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When he stepped into their empty office for the first time since Barok van Zieks’s arrest, Kazuma considered for a moment sitting behind the desk. In that ridiculous high-backed velvet chair, overlooking the gleaming, gilded room. He could just sit there as if it were his. As if he’d won.
But he hadn’t won, not yet, so he didn’t.
He ran his fingers over the gold edge of the desk, forcing the urge back down in him. Was he really that smug? So tasteless as to lounge on the man’s throne like he’d deposed a king? The arrest hadn’t even been his doing. The conviction would be—but even then, there were more dignified ways to take pride in it when the time came.
“We’re not in service to our pride,” Van Zieks had said to him after their first loss. Sitting in that chair, hand at his breast, fingertip tracing the edge of his badge. “It’s the truth that we’re obliged to. It’s only the truth that we’ve failed today.”
Kazuma had no idea where he’d found the nerve to say such things. He scoffed as he reached out to mark the page of the book that Van Zieks had left open on the desktop, shook his head as he quietly closed it.
It took him a couple seconds to realize how foolish it was to do so. He had been too intently focused on that other stupid urge that the absurdity of this smaller one had escaped him for a moment. Not closing the book—but saving the page. Van Zieks wouldn’t be back to keep reading, after all.
It was something his other self might have done. It was something he had done. Barok van Zieks had been prone to reading until he fell asleep, and his dutiful apprentice had closed his book and extinguished his lamp when he could not. Kazuma stepped away from the desk, sickened. He could remember the fondness in his quiet, light-fingered touch. He could remember gazing at his mentor’s sleeping face before the light went out. He could remember feeling privileged, to see Barok van Zieks so unguarded.
He closed his eyes.
It took a minute to gather himself enough to open them. This room was wrapped up in so many of those memories that had haunted him since he’d become himself again. He’d been trying to push them back, but here in the office again he found it insurmountable.
He was furious with himself. Those months when he’d been little more than a lump of clay for Barok van Zieks to mold to his will… It should have been easy to cast them aside. Once he’d discovered who his mentor truly was, shouldn’t he have been able to hate him properly? But that devoted apprentice still lived in him. Taking up part of his mind, part of his heart.
Now that he was prosecuting the man, he could tolerate it no longer. He breathed in deeply and squared his shoulders. He’d been granted an opportunity, and he could not allow himself to squander it.
It was an opportunity that he hadn’t expected for months at the least. In the time he’d spent in Van Zieks’s tutelage, Kazuma had seen firsthand how close to the chest he kept his cards. Even his loyal apprentice hadn’t been granted any trust. And his crimes… Van Zieks had been tried before, and cleared of all charges. Kazuma figured a man who’d gone a decade without leaving any smoking guns would take some time to slip up.
He hadn’t made plans yet for what he’d have done until then. Barok van Zieks’s apprentice would have been a far more ideal position to keep tabs on him, and after he’d fled he found himself wondering whether he should have stayed on. But there was no chance he’d have been allowed to. Van Zieks had to know that Kazuma Asogi had been coming for him, and he knew better than anyone how dangerous an enemy close at hand could be.
Thankfully, Kazuma had no need now to figure out what to do with himself while he waited.
A courier had left a package for him with the stationmaster in Dover. Lord Stronghart had known, it seemed, that he’d want to be apprised of the situation as immediately as was possible. On the train back to London he’d gone over the documents once, then twice, then thrice. Gunshot, point-blank. Kazuma had almost laughed at that. He’d have expected Van Zieks to kill with a blade, if anything. Perhaps if he’d done so he wouldn’t have been caught.
At first glance, he’d been skeptical. All of it had felt far too inelegant for Barok van Zieks. A pistol, close enough to leave scorching on the waistcoat, within earshot of witnesses? The fact that he’d let himself be seen in so clumsy a fashion, after years of infallible perfection? But Kazuma had had to beat aside that part of him that still thought so highly of the man. As he considered it more, it made sense. There must have been a reason why Van Zieks had never killed with his own hands—he didn’t have the skill to do so.
But his usual hired gun was dead now, and good riddance. And the gun he’d hired for this particular murder… He’d abandoned his task. The Reaper taking the gun in his own hands had been a desperate last resort.
In the moment, Kazuma had been ashamed of himself that he couldn’t find the nerve to kill. Now he was ashamed of himself for feeling so. On the contrary—it should have been a point of pride. With the apprentice still lurking in the back of his mind, everything that separated him from Barok van Zieks was now a point of pride.
He knew that they’d once been close, Van Zieks and the detective. How could someone who cared about Tobias Gregson do what Kazuma, who’d been personally wronged by him, could not? It spoke to a lack of humanity. And yet, however inhumane it was, his skill at hiding it was more terrifying by far. Van Zieks’s charade had been stunning. That foolish part of Kazuma still wanted to believe that he’d seen behind the Reaper’s mask. That he’d seen a gentle, noble, sorrowful man beneath.
He'd been stupid. He’d seen nothing but a second mask, an illusion of vulnerability. Nothing but the fabrication a master manipulator had wanted him to see, and at the time he’d been clueless enough to believe it.
He knew now that this wouldn’t be the first time Barok van Zieks had killed a friend.
Since he’d returned to himself Kazuma had been lost in thoughts of his father’s trial. He’d been trying to picture it. Had Van Zieks been the same man back then? Had he spoken so coldly, broken things so flippantly, stared into Genshin Asogi’s face with that same cruel, steely gaze? It had been easy to believe until he’d been to Gregson’s office ahead of their assignment on the S.S. Grouse. Until he’d caught the frozen eyes of the proud young man in the detective’s photograph.
As they left, he’d pocketed it. He hadn’t been able to restrain himself. Part of him wanted to study it: to picture the man who’d sent his father to death, as he’d been when he had. The stupider part was simply captivated. He had never seen Barok van Zieks smile.
He’d carried it to France and back. Stared at it in the dim moonlight at the Dunkirk boarding house. Countless times he’d moved to rip it, to crumple it, to toss it off the deck of the ship and watch it flutter into the channel. He couldn’t. It felt like the same biological reluctance that would have kept him from leaping off himself.
His fingers brushed his pocket, but he dragged them away. He lay the case file out on the table and forced himself to focus.
Once more, he considered the facts. A shot to the chest at close range. No time of death listed, as if the English police could be counted on for anything. But the gunshot had been heard by the vendors outside. Five o’clock, the same as the broken watch.
An uninhabited flat, but one that had clearly been in use for something clandestine. Police documents. There was no doubt Van Zieks could have gotten his hands on those—Kazuma had seen, as his apprentice, how well he got on with Scotland Yard. The content on the documents was even more telling. Kazuma scanned the list, cross-referenced them with the court records. All defendants that faced Prosecutor Barok van Zieks, all declared innocent. All had met an accidental death not long later. The oldest dated back to 1890. Would Van Zieks truly keep each victim’s case up so long? Were they records? Trophies? The Reaper seemed to be far more vain a man than Kazuma had thought.
Something about his ignorance was comforting.
The wig, Gregson could be presumed to have been wearing—a disguise for such a dangerous investigation? The model policeman was a complete mystery—likely just a lucky charm of his. The photograph—Kazuma recognized her. Juror number two from last week. Had Van Zieks known her before then? It was an odd thought.
Kazuma flicked back through records, noted down her name to contact when he could. He couldn’t help himself hoping that Van Zieks had been sweet on some woman or another. He thought that might put his mind at ease.
He studied the photograph of the candelabra. One had been shot off, that was obvious. But if the detective were shot where he fell, would there be blood on the wall? Kazuma had to admit he wasn’t as familiar with guns as he’d like. How far away would one need to be standing to avoid such a thing?
A model would help.
The thought infuriated him.
They’d done this a few times, during his apprenticeship. He knew where Van Zieks had kept his materials. His paints, his glues, his little bits of wood. Kazuma set out the photographs in front of him and began to piece together the shape of that miserable Fresno Street room.
He stripped off his gloves before gluing the walls together. He could see Van Zieks just weeks ago there at the desk, peeling off his own gloves to work. Kazuma could feel the heady rush of blood to his face behind the mask, the fluttering heartbeat beneath his cloak.
He fought the urge to vomit.
He remembered watching Van Zieks spend hours reproducing each painstaking detail of a crime scene. The first model he’d made had been a hotel suite, the second only a single bedroom. The third had been the entire Great Exhibition. That was the first time his apprentice had been permitted to help, or else he never would have finished in time.
He had felt somewhat silly, assembling that dollhouse of dollhouses. “Does this help?” he’d asked, as he placed the tiny trees to photographic precision.
Van Zieks, as always, had flinched.
Kazuma had been able to tell from the beginning that something about his voice set Van Zieks on edge. And yet—he’d argued with Lord Stronghart for his apprentice's right to use it. When Kazuma had been granted permission to speak only when they were in private, he had wondered then who else Lord Stronghart hadn’t wanted to hear him.
Now he knew.
“It helps me,” said Van Zieks, as he sanded the bell of Professor Harebrayne’s machine into the precise curve. “It’s far easier than visiting the scene every time you have a question, and far more easily manipulated to test theories.”
He had reached out and Kazuma had handed him the glue bottle. Even if they had been allowed to speak, much of their communication had still been silent. They’d understood each other just as well. But some things couldn’t be said in nods and gestures, and there was one point about which Kazuma had been ravenously curious.
“I hadn’t realized you and he were friends,” he’d said.
“…We were friends long ago, yes,” said Van Zieks. He delicately positioned the bell on top of the base, holding it there to dry. “I suppose we still are.”
“Even now that you believe he’s committed murder?”
He shook his head. “I don’t believe that he could.”
Kazuma inclined his head, a silent question.
Van Zieks sighed.
“No one else given this case would have treated Albert as anything but a killer,” he said. “I can’t leave him to the mercy of the judiciary.”
Kazuma nodded.
“Were I a defense lawyer, I’d have defended him. But as I am a prosecutor, this is all that’s within my power.”
“…You’re losing intentionally,” said Kazuma.
“No,” Van Zieks replied. “I am allowing the evidence to lead us where it may.”
“You trust his defense a great deal.”
He had tightened his lips and hadn’t answered.
Kazuma wondered now whether Albert Harebrayne had understood that. He wondered what the man had felt, hearing his dear friend speak against him at the prosecutor’s bench. The apprentice in him wondered what Van Zieks would feel tomorrow, whether he would feel similarly betrayed. Or perhaps, whether he might understand Kazuma’s actions the way he’d described his own. Protective in the only way he could be.
He clenched his jaw. Neither was acceptable. There was no love in his decision to prosecute, neither current nor former. He needed to make sure Van Zieks understood that.
He needed his head on straight. His own head, no one else’s.
With furious focus, Kazuma kept building the spare little room. Studying the photographs, measuring out the heights and the angles, placing the few pieces of furniture against the walls. He combed through the evidence once more as he arranged the scene, making sure every noted detail was accounted for.
Scotland Yard’s proposal was possible. An awkward angle given Van Zieks’s height, but possible. However—there was one sticking point, one unaccountable bit of strangeness.
The arresting officer had reported that the gun was cold.
Yet he had also smelt the gunpowder. There were multiple witnesses who’d heard the shot. The chamber was missing rounds. But they hadn’t been fired then—there’d been another gun in that room, and it was utterly unaccounted for.
Van Zieks had told the police that the gun found in his hand wasn’t his own. That he’d lost that one, and he had not elaborated. Preposterous. Barok van Zieks wasn’t careless enough to lose a firearm, Kazuma knew that for certain. He might have been clever enough to use another’s, but if its owner couldn’t be identified either way, what was the point?
Kazuma dropped his head into his hands, scraping his fingers through his hair. He was tempted just to ask Van Zieks for an explanation. Surely after so long at his right hand, he knew the man better than almost anyone. Surely he ought to be able to tell his truth from his lies? The fool he’d been had his uses.
He wondered whether there was a fool still living in Van Zieks’s own mind.
Back then, when he’d been nothing but an apprentice, Kazuma had had the sense that his feelings were requited. Requited in a distant, agonized sense, but requited nonetheless. Were those feelings haunting Van Zieks as well? Was he sick with himself for caring for an unknown enemy? Did he, too, still care in spite of it? Was he, too, feeling the shrapnel of memory in him with every thought?
Kazuma wanted more than anything to stare into the Reaper’s eyes and tell him in no uncertain terms that he was no longer an ally. That the loyal apprentice no longer lived in his heart. That he’d exorcised the remains of the nameless man who’d loved Barok van Zieks, and left nothing but the man who loathed him.
But he hadn’t, not yet. So he couldn’t.