But I knew the whole time. That this was all a complacent, unseemly delusion.
“Do you think…that you’ll be able to go back to the police if your malfunction keeps ‘getting worse’?”
“I’ll come up with some reason. At worst, I’ll just find a position that lets me freely enter the police building.”
“And that’s how you’ll secretly keep looking for Detective Sozon’s killer?”
“That’s my plan.” Harold blinked slowly. “If we’re going to keep safe, it’s for the best that we never see each other again.”
This was the first time he’d touched on this topic since their fight at the Dubai International Airport.
If I cared about my safety, I wouldn’t have taken up this secret to begin with.
But if she said that out loud, they’d just start arguing like last time. He was an Amicus, and some part of him couldn’t understand human emotions in the truest sense. Echika herself believed that it would be for the best if he mistook her feelings for simple “fixation.”
In other words, they were at an impasse, one they couldn’t cross.
She tried to imagine herself continuing to Brain Dive in the bureau without him, and though that reality was fast approaching, it only felt like a blurred, nondescript fantasy.
In the end, I really am just too…fragile.
“Either way…” Echika somehow maintained her composure. “If you’re going to quit, don’t create any more problems. Don’t do anything else to hurt people. It’s unacceptable.”
“Understood.” Harold’s response came across as noncommittal and frighteningly concise.
Echika turned around—she couldn’t stand to stay there a second longer. She walked toward the office, feeling like his artificial gaze was pursuing her the whole time. Agitation surged inside her, despite her best efforts to keep it suppressed.
If only she could just focus on work and not think about anything else.
When she returned to the Brain Diving Division’s office, she saw a notification for a new message in her Your Forma. It seemed Chief Totoki had woken up from her nap. Echika opened the message, mostly out of inertia.
<All Special Investigations Unit members who went to Al Bahah are to report to the director’s office immediately>
Her gloomy mood instantly turned to complete unrest.
“Is everyone present, Investigator Totoki?”
The office of the director of the Electrocrime Investigations Bureau was on the top floor of the headquarters building. Schlosser had asked that question gravely, sitting with his back to a window overlooking the Rhône River. He must have come from home, because he was dressed in a normal outfit instead of his usual suit. The officers present all wore severe expressions, but of course, none of them knew what was going on.
Echika had to stand uncomfortably between Fokine, who’d come back from the hotel, and Harold. She wasn’t in the state of mind to care about that right now, though. The question burning in her mind was why the director had summoned them all in the middle of the night. Whatever the reason, it couldn’t have been anything simple.
“Everyone except Bigga, who’s currently on sick leave,” Totoki replied. She still had that antiphlogistic patch on her cheek, a painful reminder of what had happened to her. “What’s the matter, sir?”
“I think that you, or maybe it’s all of you… Whichever it is, I think you already have an idea of why I called you here,” Director Schlosser said with irritation.
He placed something on the desk. The investigators remained silent in confusion. Echika stood on tiptoe to look and caught a glimpse of the object on the table. It was Kai’s card-type USB. The butterfly symbol glinted in the room’s lighting.
“The analysis team’s results came in, and they said the USB you brought in…was Electrocrime Investigations Bureau equipment.”
A very tense silence fell over the room. Echika herself wasn’t quite sure she understood what the director was saying. The others must have been equally stunned in disbelief. What Schlosser had just said was absurd—what was going on?
“The USB’s property data had an Electrocrime Investigations Bureau inventory tag number attached to it.” The chief glanced at the wall. “Analyst Mayer, please upload the analysis data in the shared folder.”
Only now did Echika notice that the head of the analysis team was standing there. Analyst Mayer, a German man in the prime of his life, uploaded the analysis results, as instructed. A Your Forma notification popped up in Echika’s field of vision, and she instantly opened the data placed in the shared folder.
She was stunned. What she saw was a screenshot of the USB’s property data, which was clearly registered with an Electrocrime Investigations Bureau tag number. The attached report spelled this out briefly, stating that the butterfly symbol had been independently printed onto the USB.
No, wait. That can’t be. This USB belongs to Kai.
“Can you explain this, Investigator Totoki?”
“We definitely found the USB in Al Bahah.” Totoki turned to Echika, staring at her firmly. “Right, Hieda?”
Echika awkwardly took a breath. Not just the director but the entire room was looking at her. Her thoughts, which had frozen in surprise, creaked back into motion. The whole time, she’d been concerned if the data on the USB was fake or not. If nothing else, the events unfolding before her shouldn’t have made any sense.
“I was the one who found it. It was tucked inside Kai’s notebook, so I assumed it was his…” The more she spoke, the less certain she felt. Because indeed, that wasn’t enough to prove that the USB really was Kai’s. “And its design had the Farasha Island logo on it, so I assumed it might be related to the Alliance and checked its contents…”
Analyst Mayer spoke up. “The Special Investigations Unit seemed to believe it contained a backup of the thought manipulation system, but it was also a well-crafted fake. It did contain system code, but it was all unrelated scribbles.”
A fake.
That revelation in and of itself didn’t come as a big surprise. Echika had doubted why Kai would leave something this important behind ever since she’d found the USB. She did have a sliver of hope it might be real, but she’d been prepared to take the news it would be a fake, just the same. But now that things had gotten to this point, its authenticity felt like an afterthought.
“How did Kai get his hands on bureau equipment?” Echika couldn’t stop herself from asking the question. “No… Why would he go to the effort of making the USB look like it was from Farasha Island and lead us into discovering it…?”
“Maybe you should change your way of thinking, Investigator Hieda.” Director Schlosser cut her off. “Don’t ask yourself how Kai got a bureau USB. Ask how someone from the bureau planted the USB to make it look like it was Kai’s.”
Echika felt all the blood drain from her head.
What the director was saying was clear, but she didn’t want to consider it. And yet she couldn’t deny the logic of his statement. Even if the USB was a fake, it wouldn’t make sense for someone to take it without knowing its tag number was registered in the bureau. There was a chance that an outsider had hacked the browsing list, but the Electrocrime Investigations Bureau’s security was top of the line, and getting both the USB and its tag number would have been difficult.