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Harriet Potter is the Girl Who Lived. She is the star Seeker of the Gryffindor quidditch team, the leader of Dumbledore's Army, the second Hogwarts Triwizard Champion. And she is so bloody tired of not being told things.
That is what she thinks as her stomach twists and her feet leave the ground, her tightly-clenched grip tethering her to the Triwizard Cup—the portkey —and to Cedric on the other side of it. I really should have been informed that there was more to the task, that the Cup was a portkey. Why does no one ever tell me anything?
Her feet hit the ground hard, her injured leg buckling and sending her sprawling on the grass. The cup flies out of her hand and disappears from view. She bites down on a groan of pain and clutches at her leg as it spasms.
"Are you alright?" Cedric asks, his tone panicked.
The shock of pain subsides enough for Harriet to sit up laboriously. "I'm fine. Where are we?"
Cedric stands and holds out a hand to Harriet. She takes it, and he pulls her upright with surprising strength, steadying her with a concerned look on his pale, tired face when she stumbles on her feet. A part of her is overcome with a sudden wave of gratitude, and guilt following soon after. Cedric really is a good man, and he's shown it time and time again, and yet Harriet has found it so hard to be as kind to him as he deserves. She wipes a hand across her forehead, pushing her sweat-soaked fringe out of her eyes. Together, they take a look around.
They're obviously far away from the maze—even the mountains surrounding Hogwarts are nowhere to be seen—in a small, ancient-looking graveyard. Tombstones, wooden crosses, and statues in various stages of disrepair and rot stick out of the ground at odd angles, and a grey mist hangs low in the air, obscuring the horizon and dampening the grass. The greyish silhouette of a small churchhouse cowers behind a gnarled old yew tree to their right, and far off in the opposite direction the outline of houses perched on the sloping hill can be made out. A few feet behind them is a headstone around Harriet's height, newer than most of the rest but coated with grime, and she could just make out the name on it: TOM RIDDLE.
Cedric looks down at the Triwizard Cup and then up at Harriet. “Did anyone tell you the cup was a Portkey?” he asks. "Is this part of the task?"
Harriet shrugs sullenly. "I don't know. You'd think they'd have warned us, but, well…"
A sharp crack of snapping wood rings out into the damp silence. Cedric and Harriet's wands are in their
hands in a second, their gazes snapping towards the pale grey outline of a cloaked figure emerging from the fog. Whoever they are, they're short and roundish and slope-shouldered, walking hunched over carrying some small bundle in their arms, carefully and reverently, as a mother might carry her infant child.
The figure stops beside a tall thin gravestone a few paces from them, and stands there a moment, looking at them from under their deep hood. Harriet glances sideways and catches Cedric's eye with a questioning look. Cedric shrugs at her. In unison, they both raise their wands to point at the figure.
There is rustling movement from the bundle as whatever is swaddled there begins to move, and Harriet just has time to wonder if it really is a child before a spike of pain rips through her, lancing from her brow to the base of her skull ad down her torso like she's been struck by lightning where she stands. She cries out, and Cedric catches her by the shoulders. She drops her wand, holding her head tightly as though she can squeeze the pain out of it, but it only rises and rises to a fever pitch. She doubles over, rasping and retching, hands on her knees, the white noise of pain replacing the somber stillness of the graveyard air.
A terrible rasping noise cuts through the quiet, a wheezing, hissing indication of a voice as though the throat it's coming from is not fully formed. " Kill the spare ," Harriet makes out, barely.
Harriet's wand is on the ground now, dropped when the pain overtook her, and she doesn't get a chance to pick it up again. She barely gets a chance to move. Green light flashes across the space between them, and she whips her head around to follow it, already moving to get between them, anything , but it's too late.
There's no sound, no scream from Cedric, just the dull sound of dead weight hitting the ground.
" No! " The word comes out as a gasp ripped from her throat. She's on her hands and knees in the dirt next to where Cedric has fallen. She shuts her eyes tightly, not looking at the body at her side, and scrabbles her wand off the ground and holds it blindly in front of her face as though the wood itself will shield her.
Mercifully the pain begins to fuzz away and dissipate, replaced by an emotion Harriet immediately identifies as out of place for its pleasantness. It's something like amusement, or satisfaction, bubbling up from underneath the lingering sharp pain in her scar. Hermione's voice drifts through her mind, explaining something about everyone having different responses to shock and loss, but Harriet knows it isn't that; she's been torn open with horror and grief, but there is something else inside her, part of her, that disagrees. And that… that thing in the man's arms… Harriet's mind is trying to connect all of this with it. She feels tired, confused, like her own thoughts are a conversation she's failing to follow along with.
Panting, Harriet pushes the thoughts down as best she can and peels her eyes open. The man has set down the bundle and is rapidly approaching her, arms outstretched, and before she can do more than take a step back he's grabbing her and pushing her backwards. The man isn't particularly strong, but he moves with a ferocious anxiety and intent. He catches her by surprise and her back hits the gravestone hard. She grunts, fighting to free her arms to no avail. His hands are scratchy and unpleasant against her arms as he holds them to the tombstone, shifting his grip to free one hand and begin summoning ropes around her wrists. She takes the opportunity and tries to pull one arm loose, but the man abandons the ropes to hit her across the head with a hand missing a single finger. Recognition strikes Harriet.
"You!" She cries, writhing as he ties her wrists tightly together and then to the gravestone. Another rope wraps around her torso, stopping her wriggling, and another around her forehead, rubbing uncomfortably against her scar and holding her head in place looking out towards the clearing the portkey had deposited her into.
The man—Wormtail, Peter —shoves a dirty bit of cloth into her mouth, silencing her, and then lets go of her and disappears from view. He returns huffing and panting, dragging behind him a cauldron larger than any Harriet has ever seen. It's bulbous and round, about the size of a dishwasher, and Harriet imagines a full-grown man could fit crouched inside of it. It leaves a furrow in the dirt behind it as it's dragged along to the center of the clearing and stood upright. Wormtail pulls his wand from some hidden fold in his robes and starts a magical fire beneath it. There is some dark, thin liquid in it, filling it just over halfway, and it begins to simmer, and then to bubble and send of sparks, glinting in the moonlight. Harriet watches it with curiosity and trepidation
A jerk of movement draws her eye a few feet away. The bundle on the ground, which Harriet had almost forgotten about, shifts and rocks as though whatever is wrapped up in there is trying to get out.Whatever is in there is a living thing. Or, mostly. It speaks, at the very least. It feels familiar, in an odd way—not like a past acquaintance, at least not just like that, but like a part of herself. A severed body part come alive and returned to her after years of feeling it only as a phantom limb.
Pain shoots through her once more, branching down from her scar in streams. This time she bites down on the scream that bubbles up around her gag and fights to keep her eyes open, intent on seeing whatever comes next.
Wormtail lifts up the bundle of robes, holding them up like a trophy; his hood falls back, revealing an expression of reverence battling with revulsion. He unwraps the robes, and Harriet chokes back a gasp.
The thing in the robes is malformed, slimy, and pink, like a squirming blind thing found in the dirt under an overturned rock. Its skin is wet and too-red, like an open wound or the inside of a mouth. It bulges where its arms and legs should be as though they're caught inside of it and pushing out against the skin. There is a tiny, pinched face in its lumpy head, with big, milky, blind eyes, the barest indent of a mouth, and no nose to speak of. As Wormtail holds it aloft, a wet bit of something—of flesh—comes loose from its raw back and falls onto the grass.
" Hurry, " the thing wheezes out, and Harriet flinches back.
"Yes, Master," Wormtail whimpers fearfully. He holds it out over the roiling and crackling liquid in the cauldron, and then lowers it down to the surface. He lets go, and Harriet hears the child-thing hit the bottom softly. Wormtail stands for a moment, holding his hands out, clawlike, over the lip of the cauldron. He seems to want to shake them off, as though the creature left some residue on his hands.
Harriet's mind whirls with confusion, addled further by the constant burning ache in her scar. Won't the thing drown? She hopes it does. This is some dark spell they are crafting, but not something she could hope to recognize from her meager four years of magical schooling.
She is distracted by Wormtail speaking. " Bone of the father, " he says, carefully, enunciating it like the incantation for a spell, his voice shaking with fear all the while and wand raised high into the night. " Unknowingly given; you will renew your son. "
The ground at Harriet's feet shivers and then cracks open like a fault line, and Harriet scrabbles to keep her feet planted. Out from the cracks flies a bit of something brownish—old bone, bare but from scraps of leathery skin clinging to it. It leaves a trail of grave-dust behind in the air as it flies up and into the cauldron, the liquid within seeming to rise up to meet it and devour it hungrily. The surface bubbles, fizzing and spitting, and all at once it turns a pale yellowish white, like enamel.
Wormtail's shaking voice and heavy breathing has broken into sobs and whimpers now, and his shoulders shake visibly as he reaches into his robes and draws out a short, glinting blade.
" Flesh of the servant—, w-willingly given, you will revive your m-master, " he continues.
He holds his right hand out over the cauldron in front of himself, the hand with the missing finger, and then with one final sob he swings the blade downwards at his own wrist.
Harriet realizes what he's about to do, and several thoughts fly through her mind. Ew, gross, she thinks, and then, no, he wouldn't; he doesn't have it in him. And finally, that dinky little knife won't be enough. As the blade finds home, she cringes back, away from the evidence that she was right in at least one of her thoughts. Wormtail cries out in agony, blood spurting from the gash in his wrist, but the hand still firmly attached. The scream devolves into wet sobs as his arm drips into the cauldron.
There is no wheezing half-voice from the creature in the cauldron, submerged as it is, but Harriet hears, or feels, the thought in her mind all the same. Keep going, it says. Wormtail doesn't seem to hear it, and Harriet's dread grows. Is the thing—and surely that thing is Voldemort, in some form—inside her head? Her occlumency had seemed to be going better recently under Hermione's tutelage, but perhaps not. And the message wasn't directed at her, so why would it be projected into her mind?
Wormtail's soft crying continues, and at some point he seems to decide he's gathered himself enough. Arms shaking fiercely, he raises the knife high once more. This second blow is not as strong as the first, but it gives him a little progress. Harriet can see the white of bone now sticking out from the mangled mess of flesh. She wonders passingly why she isn't more scared or sick, but those useless feelings tend to fade away in the face of prolonged shock and adrenaline, which is surely present at the moment. Instead she watches with disgust, fascination, and a certain amount of impatience. Only a few seconds of screaming and sobbing pass before the next blow, and the next even sooner after that, as he seems to enter some rhythm, or perhaps acclimatize to the pain. Slowly, the hand begins to fall limp and then flap in the air with each blow, the important parts finally severed somewhere in the tangle of blood and skin.
The last cut is more like a pull or a saw as he tears the knife through whatever was holding the hand onto his arm and it falls into the waiting liquid beneath it, dripping blood and gore after it. The stuff in the cauldron roars and snaps like a hungry fire, and then slowly, in blotches, turns a wet pinkish-brown color.
A sick feeling of satisfaction creeps in along the edges of Harriet's mind. Wormtail collapses into the mud, shuddering and dribbling, clutching at the tattered stump and rapidly losing large amounts of blood. Harriet wills him in her mind to cast some small healing charm, stop the bleeding, at least tie cloth over it. He does nothing except sit in the grave dust and weep. Harriet feels like an unconsenting voyeur, made to bear witness to what should be a private affair.
After far too long, Wormtail calms down somewhat and deigns to cursorily close up the wound with an episkey . Then he stands, and shuffles towards Harriet. She squirms desperately, eyes darting around wildly as he approaches her. His breath on her skin is hot and wet, coming quickly and harshly with pain and fear.
" Blood of the enemy, forcibly taken… " he says, and raises the knife still in his left hand up to rest the point against her forearm. " You will resurrect your foe. "
He digs the point of the blade into her pale skin and pulls it sharply downward, opening a shallow cut. Harriet grunts into her gag. Wormtail reaches his other hand—or the arm where it used to be—into his robes, and then stops, a look of confusion on his face, before shakily dropping the knife into the dirt and reaching his single remaining hand into his robes. He pulls out a tiny glass vial, which he holds against Harriet's arm to catch the weak dribble of blood. His hand is shaking fiercely, and the red has just begun to smear along the rim of the vial when the shaking flings it from his grip and into the dirt.
Pain sears through Harriet's scar, and the voice superimposes itself into her thoughts again. Incompetent fool, it hisses. Wormtail whimpers and falls to his knees, feeling around on the ground for the vial. He finds it, and brings it up again, only to find that the stream of blood has all but stopped, the cut already scabbing over. He blubbers and moans, sticking the vial awkwardly between his legs and grabbing for the knife again. Harriet's pain has turned completely to exasperation and impatience by this point, and again that second, foreign set of emotions rises up in her, but she finds curiously that it lines up nearly completely with the rest, for once.
It takes him another two tries, and by the end of it Harriet is all but cheering him on just to have it over with, but he collects a few drops of her blood, already oxidizing and turning thick and dark. The potion laps them up eagerly, and sparks shimmer across its surface as it darkens and turns a deep, translucent red, as though the cauldron were itself full of several human beings' worth of pure blood. It fizzes more violently, bubbling and sloshing, the cauldron rocking to and fro. It glows more and more brightly as it boils over, dripping white-hot foam over the sides of the cauldron and onto the weeds below. As it reaches a crescendo in volume and brightness, blacking out everything else into velvety dark, Harriet squeezes her eyes closed.
There is a long moment of silence, and Harriet cautiously opens her eyes. The cauldron sits, quiet and still, and it seems as though much of the liquid has spilled out or boiled off, as the surface is just outside of her view. The lip and sides of the cauldron are crusted with pinkish residue, the ground underneath it studded with bits of foam and steaming.
For a beautiful and dreadful handful of seconds, Harriet thinks that it hasn't worked, that the child-thing has drowned and the potion has gone wrong somehow. Then, something begins to rise out of the cauldron.
It's a humped pink shape with a row of small lumps just under the surface pushing up against the skin, sheets of the blood-colored liquid sliding off of it, and as it rises further Harriet identifies the points as the spine of a tall and emaciated humanoid figure. As it rises, slowly and stuttering like a broken robot, the back is followed by pointed shoulders, a long neck, and a smooth, bald head, a few stringy hairs clinging to it. Standing in the cauldron once it's unfolded itself, Harriet guesses it's at least two meters tall.
Voldemort's new form is… recognizably female, barely, not that Harriet thinks the Dark Lady would mind much one way or another. Its arms and legs are a good length too long, its fingers limp and fleshy. Its skin is pale, blotchy, and all but completely translucent, bundles of purplish veins visible along the swollen joints. Its face is hairless, the eyes large and bulging even closed behind translucent lids, the nose is flat, the barest indication of snakelike slit-nostrils, and the mouth is lipless and wide, a gash cut into the surface of the face. Harriet casts her memory back to second year and the diary, the version of Tommie Riddle that still looked as she had at Hogwarts, all sleek dark hair and high cheekbones and pouted lips, and somehow she can see a drop of that girl in this distorted, monstrous thing, diluted and spread thin across its too-tall body. The posture of the neck, the narrow curve of the jaw… as wrong as this thing clearly is, it retains something of the uncomfortable, inhuman beauty the soul within it once carried.
The woman-thing raises her misshapen arms into the air, slowly and effortfully, as though they weigh tonnes, and touches her forehead, running her fingers backward over her skull and down her long neck, like one does in the shower. She opens her bugging eyes, revealing them to be milky and pinkish, any intent or intelligence behind them missing or obscured, and her wide mouth splits into a vacant smile.
Harriet watches, transfixed. It's her. She's whole, and real, and as alive as anyone could claim to be.
Voldemort has risen.
She looks down at her own body, face still mostly expressionless, but Harriet feels an echo of her rapturous wonder and satisfaction pang in her chest. She examines her hands and fingers, head creaking side to side stiffly, and then runs her hands down the sides of her sunken waist. Then she turns, her gaze falling on Harriet, who startles out of her daze and meets her milky eyes.
Now with true vocal cords her voice carries more than it did before, but it still sticks in her throat, coughed up like phlegm. "Robe me," she says, still staring straight at Harriet, who is confused for a moment before the shuddering lump that is Wormtail rises and shuffles over to the abandoned bundle of cloth a few feet away, picking it up and shaking it out. It's plain black wizard's robes, which he holds up as high as he can, and Voldemort steps carefully out of the cauldron, bending down to slip the robes over her long arms. They are, miraculously, long enough for her, brushing the ends of the crushed grass and obscuring her thin figure. Her pale arms emerge out from between the folds like bone from opened flesh.
"Harriet Potter," she says, forcing the name out as though it's painful. She tilts her head, and Harriet hears the bones in her neck crack. "Enjoying the show?"
Voldemort tilts her head back to neutral, or tries to—the curve in her neck remains even as her head straightens, her shoulders now stuck at a slight angle. She frowns slightly, shifting her back under the robes, and Harriet hears another pop, but her shoulders do not straighten. Harriet squints at her, curious. She continues forward, her gait now noticeably asymmetrical, and Harriet's head tilts further and further back to keep her face in view.
"Last we were… truly face to face," she says, "you were a baby. I could not touch you then." She raises one arm high, fingers splayed out. "I can touch you… now."
She smears the pad of one finger haphazardly across Harriet's forehead, the skin stinging in its wake as though the touch were poison. The place where they touched feels slimy and rubbed raw, and the pain in her scar doesn't abate for several moments. In the meanwhile, Voldemort keeps talking in her direction.
"I've got a bit of you … in me, " she says. "I feel what you feel, I think what you think… we're," she pauses to cough, "the same thing now. I can touch you… I can kill you. But for now…" She turns her back to him. "Pettigrew."
Harriet had nearly forgotten he was here, but sure enough he is still cowering off to the side, hunched over his mangled arm. Wormtail’s robes are shining with blood now; he has wrapped the stump of his arm in them.
“My Lady,” he chokes, “my Lady, you promised . . . you did promise . . .”
“Hold out your arm,” she says slowly, chewing on the words.
“Oh Master . . . thank you, Master . . .”
He extends the bleeding stump, but Voldemort doesn't move. “The other arm, Wormtail.”
Wormtail looks up at her, terrified and confused, whimpering. Voldemort sighs and then reaches down, grabbing his left hand. She pulls it up into the air, and his sleeve falls down, revealing the Dark Mark stark against his skin. She curls in all but her pointer finger, and then presses the swollen fingertip firmly to the mark.
Harriet's scar throbs again, and she's starting to feel like the pain is getting a bit repetitive. Whatever magical bond the scar draws between her and Voldemort, she's gotten the idea by this point and now it's just a bit overkill.
"Bored, are you?" Voldemort says, turning around. She's smiling horribly. The graveyard fills with smoke and flashes of light, and suddenly they are surrounded by dark-robed and pale-masked figures, each letting out a gasp and dropping to their knees as they lay eyes on their Lady reborn.
One of the death eaters crawls forward, touching their forehead to the hem of Voldemort's robes. "Master," he murmurs.
"Feeling guil—" Voldemort chokes on the syllable, her swollen, grey tongue too large and sluggish for the consonants. She frowns and tries again. "Feeling guilty?"
"Master, I—"
"Thirteen years. You must have thought me dead and gone…" she spreads her arms wide, her hands flopping uncomfortably. There's another snap, but she ignores it. "And yet, here I am."
“Master!” the death eater shrieks, “Master, forgive me! Forgive us all!”
She reaches into her robes, and brings out from some hidden fold of it her wand, Harriet's wand's twin. It is held awkwardly pinched between her oversized fingers, not pointed correctly. A frustrated look ghosts across her face—Harriet feels its echo—as she uses her free hand to readjust the wand so it's sitting correctly. It takes her several tries, and Harriet hears Wormtail, on the ground, muffling a cry of abject terror. Voldemort's eyes cut over to glare at him, but she leaves him be, for now.
" Crucio ," she says, slowly and carefully. The death eater at her feet screams and writhes, and amusement bubbles up in Harriet's chest, mixed in with her own feelings of righteous anger and disgust.
She stops once she's satisfied he has felt her power.
"Stand up," she rasps. He does. "I do not forgive. You will repay your debt. Wormtail has begun to repay his. He helped me return…"
Wormtail whimpers. "Please, p-please, Master, you promised…"
She walks towards him. Harriet knows that is the intent, at least. Instead she tips sideways, catching herself on one thin ankle, awkwardly. There's a horrible crunching noise, and when she stands upright again she is even more crooked, her shoulders stuck one way and her hips the other.
"Wormtai…l…," she forces out. Wormtail scrambles back. "What is… happening?" She tries to raise her wand, but it falls out of her clumsy fingers.
"My— my Lady, I don't—," he stammers, "The— the spell, it must have, or Potter, maybe she—"
He cuts off when Voldemort grabs his shoulder, pulling him to his feet. She overshoots the power necessary and her arm swings back, her shoulder twisting outwards and, like her neck, sticking that way. Her hand is bleeding, the blood viscous and cloudy, and Harriet squints closer at her hand—the friction of the grab has pulled some of the skin on her palm and forearm loose, and it hangs off of her like torn clothing.
"What… was the spell?"
"Wha—what was—" She shakes him violently, and he cries out. "I don't remember! I don't— it was—" He gulps. "I-I don't know, a dark spell, a soul left without a body —"
Voldemort rears back. " A soul? " she says. " A SOUL? YOU—" she chokes, and then begins coughing, doubled over. Harriet hears her stream of consciousness in the back of her mind. Idiot, fool, worse than useless, I'll kill him, I'll kill them all, and all the while the Dark Lady is hunched before her, hacking up a lung. It would be humorous if it weren't so deeply disturbing.
The wet choking sounds finally slow, but she does not straighten. Harriet hazards a guess that it might be beyond her abilities now. She raises a hand up, though, and commands her death eaters: "Go."
Nobody moves. "But, my Lady—"
"GO!" she shrieks, burbling. They scatter.
Once the graveyard is empty but for Voldemort and Harriet, she straightens as much as she is able and begins shambling, half falling, towards Harriet. Harriet scrabbles at the ropes binding her wrists, to no avail. Voldemort opens her mouth to speak, and instead a sheath of sticky, spit-diluted blood tumbles out. She makes a bubbling noise. The sleeve of her robe falls down off her shoulder, revealing the joint dislocated and the skin peeling off like old wallpaper.
The girl, the voice Harriet knows is Voldemort says in her mind. Need more… soul… more flesh. It's… breaking.
For the first time since she landed in the graveyard, every particle of Harriet screams out in terror. She pulls at her ropes, feels them rub open the skin at her wrists. She needs to get a hand free, then she could cast something, get Riddle away from her. Voldemort grabs at her shoulder, her arm, each motion breaking her body apart further, A fingertip falls off at the first joint, and Harriet can feel it hit her stomach, her thigh, as it tumbles to the ground between them.
She shuts her eyes tightly and feels for her hands, partially numb as they've become. Surely, just like when she was a kid, she can do something without her voice or wand. She imagines a hand free from the ropes, reaching out into the air and then feeling for her wrist, calling on every bit of her emotions, her own voice and maybe Tommie Riddle's too, her echoing stream of derision fueling the white-hot burst of energy. And then she feels it, her own hand against her bound right wrist, free and already pulling at the knot. Her eyes spring open and she looks down and—
Oh. That can't be good.
Protruding from her left elbow are not one but two forearms, the join uncomfortably full and grinding against itself. One, the original, is as it was: bound tightly behind her. The second, pale, pink, and new-looking, is tugging on the ropes at her right wrist. She swallows down the bile rising quickly in her throat. This is—surely it's not unheard of. After all, there are metamorphmagi, and she blew up her aunt once. It's normal enough, surely.
Compartmentalize, Harriet, she tells herself. Get out of here. Get yourself and… and Cedric—oh God, Cedric—back to school. You can do it. The cup is right there.
She tries again, thinks of sparks and of fire, and her new hand grows warm, and then she's half-free, two whole hands to work with. She frees herself enough to kick Voldemort away from her, and Voldemort is deteriorating further, back hunching into a horseshoe shape, bits of her piling up on the ground, blood everywhere, but it's fine, it's—
She tears the gag out of her mouth with one of her hands and yells, as loud as she can, " Flipendo! "
Voldemort's crumpled form flies backward. Harriet begins to run, scrabbling for her wand by her feet, head always turned over her shoulder as the lump of parts that used to be She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named tries to pull itself up, hold itself together, crawl after Harriet. Its voice in her head rises in volume— GIVE ME BACK MY— and she feels something clawing at her side, a hand, too small and too whole to be hers.
She looks down and the new hand she magicked into being is clutching at the flesh of her waist, as though trying to pull a piece off of it. She wrenches it off, holds the hand away from her own body, and keeps running.
She nearly trips over Cedric, when she finally gets to him. He's cold, terribly still, going blue in the face. She sobs, and grabs his cold hand, and then with her other reaches towards the Cup, lying upturned a few feet away.
Voldemort is halfway across the grass, hands missing skin and fingers reaching out hopelessly across a space that is simply too far. It's the last thing Harriet sees before she squeezes her eyes shut and slaps a hand down on the cool metal of the cup, and the world twists out of true… They are going back.