“Um,” Echika said carefully. “I was wondering why you suddenly got a fever, so I… Sorry. I was going to wait until you brought it up first…”
“Oh, no! I’m sorry I kept quiet about it.” Bigga was clearly trying her hardest to maintain a cheerful front. “But I guess you found out. You know, I’ve been getting over it pretty well. It hasn’t really affected me much…”
Her words trailed off, burning in the gentle sunlight. But even so, her small shoulders didn’t tremble like she was about to break into tears. She did take a deep breath to calm herself, though.
“He told me my feelings for him weren’t real. That I feel for him the same way I’d cherish a stuffed toy.”
Echika felt a sharp pang in her heart. “Yeah.”
“And he also said that Amicus can’t love, they can only act like they do.” The light shone through Bigga’s pale lashes. “I still feel like Harold really has a heart, but… At this point, it’s all a mess, and I don’t know anymore…”
Amicus are only capable of acting like they love someone. Echika remembered Harold telling her the same thing. If she recalled correctly, it was back when they’d met Bernard, an Amicus who was married to Shushunova. At the time, Echika had thought Harold was the exception to that, just like Bigga did.
And indeed, given his neuromimetic system, he was radically different from mass-produced Amicus. But looking at how much he’d changed, Echika couldn’t help but feel that his interpretation was wrong.
In a sense, he had full control of his emotions. A human wouldn’t be capable of shutting off their emotions like that, but Harold had done so with ease. She had to admit that the mechanisms inside him really were completely different from those of humans.
“But…what shocked me the most was my reaction to this information.” Bigga’s smile was very feeble. “The fact I didn’t feel like I should keep pining for him just made it hurt all the more… I felt like a horrible person. Like everything Harold said about me was true…”
“Bigga…”
“So, um, I’ll be good and go back to the academy. I thought I was fine, but I guess it hasn’t been long enough, and if I act awkward around him, it’ll get in the way of the investigation…”
Echika swallowed. It felt bitter. She felt utterly and consistently powerless whenever this was brought up. All she could do was pray that Bigga’s feelings would heal quickly—despite knowing that she was the one who’d opened this can of worms again.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have talked about this.”
“Don’t worry. You only did it because you care. I know what you were thinking!” Echika could tell Bigga was trying to keep her voice as cheerful as possible. “Also, I forgot to mention this, but I still want to see you and Harold make up.”
“Uh, hey, you two, could you come over?!”
Suddenly, they heard Investigator Gardener calling for them from above.
He was leaning out of the second-floor window and motioning for them to come over. Echika and Bigga exchanged glances. The time had come to return to the job at hand.
“Anyway, don’t worry about us, Bigga. We’ll do what we have to.”
“If you need my help, don’t hesitate to call. And, um… Be really, really careful.”
The two whispered this to each other and walked back into the villa together, descending the staircase leading from the garden to the surface.
The rock garden built along a slope had a porcelain decoration shaped like a dog. As Echika looked at a few cracks running along the statue’s head, she recalled the cage from earlier. It still tugged on her mind, but she doubted investigating it any longer would produce results.
With Bigga leading the way, they went through the back door, which connected to the kitchen. Just as Echika was about to leave the yard, she heard the crunch of dried leaves underfoot and stopped in her tracks. She raised her foot and found a dead bee that had gotten caught in the doorframe. There was an old beehive in the eaves—it must have come from there.
The dead bee was already dried up, its stinger still and limp and its wings crumbling away. The breeze lifted it gently into the air.
A stinger.
The realization came to her in a flash and slithered down her back.
“Normally, they use agricultural pollinator hollow units.”
“Ultra-small drones modeled after insects, right?”
Her conversation with Totoki from a few days ago in Al Bahah came to mind. She used her Your Forma to look up agricultural pollinator drones. The results returned in less than a second—only one company was engaged in their research and development at present, holding a monopoly over that market. She entered the distributor’s official site and looked through its design catalog.
Just like she remembered from her classroom studies in high school, they all looked just like real insects. Butterflies, flies, horseflies… Soon enough, she found it and stopped scrolling at the honeybee model.
“Miss Hieda?” Bigga turned to look at her dubiously. “What’s wrong…?”
Echika broke into a sprint. She moved past a shocked Bigga and bolted up the spiral staircase. Without so much as pausing for breath, she made her way to the second story, nearly bumping into Gardener, who was waiting for them at the top of the stairs. He pulled away from her in surprise, just barely preventing the crash.
“You didn’t have to hurry that much.” Gardener looked taken aback. “It wasn’t anything that important. I found some kind of book stuck in the mattress of the bed and needed a hand.”
“Would agricultural pollinator hollow units be able to carry a virus?” Echika asked, struggling to catch her breath.
“What are you on about?” Gardener looked at her, flummoxed.
“Your father manages a drone development company, right? Robin Flutter Inc.” She shared the link to the online catalog with Gardener. “The agricultural pollinator hollow units they develop there are meant for spreading pollen, but structurally speaking, would they be capable of injecting a virus?”
“Uh, I’m sorry, I don’t follow. Why are you asking me about that right now?”
Gardener stepped back, looking overwhelmed, and Echika heard Bigga’s footsteps behind her.
“Miss Hieda, what’s gotten into you?!” She brushed her hands against Echika’s back soothingly.
But it did nothing to calm her.
“I think I found it.” Echika wheeled around, facing a shocked Bigga.
A way to kill someone without any signs of homicide, something that could slip through a small opening and not be picked up on security cameras. Come to think of it, Quine had died after he went outside to pick up something he forgot. In other words, it was after he opened the front door. That would have been enough time for a small insect to fly in undetected. And the investigation report mentioned that Banfield had cracked the window in the room he’d died in.
“I think the investors were injected with the virus…by agricultural pollinators with stingers.”
In other words—bees.