8 1 0.

For almost three months now, the numbers had been haunting Jonas.[1]  Life had been busy enough that most of the time, it was merely a faint nagging --  an ominous hint in an argument that was quietly let go unmentioned the next morning or a plot line on his favorite crime drama that got dropped once the new series started. 

But whether he paid attention to it or not, the puzzle was still there.  8 1 0.  It could have been eight-one-zero, or eight hundred and ten; separate digits, or part of a larger whole.  It was five off from 815, which didn't mean anything outside of television shows about plane crashes and polar bears.  It could have been a password, an address, or a locker combination; digits in a phone number, a birthdate, a lottery number, a license plate.  For all Jonas knew, it could have been part of Nate Briggs's masterful plot to slowly drive him insane, but that was his least favorite out of all of the possible options.  There was nothing more intriguing than an unsolved mystery, at least until he solved the bulk of it and quickly lost interest.

In the past three months, in between everything he had done on his "official" cases, Jonas had run down every lead he could possibly think of.  He had checked the lockers at King's Cross, visited every magical 810 address in England, and doggedly checked Hogwarts yearbooks and history books for links to an auspicious date.  When he was bored or didn't have something more immediate to apply his thoughts to, mulling over the digits 8-1-0 occasionally put him to sleep at night.  It had been almost disappointing when 10 August came and went without incident. 

It was enough to make him think that whatever 8-1-0 meant, it wasn't anything in his worldview.  Which meant -- finally, disappointingly, perhaps a bit intriguingly -- that he had to ask for help.  If he didn't know what it meant, then someone had to.  The other Aurors were unlikely to have any sort of groundbreaking new paradigm to help him crack the mystery, and so Jonas had gone outside his usual circle.  Niobe Thursby -- intrepid reporter, occasional contact, and -- he suspected -- the only person he knew in London who was likely to find the idea of an unsolvable clue as enthralling as he did.

"So that's all I know," he told her, after swallowing a mouthful of samosa.  He didn't know what the Muggle owners of The Indian Restaurant thought of his occasional rendezvous with the dreadlocked witch, but the food was good enough that he was happy to take the risk of them overhearing something they shouldn't.  No normal person could make sense of terms like Azkaban, Muhra Glass, and Wizengamot anyhow.  "We found the paper on him when we searched him.  8-1-0.  And no one's been able to make heads or tails of it since.  The Ministry's never going to get anywhere with the case officially; now that Briggs is in Azkaban, I reckon they're all prepared to just let the whole bloody thing rest."

1.	Hidden Away in the Bottom of my Brain

Niobe was similarly occupied with a vegetable-stuffed pastry dipped in mint sauce, hunched in close in the worn out booth at Indian Restaurant.  But that wasn't the most delicious part. 

It was the grotty little napkin with the grotty little numbers on it, and the ginger wizard across the table.  Jonas had brought her the loveliest present.  Something to obsess about.  Something grimy, shadowy.  Something that wasn't some happy-dappy, lovey-dovey, superficial nonsense like Barnabas Cuffe had her reporting on lately.  She'd been doing that Tournament fluff all month and so this... this was something worth her time.

On her left hand, her thumb was idly rubbing the rough nubbin of a half-finger third space in where a Runespoor had taken it off and where Mungo's hadn't be able to re-attach it or even grow a new one.  It was a constantly ignored reminder of her own over-reached daring and its consequences. 

"And he wouldn't say what it was?  It could be anything," she said, more pleased than grim at the statement.  "I mean, is this supposed to be a place? A time? I figure you've already tried all that?  Addresses and the like?" she asked, in her light Irish accent, looking up from under a curtain of rope-like locked hair.

"You sure it's not just a bit of rubbish out of his pocket?" she asked.  They must be cold on leads if this little scrap of paper was the best Trevelyan had.  She knit her brows and inspected him. 

"I thought you caught this guy?"  She barely remembered the little write-up she'd done.  They'd never found the stolen bit, but that was hardly needed considered all the bloke had been  caught red-handed doing.  This seemed like a strange loose end to follow up on.  Was the glass worth all that much?

Jonas paused mid-motion, his fork stuck in a second samosa, forehead creasing as he considered how best to respond.  That he hadn't caught Briggs -- that if he had, he would have treated the bloke a hell of a lot more decently, and they likely wouldn't have this problem to begin with.  But he wasn't here to deliver a lecture on what he thought about magical class prejudice and the Ministry's flawed justice system.  That was a speech for another time.

"Yeah, I've tried running down the obvious -- addresses, birth dates, the like," he said with a nod, maneuvering the filled pastry onto his plate.  "I've not hit on anything yet.  But it's not like three numbers give me much to go on, innit?"

He knew that the scrap of paper wasn't simply rubbish out of the poor bloke's pocket.  But explaining that meant explaining how he had gotten it -- the midnight visit to the Ministry's holding cells, the unsanctioned coffee break on Level Ten.  Although Thursby would have likely been approvingly thrilled by that feat of rule breaking, he wasn't quite prepared to admit to it yet.  Nor could he admit why this piece of information had not exactly made it into the official file.

"Yeah, we got 'im," he agreed vaguely, giving a half-shrug.  "But that bloody Muhra Glass is still Vanished off somewhere, and Level Nine's been in a tizzy ever since it went missing.  It's worth running down a few leads if it means getting them to stop whinging about it. So humor me."  He arched his eyebrows, giving her a bemused, challenging look.  "Let's assume it's not rubbish.  8-1-0.  What do you reckon it could mean?"

"Alright, alright, alright," Niobe chuckled when Jonas directed her to 'humor' him and focus on the what-now? instead of the how-now?.  She grinned and shook her shoulders in quiet giddiness of a new mystery to solve, something fun to chase after.  A truth to be outed.

She took another bite-ful of the samosa as she kept on staring at the bit of napkin, as if just looking at the etched numerals would provide more insight.

"Eight - one - zero...  Eight - one - oh...  eighty-one zero.... eight - ten..."  she mumbled through a mouthful.  She raised her eyebrows and looked up at Jonas.  "Eight galleons, one sickle, no knuts?  Eight galleons, ten sickles?  Hmm...."  And then she sat up so she could count on her fingers.  "A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H? H - A - O?  Initials?"

She was running through everything she could think of, but chances are Jonas had been through it all already.  It wasn't as if she was likely to be the Auror's first stop.  She knew he'd have only come to her if he'd already exhausted his other resources.

She sat back into the booth, and brought her leg up with her, so she was almost reclined in her side of the booth, sitting in it sideways.  She drummed her three fingers on the table top next her mint sauce. 

"Might be Arithmancy?  Not exactly my subject in school.  But what kind of guy is he? Are we thinking to hard, here? What kind of two-bit burglar sets up an Arithmancy cipher?" 

Jonas leaned back, resting an arm on the booth behind him as he mused over Niobe's train of thought.  Eight galleons, one sickle -- that was the sort of thinking that might occur naturally to a wizard, but was much harder for him to stumble across.  He had been back at the Ministry for over six months now, but it was hard to escape a paradigm that tended to pounds sterling and pence.

"Well, he seems like a sharp enough bloke," he said, forehead creasing as he glanced at her with a frown.  "Ravenclaw in school, and he worked at an Apothecary -- that one got shut down for connections to the Runespoor trade back in October."  That had been Adon's case, months before Jonas had rejoined the Ministry.  But he didn't really want to start obliquely grilling his partner.  Adon was too good at noticing when he wasn't being told the whole story, and Jonas's friend had enough on his shoulders without adding potential violation of Ministry procedures to the list.

The whole thing -- the ongoing moral debate -- was wearing him down as much as the frustration of not-knowing.  The red-haired Auror sighed, setting down his fork so that he could rub a hand over his face.  "But he dropped out after his fifth year," he said tiredly.  "None of his prior convictions have anything to do with dark magic.  Just your typical idiocy and thuggery -- Muggle-baiting when he was a kid, vandalism, the Runespoor bit.  I don't know much about Arithmancy meself, so I reckon it could have something to do with that, but it feels too complicated for this one.  It was just a note he had scribbled in his pocket, yeah?  Like he had to remember it to get to where he was supposed to be going."

"Hmmm..."  Niobe chewed the inside of her lip as Jonas offered more information about the author of this circumspect little missive.  It didn't really help at all. 

"Trying to think of things identified by a number," she said, "other than what's plain.  Oh shit -"  she used two fingers and gave the napkin a little spin around, one-hundred and eighty degress.

"Zero-one-eight...!"  All the numerals could be read upside down.  "He could have written it the other way, starting with the zero.  Although that only puts you back at the start tracking down number 18 addresses... But why the initial zero?"

She was just thinking out loud, attacking the number from all angles.  She turned it around again, this time just ninety degrees.  "Maybe it's an egg over infinity... Infinity divided by zero? Is it some sort of rune?"

Niobe shook her head, though, already disapproving of that line of thought.  The handwriting was pretty clear in what direction it was written from.  A slight turn to the right, the zero being written counter-clockwise, the way the line of the eight swung around.  "Nah, that's not it, is it."

"It's not a case file - not enough alphas and omegas.  Not a date.  Not a postal code..."  she went on, naming things it couldn't be.  "Not enough numbers for an edition of the Prophet.  And you already checked Grinfotts..."

She shook her head again, less enthusiastic now that she was feeling stumped.  She stuffed her mouth with more samosa, which was beginning to go cold now.

Jonas could have hit his forehead.

"Oh, bloody hell," he said helplessly.  He wanted to add far more swears than that, but instead he leaned back in the booth, staring up at the ceiling.  After months of doggedly mulling over 8-1-0, having to contemplate 0-1-8 instead was world-shattering.  Closing his eyes, he tried to replay the moment when Briggs had slipped him the note.  If he'd turned it right side around -- if Jonas had missed that crucial detail in the heat of the moment --

But after all, this was why he had asked for Thursby's help to begin with.  Turning the numbers on their head to read 0-1-8 seemed like a deliciously crooked way of thinking -- it was wizardly, through and through.  But it was also obvious, Jonas thought furiously, the kind of minuscule twist that would have been thrown into an episode of a crime drama, that the audience would have been screaming at their televisions about from the very first moment while the poor plodding detectives went on about their business and futilely ran down every useless lead --

Grimacing, he gave Niobe a shrug, his posture clearly unhappy.  "I checked Gringotts, but not Vault 018," he admitted sourly.  "There's plenty of work I should redo."  Lockers in King's Cross, addresses...he already had a vague idea of how many 8-1-0s there were in the world, and now he was going to have to double them by checking for all of the 0-1-8s. 

They sat in silence a bit.  Both of them seemed to be stewing at the puzzle that was stumping them both, a puzzle set to them by a bloke who sounded like quite a low character.  Bit of a blow to Niobe's ego, that was for sure, as she fancied herself quite the kneazle when it came to things like this.

She sulked, staring at the stupid little napkin, with the stupid little digits.  Her meal was finished, only empty plates and forgotten forks remained. 

Niobe's four fingered hand was buried in the roots of her dreads and bit her lip in thought.  It was killing her.  Who started numbers with a zero?  She couldn't think of any place... A snatch of a memory tugged at the back of her mind.  She narrowed her eyes and lost focus of the restaurant.

Laughter echoing.  "Look Niobe, there's a zero zero one!  Why don't they just make it one and save on numbers...!"

She shut her eyes tight, and knit her forehead with her thumb and forefinger.  The memory was faint and she was trying to pull it back.  Was it a hotel? A narrow place... she remembered being excited...

"Because zeros don't cost anything to make..." And then a train whistle..."

Niobe's eyes flew open as the rest of the memory flooded back and she slammed her hand on the counter.  It felt like she'd been choking and finally the offending bit of chip that had been keeping her from breathing had suddenly come loose! 

"Hogwarts Express!" she said in a near shout, startling more than a few of the scant patrons. 

She coughed and leaned into Jonas.  "The train.  Hogwarts Express.  I remember, the compartments are all numbered with three digits and so some start with zero.  I remember, I'd never seen that before and we joked about it when I was in school.  There is a compartment oh-one-eight on that train, Jonas."

She reached across the table and clapped him on the shoulder.  "Bugger-all, that's got to be it.  Little shit..."

The red-haired Auror stared back at her, and then closed his eyes.

"I don't know whether I ought to hug you or hit me head against something," he said weakly.  This was not the way things were supposed to work.  Well -- actually, it was, which was why he'd gone to Niobe in the first place.  He'd given up his right to blinding flashes of brilliant intellect the moment he'd turned in his status as a maverick private detective for all of the shiny benefits that came with being an Auror.  Now he was the law; she was the brilliant maverick.  And he wasn't nearly as familiar with the magical world aside; that was two strikes against him.

He had never paid much attention to details on the Hogwarts Express.  As a boy, he had always been more concerned about more important things, like the fact that he was actually a wizard and he actually owned a wand and now he was going off to wizard school to learn how to do all sorts of wizardly things.  That had occupied him for the entire train ride his first year.  Even after that, there had been a lot of other things going on: catching up with Tait after a whole summer gone, finding the witch with the sweet cart, and then, as he'd gotten older, nonchalantly tracking down whichever classmate he was too embarrassed to admit he currently had a crush on, which was usually either Taryn Aldridge or Josephine St. Just...

Jonas let out a sigh, shook his head, and opened his eyes.  "Alright," he said, flashing Niobe a resigned grin.  "Reckon that means this meal's on me.  The Hogwarts Express has already come and gone once this year, hasn't it?" he asked, his forehead creasing as he considered.  That could be a problem -- it was one thing tracking down the Muhra glass when he had to search the whole bloody world, but somehow the thought of figuring out which grubby-handed youth had snatched the unidentified package off the luggage rack and dragged it back to their own grubby dorm seemed even more insurmountable.  Didn't wizards have a version of 'If you see something, say something!'?

"Well, at least they've got to keep it somewhere when it's not in the dock, yeah?  Unless they vanish it?"  He frowned, giving the reporter another uncertain look.  His Muggle-ness was showing.  "Reckon I'll have to ask Raynor or Rosier to petition the Wizengamot to let me search it.  Might take time, that."  Especially since he couldn't really explain why he had a sudden hunch that there might be something valuable on board.

Niobe tried not to look too smug, but she did rather like this moment.  She still couldn't ken what Jonas Trevalyan had done by re-joining the Auror Corps.  He wasn't the power-hungry sort, more brains and blasting spells this one.  She sat back grinning as he settled in that her conclusion was worth looking into.  Job well done, Thursby.  Duty done.

She waved him off politely when he offered to buy her dinner.  Just being a bad sport, but she could understand how he'd be kicking himself, having missed the connection.  Especially after all the footwork they'd already had to do.  It had to sting a big.  No need to dent his pocket twelve quid over it. 

And now that the puzzle seemed solved, Niobe still had questions.  She always had questions.

"Really?" she asked,  "Seems routine to me."  Niobe wondered at the need to involve the Head of Level Two, Cameron Rosier, in what seemed like a typical search on decent cause.  They'd presumably already searched many other places that'd be more difficult to get permission for, like Gringotts...