Dawn looked at him across the wet empty street.
"Is this the part where we become enemies." He said it without accusation. Like a person checking which page they were on.
"You were never my enemy." Ives said. "You are an obstacle between me and where I am going. Those are different things."
Dawn was quiet for a moment. The rain came down on both of them and neither moved.
"Were we ever actually friends." Dawn said. "Honestly. Not what you told yourself. What you actually felt."
Ives did not answer.
Dawn nodded slowly at the silence. Like the silence was the answer he had expected and had made his peace with before asking the question.
"I need to tell you something." He said. "Before whatever happens next." He looked down at the hawk mask in his hand for a moment and then set it on the ground beside him as if he was done with it. "Aura and I are not Aldire's children. Not biologically. Not in any way that matters except the way she arranged it to appear." He paused. "There was an auction. Private. The kind that does not have a name or an address until three hours before it runs. We were fourteen. Both of us. I do not know what country we came from originally — the documentation from before that point was removed along with everything else. What I know is that Aldire was present and she saw us and she decided that our features were compatible with the aesthetic she wanted. The hair. The eyes. The bone structure. We matched what she had in her mind for what her family should look like." He stopped. "She bought us. Had the paperwork restructured. Built the story around us until the story was all that existed."
Ives said nothing.
"She treats us well." Dawn continued. His voice was level but something underneath it was doing work to keep it that way. "That is the part that makes it difficult to explain to people. She is not cruel. She does not mistreat us. We have everything. Every resource, every protection, every privilege that comes with being in her circle." He looked at the wet street. "But when Aura curls up against her and puts her head on her shoulder, Aldire rubs her head. That is all. The same way you rub the head of a dog you are fond of. The eyes do not change. The expression does not change. There is no warmth behind it that belongs specifically to Aura." He paused. "I have watched for it for six years. It is not there."
He breathed out slowly.
"Aura does not know any of this. She has built her entire world around Aldire. She believes it completely — the family, the belonging, all of it. She fawned so completely and so quickly that she simply incorporated the story as her own reality. She is not stupid. She is the opposite of stupid. She just needed it to be true so badly that she made it true for herself." He looked at Ives directly. "I do the dirty work so that we remain useful. If we are useful Aldire keeps us. If Aldire keeps us then Aura continues to have the only family she has ever believed in. That is the entire structure of my life."
The rain came down.
"When Aura asked you on the jet." Dawn said. "Whether you could all be friends. She meant it. She was not performing. She was not running an angle for Aldire or for the order. That was just Aura wanting something real from a person she thought was real." He looked at Ives steadily. "She was the only genuine one among all of us. Including me."
Ives held that.
He thought about the jet. The fist bump. The way Aura had asked it with the directness of someone who had not yet learned to be strategic about that particular desire. The way it had felt like something true in a night full of things that were not.
"I know." Ives said quietly.
Dawn picked up the hawk mask from the ground.
"I am sorry." He said. "For what comes next."
He moved.
The speed was genuine — not the chest unit modification that the operative on the street had used, something more integrated than that, built into Dawn himself at a level that did not require a separate power source. He covered the distance between them before Ives had fully registered the commitment to movement.
Ives felt space ripple as he began to adjust — pulling the same process he had used on the mountain, reaching for the underlying layer, beginning to change the terms of what was about to contact him.
Something hit him from the side.
Not Dawn.
Something else entirely.
The force was enormous and arrived with no warning and no sound preceding it — just impact, total and immediate, the kind of force that does not negotiate with whatever it hits. Ives felt two ribs snap on the left side and his feet left the ground and the building wall on the right side of the street came up fast and he hit it with his shoulder and the back of his head simultaneously.
He slid down the wall.
Dawn's kick arrived while he was still against it. Fast, straight, aimed at his head with the full commitment of someone who knows exactly where the head is and has no reason to miss.
Ives got his broken left arm up.
The kick landed on the arm instead of his skull. He felt the arm come apart — not cleanly, not a single break, the kind of destruction that happens when enough force is applied to something already compromised. The arm took all of it. It hung from the shoulder by sinew and the sleeve of his coat and the pain was enormous and distant at the same time, the way pain is when the body has already decided it cannot afford to prioritise it.
The kick's remaining force drove him back and sideways along the wall.
He got his feet under him.
Third attacker.
He felt it before he saw it — the displacement of air above him, something large dropping from a significant height with the speed of something that had been falling for long enough to build real momentum. Not enhanced speed. Genuine falling velocity from a genuine height, directed.
Ives went into the zone, utilising the same technique he used to save Silva now to save himself from being blown apart.
He managed to get himself two feet to the left of where he had been standing and the third attacker hit the ground where he had been with enough force to crack the road surface in a clean circular pattern.
He looked at the third one.
The armour was similar to his own — Beelzebub's hollow body design, the same basic architecture — but built differently. Heavier at the joints, the chest unit larger, the whole thing oriented toward taking and delivering damage rather than the mobility his own prioritised.
Ives didn't need a single glance to know that thing was designed to slay gods and in this case, him.
One enhanced operative with speed and strength modifications built directly into the body. One he had not seen yet — invisible, the attack from the side had come from nothing, which meant a cloaking modification at minimum. One hollow body armour between him and the order's full combat specification.
His left arm was effectively gone. Two broken ribs. The push on the mountain had cost him more than he had accounted for and he was not fully restored.
Dawn stepped forward from the side. He looked at Ives' arm with an expression that was not pleasure.
Ives rose from the dirt, barely able to maintain a breath, his body strained so much you could see the bulging veins at the clasp of tearing from pressure.
A sting struck Ives who soon watched part of his left foot eaten away by a spreading earthy mass matching that of the pavement he was standing on. Watching with horror and confusion as part of his body turned to stone.
"That is what happens when you strain yourself, this sort of abilities usually come with bizzare costs." He said. "Back at the Black gala I did say that you would need faster hands before the year was out."