The British delegate's name was Selwyn-Fawley, appointed by the new Minister, and he had the particular confidence of a man who has never been wrong about anything simply because he has never been consulted about anything.
"With all due respect to the honored delegates," he said, rising, "I feel we have talked ourselves into a rather dreary gloom this morning. Doomsday machines. Submarines hiding under the ice. My goodness." He smiled around the chamber. "Britain would remind this body that we are not accountants tallying worst cases. Even this famous fire of theirs is not beyond answer. If the very worst came, if the Muggles were mad enough to reach for it, we could handle that too."
"How?"
Selwyn-Fawley blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
Deputy Halloran leaned forward, chin on her hand. "You said you'd smoothly handle the fire. Ten thousand missiles, one afternoon. I'm asking exactly how. Walk me through the math."
"Because..." And here Selwyn-Fawley said the honest thing, the thing half his bench believed and none of them had planned to say aloud. "Because we have Harry Potter."
The chamber went very quiet.
"You should have seen it," he pressed on. "London. The invasion. The man took a staff onto a broom and carved a metal monster out of the sky. A warship the size of a cathedral. Alone. I watched the Muggle recordings afterward. Their own cameras could barely track him. I hear the weapons these aliens wielded were vastly more advanced than anything the Muggles have on this planet. Harry Potter won against the better weapons. Now do you seriously think anything the Muggles launch is beyond Harry Potter?"
"He's powerful," Halloran conceded evenly. "Maybe the finest combat wizard alive. But before this chamber engraves 'we win every battle' into its doctrine, let me quickly complicate the record. Since mine is the only delegation that lives where the other half of that invasion came down."
She stood up slowly.
"New York was held that same day with almost no help from us at all. A man in a metal suit he built himself. A soldier from one of their old wars. Their own guns. I've read our observers' reports from that week, Delegate. I suggest you read yours."
"Muggle machines..." Selwyn-Fawley started dismissively.
"Fly faster than sound now," Halloran cut him off. "Their newer missiles cross a continent in minutes and arrive before their own noise does. Tell me which shield charm that is, exactly. The one you cast at something you never hear and never see. A wizard duels what he can face, Delegate. Their wars stopped being faced two generations ago."
The benches around Selwyn-Fawley were smiling now, the small indulgent smiles old families reserve for foreign nerves, and Halloran saw it, and something in her face went flat and patient.
"All right," she said. "Since Britain would rather have testimony than theory, let the record recall something half the senior benches in this room watched with their own eyes, and have stubbornly spent three years agreeing to forget."
The smiles faded slightly.
"In 2010, Madam Bones arranged a demonstration for the leadership of this body. Fifteen Hit Wizards. Elite duelists, volunteered by six of the nations sitting in this chamber, the finest combat casters their Ministries could field. Against them, a dozen Muggle women and six empty metal suits."
Nobody on the old benches was smiling anymore. Several delegates had discovered urgent business among their papers.
"The wizards opened well," Halloran continued, in the same level voice. "They pressed hard, the way you'd all expect. Then the Muggles fell back into ground where long spellwork couldn't reach them, the empty suits came in from four directions at once, and the women walked in behind the barrage. Three minutes, start to finish. Fifteen of our best on the ground, and not one drop of Muggle blood spilled." She looked slowly around the chamber. "Every leader who watched it filed the memory and never spoke of it again. So understand something, delegates. This chamber did not forget that Muggles can fight. It decided to. And there is a word for a war plan built on a thing you decided to forget, but it is not a polite word, and the acoustic charm carries."
"Those were not ordinary Muggles," someone protested, without much conviction. "Those were the Iron Man's advanced machines. And hand-picked, elite soldiers."
"And the people who come for your alleys will be ordinary?" Halloran asked. "You think a world this frightened sends its average? But believe what you like about the battles. Truly. I withdraw the point, all of it, because it changes nothing. Take Britain's version, where we win every engagement on Earth, and you finish under the Japanese delegate's sky. Take my department's version, and you simply get there faster. Every road on the map ends at the same afternoon, delegates. Pick whichever road flatters you." She turned back to the British bench. "So let's stay with your plan, because I want to make sure I have it right. Britain's answer to the end of the world is one DADA professor."
"He is more than..."
"And this professor." Halloran's voice did not rise. "This is the same Harry Potter whose aunt, Madam Bones, your government hounded out of office. Whose godfather told your legislature where to put itself on his way out the door. Whose friends you've spent the past half-year shuffling into basement offices. That Harry Potter. You alienated the man in every way a government can alienate a man, and your war plan is that he shows up anyway."
"He will." Selwyn-Fawley said it simply, and for one moment he was neither pompous nor foolish, because he was saying something true. "You don't know him. I watched him grow up. He may not like us. He may despise us. But it will not matter. Because if war comes, wizards will die. Children will die. His students will die. And Harry Potter has never once in his life sat behind a wall while children died on the other side of it. He'll come. Hating every minute of it. He'll come."
Halloran considered him, and then, surprisingly, she nodded.
"You know something? I believe you. Everything we hear says the same. The man is noble in the old way. He'd bleed for people who spat on him. So I'll grant Britain its champion, and for the sake of argument I'll even grant him his battles." She let that stand for one breath. "Now walk with me to the end of the war, Delegate, because this is the part your bench keeps skipping. The last month of it. Some Muggle government is down to its bunker and its math, and the math comes up if we cannot have the world, no one will. Ten thousand missiles. Ten thousand cities. One afternoon. Tell me what Harry Potter does about that." She tilted her head. "He carved one warship out of one sky, over one city, on one single night. Can he physically stand over every single city on this planet on the exact same afternoon? One man cannot possibly be everywhere. One man sleeps. Your champion is a magnificent answer to a battle, Delegate, and the battle was never the question. If you wanted a single name that successfully answers the fire itself... it was never that one. If it was anyone at all... it was the other man your country alienated."
The acoustic charm carried her words to every seat, and every seat went still, because every seat knew who she meant before Selwyn-Fawley said it.
"...Arthur Hayes."
"Arthur Hayes." Halloran sat back. "I'll be honest with this chamber. I have never seen him work. Almost nobody has. That is rather the point of him. But my department reads the Muggle intelligence services the way you read the Prophet, so let me tell you what they think, because it is instructive. Every serious Muggle power keeps a threat register. The people and things they plan around. Their power lists. Their enhanced-individual lists. Hayes sits at the top of all of them, and his file carries a designation none of the others have."
She held up one finger.
"'DO NOT ENGAGE.' With a standing note that anyone foolish enough to cross him is on his own. The most paranoid government on this planet looked at one wizard and formally planned to never be in his way. No other being on Earth has that. Not your champion. Not our strongest. Not, I highly suspect, absolutely anyone in this room. Could a man like that stand under the burning sky the Japanese delegate showed us, and magically hold it up? I honestly don't know. Nobody knows what that man can actually do. But if this chamber insists on betting the planet on a single name, his is the only one where the bet isn't lost before it's placed."
Selwyn-Fawley rallied, because there was nowhere to go but forward. "Then you make Britain's argument for us. Madam Bones briefed our Ministry on Hayes years ago. The man is levels beyond any of us. He defeated You-Know-Who as an afterthought. If the Muggles fear him that much, he is precisely the deterrent you claim we lack. And when war comes, he will stand with the wizarding world. He is one of us."
"Is he?" Halloran asked. "Why are you so sure?"
"He..." Selwyn-Fawley stopped.
"Because I'll tell you what my file says," Halloran went on, into the gap. "It says he built one of the largest companies in the Muggle world, with a Muggle partner. It says his wife is a Muggle. It says his closest friends include their Iron Man, their spymaster, and a cold Muggle underworld queen. It says he spent years trying to pull the two worlds toward each other while we did not listen. Muggle-born. Muggle-married. Muggle-allied."
She spread her hands.
"So your plan for the one afternoon that actually matters is a rumor about a man who owes you nothing. You want to bet the world that when the sky catches fire, that man burns his hands for your side of the wall? I wouldn't bet my hat."
"Now you are simply being provocative." Selwyn-Fawley's color was up. "The far more likely outcome, on any sober reading of that man, is that Hayes takes no side at all. He has withdrawn from public affairs entirely. Even Bones said as much before she left. And whatever you insinuate, the man has friends in the wizarding world too. Deep ones. Old ones."
"Friends you sidelined," Halloran said. "So when Britain assures this chamber that the most dangerous being on the planet will surely fight for the wizarding world, I have to ask, Delegate. Which wizarding world? The one he grew up in tried to kill him at school. And the one in this room has spent the last six months proving to his every friend that it hasn't changed."
Selwyn-Fawley stood at his bench a moment longer. He was not a clever man, but he was not a stupid one. He sat down without another word.
And the question stayed standing where he had been. The most dangerous being alive owed the people in this chamber exactly nothing, and the chamber had just spent an hour finding out.