Harry barely noticed as the first of September approached. He had pushed Hogwarts to the back of his mind and the fact that he would normally be preparing for his trip back to school at this time barely registered in his mind. He was far too busy travelling from place to place to worry about missing school.
After his close call in Amsterdam he made it a point never to spend more than a few days in any one place. He was still kicking himself for being naive enough to think that the Death Eaters wouldn't find him just because he had left England. Of course they would look for him. He had been incredibly stupid to assume otherwise.
The first plane out of Amsterdam had been headed to Chicago. As soon as the plane had landed at O'Hare Harry had Dobby apparate him directly off the plane straight into the city. Harry and Dobby had barely paused in Chicago for a day before apparating over to Milwaukee and so on they went - Popping all over America.
He barely took off his invisibility cloak any more. Sitting and enjoying a snack at a cafe or restaurant was no longer an option for him. He just felt too exposed sitting anywhere he could be seen.
He had bleached his hair blonde in an effort to disguise himself further. But even with that he still felt unable to go out in public. What made it worse was that he was still flinching violently whenever he looked into a mirror. The blonde hair looked absolutely ridiculous to him and it really didn't help that he had been unable to get his eyebrows to match. One was nearly platinum blonde and the other was stuck at a browny beige.
He also had a sneaking suspicion that the back of his head did not really match the front either. He hoped that he would soon have another episode of the accidental magic that had re-grown his hair after his aunt had hacked it off that one time. If not he would soon have to endure an embarrassing visit to a hairdressers.
Still, that barely mattered at the moment. He had so much to do. He needed to come up with a permanent way of making sure he was safe. He needed to find a way to settle down somewhere. This constant travelling was getting to be incredibly exhausting.
Sighing to himself, he dug into his backpack for the pile of guidebooks that Dobby had gotten for him a lifetime ago in Privet Drive. He needed to find a magical bookshop. He had so much to learn. Glamour spells and warning wards and anti tracking charms. The list just went on and on.
...
Halfway across the globe, Albus Dumbledore was only too aware that the first of September was fast approaching. He was in fact staring at a calendar even then. Harry had disappeared on the 2nd of August. It had taken him two weeks to construct the tracker. The search time had been in the Netherlands for only 4 days before the tracker had shown that Harry was no longer in that country. Now it was nearly a month later and they still had not found Harry.
The tracker was currently absolutely useless. Harry was moving around far too much. He did not even have enough time to get the team to the location pointed to by the tracker before Harry was moving again. Each time Harry moved the tracker would go wild, the dial jumping all over the place, and it would take several hours before it could get another fix on the boy. He could not understand why the tracker was behaving so erratically.
At times the Dial jumped so suddenly that it was obvious that Harry had managed to get a hold of a port key. Perhaps he had even managed to get someone to apparate him from place to place. Yet at other times the dial would sweep steadily across the dial indicating that Harry was moving at an impossibly fast speed. Much faster than even the top speed of that Firebolt that Harry owned.
How was Harry doing it? Perhaps he wasn't doing anything, Dumbledore decided. It could just be the tracker that was malfunctioning. He had to come up with a way to improve the performance of the tracker. Perhaps he needed to rebuild it with better components. Swapping out the bronze gears for a gold alloy should decrease the sensitivity to ambient magical fields he mused. Perhaps he should look into increasing the sensitivity of the signal strength gauge first. He had so much to do.
And yet his eyes kept returning to the calendar. The first of September was approaching. It felt like a death knell. On the first of September, the students would be returning to Hogwarts. Unfortunately, they would return without Harry Potter.
The news that Harry Potter was no longer attending Hogwarts would soon leak wide and far and with that would go any hope he had of keeping Harry safe. So far, he had managed to keep Harry's disappearance mostly under wraps. Thank goodness, his and Kingsley's testimony had been enough to squash that disciplinary hearing the Ministry had called for Harry. Snape had also verified that Voldemort had not yet heard that Harry was missing. But that would soon change.
Soon Voldemort would know everything. When the boy failed to turn up to meet the Hogwarts Express, it would no longer be a secret. Voldemort would hear of it and he was sure that the first thing that Voldemort would do was send out his own search teams - Teams that would be set to kill or capture Harry Potter.
Unfortunately, there was really nothing he could do to keep the news from breaking. He held absolutely no illusions that Harry would turn up on the train. The damn Ministry's expulsion notice had seen to that.
He had briefly contemplated roping in Nymphadora Tonks to impersonate Harry but he had decided that there would be little point in that. Tonks could not just disappear from her job as an Auror. Even if she could, he sincerely doubted that even a Metamorphmagus of her talent could pull off a long-term deception like that. Hell, the very first time she had to sit on a broom everyone would know that it was not really Harry Potter they were seeing. Eventually the story would break.
Polyjuicing someone else to take Harry's place was also out of the question, simply because they had no supply of source material. Why hadn't he ever laid in a supply of Harry's hair?
What could he do? Soon Voldemort would know that Harry was not at Hogwarts. That he was somewhere out there, alone and unprotected.
What could he do?
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