CHAPTER THIRTY
Beelzebub found them between the third and fourth stall.
He moved the way he always did — unhurried, like the concept of being late had never occurred to him and never would. His fly mask caught the candlelight as he approached and the people around him instinctively created space without seeming to notice they were doing it.
Ives saw him coming. Dawn and Aura did too.
All three bowed.
"Lord Beelzebub." Dawn and Aura said together.
Ives said it a beat after them. Not from disrespect. Just because saying it still felt strange in his mouth.
Beelzebub stopped before them and looked at all three with the particular stillness of a man who is always observing far more than he lets on.
"Rise." He said simply. Then after a moment, "Well. How has the evening treated you?"
Dawn answered first. "Exceptional. The neural insert vendor had some genuinely impressive modifications. I placed an order."
"As did I." Aura added. "The engineered fauna alone was worth the journey."
Beelzebub's mask turned slightly toward Ives.
Ives took a short breath. "It wasn't what I expected."
"No?"
"No." Ives kept his voice even. "I expected more... ritual. Candles in circles. Chanting. Skull cups. Something that looked like what it actually was."
Beelzebub made a low sound that was almost certainly amusement. "Ah. You wanted the aesthetic. The robes in a forest. The altar. The sacrificial lamb for good theatre. The elder speaking in dead languages while everyone kneels on cold stone." He tilted his head. "I can arrange that if you feel strongly about it."
"No." Ives said. "It's just that the last gathering I attended that looked this normal ended with a man flying through the walls and killing everyone." He paused. "I find it hard to relax in rooms like this now. I'm fine as long as the company's decent."
Something in Beelzebub's posture shifted — barely, but Ives noticed.
"That is a remarkably honest answer." He said. "And a fair one. For what it is worth, gatherings of powerful people look the same regardless of which century they are held in. The drinks are better now. The conversation is largely identical."
Dawn and Aura exchanged a glance behind their deer masks. Ives caught it. He understood what it meant — you two talk like you have known each other for years — and said nothing about it.
"The island." Ives said. "All of this — the city, the infrastructure, the people living in it. Is this purely a venue?"
"For us, yes." Beelzebub said. "The order does not keep one gathering place. Our members host across locations that suit them. This particular gala — held every six months — belongs to the Demiurge. She calls this site Echoes of Ancient London. It is one of several art installations she maintains." He gestured broadly at the stone ceiling above them, at the torch flames on the walls, at the cobblestone they could feel even through the soles of their shoes. "Every brick is authentic to the period. Every resident is there by choice, even if they no longer remember making it."
Ives looked up at the ceiling.
An art installation. The size of a city. Housing real people living real lives that were not real.
"You said this was nothing to be impressed by." Ives said slowly, remembering the words from the carriage.
"It isn't." Beelzebub said plainly. "You haven't seen Heaven yet."
The word landed differently than any other word he had used. Ives looked at him.
"Are you using that word literally."
"I rarely use any word any other way." Beelzebub turned to Dawn and Aura. "Tell your mother that I intend to arrange a visit to Heaven in the near future. I would like Mister Rothschild included in the party. Give her my regards."
Dawn bowed his head. "Of course."
Aura did the same. "We'll pass it along."
Beelzebub began to turn. Ives spoke before he could complete the movement.
"One moment." He said quietly.
Beelzebub stopped.
"Is there somewhere we could speak privately?"
A brief pause. Then Beelzebub reached up and pressed something on the side of his mask — a small recessed button that Ives hadn't noticed before. He nodded at Ives' eagle mask.
"Left temple. Press and hold for two seconds."
Ives found and pressed it. Something shifted — a faint vibration that ran through the mask's interior — and suddenly the noise of the hall reduced to a low distant murmur even though nothing around them had changed visually.
"No one other than the four present can hear this conversation." Beelzebub explained. "No one else."
Dawn and Aura stood quietly watching their conversation.
He faced Beelzebub directly and asked without building up to it.
"Did you kill my mother?"
The fly mask was completely still.
"I know about the games." Ives continued. His voice was calm. He had practiced calm for a long time. "I know Valkyren isn't what it looks like to the people living in it. I know you've been running something in it. I want to know where my mother fits into that and whether she is dead because of you."
Beelzebub was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke his voice had lost none of its composure but there was something underneath it now — a kind of attention that hadn't been there before. The attention of a man who has just revised his estimate of something.
"The games." He said. "You want to know what they are."
"I already know pieces. I want the full picture."
Another pause. Then Beelzebub spoke.
"Valkyren is a controlled environment." He began. "Not in the way New London is — not physically sealed or historically frozen. But controlled nonetheless. For the past two decades the order has been running continuous cycles within the city. Each cycle begins with a set of conditions we introduce. A person receives an unexpected fortune. A dying patient recovers from a terminal illness. A criminal is given a weapon they should never have access to. Someone receives an identity that isn't theirs." He paused. "The Wheel of Fortune, for instance, is not magic. It is a lottery. A selection tool we use to identify individuals who meet specific criteria — psychological profile, circumstances, potential — and introduce a radical change into their life. You were not chosen by fate, Mister Rothschild. You were selected."
Ives said nothing. He had already suspected this. Hearing it confirmed was a different thing.
"The cycles run on a closed time curve." Beelzebub continued. "Time within Valkyren folds back on itself through means I will not explain now because the explanation requires three hours and significant mathematics. What matters is this — we can alter events across cycles. We introduce changes and we observe the results. How does a single windfall affect the social structure around the recipient? How does one person with extraordinary power shift the behaviour of thousands? What happens to human nature when the rules of cause and effect bend? These are the questions we are testing." He stopped. "We are also looking for aberrations."
"Events that defy cause and effect." Ives said.
"Yes. Events that should not be possible even within an altered loop. They are rare. And when they occur they are the most valuable data we have ever collected." The fly mask tilted slightly. "I think you already understand why I am telling you this."
Ives did. He did not say so.
"The cycles have produced casualties." Beelzebub went on. "People whose lives intersected with our introductions in ways we did not anticipate. People who knew too much and could not be redirected. People who were simply in the wrong place when an experiment required a particular outcome." He stopped. "Your mother falls into a category I am not yet at liberty to discuss in full. What I will tell you is that she was not a target. She was a complication."
Ives breathed in slowly through his nose.
A complication.
He held it. He did not let it out into his face.
"Are you angry?" Beelzebub asked. The question was direct and clinical in the way a doctor asks about pain levels.
Ives thought about it honestly.
"No." He said.
A silence. Then something shifted in Beelzebub's posture — a small movement, barely visible, that looked almost like disappointment.
"You are certain."
"I'm still here, aren't I." Ives said. "I'm still wearing the mask. I know what the order is and what it does and I'm still standing in this hall with a bow in my back and an invitation to Heaven. I'm not going to fall apart over the truth of how things work. I just needed to know."
Beelzebub was quiet for several seconds.
"No one else." He said finally. Not a request. "What has been said here must not leave you."
"Understood."
Beelzebub reached into his coat and produced a slim silver case no larger than a laptop. He held it out and Ives took it. It was heavier than it looked.
"A commission and a gift." Beelzebub said. "Continue investigating the thread you have already begun pulling. The one connecting the research to the disappearance to the woman in the hospital." He paused. "You have good instincts. Use them."
He turned to go.
Then stopped.
"One last thing." He said. Not turning back fully. Just enough. "You said you deduced all of this. About the games."
"Yes." Ives said.
"From what, specifically."
"Patterns. Things that didn't add up."
The fly mask stayed angled away from him just long enough to make Ives' neck feel cold.
"Of course." Beelzebub said.
He walked back into the hall and the candlelight closed around him like water.
Ives pressed the button on his mask and let the sound of the room back in. Dawn and Aura drifted back toward him without being called. Neither of them spoke for a moment.
Then Aura said quietly. "Are you alright?"
"Yes."
Dawn looked at the silver case in Ives' hand. "What is that?"
"Something I need to look into." Ives said. "Not tonight."
The jet climbed out of New London's airspace three hours later with the black ocean spreading out endlessly below and the stars doing nothing useful above.
Ives sat with the silver case on his knees and opened it.
Inside, nestled in cut foam, were six sealed vials of a liquid so dark blue it was almost black. The same ones from the market stall. Beside them was a single card with no words on it — just an image embossed in the surface.
A dove.
Ives looked at it for a long time.
The dove necklace Sabine Carpenter had pressed into his palm in a hospital room. This contains everything my husband was working on. The anti-aging research derived from a deep ocean micro-organism. The research that made her husband disappear. The research that cost his mother her life.
And now the finished product was sitting in his lap delivered by the hand of the man who built the world that destroyed both their families.
He closed the case.
"Dawn." He said.
The young man across from him looked up from the window.
"Explain a closed time curve to me. Simply."
Dawn leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. For someone raised inside the order he explained things the way a person who genuinely liked explaining things did — without showing off.
"A closed time curve is what happens when the path of an object or a person through space and time loops back and connects to its own past." He said. "In nature it can only happen near a black hole where gravity is strong enough to bend spacetime back on itself. In theory you could travel forward and eventually arrive at your own starting point." He paused. "From outside the loop you could in theory introduce changes that affect what happens inside it without being inside it yourself. You send information back. You alter a condition. The loop plays out differently."
"And paradoxes." Ives said.
Dawn nodded. "Many. The most common one — you go back and prevent your own birth. Now you were never born to go back in the first place. So were you born or not?" He spread his hands. "The universe does not like these questions. When a closed time curve is running inside a real environment and conditions inside it stop matching conditions outside it, strange things begin appearing. Effects before their causes. Duplications — a person walks through a door and then a second version of the same person walks through the same door minutes later. Events that should have been erased by a change in the loop still leaving traces."
"Like memories." Ives said.
Dawn went very still.
"Like memories." He said carefully.
They looked at each other across the cabin.
Aura from her seat said quietly, "Have you perhpas encountered an aberration?"
Ives didn't answer. He looked back out the window at the black water below.
"Can we be friends?" Aura asked.
It was such a direct and simple question that it cut through everything else in the cabin. Ives almost smiled. He raised his fist.
Dawn bumped it. Aura bumped it.
Something real had formed between the three of them in the space of a single night. Ives registered it and also registered that it didn't mean he could be careless. They were still Aldire's children. They were still the order's.
But for now, in this cabin above this ocean, they were also just three people who had been handed more truth than was comfortable and were still sitting upright.
A soft sound came from one of the seats further back.
A thin veil materialized and unfolded and Aldire was simply there — seated, composed, her silver hair catching the dim cabin light. Her deer mask faced the window. Her posture suggested she had been there for some time.
"Don't worry I was always here."
Dawn didn't react. Aura didn't react. Ives had stopped being surprised by Aldire at some point during the evening and wasn't sure exactly when.
He looked at his phone instead.
Selene had sent nine messages during the gala.
He read through them in order:
"Hope your evening is less catastrophic than mine. Silva broke three of my vintage wine glasses within an hour of arriving.
She is exactly like her father and I cannot decide if that is wonderful or exhausting.
Are you eating? You forget to eat.
Rhea keeps asking about you. I haven't told her what I actually think about that.
I know you're busy. I just wanted you to know there is somewhere warm to come back to.
Take care of yourself, Ives."
Then two pictures. Then — Silva wants to meet the man who saved her mother. Say the word and I'll set something up.
Ives typed back. Alright.
He set the phone down and leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling of the cabin. Somewhere behind him Aldire was watching the ocean. Dawn and Aura had fallen into a quiet conversation. The silver case with its dove seal sat on the seat beside him.
He thought about his mother.
A complication.
He thought about what it meant that Beelzebub had handed him the finished product of the research that made her one.
He thought about the fact that Beelzebub had not believed him when he said he had deduced it all.
He thought about the aberration growing in him like a second heartbeat.
He closed his eyes.
In Valkyren, the lobby of Ives' building was quiet past midnight.
The night receptionist sat behind the front desk with a cup of tea going cold beside the keyboard. The front door opened.
A woman walked in.
She was perhaps forty. Dark hair going grey at the temples. She moved with the careful deliberate walk of someone who had been moving carefully for a long time. Her clothes were clean but worn in the way that said practical rather than fashionable. Her eyes moved across the lobby quickly — reading it, clocking the exits, counting the people.
She approached the front desk.
"I need to speak with Ives Rothschild." She said. Her voice was steady. Quiet. "He lives here. I know he does. Please tell him —" She stopped. Swallowed. "Please tell him his mother is here."
The receptionist blinked.
Standard protocol: call up. She dialled the penthouse.
On the third ring, not Ives but Zeke answered. The receptionist relayed the message.
A short silence.
"Send her up." Zeke said. "I'll meet her at the elevator."
He was already there when the doors opened. He stood in the corridor in his full tuxedo despite the hour, his glasses catching the hall light, his expression carrying the particular quality it had when he was not surprised by something that should have been surprising.
The woman stepped out and looked at him.
"You must be his assistant." She said. "Zeke. He mentioned you."
"He did." Zeke said. He studied her face the way a doctor looks at a chart — quickly, completely, without showing what he found. "How did you find this address?"
"I have been looking for a long time." She said. And then something broke open in her expression — just briefly, just at the edges. "I know how this looks. I know what they must have told him. But I am alive and I need to speak to my son. Please."
Zeke looked at her for a long moment.
Then he smiled with genuine warmth.
"Of course." He said. "Come in."
He stepped aside and gestured her toward the apartment door.
She walked past him.
She did not hear him reach into his jacket.
She did not feel anything after that.
Zeke stood alone in the corridor with his phone already raised.
It rang once.
"Third one this month." He said quietly when the line connected. His voice had no emotion in it at all. "Something is wrong."