Under the Shadow of Aldeburgh

"She froze in Mountain Shadow all day, and she's still waiting." Vivi closed the file in front of her and tapped the cover lightly twice. "Send her Rahmani's deep signal waveform and Cohen's Tell Atlas annotations. Ask her to run a comparative scan at Mountain Shadow. If she can successfully record matching characteristics on the same instrument, it will prove these deep signals aren't a local phenomenon, but a shared structure spread beneath the known Seal grids across at least two continents."

She turned to Harry and was just about to go on when her phone screen lit up again.

This time, it was an encrypted call request directly from Kingsley.

Vivi answered. From the other end came the background noise of the communications room at Confederation Headquarters—keyboards clacking, magical fax machines clicking as they spat out paper, and an Auror loudly reporting, "The Salem search team has departed."

"Lady," Kingsley said, "the scarred man gave up another piece during the fourth round of interrogation. He said that while Cohen was serving at the Bureau of Artifact Research, besides the seven Seals within the United States and Voldemort's analytical Manuscript in the Albanian forest, he also personally made a trip to Britain. Not to London, and not to Hogwarts—he went to the Suffolk coast. He said that after Cohen came back, he put a new file into that five-tier drawer cabinet. The label read: East England—Aldeburgh—Unconfirmed. The reason he remembered the place name was that after Cohen returned that time, he didn't leave his office for three days straight and suspended all ongoing Directional Magic Guidance experiments."

"Aldeburgh." Harry frowned. "The Suffolk coast, the southern shore of the North Sea. What's there?"

"I don't know," Kingsley said. "But he confessed one detail: during the three days when Cohen suspended the