"This memory belonged to a vagrant on the streets of Germany in 1945. His legs were crippled, so he saw everything that happened outside the orphanage with his own eyes."
Katherine explained in a level, unhurried voice. "After my sister graduated, she went to the trouble of tracking down every last survivor from that day. She drew their memories out and stored them in secret, and every vial was labelled in detail. I only found them when I was sorting through her things after she died."
"These... my mother found these?" Kate straightened up out of the Pensieve, startled.
So Katherine had known nothing about where she and her sister came from until she found these memories?
"I have no idea where she dug any of it up. Right up until I graduated and decided to go travelling, she never said a word to me about it."
As she spoke, Katherine took out another vial. "After the fighting in 1945, every survivor had their memories wiped. Everyone believed the casualties came from an explosion at a chemical plant nearby."
"After that, my sister and I stayed on at the orphanage. Later a couple adopted us and brought us to England, and then our Hogwarts letters arrived."
"Our adoptive parents had been decent enough before that, but their fear of wizards changed them completely. They beat us, they screamed at us, and they forbade us to go to Hogwarts."
"They already had children of their own by then, so a month after the letters came, my sister and I packed up properly and ran away. We never went back."
"And so we got into Hogwarts, and seven years of school began. During that time my sister met Everard Shafiq, and the two of them fell in love."
She tipped the memory in the vial into the Pensieve.
Kate hesitated for a moment, then bent her head and sank in.
When the darkness cleared this time, she saw Dumbledore -- decades younger, not yet worn down by age.
He sat with his half-moon spectacles perched on his nose, brows drawn tight over a letter spread on the desk in front of him.
A girl of about fifteen or sixteen stood before him. Kate circled round to face her, and found that the girl's features were startlingly close to her own.
She was lovely. Long black hair fell loose like dark seaweed, her skin pale as porcelain, and the corners of her pretty lips curved up a little, giving her the look of a sly fox.
So this was her mother, young.
"Grace," Dumbledore said, his face grave, "where did you get this letter?"
"At my summer job," Grace answered calmly. "You know my sister and I can only afford the cheapest inns over the holidays, so we have to work to keep ourselves fed."
"I was on the night shift at a fried chicken shop when a strange old man walked in. Half his face was burned away. I couldn't make out his features."
"He handed me this letter, and then he vanished. The letter says he's my father by blood, and it also tells me--"
She never finished, because Dumbledore's face had visibly darkened.
"Germany, 1945. It seems the pair of you were both victims of that war..." Dumbledore murmured, rising to his feet and laying the letter down on the desk.
"Professor," Grace said abruptly, "could we keep this from my sister, for now?"
Dumbledore paused, surprise flickering in those bright blue eyes. "You mean to--"
"I'll look into my father on my own, after I graduate. For now I don't want this interfering with my sister's studies."
No wonder Katherine had learned none of it until her mother was dead.
Kate watched their conversation without a word. While the two of them were talking she stepped round behind the desk, and when she made out what was written on the letter, her expression changed all at once.
The moment she came back out of the Pensieve, she lunged forward and caught Katherine's arm. "Auntie... you -- are you all right?"
"It was my sister who wasn't." Something rippled through Katherine's calm eyes. She brushed Kate's hand lightly aside. "You read the letter, then?"
Kate nodded, her face troubled. "Yes. It said... the two of you carry a Curse."
"We do. A Curse that man cast himself." Katherine gave a small, self-mocking laugh. "He laid it on our mother's womb before we were even born. He simply never counted on her bearing twins."
So only her mother, Grace, had taken the Curse's effect.
And that was why her mother had chosen not to tell Katherine -- she hadn't wanted to drag her into it.
Kate drew a deep breath and fought to still the heaving in her chest.
Maybe she was simply too ignorant of the world, but across her past life and this one, she had never once heard of anyone digging a pit this deep for their own family.
She pressed on at once. "What exactly does the Curse do?"
"I'll tell you that in a moment." Katherine gave her a look weighted with meaning.
"What you need to know right now is that the Curse comes out of the womb with you. There's a chance the one who bears it becomes a Squib, or that their constitution is damaged -- unable to bear the cold in winter, for instance."
Kate's eyes flew wide, and the violent surge of feeling in her chest dropped away, sinking down and down until it settled at the very bottom.
A Squib. A damaged constitution.
Which meant...
"Which means the Curse came through my mother and landed on me. Is that it?" She let out a snort of laughter, the sound closer to mockery.
No wonder. No wonder the Mana in her body had never grown on its own, however hard she worked at it. No wonder winter cut into her the way it did.
She had always assumed the fright Voldemort gave her mother had brought on an early birth, and that was why she'd come out so frail. It seemed not.
Without the System, she would be a Squib right now. A Cursed Squib, one anyone could carve up, with no power to fight back.
In an instant the images came flooding in together: herself as a small child struggling to run through the pouring rain and being beaten down again and again, and that dim, shadowed long table.
Her hands had closed into fists without her noticing, gripping hard enough to leave the knuckles bloodless. She shut her eyes and let out a long sigh at the ceiling.
If she really had been nothing more than a fifteen-year-old girl, a truth this cruel might well have flattened her for good.
But an adult soul that had taken every beating the world had to give was not so fragile. Even as the memories of those beatings came at her, wave after wave, she made no sound.
Only after she had digested, a little, the fact that there was a time bomb of unknown purpose sitting inside her body did she open her eyes again.
"I'm all right. You don't need to worry about me."
Her small face had already gone pale, but looking at the two women in front of her, Kate still pulled the corners of her mouth up and let them see exactly where she stood.
"Honestly, as misfortunes go, I've come out of this rather lucky, haven't I?"
Cursed, perhaps -- but she had the System.
There was still a way to save all of it.
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