The SS Mauretania cut through the brown waters of the Mersey, her black hull gliding toward Liverpool beneath a sky the color of slate. A steel forest of rust-colored cranes jutted up from the docks, swinging netted loads onto the decks of waiting cargo ships. Columns of inky smoke poured from the stacks of factories further inland.
Closer to shore, a crowd gathered along the quay, their figures blurred by drifting steam. Women in headscarves, children in sweaters too big for them, a few men in caps and coats with their hands shoved in their pockets.
Some waved, most just watched, their faces marked by weariness and English reserve.
Jack Semmes leaned against the railing, his wand safely tucked in an hidden pocket of his checkered sports coat. He pulled his flat cap down low over his dark hair to keep the sea breeze from snatching it. At fifteen, he was tall and wiry, sun-browned from more time spent outdoors than in. An onlooker could have mistaken him for a young Tyrone Power, all dash and roguish casualness that belied his current nervous energy. His hazel eyes darted over the city with insatiable American curiosity.
Everything was so No-Maj.
Inside, his guts were churning in time with the thrum of the ship machinery shaking the deck below his feet, driving the massive props beating the murky water. Thick black smoke belched from Mauritania's twin smokestacks over the heads of passengers crowding the deck, pointing at the approaching Liverpool dock and waving at waiting acquaintances. Jack's nose caught the mingled scent of brine and coal smoke mixed with unwashed bodies and garbage.
It smelled like Newark.
Two years after the greatest war the world had ever seen, Liverpool still bore the wounds. Bombed-out warehouses lined the waterfront, skeletal remains of buildings standing as grim reminders. Some were still piles of rubble, while others were enveloped by scaffolding and tarpaulins, mid-reconstruction. Jack idly wondered how much of the damage had been caused by German bombs and how much by desperate street battles between Grindelwald's radicals and the forces that had finally brought them down.
Britain had been one of the hot zones.
"Long way from home," he said to himself as he fingered the letter in his pocket – heavy parchment bearing the Hogwarts seal and containing an unprecedented approval of his transfer request from Ilvermorny to Hogwarts for his sixth year (3rd year of high school, by American reckoning, but the Brits just had to do things their own way).
His father at MACUSA had moved heaven and earth to make it happen instead of leaving him in Ilvermorny while his parents moved from New York to London for his father's new job, a liaison position in the U.K Ministry of Magic's Department of Foreign Affairs. All that was needed next was a combination of a new Minister for Magical Education and a well-timed suggestion of "cementing the special relationship."
Jack still wasn't sure how he felt about it. Just three months ago, he'd been ready to start a normal junior year and his highest priority was improving his Quopro fastball. Now here he was, thousands of miles from the Taconic Mountains, watching seagulls wheel over a dirty industrial city that looked (and smelled) uncomfortably like New Jersey with a cathedral spire blackened by fire.
Still, there was a thrill in it. A good thrill. Something out of an adventure novel.
His hands fidgeted as the crew made fast the lines and extended the gangplank. He pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes and struck a match, inhaling the smoke with a practiced motion. Two weeks without magic had forced him to get good at Muggle methods.
It made him feel a bit like a character in a movie, older and wiser than the scared teenager lying just underneath the surface.
His fellow passengers had been tense the entire crossing. Jack had grown up in the safety of the United States. He had never seen the war firsthand, where cities had been bombed in the night, where food and gasoline had been rationed into thin, desperate portions. But these No-Majs had lived through it. And now, as newsreels rolled footage of crumbling empires, hordes of refugees, and new battle lines across the planet, their shoulders hunched with the weight of an uncertain future.
Jack knew the wizarding world wasn't immune either. Grindelwald might be gone, but the scars of his reign ran deep.
"This is a crucial time, Jack," his father had said before he left. "The magical and No-Maj worlds are both rebuilding. What we do now will shape the next century."
Easy for him to say. Thomas Semmes would be spending his days in the cozy subterranean offices of the British Ministry of Magic, arranging postwar wizarding cooperation over afternoon tea. He wouldn't have to navigate a whole new school, a new country, and a student body who'd see Jack as a curiosity at best or an interloper at worst.
He glanced behind his shoulder towards Birkenhead, where a century before a No-Maj who shared his surname had set forth to face his own destiny. He took a deep breath and shrugged the tension out of his shoulders. Whatever challenges lay ahead, he was still a Thunderbird of Ilvermorny, adventurous and daring. Terror of the Horned Serpent nerds and the Pukwudgie softies. He grinned fiercely around his cigarette.
The sorting at Hogwarts would place him somewhere new—he'd spent the whole week crossing the Atlantic reading Hogwarts: A History—but who he was wouldn't change.
It couldn't.
He was a Semmes. And Semmes were stubborn. His mother reminded his father of that daily.
He sent the glowing end of the cigarette pirouetting into the Mersey with a practiced flick.
Jack strained to pick out the disguised magical officials mixed with their No-Maj counterparts waiting to process the new arrivals, but couldn't pick any out from this distance. Somewhere in that crowd should be a Ministry representative ready to escort him to London, and from there, King's Cross. And after that... he started to reach for another cigarette but stopped himself, forcing himself to ration them. Might not have a chance to buy more before London. After that though, a castle in Scotland and whatever adventures awaited Jack Semmes there.
Mauretania's horn bellowed as the gangplank hit the dock, startling a flock of seabirds into flight. Passengers began filing toward the customs warehouse—its official replacement still a bombed-out shell thanks to the Luftwaffe's creative redecorating. Jack hoisted his charmed featherlight trunk onto his shoulder, grabbed the guitar case carrying his broom, and stepped into the stream of travelers eager to disembark.
The gray sky obligingly began to drizzle.
Freaking hell.
Welcome to England, Jack thought irritably, flipping his collar up.