking today and a copy of an annotated bill on the Magical Creatures Classification Framework that he had spent the previous evening reading very carefully. He made a note in the margin with a fine quill, turned the page, and made another note. He appeared, to anyone who glanced at him, to be doing exactly what he looked like: a new member of the Wizengamot doing his homework with admirable diligence.
The room had seven other people in it. He knew who all of them were. He knew their positions on eleven relevant legislative matters. He knew who owed favors to whom, who had unspoken ambitions that their public postures didn’t reflect, and who was quietly unhappy with the current composition of three separate subcommittees. He had assembled this knowledge in four days. A week ago, none of these people had known his name.
He turned another page. Made another note. Sipped his tea.
The sub-editor from the Daily Prophet had sent a follow-up request for comment this morning. He had responded warmly, expressed interest in a proper interview at the appropriate time, and suggested they speak again in a fortnight once he was properly settled. The response had been effusive. The Prophet wanted Lord Slytherin, and Lord Slytherin would give them Lord Slytherin, in carefully chosen increments, at a pace entirely of his own determination.
There was a meeting of the Legislative Ethics subcommittee tomorrow morning. He was not yet a member of it — that would come in time — but he had arranged, through the entirely legitimate mechanism of a written question submitted through the procedural office, to have a query on clarification tabled at the end of the meeting’s agenda. The meeting would be chaired by a woman named Portia Selwyn who was efficient, principled, and privately frustrated by what she saw as the current chair’s mismanagement. She would notice the written question. She would notice the precision of it. She would wonder who drafted it.
The answer, when it reached her, would be exactly as useful as he intended it to be.
He made another note in the margin. Set down his quill. Picked up his tea.
Across the room, through the tall windows that overlooked the atrium, he could see the ordinary movement of Ministry business — witches and wizards crossing back and forth with files and parchment, the small cogs of governance doing what they always did. He watched it for a moment.
He had waited a very long time for this. Years of plans that had gone sideways, alliances that had bent or broken, approaches that had cost more than they had returned. All of it, every piece of it, had ultimately been instruction. The battlefield had taught him what the battlefield could not give him. The Ministry, it turned out, had always been the better terrain, not for the man he had been then, who had wanted spectacle and dominance and immediate recognition. For the man he was now, who understood that the most durable power was the kind that people handed you willingly, that they defended on your behalf, that they built themselves into habits of deference toward before they had quite noticed it happening.
He reached the end of his document and closed it. Once his work was done, he folded his hands on the table and sat for a moment with quiet satisfaction. In his mindscape, he had looked at the very long road that was ahead of him and confirmed that he was, unambiguously, on it.
He sat with his thoughts for a moment, smiling politely at the few lords who happened to glance in his direction, and picked up his quill. With a flick of his wand, he opened his correspondence file and began composing a letter to Portia Selwyn’s clerk requesting that his submitted query be appended to the published subcommittee minutes.
It was all very procedural. It was all very proper. But it was exactly the kind of thing a diligent new Wizengamot member would do.
He wrote in his clear, precise hand, the afternoon light filtering through the tall windows, and the Members’ Dining Room quiet and entirely ordinary.
Thomas Marvolo Slytherin smiled to himself once, his eyes glinting red for a fraction of a second, before he finished the letter and sealed it.
And then he moved on to the next one.
TBC.