Through time II ; Flames of time

They need Watson

*Leo*

“I do not know. He never finished it. Or he said he never finished it.“ I lift the chronometer from the shelf, cradling it in both hands. The crystal pulses once, a faint blue light that fades almost before I see it. “But if the killer is using Augustus“s methods, then understanding this device may tell us how he moves. How he chooses his targets.“

Lily stands and moves to my side. She does not reach for the chronometer, but she leans close enough that I can smell the soap from the manor, a clean scent that does not belong in this dusty room. “The reports,“ she says. “The arches. They are the key.“

“The arches are how he travels. But they are also how he hides. There are dozens of stone arches in this city, most of them unremarkable, most of them ignored. If he knows which ones are active, which ones connect to which times, he can move through history without leaving a footprint.“

“Except for the witnesses.“

“Except for the witnesses. And the reports my father buried.“

I set the chronometer back on the shelf with more care than the motion requires. My hands are steady, but only because I am concentrating on keeping them so. The implications are assembling themselves in my mind like a mechanism: the killer learned from Augustus, the killer uses the arches, the killer has been moving through history for years, decades, perhaps longer. And every anomaly Lily has seen in her London, every anachronism that made her question her own sanity, is a scar left by those movements.

“We need to visit the arches,“ I say. “The ones from the reports. Middle Temple Lane. St Bartholomew“s. Fleet Street. If the killer is using them, there may be traces. Residual energy. Something the chronometer can detect.“

“You said it does not work.“

“I said I do not know if it works. There is a difference.“

Lily looks at the chronometer, then at me. “And if it does work? If we find something?“

“Then we will know where he has been. And perhaps where he will go next.“

She nods, once, and I see the shift in her posture: the set of her shoulders, the way her weight settles forward onto the balls of her feet. She is no longer a woman dragged into a nightmare she did not choose. She is an investigator. A partner.

I gather the ledgers and return them to the shelf. The reports we found I fold carefully and tuck into my coat. They are not evidence in any legal sense, but they are proof of a pattern, and patterns are what I was trained to find.

“There is something else,“ Lily says. She has moved to the window and is looking down into the ventilation shaft, though there is nothing to see. “The killer. If he learned from Augustus, and Augustus was your father, then you might know him. You might have met him.“

I have been avoiding this thought. I have been avoiding it since the moment I understood that the person destroying the timeline was not acting alone. “Augustus had many associates. Scholars, inventors, men who shared his interests. I did not know all of them.“

“But you knew some.“

“I knew some.“

She turns from the window. “Then we start there. The names you remember. The ones who came to the house, who corresponded with him, who might have had access to his research.“

“That is a list of dead men, Lily. Most of them would be decades in the grave by now.“

“Unless one of them is not.“

The sentence hangs between us. I think of the ledgers in my father's study, the correspondence we searched only this morning, the name Watson and the payments that spanned three years. A man who was paid for consultation services and then vanished from the record. A man who might still be alive, somewhere in this city, carrying the knowledge Augustus gave him.

“Watson,“ I say. “We need to find Watson.“

Lily nods. “Then we will.“

Outside, the gas lamps along Whitehall are being lit, small blooms of orange in the gathering dusk. I can hear the distant rumble of carriage wheels, the cry of a newsboy selling the evening edition. The sounds of a city that does not know it is bleeding at the edges, that does not know its history is being rewritten by someone moving through its stones.

I pick up my coat and offer Lily her shawl. She wraps it around her shoulders, and I notice that her hands are steady now. The tremor is gone.

“Tomorrow,“ I say, “we begin with the arches. The ones from the reports.“

“And Watson?“

“We keep looking. There are more records here, more files that have not been touched in years. If Watson left a trace anywhere, it will be in this building.“

She moves towards the door, then pauses with her hand on the frame. “Leo. The chronometer. If it works, if it can really detect temporal energy, then it might also be able to track the killer. To find him before he strikes again.“

“That is the hope.“

“And if it does not work?“

I look at the device on the shelf, its crystal dark now, its gears still. “Then we find another way.“

She holds my gaze for a moment longer, and I see something in her face that I have not seen since we arrived in this century: a flicker of the woman I met in 2026, the woman who argued with me about the correct way to brew tea and refused to be impressed by my title. She is still there, beneath the borrowed dress and the borrowed name. She is still fighting.

I open the door, and we walk out into the corridor together. The clerks have thinned, most of them gone home to their suppers, and the gas jets along the walls have been turned low. Our footsteps echo on the wooden floor, two sets of shoes striking in a rhythm that is not quite synchronised but is learning.

At the top of the stairs, Lily stops. “What do we tell people? If they ask why we are here so late, why a distant cousin is helping you with police records.“

“We tell them the truth. That we are researching family history.“

“And if they do not believe us?“

“Then we let them disbelieve. The truth is too strange to be credible. That is our advantage.“

She considers this, then nods. We descend the stairs and step out into the evening. The air is cooler now, the coal smoke thinning, and above the rooftops the sky is a deep, bruised purple. A lamplighter is working his way down Whitehall, his pole extended, and each lamp catches with a soft pop that sounds like a door closing.

I hail another cab, and we ride back towards the mews in silence. But it is a different silence from the one we shared this morning. It is not the silence of two people avoiding what they cannot say. It is the silence of two people who have begun to work together, who are saving their words for the things that matter.

The cab turns onto Marylebone Road, and I see the stone arch at the end of the mews, dark and unremarkable, waiting. Tomorrow we will begin the search in earnest. Tomorrow we will walk through the city and press our hands against the stones and see what answers back.

Tonight, I will sit in my father“s study and examine the chronometer by lamplight, tracing its circuits and its symbols, trying to understand what Augustus built before he died. Trying to understand what the killer took from him.

The cab stops. Lily steps down onto the cobbles, and I follow. The arch is silent. The night is still. But somewhere in the city, I know, another arch is opening, and someone is stepping through.