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Chapter 127: Chapter 3.3

That was the secret Boy K. had kept hidden all this time—a full year, to the day.

What had happened to him then—or rather, to Danny Bryant?

The truth behind Danny\'s disappearance was the worst one possible: He was already dead.

"He won\'t be coming back here. He\'s gone."

When Jekyll heard that, he silently closed his eyes. Grete looked stunned, unable to process what she\'d just learned. I was the only one who managed to speak.

"Who did it?"

According to the kid, Danny had spoken as if he knew he\'d reached the end of his life, and he\'d heard other voices and a gunshot. It was only natural to assume that someone had shot and killed Danny.

"I have no clue. ...Some of the jobs he did would have made him enemies. It\'s highly likely that one of them decided to settle their score with him."

It made sense. He was a former Federation Government spy; had someone been after him because of that? Maybe he\'d been on an undercover mission, and his cover had gotten blown, so they\'d executed him. Or it might have been some anti-government group who\'d wanted to pry classified information out of him—

"So that\'s why you kept asking whether I was Danny Bryant\'s enemy."

Danny was already dead. Boy K. had no idea who\'d killed him. Since I was still pursuing him, he\'d been trying to gather information while pretending to help me.

Thinking back, I realized that the boy\'s attitude toward me had clearly warmed the moment I brought Danny up at the police station. He might already have been weighing the possibility that I was worth using.

In other words, our interests had lined up. We\'d been using each other: Me in an attempt to find Danny Bryant, and Boy K. in an attempt to uncover the truth behind his death.

"In that case, I really wish you\'d told me the truth a bit sooner."

We\'d acted as if we were cooperating for the sake of our own goals, but I\'d suspected Boy K. was hiding something. I never would have guessed it was Danny Bryant\'s death, though.

"Yeah, I feel bad about that. Still..." Boy K. gave a crooked smile. "Danny told me to be a con man so that I could fool cops and detectives."

Goosebumps ran across my skin.

Cops and detectives—he had to have picked those words by coincidence. Even so, it felt as if he\'d figured out what I really was, and I felt a weird sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach.

But there was no way the kid could have unmasked me so easily.

...Actually, in this case, he wouldn\'t have been the one who\'d seen through me, would he?

"No, not possible."

A certain theory crossed my mind, and I shook my head, hastily getting rid of

it.

There was one more thing that kept tugging at me, though.

"Kid? Is Danny Bryant really...?" I didn\'t say dead. I didn\'t have to.

"...Good question. I dunno." The boy didn\'t deny the possibility he was

wrong. He hadn\'t actually seen Danny\'s body after all. He only had indirect evidence.

"I was hoping you might turn something up, Gekka. I thought Danny was dead, and here was this mysterious police officer who was looking for him... And then you were actually the Fiend with Twenty Faces, acting on orders from some organization. I thought you might know a few secrets."

But as it turned out, I hadn\'t known the truth about Danny\'s death. Maybe the boy was disappointed in me.

"If you\'re confessing this now, though..."

"Yeah. I thought if I showed my cards, new information might turn up."

As a matter of fact, by coming here, we\'d learned that Danny had been involved with Sun House, a facility that sheltered children with special circumstances. Some of his secrets must still be hidden, and they were probably linked to the truth behind his death. That meant we still had to—

"That can\'t be true!" the girl with us shrieked.

Grete shook her head again and again, denying what we\'d said. "I mean, he promised! Danny... Danny\'s not—!" She wiped her tears away. Then she turned her back to us and ran.

The children who\'d been playing in the big room all looked over, startled. "Nice. You made a girl cry." I sighed.

"It\'s that guy\'s fault for vanishing on everybody," Boy K. said.

Still, I\'d seen his expression as he murmured those words, and I really couldn\'t scold him.

"May I ask you to...?" Jekyll gave us an awkward smile. The kid and I exchanged looks, then went after Grete.

Not even five minutes later, we spotted the girl\'s small back. She was outside, on a cape with a view of the ocean, watching the waves roll in. "Grete," I called out to her.

Her shoulders flinched. Then she sniffled. "I can\'t draw Danny\'s face."

She was talking about her pictures. Grete always drew by making perfect copies of subjects. However...

"Because you\'re bad with expressions and other moving things?"

The old man had told us that was why she only made copies of existing drawings.

"Jekyll always glosses it over like that, but that\'s not actually why. I can\'t see people\'s faces."

Face blindness. The condition came to mind right away.

It was a type of neurological disorder: the inability to recognize human faces. A sufferer could perceive eyes, noses, and other features separately, but they

couldn\'t see them as a single integrated "face."

This meant that people with face blindness couldn\'t pick up on changes in human expressions, and they were unable to tell others apart, even if they were close friends. That was why Grete—

"And so you always drew things that didn\'t change."

"Funny, huh?" the girl said, laughing at herself. "All I can do is see people\'s eyes, noses, and mouths as symbols and paint them that way. If that\'s enough, I can sort of paint people; it\'s just like making a copy. But..." She turned around. Her large eyes were filled with tears. "When I finish a picture like that, I can\'t tell if it\'s really finished. I still don\'t know what the face of the person I love looks like."

At this point, we hardly needed to ask who that person was.

"I promised. I said I\'d beat this thing someday, and I\'d paint Danny\'s portrait. Then I\'d show it to him and have him tell me whether it really looked like him, whether I\'d gotten it right or not."

That was the promise Grete had made with Danny. Now that dream would never come true. What she\'d heard from Boy K. had dashed her hopes.

"Still, somewhere in my heart, I think I knew. This whole year, I waited and waited. I did think Danny might never come back. But..." Grete wiped her tears away with her palms, again and again, and managed to say the rest of her sentence. "I wanted him to be safe and happy somewhere...!"

Even if their promise never came true—as long as Danny had been alive somewhere, that would have been enough.

I was an outsider, and I had no idea how close the two of them had been. It would have been presumptuous of me to assume that they must have been like father and daughter. The tale they\'d woven was theirs alone.

And so I couldn\'t take that step forward. I couldn\'t reach out and wipe Grete\'s tears away. It probably wasn\'t my job, or a job for any detective. You can\'t use egocentric kindness and thoughtfulness to save people. In that case, I\'d keep doing things my way and—

"I don\'t know Danny\'s face, either."

The kid lacked the kindness and thoughtfulness I had—but he went up to Grete without hesitating and spoke to her before I could. "He never genuinely laughed around me; he didn\'t cry, and he didn\'t get mad. That guy never showed me who he really was."

Right: This wasn\'t kindness or thoughtfulness. It was objective fact, based in two years\' worth of Boy K.\'s experiences.

Speaking gently, he offered Grete what sympathy he could. "So I don\'t know what he looks like, either. I still remember lots of things about him, though. His voice was hoarse from liquor and cigarettes, and his hair pomade had this really cloying smell. Oh yeah, and he was always going up and patting people\'s shoulders. His hands were really rough. I\'m sure I never knew his true self, but even after a year, I remember his voice and that smell and the way his hands felt. You do, too, don\'t you?"

"...Uh-huh. I do, too." On the other side of the boy, Grete smiled just a little, although her eyes were red.

"Besides, when Danny looked at your paintings, he seemed happy. He said he wanted to treasure those beautiful pictures of yours more than any sound argument or his own philosophy."

When Grete heard that, her eyes widened, and she teared up again. "...I see. I know it\'s late to do it now, but I do want to draw his portrait."

The wind blew, softly ruffling her red hair.

"Yeah. I\'m sure he\'s waiting for that, too," the boy said, encouraging her gently.

From where I stood, I couldn\'t see his face. "—I\'m tired."

I\'d taken off my mask, and as I was gazing at my face in the hotel washroom\'s mirror, the words slipped out.

This was my own face, no makeup. Pale skin and blue eyes. My face might seem grown-up compared to other kids my age, but objectively speaking, my youth was obvious.

With a small sigh, I stripped off my clothes, then left the washroom. There was no one else in the room.

Boy K. and I had parted ways at the children\'s home. He\'d had something he wanted to think about on his own, and when Jekyll had generously offered to let him stay the night, he\'d accepted.

Meanwhile, I\'d ridden buses and trains back the way we\'d come, returning to our hotel. I had several jobs to do.

"It\'s been a while since I was alone."

I toppled over onto the bed in my underwear.

Now that no one was here to see, it should be okay to be this sloppy. Curling up within the sheets when I was practically naked was oddly soothing. Was this what being in the womb felt like?

"I\'d better call in."

I couldn\'t just laze around. I had new information about Danny Bryant, and that meant I had a report to make. I picked up my phone and considered calling Ice Doll, the Federation Government official. First, I\'d tell her that Danny had been sheltering children with special abilities.

"I wonder if she knew."

I got the feeling that Danny\'s involvement with the kids hadn\'t been connected to the spy work he\'d done for the Federation Government.

In that case, had it been a personal job? It was also likely that job had somehow gotten Danny killed. That much was clear from the fact that it had happened while he was working nearby.

In that case, had the enemy—the killer—been trying to keep Danny from helping those kids? But why?

"Maybe it\'s still a little too early to report this to the higher-ups."

I went over what I needed to do. First, I wanted to figure out who Danny had

been up against last year. In order to do that, I\'d probably have to leave the area. There was one more thing I wanted to think about carefully before I contacted

Ice Doll: Danny Bryant\'s death itself.

Of course, the possibility of his death had crossed my mind. It was the first explanation that should have occurred to me, really.

Even so, because of Boy K., I\'d begun to eliminate that possibility. He and Danny had been practically family, and although he\'d known the truth, he hadn\'t let anything slip.

It had seemed as if he\'d completely forgotten about Danny\'s death and was working with me to find out the truth. The reality was different: He\'d known that Danny was dead and used me in an attempt to learn more about it.

"Clever

isn\'t quite the word."

When I\'d first met Boy K., and when I\'d learned that he was pretending to be the culprit behind that murder incident, I\'d thought he was a very crafty kid. He wasn\'t afraid to sacrifice himself in order to reach his goals, and he was able to carry out meticulous plans.

That might not have been the case, though. He could feel genuine fear. He was scared of losing something. And yet he was able to hide it completely.

At first, I\'d thought he was a perfectly ordinary boy, then I\'d learned he was very clever, and now he frightened me a little.

I\'d thought we were alike. Neither of us was temperamental, and we kept a similar distance between ourselves and others. ...But he wasn\'t like me.

He did have strong emotions, impulses, and wishes, but for the sake of his goal, he could stifle them all. He could pretend to be a delightful, engaging person. The mask of the Fiend with Twenty Faces had nothing on his.

"Which face is your real one?"

I stretched my hand out toward the ceiling. This hand wasn\'t capable of stripping off his mask yet, most likely.

"...What am I thinking?" Suddenly, I realized I was planning to keep him in my life. Was it for the sake of the mission? Or was it—

"I guess I really am tired."

I let my hand fall to my forehead.

Desperately, I banished that second possibility from my mind. "Will you sacrifice your companions again?"

The voice of the great evil echoed in my head.

I know.

I know, so get out of here. I brushed the illusion away with my right hand.

"—Oh, you finally picked up."

Just then, a girl\'s voice spoke from the smartphone by my pillow.

Apparently, a call had come in, and I\'d unintentionally hit the TALK button. ... In video call mode, too.

"Oh, Mia. It\'s been a while, huh." Collecting myself, I responded. I\'d said "It\'s been a while" on instinct, but it had only been a week or so since the last time we\'d talked. I\'d met Mia Whitlock in London, right before I left for Japan.

"Yes, it\'s been a week... Wha— B-Boss? What are you wearing?"

I was lazing around on the bed, holding the phone up high, when Mia started panicking. Oh, right, I was still in my underwear.

"You\'re a guardian of the world. Get it together, would you?"

Mia blushed, partially covering her face with her hands, peeking through her fingers. What is she trying to do?

"Sorry, sorry. You caught me in the middle of changing." Telling a small white lie, I set down my phone and put on a nearby bathrobe. "And? What did you need?"

Mia was the Oracle, a Tuner like me. Since we traded information about Seed on a regular basis, we often talked like this, but today hadn\'t been one of our scheduled meetings.

"Well, I may have finally found something that could change the future recorded in the sacred text." Mia\'s voice sounded serious.

The sacred text was a book of prophecies about global crises, written by a series of Oracles. At present, it foretold my defeat at the hands of one of Seed\'s executives. We\'d been spending our days working out a strategy that would change that future.

"A possibility? Don\'t tell me—is this about the Singularity?" I asked, picking up my phone again. The Singularity was the one thing that could change the future as it was written. Mia had once explained that the future branched out in many directions, with that individual as the point of origin.

However, knowing when and where the Singularity would be born was nearly impossible. Even the Oracle had to wait until she just happened to spot them. ... But I\'d definitely heard Mia say she might have found a way to change the future.

My heart was pounding, whether I wanted it to or not.

And then Mia told me the identity of the Singularity she\'d seen.

"...Boss?"

After a short silence, she called out to me, worried. "No, it\'s all right. It\'s just..."

I really have been hearing that name an awful lot lately, I thought.