XX/XX, Saturday. Sunny.
I failed again this time. It's too hard. I don't want to do it anymore. I want to leave this world, but I don't know how to say goodbye to Queen.
...
The passage above was a diary required as homework for writing class. Finding something like that in a first grader's exercise book made Kobayashi-sensei break out in a cold sweat.
She hurriedly called Yimi to the office and spent an entire class period showing concern for her. She even seriously considered calling Yimi's guardian to ask whether the child was being pushed too hard at home.
Of course, Yimi was not the only genius child in this class. Besides Mitsuhiko, who was also quite bright, there were two other fake children doing their best to pretend they were normal.
"Conan, what are you drawing?" Ayumi circled behind Conan and stared intently at the diagram in his notebook.
"It's nothing. I'm just thinking about something." Conan bit down on his pencil and concentrated on some calculations.
Three bodies had been recovered after the bus explosion. Besides the robber who had been shot to death by the female accomplice, the man by the door whose right hand had been crushed also died in the stampede.
Conan had actually wanted to help him at the time, but Conan himself was just a short little kid. Professor Agasa had no choice but to carry him away before he got dragged down too.
The other victim was naturally the woman who had been shot in the leg. With her leg in that condition, there was no way she could have escaped in such a short time.
The question was, what about that beggar?
Unfortunately, the road where the bus had stopped was extremely open, with no other vehicles nearby. If the beggar had successfully escaped, there was no way Conan would have failed to see him.
Could he have done the same thing as Kid, using the instant of panic caused by the explosion to change clothes and blend into the crowd? If so, didn't that mean his objective had been to detonate the bomb and kill those three robbers?
But that raised another question. How could he guarantee that two bullets fired at him from close range would somehow veer away, then perfectly hit the woman at the very back despite another person standing between them?
Putting aside the question of how the woman got hurt for the moment, the only explanation for the beggar being uninjured was that the robber had been holding a fake gun. Yet when Conan tried to support the man, he had noticed that the crushed gun was real, and it still carried the lingering smell of gunpowder...
The scales. What were those scales for?
The impossible puzzle nearly made Conan tear his hair out. Normally, whenever he hit a bottleneck like this, he would be lucky enough to receive a hint from someone. Unfortunately, his luck was not that good this time.
"Yimi-chan is back!" Ayumi cheerfully called toward the front door.
"How did it go? Why did the teacher call you over?" Mitsuhiko asked nervously, already trying to figure out what kind of comforting words would fit the problem.
Yimi clutched her notebook. "Diary. Wrote it badly."
Genta laughed with absolutely no tact. "Come to think of it, the first time we had diary homework, Yimi wrote something like 'having superpowers is convenient.' The teacher singled her out and criticized her, saying a diary wasn't supposed to be a novel."
That was because Yimi had not known at first that the teacher was actually going to read the diary.
Conan really was lucky. Genta had already given him the clue he needed to break through his stalled train of thought. Unfortunately, there was no way he would grasp it.
Seeing the three children fussing over Yimi, Conan could not help glancing toward her as well.
Come to think of it, during that test Yimi had kept tapping her pencil while staring at him. Conan had instinctively assumed she was sending him Morse code and spent quite a while decoding it, only to end up with the message: "Yimi is going to stick her toes up his nostrils to ambush a polar bear"...
Shaking off the thought, Conan turned his gaze toward Ai while everyone else's attention was on Yimi.
Ai had been unusually quiet ever since that incident. She was so distracted that she had actually scored lower than Mitsuhiko on a Japanese quiz.
Conan could more or less guess what had been going through her mind when she stayed on the bus. That was why, after concluding the beggar probably had not died there, he had felt relieved for Ai too. At least she would not have to sink into depression over believing she had gotten someone else killed.
That day, Kisaki Eri personally picked Yimi up from school. She hugged the girl while carefully asking whether she was under too much pressure, whether anyone was bullying her at school, whether Kogoro had been scolding her, and so on.
Eri told Yimi not to say silly things like "leave this world" anymore. She was still so young and had a very long road ahead of her. If studying was putting too much pressure on her, it was perfectly fine to relax once in a while.
To help her relax, Eri deliberately cooked an enormous table full of delicious-looking dishes. Unfortunately, her cooking skills were not capable of helping anyone relax.
"Good night." For the first time in a long while, Eri told Yimi a bedtime story about a cat. She gently kissed the girl's forehead, emphasized that Yimi was a child surrounded by love, and in doing so declared the day over.
But after Eri turned off the light and closed the door properly, Yimi's big eyes were still wide open.
She had been watching a legal-affairs program lately in search of cases that had not been solved. The show had mentioned that nighttime was when bad people liked committing crimes most.
Living at Eri's place had one major advantage over staying at Kogoro's: Yimi had a room of her own. She still liked crawling into other people's beds when she slept, but at least if she wanted to sneak out in the middle of the night, she was much less likely to be discovered.
Turning into her cat form, she jumped directly down from upstairs and used her superpower to land without a sound. The sight made a certain calico downstairs, which was always meowing at empty space as though chatting with an invisible cat, stare at her with round eyes.
"Meow~" Seeing nobody around, Yimi floated into the air on the spot to show it.
Auntie had said she was not allowed to use her superpowers to bully people. She had never said anything about bullying cats.
"Mraow!" The calico's fur puffed up as it jumped in place, all four legs seemingly trying to run in different directions before it fled from Yimi.
Yimi landed again and strutted forward with her head high, walking like a proud little cat. After carefully studying that legal program, she had finally obtained a genuinely useful piece of key information.
Aside from the police, people carrying guns were bad guys.
In other words, she did not even need to pay special attention to how many wanted criminals appeared on the news. She had already memorized the smell of bullets. As long as she followed that scent, she could catch bad people.
She ran out onto the street first and sniffed the air.
"Meow?"
Her cat face froze.
Why were there so many scent trails?
One front paw remained raised in midair for quite a while before she remembered to put it down. Eventually, she chose one direction and ran off.
Then she decided that did not look enough like a detective, so she summoned her Stand and had it carry her instead.
* * *
Gin walked across an overpass carrying his briefcase, scratching his neck along the way. The skin there had developed an infection, and that was apparently the reason for the sudden pain he had felt that day.
Of course, he was not the armed person Yimi was tracking, even though he certainly was carrying a gun as well.
He was investigating someone too: Vermouth. She had a close relationship with the boss and was a secretive type Gin found infuriating.
At a memorial gathering not long ago—the same memorial where Pisco died—both the fire and the apparent suicide by a gunshot to the forehead had drawn more attention. On top of that, an "eyewitness" could easily be brushed over compared with the "detective who solved the case," so the report had not mentioned the stage name Vermouth used as a celebrity.
But with so many people at the scene, some information was bound to leak. That was what Gin wanted to investigate.
This time, however, Gin had gone out alone. For the time being, he had stopped thinking about finding himself another partner.
Bourbon's report, written with the intention of protecting Gin for the moment, was perfectly conventional. After all, protecting someone else did not mean he could endanger himself. He had basically reported the truth: from an outside perspective, it really did look as though that underling had betrayed the Organization and attacked Gin first.
Naturally, Gin knew none of that. Even if he did, he probably would not have been particularly surprised.
He did not like Bourbon much, but in Gin's eyes there was no question that Bourbon was a genuine member utterly loyal to the Organization. Every time Akai Shuichi came up, the hatred and viciousness Bourbon showed were not things that could be faked.
As for the strange things happening to and around Gin, he still could not determine whether they were some form of split personality. First of all, except for that day at the restaurant, he had never experienced a memory blackout. Even the slightest change in his position or in the surrounding scene would have...
Yet in the very next second, Gin looked down from the overpass and saw a strange cat in an alley pause. Then a beggar seemed to appear out of thin air behind it, bending down to pick it up.
"..."
There it was.
A blackout.