“Hello sweetheart”, Arthur addressed Crookshanks the cat who got up from his bed under the portrait of Sirius, stretched, yawned and came to meet him. “Still miss your friend?”, he looked at Sirius, as the cat rubbed his head on his leg and he kneeled down to pet him. “You’re a good boy”.

“Hello Lyra”, he stood up and looked at the young woman who came to greet him. “It’s so nice to see you”, he hugged her. “Is Hermione all right?”, he whispered.

“She’s fine. Somewhat shaken, but nothing more. Come, see for yourself”, she led him to the couch where Hermione rose up to greet him.

“Hello Arthur”, she smiled as he embraced her.

“I was so worried when I saw the news”, they sat down as Lyra went to get them tea and biscuits.

“How did they let you go there all alone?”, he pulled fingers through his hair.

“Well, here’s the thing. We didn’t know what we’ll find. We knew they were smugglers. We knew they moved stolen goods to and from that location. We knew the hut was protected against remote viewing and apparition. We knew there’s several of them, and we decided to send an Auror to be safe, rather than risk ordinary magical police force. You see, smugglers who have a shielded base in the middle of nowhere rather than somewhere in town is already a red flag. There were things there that they didn’t want seen, and that could be anything. What we didn’t know was that they weren’t smugglers – they were murderers who used smuggling to get money”, she nodded. “So, our hunch to send an Auror to deal with mere smuggling ended up being justified. Unfortunately, the problem was still worse than we suspected, much worse, and I was initially overwhelmed”.

“Why you, of all people?”, Arthur wondered.

“Well, I’m a new Auror and what better way for me to get used to the work, than go on a job that looked barely worth sending an Auror for?”, she laughed. “It wasn’t supposed to be dangerous. What else was I supposed to do? Guard Azkaban?”.

“No, I guess not”, he agreed. “But…”

“How did I miss it and put my sister in harm’s way?”, Lyra offered, as she brought refreshments. “That’s the thing with shielding. You don’t know what’s being shielded. I had to guess based on the sort of crime that’s being committed – theft of imported goods from a warehouse, selling it on the black market. Not exactly terrible. We hardly even deal with small fry like that in the office, and forward it to the ordinary law enforcement. However, there was something weird about this one. Their base was too remote to make economical sense. Too large travel distance. Also, too much shielding, of too great power and sophistication. They usually never bother; they assume nobody will look, and if they get caught they try to get away quickly and abandon the goods. Shielding against apparition isn’t something you do to protect imported cauldrons and invisibility cloaks. You do it to protect something really important. So, we decided to deal with it ourselves, and Hermione volunteered because she was bored and wanted to finally do something”, she smiled. “Had I known, I’d send Viktor with her, which would make it much harder for criminals to overwhelm them initially, and she’d likely not have to resort to her last line of defence, which was to use space to crush them”.

“I read about them being liquified”, Arthur looked questioningly. “What did you do to them?”

“I touched magic directly, and saw them as four dim lights around me, and since I was under a full body-bind curse, I couldn’t move my eyes to target them visually I had to rely on that, and I touched space with magic on all four dim lights at once, and crushed and swirled. I later looked up and didn’t find anything about that in magical literature, and then I tried Muggle literature. They describe space doing terrible things like that in the context of astrophysics – objects of enormous mass like neutron stars and black holes that produce a gravity well with a very steep gradient, specifically a quickly rotating massive object that also introduces extreme angular momentum on a steep gradient, like a very fast rotating neutron star, or a Kerr black hole”. She saw that they are looking at her with eyes glazed over and mouths open. “Anyway, I fortunately contained the effect to them specifically because had that extended outside them, it could have easily killed me and destroyed everything there”, she finished.

Lyra managed to get her bearings first. “So, basically, the differences in density of space and differences in its rotational speed tore every part of them from every other part of them, and continued to do it until they were liquid, or close enough”, she explained it to Arthur.

“Isn’t that hard to do when you’re surprised and petrified on the floor?”, he wondered.

“No, in fact it’s the easiest thing to do”, Hermione explained. “It’s like pressing a button on an onion blender”. She saw his confusion. “A muggle device that works on electricity. It has a motor that turns a knife that spins in circle in a jar and cuts onions into small fragments when you press the button”. He nodded. “Anyway, I contained, crushed and swirled, came out of deep magic, saw what became of them, called Lyra and threw up”, she smiled.

“How did you call her?”, Arthur wondered.

She tapped her wrist, and a red circle showed up on both her and Lyra’s wrists. “We made this to keep in touch when the babies were very little, so that one of us can go to work and the other one could notify her when they are awake. Lyra was exploring Voldemort’s dark mark, and this is technically similar, but much more sophisticated. You can tap it and it glows, tap it twice and it starts blinking, which notifies us that babies are up, or you can tap and talk and it functions as a muggle radio, so we can talk to each other at a distance. It turned out to be so useful, we left it there even when it wasn’t needed, because it now allows me to call my boss for reinforcements when I’m in over my head”, she smiled blissfully at her sister. “And when you’re done, you do this”. She stroked over the circle with her palm and it went off.

“That’s amazing magic”, Arthur was in awe. “Which one of you made it?”

“Both of us”, Lyra smiled. “We talked about what we wanted, and since it’s the kind of a spell that requires consent, we both just figured it out together as we held hands”.

“Can you connect to other people with the same thing?”

“In theory, but in practice we don’t want to. We thought about it but we just don’t want to give other people the ability to pull our strings or disrupt us. It’s just between the two of us because we decided we wanted to stay connected when we are apart”, Hermione smiled.

“So, the Dark Mark inspired a baby alarm”, he laughed.

“At least something good came of it”, Lyra snickered.