"Any leads."
Cale already knew the answer before he finished asking it.
"None."
They sat with that for a moment, both of them watching the sky. The stars were out, scattered and indifferent, and they had stared at this same view enough times over the past days that it had stopped being a comfort and started being a reminder.
"I wish I could just post online," Cale said. "A poster saying wee are intruders from outside Ellejort, we have lost contact with some of our people, please help us find them. We mean no harm."
"Shilial worries me more than Atiya right now," Zelaine said. "She has been pampered her entire life. Her family made sure of that."
Cale did not argue with that assessment.
"Does this not bring back memories," he said after a moment. "Sitting like this."
"Which ones specifically. All I remember is every time I tried to summon a gold servant I got Hyde. Every single time. Is he a stalker?"
"I am not talking about your gacha game."
"Then the time Shilial kicked your ball?"
"For the record, none of us have ever raised a hand against each other."
"Hmph." Zelaine looked back at the sky. "Ah. I remember the night Frieza sama came to invade."
"Frieza sama did not come."
"Ah, I just remembered something. I have never told anyone this." Zelaine sat up slightly, the wine glass loose in her hand. "Do you remember that night we were on a balcony like this, at the party."
"We had many of those."
"Shilial suggested having an intimate mixer. And you agreed without thinking about it."
"Stop. I misunderstood what she meant."
Cale's ears had gone slightly red.
"If it was not for Atiya's terrified face you would have walked straight into it," Zelaine said. "Your wife would have totally gone along with the whole thing."
She took a long sip of wine.
"You know, she used to like Atiya. For quite a long time."
Cale went quiet for a moment. Not uncomfortable exactly, just somewhere adjacent to it.
He had always known. It was not something Shilial had hidden particularly well and he had never been blind to it.
She had been given to him through a forced arrangement, not a choice either of them had made, and for a long time she had simply endured the situation rather than lived inside it.
Her feelings for Atiya had been real enough in that period.
But Shilial, for all her strangeness, had never crossed a line. Not once.
And somewhere along the way the feeling had shifted into something else entirely, something easier and less complicated. She and Atiya had become genuinely good friends, the kind that did not carry weight or history in the wrong direction.
Atiya, for his part, had never appeared to notice any of it in the first place.
"were you jealous?"
cale pryed.
"jealous! of course, but we haven't began dating back then so it would be oversteeping back then."
zelaine was starled and taken aback by the question.
"so you would rather step back and watched your friend's wife snatching your love?"
Cale was confused by her thought process but didn't mind much, it was how she always was.
The next day.
"A job request? I will make sure not to sleep through it this time."
"It is not a job." The old man's tone was different from usual. "Something I wanted to ask you."
Zelaine and the old man were alone in the office. The quiet of it had a different quality than usual.
"Go ahead." She was already slightly on guard from the tone.
"How are the hotties back home?"
Zelaine blinked. Then settled.
"No idea. I do not go out much, I sleep most of the time." She paused. "But yes, there are some genuinely beautiful women there. They pale in comparison to me, naturally."
"I hope I can fu—" The old man caught himself. "Meet them someday." He smiled, clearly somewhere far away in his own imagination.
'This man is a complete pervert,' Zelaine thought. Then a different thought followed immediately. 'Wait. Why has he not made a move on me. Not once. This is more infuriating than if he had. Terrible eyesight, old man. Truly.'
"119th Belt women are something else, from what I hear," the old man said pleasantly. "Genuinely beautiful."
"Yes, but not as much as—"
Zelaine stopped.
The words dissolved before they finished forming. She took a slow breath, her eyes steady on him.
"You knew." It came out quieter than she intended. "Cale told me you knew, we just never actually spoke about it directly."
The old man nodded. His expression gave nothing away.
He did not address it directly. Instead he leaned forward, the pervert persona set aside entirely, and when he spoke his voice carried a weight she had not heard from him before.
"I can help you return home."
The office felt smaller suddenly.
"However, I need a favor first."
Zelaine kept her face neutral. Inside, something had already started moving, the thought of Atiya's cooking, her room, her bed, her ordinary life waiting exactly where she had left it.
"What favor. I will do it."
She meant it completely and did not bother pretending otherwise.
"Foil Nongban's plan." The old man's voice was low and steady. "Ngamba and I cannot act against him directly. There is a pact and it binds us. You are an outsider. Ellejort's laws do not apply to you, the queen's restrictions do not reach you. You are the only one who can move freely against him."
Zelaine looked at him for a moment.
"In return you help Cale and me find a way back. And you help us locate our friends."
"Yes."
The weight of it sat between them, the shape of a deal that would change the direction of everything.
Then the doorbell rang.
Zelaine's expression did something immediate and specific.
She crossed the room and pulled the front door open with the energy of someone fully prepared to take the interruption personally.
A man stood on the step, blinking at the half dressed furious woman filling the doorway. He looked down at the crumpled paper in his hand and back up again.
"Uh. Is this the Odd Jobs office? I have a job request."
****
More than fifty years ago.
"Cale, are you actually retarded? You reported me to my mother and she is going to roast me alive."
Atiya was not stopping. Cale held the phone slightly away from his ear and said nothing.
"I blew up your lab, yes, but let me be very clear about something, why did you have a family heirloom worth millions sitting inside a lab where I cook fried rice? Who leaves something like that in there, and on top of that you left the gas on."
"You cook fried rice in my lab on a regular basis and you think that is acceptable."
"Is it not normal to cook somewhere when you are hungry."
One second of silence.
"It is my lab Atiya, not a kitchen, and that heirloom cost millions and now it is gone and you called me retarded."
"I called your mother so she could be compensated properly and I spoke to my family about covering the cost, the heirloom will be handled."
"That is not the point!"
"Then what is the point."
"The point is that my mother is going to roast me alive over your heirloom and your lab and your gas that you left on!"
Cale considered this for a moment.
"You left the gas on."
The sound that came through the phone after that was not entirely a word.
At present.
"It has not even been an hour since you woke up and you are already dozing off."
The prison cell was small and cold, the stone walls close enough on either side that a grown man could touch both simultaneously without fully extending his arms.
A single torch somewhere down the passage threw unsteady orange light through the iron bars, enough to see by and not much more. The floor was bare stone, slightly damp, and the chains securing Atiya to the wall were old but solid.
He could not move with any real freedom and using yaicraft was not worth attempting. He had already checked that particular door and found it closed.
"It is a funny story actually, do you want to hear it."
Fredo Nelljan stood outside the cell, the torchlight catching the white of his beard and the deep blue of it underneath.
He had initiated the conversation himself and now he looked at Atiya with the expression of a man deciding whether to be amused or suspicious, the two things sitting close enough together on his face that it was hard to read which one was winning.
"I do not take you for a comedian."
He opened the cell door anyway, the hinges giving a low groan as it swung inward, and stepped inside. He settled onto the bare floor across from Atiya, his robes pooling around him, his hands loose in his lap.
The torch down the passage flickered once and steadied.
"Then tell me your story," Fredo said. "Where you are from, what you want, how you found out about us. Everything."
"Okay, okay." Atiya shifted slightly against the chains, the metal catching the light. "Trust me it is funny. Really funny."
"There once lived a man named Alighieri, and in his divine tale he wrote of a journey to the depths of hell. He spoke of sins, of circles, of where each sinner would end up for what they had done in life."
Atiya's voice was unhurried, settling into the story with the ease of someone who had told it before.
"Dante's Divine Comedy," Fredo said. "I assume. What of it."
He was not unamused. He had read the source. He was simply waiting to see where this was going.
"In that work, Lucifer, the great villain at the center of it all, is depicted as a massive grotesque creature frozen waist deep in the icy floor of Judecca, the ninth circle of hell. Three faces, three mouths, each one chewing on a specific sinner for eternity. Judas in the center, Brutus and Cassius on either side."
"So."
Fredo's eyebrow moved slightly.
"Tell me," Atiya said, "did Lucifer grow a new head specifically to chew on Adolf Hitler? Because if he only has three and they were already occupied, someone had to be let go to make room. So who got released? Who did Lucifer spit out so he could fit Hitler in there?"
Fredo stared at him.
The torch down the passage flickered.
"That is not funny at all."
"Wait for it."
Fredo was silent for a moment, sitting with the question he had not asked for and now could not entirely put down.
"Where was I." Atiya paused as though genuinely trying to remember. "You know, when I regained consciousness earlier I noticed something hilarious."
"Again," Fredo said, his voice carrying the particular patience of someone who had committed to seeing this through. "What was hilarious."
"Lucifer. The big frozen grotesque one with three faces." Atiya's mouth pulled into something that was almost a smile. "He looked exactly like him."
"Like who."
"Come on, you know him."
Fredo had no idea who he was talking about and his face said so plainly.
"Your father," Atiya said. "Kallar Nelljan."
The cell went quiet.
Fredo's eyes widened, something moving fast behind them, and when he spoke his voice had dropped from patience into something considerably sharper.
"How do you know that name."