The Girl Who Hid | ✓

|143| Reunited

"Neville, she's all right, we've seen her —"

"Yeah, I know, she managed to get a message to me."

From his pocket he pulled a golden coin, a fake Galleon used to contact Dumbledore's Army.

"These have been great," said Neville, beaming at Hermione. "The Carrows never rumbled how we were communicating, it drove them mad. We used to sneak out at night and put graffiti on the walls: Dumbledore's Army, Still Recruiting, stuff like that. Snape hated it."

"You used to?" said Harry, who had noticed the past tense.

"Well, it got more difficult as time went on," said Neville. "We lost Luna at Christmas, and Ginny never came back after Easter, and the three of us were sort of the leaders. The Carrows seemed to know I was behind a lot of it, so they started coming down on me hard, and then Michael Corner went and got caught releasing a first-year they'd chained up, and they tortured him pretty badly. That scared people off."

"No kidding," muttered Ron, as the passage began to slope upward.

"Yeah, well, I couldn't ask people to go through what Michael did, so we dropped those kinds of stunts. But we were still fighting, doing underground stuff, right up until a couple of weeks ago. That's when they decided there was only one way to stop me, I suppose, and they went for Gran."

"They what?" Harry, Ron, Hermione, and I said together.

"Yeah," said Neville, panting a little now, because the passage was climbing so steeply, "well, you can see their thinking. It had worked really well, kidnapping kids to force their relatives to behave, I s'pose it was only a matter of time before they did it the other way around. Dawlish is still in St. Mungo's and Gran's on the run. She sent me a letter telling me she was proud of me, that I'm my parents' son, and to keep it up."

We said nothing until Neville had us turn the corner. Another short flight of steps led to a door just like the one hidden behind Ariana's portrait. Neville pushed it open and climbed through. As I followed the group, I heard Neville call out to unseen people:

"Look who it is! Didn't I tell you?"

As we emerged into the room beyond the passage, there were several screams and yells: "HARRY!" "MAISEY!" "It's Potter, it's the POTTER TWINS!" "Ron!" "Hermione!"

Before I could get a good look at anyone, the four of us were engulfed, hugged, pounded on the back, our hair ruffled, our hands shaken, by what seemed to be more than twenty people.

"Okay, okay, calm down!" Neville called, and as the crowd backed away, I was able to take in our surroundings.

I didn't recognize the room at all. It was enormous, and looked rather like the interior of a tree house, or a gigantic ship's cabin. Multicolored hammocks were strung from the ceiling and from a balcony that ran around the dark wood-paneled and windowless walls, which were covered in bright tapestry hangings: I saw the gold Gryffindor lion, emblazoned on scarlet; the black badger of Hufflepuff, set against yellow; and the bronze eagle of Ravenclaw, on blue. The silver and green of Slytherin alone were absent. There were bulging bookcases, a few broomsticks propped against the walls, and in the corner, a large wooden-cased wireless.

"Where are we?" Harry said.

"Room of Requirement, of course!" said Neville. "Surpassed itself, hasn't it? The Carrows were chasing me, and I knew I had just one chance for a hideout: I managed to get through the door and this is what I found! Well, it wasn't exactly like this when I arrived, it was a load smaller, there was only one hammock and just Gryffindor hangings. But it's expanded as more and more of the D.A. have arrived."