"It's snowing."
"Awesome! We can build snowmen again this year."
"Too bad we can't play soccer anymore." Conan held the back of his head, caring only about that.
Mitsuhiko ran ahead, turned around, and walked backward while facing his friends. "Speaking of soccer, Yimi's last kick was amazing. She's a girl, but she's better at sports than all the boys."
Is it already winter?
Ai breathed out a puff of white mist and fixed her gaze on the pale-haired girl walking in front of her. The little girl who had just been praised for her athletic ability was shivering from the cold.
"You're dressed too lightly." Ai walked over to Yimi, took off the scarf around her own neck, and wrapped it around the girl.
"Thank you." The kitty happily threw her arms around Ai's neck and rubbed her slightly chubby cheek against hers.
Ai smiled silently and gently patted her back.
Out of the corner of her eye, however, she saw a pitch-black Porsche pull up beside them.
"All right. It's time for you to wake up from your dream and celebrate our reunion. We'll celebrate with that bright red color you love so much—the color of roses."
A long-haired man dressed entirely in black stepped out of the Porsche. "Ah~ Sherry."
The icy muzzle pointed straight at them and blew a bloody hole through the white-haired little girl's head. Then came Conan and the other brats...
"No!"
Ai jolted awake from the nightmare. It was still dark outside, and the Professor's snores were shaking the house.
...
Then she caught a cold because she had given Yimi her scarf in the dream. That little cat really was nothing but trouble.
"Is this an MD player?"
"That's amazing! I begged Mom for one for a whole month and she still wouldn't buy it for me."
Yimi was showing off her new toy to her friends. All you had to do was put a disc inside, put on the earphones, and you could listen to music. It was advanced technology, and later she wanted to take it back and show Origami and the others what high-tech gadgets from another world looked like.
But human design was way too unreasonable. Why were there only two earphones? Had they never considered what would happen if someone had cat ears?
Still, back then she seemed to have made the Queen angry. Kisaki Eri had turned her face away and talked to Kogoro about things Yimi could not understand, and then Kogoro had invited Eri out for a meal.
He did not bring Yimi or the other two along.
Ran was pretty happy about how things developed, and Yimi got what she wanted too. Thus, a world where only Conan—under Ran's suspicion—suffered was born.
The weather had still been hot enough for the swimming pool back then. Yet when Yimi woke up today, Eri had already started stuffing her into a padded winter coat.
"Hey, look outside!" Genta suddenly shouted, making everyone notice the snow drifting down beyond the window.
"Awesome! Let's have a snowball fight later!"
"Snow."
Yimi pressed herself against the window and looked outside. Plenty of elementary school students were already running wild all over the playground. Somehow there were even more people out in weather like this than usual. So many, many people.
"Congratulations, Host, on unlocking the achievement [People Are Like Garbage]. Reward: 5% portal energy."
"Meow?"
Ignoring the strange achievement, Yimi thought again of the first world, back before she could even turn into a human. To search for the Saint's Corpse, she had to walk through snowdrifts taller than she was.
That had felt like a long time too, but she had always been running from place to place. Every so often she would obtain another Corpse Part and see the quest progress move forward, so it had never felt as endless as things did now.
"Haibara-san, come look at the snow with us." Ayumi enthusiastically tugged Ai and invited her over.
Ai flinched and jerked her face away. "Please don't touch me!"
She remembered everything that had happened in her dream. It had started with snowfall too. Without thinking, she lowered her head and hid her eyes in the shadow of her bangs. "I'm already sick of this place. I wish I could disappear right now... though I guess it won't be long."
"Are you transferring schools?" Ayumi asked anxiously, clenching her fists.
The other two boys crowded over too.
"Is someone bullying you?"
"Tell me who it is. I'll beat him up!"
"I accidentally pressed record." That one was Yimi.
Ai came back to herself in a daze and smiled faintly. "I just have a cold. I was afraid I'd infect you, so I said something depressing."
The snow still had not stopped by the time school ended. It was not heavy enough to block their vision, and only enough had accumulated on the ground to make snowballs. The first graders headed home on their own as usual.
"Then we'll head home first!"
At the same intersection as always, three of them happened to split off because their routes were different from the other three. With snow falling, nobody should be thinking about running off somewhere to play for now.
"Whew..." Ai let out a long breath. "What a shame. I still wanted to visit Yimi's place and see Goro and Miao."
Miao had been too mischievous for any of the children to choose her. Eri figured one extra cat would not matter and simply kept her at home, though Miao got along with Goro the worst.
"In weather like this, Yimi will just stay at Uncle Kogoro's place." Conan balanced a soccer ball on his head as he spoke.
The troublesome part was that even when Yimi was not home, Ran no longer wanted to sleep beside him. Her suspicion was practically written across her face, yet she stubbornly refused to ask him anything.
Ai did not answer. She quietly slowed down until she was walking beside Yimi. "Can I borrow your MD player? I haven't gotten to look at it today."
"Sure." Yimi handed over her new toy, then crouched down with nothing else to do and grabbed a handful of snow to make a snowball.
Not far away, Gin suddenly felt that the hand he had stuffed into his pocket was unusually cold.
"Thanks."
Ai did not plan to use it for anything special. Her thoughts were simply in chaos, and she wanted to listen to some music to calm herself down.
Her sister had already escaped safely. She herself was completely safe as a child. Her current task was simply to hide and survive as a child until the day she could meet her sister again. As for an antidote that would turn her back into an adult, it honestly was not that important to her anymore.
The only difficult question was this: if Gin found her, would the children around her and the Professor be dragged into it too...?
"I'm already sick of this place. I wish I could disappear right now..." That was not Ai speaking now. It was the line Yimi had accidentally recorded on the MD player.
"..."
Ai reached out with her ice-cold hand and pressed it against Yimi's cheek.
"Ah!"
After getting the scream she wanted, she immediately received a rapid barrage of Meow-Meow Punches in return.
Strangely enough, after saying at school that she had a cold, Ai's cold seemed to have gotten better. At least she had not felt physically unwell at all since then.
She held out one arm to block Yimi's counterattack when a chill suddenly ran down her spine. It flickered for only an instant before vanishing.
Ai did not understand it, but she knew this sensation. It was almost like radar. Whenever someone from the Black Organization appeared near her, she could faintly sense it.
Her breath caught. She hurriedly looked around and spotted a newer Porsche. The car Gin drove in her memory was not this one.
"What's wrong?" Conan noticed her expression.
"It's an Organization car..." Ai replied uncertainly.
Only then did she realize that moments ago she had been thinking about hiding and surviving forever, yet she had just told the detective who wanted to investigate the Black Organization to the bitter end.
"What?!" Conan exclaimed.
"Mm?" Yimi, who had Laughing Coffin on her mind, perked up her ears too.
The corner of Ai's mouth twitched twice. She had already said it, so she might as well stop hiding things. "Gin's car should be that old geezer of a car from fifty years ago. But you said it sank, so he probably replaced it. The important part is that just now, I felt someone from the Organization nearby."
"Felt..." Conan did not put much faith in that sort of thing.
But then he remembered that when Kid had slipped into the queue aboard the ship last time, he seemed to have faintly felt something too.
"Damn it. If it were his old car, I could at least try opening it with a coat hanger. I wonder if there's still time to ask the Professor to whip up a car-stealing tool." Conan irritably said something no detective ought to be saying.
"Meow."
Then he watched Yimi casually open the car door. That basic driving-knowledge book could indeed be combined with Yimi's superpowers.
"..."
Was the car unlocked? Whatever.
Conan first trampled the footprints in the snow around the car until nobody could tell whether they belonged to adults or children. The tracks from their approach were already mixed in with those of passersby anyway.
Then he climbed inside and started installing a listening device.
"Wait. We still can't be sure this is his car." Ai followed him in, already regretting telling him anything. She had never expected him to be this reckless.
Ai suddenly sensed something and raised her head. The light vanished from her frightened eyes.
Gin was walking toward them from across the street, though he probably had not noticed anything unusual yet.
"Get out, quick!" Ai urged.
Instead, Yimi climbed in too.
She even closed the door.
"You...?" Conan was stunned by her incomprehensible move.
We're finished!
Yimi looked in confusion at the other two, whose little faces had gone deathly pale. Conan had clearly been the one talking about stealing the car. Now that they were actually doing it, why were they scared?
She lowered her head and looked toward the ignition. Naturally, there was no key.
Yimi remembered the days when she and Polnareff used to steal cars together. She pulled a pen from her schoolbag and, with the help of her superpowers, jammed it straight into the ignition.
The headlights came on. With a vroom, the car drove away.
"..."
Across the street, Gin—who had inexplicably caught a cold and whose hands were cold as well—stood completely motionless as he watched the rear of his car get farther and farther away.
Ignoring how awful he felt, he took out a cigarette and lit it.