Conan's Secret Admirer
By Muphrid

I'd never been so excited about a bunch of rats before.

It was two months since the downfall of the Black Organization. Half of the world's intelligence and counterterrorism agencies had had a hand in bringing those creeps down, and I was grateful that Haibara and I had been needed for only a small part of it. The FBI, CIA, and PSB bore the brunt of the blame, and to any of the remaining disaffected Black Organization members around the world, there were bigger fish to fry than Kudo Shinichi and Sherry.

Still, we'd helped unmask the identity of a codename agent who was vulnerable to leverage, and for that, Jodie-sensei had been kind enough to forward us some Organization research data Haibara's poison. Haibara had worked night after night to incorporate the archived data into her prototype antidote, and so far, the results were promising: Haibara had subjected two dozen rats to the APTX drug and her new prototype antidote, and even after a week, the rats were alive and well—and eating her and the Professor out of house and home.

"Eat hearty while you can," Haibara told one of the rats as she refilled its water dish. "It's just a matter of time before I find how much of a dose will kill you, so you should enjoy yourselves."

Was that really necessary? If the rats were safe and sound after taking the drug and the antidote—and they were adults, too!—did she really need to kill them? Apparently, yes. A good scientist would want to know what the lethal dosage was, just to know how much antidote could be given safely. Even so, I marveled at Haibara's heartlessness. That look didn't suit a child. Then again, most of Haibara's behavior didn't suit a child. I swear, if I'd acted half as mature as she had in front of other people, someone would've figured out there was something wrong with me. I think she got away with it because people expect to meet a few ice cool girls in their lives.

Well, I didn't see the need to be so heartless. I shook one of the rats' cages and smiled. "Thank you, little rat! When I'm big again I'll remember it was all thanks to you!"

Haibara shot me a withering glare. "Yes, no thanks to someone else in this room, hm?"

I promised I'd buy her a coin purse, and that satisfied her for the moment. It couldn't be cheap, and she might want two or three to match different kinds of styles—fine, fine. It was a small price to pay. Haibara was already losing sleep over this, even when the Professor and I had told her not to push herself. I needed her to get it right—a few more days as a child wouldn't bother me—but finishing the antidote was to Haibara like solving a mystery was to me. Neither of us could let it go when we were close.

Haibara wanted to do some more tests and analysis, but for now, the results were very promising, and we'd already started making plans for the future. Edogawa Conan and Haibara Ai would soon disappear from existence. For most people, the story would be that we'd moved away, but there were a few people close to us—Ran and the Detective Boys in particular—who we wanted to know the truth. Our plan was to invite them to Haibara and Conan's going away party. There, they'd learn the truth. There, I'd take the antidote and be Shinichi again.

"Or," said Haibara as she pored over data from her experiment, "you die horribly, scarring the Detective Boys for life. You die so horribly that even your angel can't save you."

Never mind her; she was an eternal pessimist. And besides, why would I die when I was in Haibara's capable hands? I said something like that to her, and she was not amused. This was science! she argued. We couldn't possibly predict with certainty the effect of a prototype antidote on a human being without actually subjecting a human to it. Careful though she may have been, Haibara would not rule out the possibility.

And I didn't ask her to. I knew well there was a chance I'd die. If that happened, I wanted Ran to be there for sure. Shinichi shouldn't disappear from her life just to come back as a corpse.

"As entertaining as it is to imagine you as a zombie," said Haibara, "I think only you will have the luxury of taking the antidote in front of friends and loved ones at the party. Someone has to make sure you don't keel over."

Fine, so Haibara would hold off on taking the antidote until a later date. I could almost accuse her of making me the guinea pig, but her reasoning was airtight: if she took it first and died or were incapacitated, there was no chance I'd be able to finish the antidote properly. That was fair. One point for Haibara—and yes, I was keeping track. The running total that day was 4-3, which I would've admitted to no one at the time.

"So, what do you think, then?" I asked her. "You wait a week to make sure I'm all right, and then you take the antidote?"

Haibara folded her arms at that. "Who says I'm going to take the antidote? Maybe I'd like to be a child forever." She put her hands together, leaned on one foot, and winked. "Am I not the cutest thing you ever did see?" she asked, her voice going into a register I didn't know she could reach.

"The new Fusae handbag doesn't come in your size," I noted.

Haibara hissed, and she snapped her fingers. "Well, that settles that then," she said.

"That's a point," I asserted, and I started jotting it down on the tally for the day.

Haibara wasn't amused with this. She insisted that it would be a point under protest—begrudgingly was her exact word—and it would only be used as a tiebreak, not for any official records or statistics going forward. With logic like that, I argued that she was basically equating me with someone who set records under the effect of performance-enhancing drugs.

"You're in elementary school and solve crimes that the police can't," she said.

Please. I'd lived 17 years and earned that the hard way.

Putting that aside, there was still planning to do. If Haibara wouldn't take the antidote at the party, then we'd just have to hold another one for her. Genta surely wouldn't mind a second chance at some cake, but Haibara wasn't having it.

"Maybe I don't want to have a party," she said, not watching me. Her eyes were fixed on the computer screen with charts and graphs and all that. "Haibara Ai is even more of a fiction than Edogawa Conan. I always imagined that, if someone we escaped the shadow of the Organization, I'd just disappear. The kids—they're going to have a hard time with this, you know."

And here I'd thought she was mature and wise beyond her years. People coming and going from each other's lives was nothing new. In a little while, I'd graduate high school and go to college, probably leaving home behind, at least for a time. There was no reason Haibara couldn't go her own way for a while and come visit—or come back, if she wanted to.

"That's true," she conceded, sitting back in her chair. "I'd thought—" She took one look at the tally pad in my hand and shot me a glare so fierce I didn't dare mark it down. "I've thought for a long time," she corrected herself, "that it'd be nice to get an actual degree. Criminal syndicates aren't so good about guaranteeing accreditation or meeting degree requirements, you know."

"That's good, then; we can go to college together!"

Drumming her fingers around a coffee mug, Haibara shot me a look like I'd surprised even her with my own idiocy. Just what exactly would we do in college together, she wondered. Neither of us was the partying type. What would I do in college, for that matter?

Please, those were easy questions. A good detective always has to stay abreast of new developments in forensic science and psychology. It's true I was the furthest thing from a party animal, but college atmosphere—the idea of being out on one's own—that was an opportunity I wouldn't get back, not unless I took another dose of apotoxin. She should enjoy the idea, too. Going to college would be part of a normal adult experience for her. If she was worried about going off on her own, then a bunch of us could try to go to the same college, or at least nearby to each other.

I made that suggestion, and Haibara raised an eyebrow. "A bunch of us?"

Of course; me, Ran, Sonoko, maybe Sonoko's boyfriend—people like that. Hattori too, come to think of it—he had to have plans. I knew it was unlikely we'd all end up nearby each other, but that's life, right? You start with people you know and then branch out.

"We're not going to hang out in college like we're friends, Kudo-kun," she said.

"Excuse me?"

"I don't think your pure and good-hearted girlfriend would be at ease with someone like me. I was the chief scientist for a criminal enterprise, after all."

"Ran trusts me, and I trust you," I insisted. "Therefore, she trusts you."

"That's logic, not reality. As usual, you're being overly optimistic. She doesn't even know who I am." She turned in her chair, freezing me with her gaze. "You know what I think? We should be cautious about all of this. The kids aren't going to understand it right away. For them, it will be like losing us to strangers."

I admit, I'd worried about that, too. Our friendships with the Detective Boys were going to be upended. I liked to think that I would start my own detective agency—or maybe take over for Ran's father, since he would love to have something with his name on it and do none of the work. I could take on the Detective Boys like apprentices, and Haibara could stop by from time to time, see the kids, and maybe do a little consulting. She had a sharp mind, after all, and her knowledge of biochemistry could rival anyone's. Maybe that was all a bit fantastic, but still, I hoped for something like that.

"You want me," Haibara said icily, "to be your consultant?"

Well, I didn't see her coming up with any good ideas? What was she going to do, anyway?

She said she would probably take the antidote after a week, as long as I didn't show any complications, and she expected she'd be around for a while after that. She did think college was a good idea, and college entrance exams would take time to prepare for. I was glad about that—that she would still be around for some time. Of all the other things that would be changing, at least she would still be there. If I woke up from taking the antidote and heard anything other than a smart remark about me exaggerating the pain for sympathy, I'd actually worry.

"Just because I'm going to still be here doesn't mean things aren't going to change," she said, watching me out of the corner of her eye.

"I hope something does," I said. "After all the work you've been doing, you should get some sleep at least. You look like a monster who could climb out from under someone's bed right now."

Haibara may or may not have attacked me with a shoe then. I'm still fuzzy on the details.

To be honest, I'd been a little worried about Haibara. That girl liked to play it cool, but this was going to be a big change for her, too. If she had any anxieties about it, she didn't confide them in me. I asked the Professor if they'd talked about it either—no details, just that they'd talked—and he said no, too. Honestly, that girl was too willing to go it alone sometimes. I know she had a terrible childhood, but wouldn't most people who went through that try to find something normal? I mean, just as a reaction, you'd think a child prodigy like her would try to be a kid again given what happened. But no, she acts like she's 84 all the time—unless there are cute animals or soccer players involved.

In all the time I'd known her—all the time we'd worked together—I'd only seen a true face of hers a handful of times. For two people who stuck together to bring down an international syndicate, we really didn't know very much about each other. Or I should say, she knew plenty about me, and I knew some dry facts about her—about her family, her sister, even her real name—but beyond that? The woman who called herself Haibara Ai was a self-made puzzle, ever-shifting in her patterns and solutions. That's the problem with puzzles. If they need to get into some other configuration, how are you supposed to do that without solving them? And if they don't want to be solved, what do you do then?

Perhaps I was too worried about Haibara. Small as she was, she'd come a long way from the despondent woman who would throw her life away given the chance. She had too much of a life here to just abandon it. She'd find a way to make things work.

Right?

I wished I could be more sure of that, but as usual, Haibara wasn't giving me anything to work with. She studied the results of her test without a hint of emotion. That was just the way she was, sometimes.

#

The next day was Thursday, two days before Edogawa Conan and Haibara Ai would leave to go "overseas." We made it known to Kobayashi-sensei that we'd be going—she looked heartbroken at the thought, and I made a note that we'd need to clue her in, too. She'd probably end up hearing about it from Inspector Shiratori soon enough; there was no sense in delaying it, but for the moment, we needed her outside the loop to execute run-of-the-mill transfer. Jodie-sensei's contacts overseas would handle the false paperwork to make it appear those two kids had gone for real.

The Detective Boys didn't handle the news well. Wasn't it strange that we were leaving at the same time? How would the Detective Boys go forward? Genta was super worried about this; no one believed for a second that he was the brains of the operation! I told them they could still investigate things together and learn the trade of being a detective, but that was little comfort. Ayumi-chan was despondent—she had a bit of a crush on me, and she was terribly fond of Haibara, for reasons I still didn't understand. Mitsuhiko had no small crush on Haibara, too, and he promised he would write her emails every day—really, that was a bit much.

"Why don't we go out this afternoon and look for one last Detective Boys adventure, then, hm?" Haibara suggested.

I shot her a look, which she parried with a childish grin. Very funny, Haibara. Making that expression was like giving me the cross of a Rubik's cube. Still, for the kids' sake, I played along. "Maybe we can find one last case for the Detective Boys to go out on?"

Our hopes were initially dashed: Genta searched his shoe locker—and his shoes—twice, but there was nothing—at least, not in his locker. There was, however, a note left in mine:

Edogawa Conan-sama,

I understand you'll be leaving soon. Please meet me today after school. There's something I want to tell you in person, and it can't wait.

I know you like mysteries, so I've written a code for how I feel and where and when we should meet. I know you'll be able to solve it. You're too smart not to! But if you're not interested, I understand.

MPSUFIDM

I hope that's not too embarrassing to read.

LTNYICRNPNCMC

I wanted to pick a place that I like, with a lot of people around, so you wouldn't feel like you're all alone.

DHXLLI

I hope that's not too early.

Please hear me out. I think we make a great pair!

And of course, if you know my name, you don't need any of my hints, do you?

The card was unsigned. Seems I was meant to show up without even knowing who this person was.

"Eh?" cried Ayumi-chan. "A secret admirer for Conan-kun? And she wants to confess today, of all days?"

"Confessing your love for someone before they leave for good seems better than the alternative," said Haibara. "Living with those feelings for the rest of your life does no one any good."

Just whose side was she on? I shot her a glare. Trying to get me entangled with a classmate was the last thing I needed.

But Haibara feigned innocence. "I have no interest in seeing you pursue a relationship with one of our classmates, Edogawa-kun. If you want my help solving this code, I'm afraid you're out of luck."

Like I needed a shred of help from her! Any code an elementary school kid could come up with would literally be child's play! And any disciple of Holmes could crack common ciphers in his sleep. We'd be done in ten minutes, fifteen tops!

Or so I thought. I admit, maybe I underestimated this culprit—even if she were just an infatuated little girl. I could tell just by looking at the code that it wasn't any simple cipher, nothing a seven-year-old would come up with on their own. Roman alphabet ciphers start with the simple: Caesar ciphers. You shift the alphabet some number of spaces, and that's it. It was obvious that would yield gibberish. Even so, this was a lot more than I'd expected. Having all of the Detective Boys looking over my shoulder didn't help anything.

"You're not going to meet her after all, are you?" asked Ayumi-chan, peering at the message. "It's a pretty strange love confession, isn't it?"

"A strange confession for a strange boy," said Haibara, who stood aside from us, nearer to the exit. "That seems perfectly appropriate to me."

You be quiet, I told her with a glare. Even so, I didn't have time to get back at her any more than that. Some girl out there could've been expecting to see me at any minute, and it would've been rude to keep her waiting. Though really, it would've been smarter to include some instruction if I didn't want to return her feelings—which I didn't.

Well, if the code didn't admit solution by inspection, it was time to be methodical. We didn't have a lot of plaintext, but given the situation, it might be easy to guess one piece—or all of the plaintext—and go from there. I explained that to the Detective Boys, and Ayumi-chan chimed in right away:

"Then this part—" She pointed to the section MPSUFIDM. "That has to be her confession! Why else would it be embarrassing?"

A reasonable conclusion. I briefly considered something as simple as aishteru—I love you—written in Roman characters, but in a Caesar or affine cipher, that wouldn't work—A and U would both map to M individually.

Briefly defeated, I decided that solving a cipher like this—even as simple and obsolete as it was—couldn't be done comfortably at our shoe lockers. The five of us headed to the library. Though Genta was quick to call this letter nothing like "real detective work," I thought it was a good exercise. Criminals often like to use codes both sophisticated and simple. A basic working knowledge of cryptanalysis—don't ask Genta how to pronounce that—was essential for any detective.

"Edogawa-kun is right," said Haibara as we were on the way to the library. "Knowing the basics could help you recognize codes that are hiding in plain sight. The most effective encryption is the kind that you don't even know is in place."

"You know a lot about codes?" asked Mitsuhiko. "Amazing!"

Haibara laughed—her restrained, you-have-no-idea laugh. "I'm nowhere near as familiar as any disciple of Holmes," she said, shooting me a smug look. "Holmes himself wrote an entire treatise on codes."

"And solved a code that was based entirely around stick figures," I noted.

The kids were floored, distracting me for twenty minutes as I had to track down a copy of The Return of Sherlock Holmes to faithfully recreate the Dancing Man code. Haibara, of course, was no help with this, content to watch me lecture the Detective Boys on the fundamentals of frequency analysis and substitution ciphers. I even walked them through an exercise following my idea: aishteru couldn't be the plaintext for the first part of the coded message in a simple substitution cipher. So either aishteru wasn't the plaintext, or the cipher used two or more letters—digraphs and trigraphs and the like.

"A pair, a pair!" cried Genta, making the other library patrons glare in his direction. Bashfully, he sat down, but he still stuck his finger on the note. "It says you make a great pair! You think the secret code could use pairs of letters, Conan?"

Aha, so it did. Like any culprit, the perpetrator couldn't resist one parting hint. That simplified things considerably. There were only a few methods that were common with pairs of letters: the Playfair, two-square, and four-square ciphers in particular. Playfair was simplest, and I started right away on putting together a candidate table for a key. The Detective Boys were eager to help out, so I showed them how to check candidate plaintext for a Playfair cipher.

The rules of a Playfair cipher are simple: you start with a key—a word or phrase—and strip out the repeated letters, then fill out a 5x5 table with the remaining letters of the Roman alphabet (minus one; usually something like I or J). This table lets you encrypt a message: you take pairs of letters and, if they're not in the same row nor column, then you can make a rectangle with them. The other corners of the rectangle form the corresponding ciphertext. There are various exceptions for when you have double letters or the letters belong to the same row or column, but the rules are deterministic—and reversible. You use the same table to encrypt as well as decrypt. That's what made Playfair simple.

Nowadays, a computer can brute-force a Playfair cipher, but it still helped to have some idea of the plaintext or the key. I got the three of them—Ayumi-chan, Mitsuhiko, and Genta—building up possible encoding tables for possible plaintext. Despite the difficulty, they seemed to be having a good time. The puzzle of the Dancing Man captured their imaginations, and the idea of being in on some secret kept them going, even as we churned through idea after idea of what the three lines of code could mean.

Eventually, I decided to consult some reference material in the library for information on other digraph ciphers. I wasn't as familiar with the two-square and four-square methods, particularly whether they had any edge cases I needed to worry about. Haibara offered to help.

"It's rare to see you taking something that isn't a crime so seriously," she observed. "Are you so desperate to feel loved?"

"Please," I said, rolling my eyes. "I just don't want to leave something like this unfinished. Besides, the kids are learning a lot."

At that, Haibara smiled—I'd rate it a 76% true face of hers—as she looked back at the Detective Boys. "I'm looking forward to seeing how they grow," she said. "They're going to be fine adults someday."

"They're already finer than most adults." I smirked. "Good work, Mom."

Haibara pressed her lips together and shot me a look that could freeze a sun. "I am not calling you 'Dad' under any circumstances."

Of course. If she did that in all seriousness I would wonder what was wrong with her head.

We didn't say another word to each other for the rest of the time at the library, as we unofficially tag-teamed the Detective Boys in teaching them the rules of other digraph ciphers. In the end, though, we didn't make much progress. Obvious plaintext for the first phrase, such as aishteru and sukidayo, didn't seem to yield anything promising. The second ciphertext didn't lend itself to obvious plaintext guesses, either. I wasn't exactly used to thinking of Japanese words' romanizations. What word or phrase would have 14 letters in the Roman alphabet? The time of meeting puzzled me, too. One o'clock—ichi-ji—absolutely wouldn't make sense, as we were still in school. Six o'clock—roku-ji—might, but I followed that train of thought to nowhere. In a common Playfair cipher, J and I are usually identified, so JI would become II instead, and double letters usually map to double letters, so II should become QQ or XX or something. Some methods strictly avoided doubles, so II in plaintext would be fed as IX instead. Yet still, that would only give me a triplet of letters that belonged to the same row or column of the square: I, X, and L. Not much to go on.

Stymied, I told the Detective Boys they should go home for dinner if they liked. We all took copies of the code and some ideas, but I didn't expect them to keep at it and make much headway. After that, we went our separate ways. Ayumi-chan, Mitsuhiko, and Genta all lived in Haido, so Haibara and I left them first as we made our way toward the Detective Agency and the Professor's house, both toward the river.

"Any which way you go about it, there's no way a kid came up with this," I said, scribbling on a notebook as we walked. "It could be someone needs help and just pretended to be a child to get our attention?"

Haibara shook her head and sighed. "This person has given you ciphertext and clues to the plaintext. I'm not sure what else could convince you it's innocuous."

Solving it, of course. I'd rather not assume anything about what it says and commit to that. Trying out a few likely plaintexts was one thing; in all likelihood, I'd still miss this person for the day.

"You're hopeless," she said with a sigh. "If a mystery grabs your attention, you stop at nothing to solve it."

Please. The last thing I needed was to get flak about my passion from her, too. I already got enough of that from Ran.

"I'm not criticizing you for it," said Haibara. "It is incontrovertibly you, Kudo-kun. You would not be Kudo Shinichi if you weren't doing things like that. I'd be troubled if you stopped. Your passion for the truth, the joy you take out of life—those are things I admire about you."

I stopped in my tracks. Excuse me? Who are you? I didn't think any of the people I know who could imitate others could get that short. Mom, is that you? Are you playing a trick on me? Is this really Haibara Ai?

"Haibara Ai is a fiction," she said, staring me down. "That hasn't stopped us from working together, but now I think a proper introduction is in order." She stuck out her hand. "I'm Miyano Shiho—codename: Sherry. It's been a pleasure working with you, Kudo-kun."

I shook her hand, bewildered by this turn of behavior. "I know who you are."

"Do you?" She let go of me, and she headed back the way we came. "I just remembered I have something to do. Good luck with your code, Detective."

"You're not going home? But I thought I could talk to you about this code."

She shook her head, exasperated. "I'm not your Watson, Kudo-kun."

"No, you're my suspect, and I'd like to interrogate you."

"Oh really?'

"Yes, really. You knew there would be something waiting for me in my shoe locker. You conspicuously made no attempt to help solve the code."

"That's all you've got?" Haibara shook her head, disappointed. "It's not like you to jump to conclusions without a firm line of argument. Keep working on the code, hm? I think everything you need should be right in front of you." With a coy smile, she trotted off in the exact opposite direction of the river, back the way we'd come from.

"You're going to the meeting point," I called after her.

"If that's the case," she called back, "then you don't need to follow me to know where I'm going."

Really, if there was something she wanted, she should've just asked for it instead of setting up this silly game. And if she wasn't involved, that was strange, too. She'd never been one to tell me to buzz off about a case—even as one as trivial as this.

I read over the note again. Maybe there was something I missed. The first three lines seemed straightforward. There were no obvious clues from them. The next three uncoded lines were hints about the possible plaintext. The next line after that was a hint that the cipher was some sort of digraph substitution cipher. The final line—I realized I hadn't paid any attention to it. "And of course, if you know my name, you don't need any of my hints, do you?"

I slapped myself on the forehead. Hiding clues in plain sight. Every perpetrator and crook has done it. The literal meaning was expected, and like a fool I didn't pay it any thought. A Playfair cipher has a key—a word or phrase that you put before the rest of the alphabet in the 5x5 square. The key works both ways: it lets you encrypt as well as decrypt messages. I wouldn't need any of this girl's hints if I knew the key, and she told me how I could find the key: it was her name.

The theory was good—it was real good—so I was surprised, then, when I tried Haibara Ai and its reverse and got garbage. I let out a sharp hiss at that. I was so sure. Granted, Haibara Ai isn't a great key because it's got a lot of redundant letters. Something with more uniques would be a little less obvious. But that was the clue—if I knew this girl's name, I'd have the key.

I stopped for a second, flipped to a new page of my notepad, and wrote out a new Playfair square starting with MIYANOSH. I worked through the three lines of code, stopping when I was fairly sure what I would see:

ILOVEYOU

TRAINSTATION

FOURPM

Cheeky brat—sending me coded messages in English, no less! I stomped back up the road to the station, and sure enough, I found her sitting at the base of the fountain, kicking her feet like any 7-year-old girl might. I showed her the decoded message, and she smirked. "It's five-thirty," she said. "You're quite late."

"I'm sorry; I was too busy being trolled by a terrible woman," I shot back, and I sat down beside her. "What's so important that you couldn't talk to me about it on the way home? You should've involved me in this; this was way too hard for the Detective Boys to solve! And what's with making up this phony confession scenario? This prank's gone way too far, Haibara!"

Haibara laughed, leaning back over the water of the fountain. "The only thing I would've done differently," she said, "is stay with you until you figured out the code. It would've been the last time I'd get to see such a flash of inspiration in your childish eyes." She peered at me. "What a pity."

There was something wistful or nostalgic in her expression. Haibara had been acting strangely all right, and no doubt it had to do with the party, the antidote, and all of that. All of this was just her roundabout way of asking to talk in private—without the Professor or Ran or the Detective Boys around. I asked her what was on her mind, and her answer was surprisingly direct.

"I haven't thanked you properly," she said, talking about the Organization.

"There's nothing to thank me for," I said. "We were a team. We did it together. We had a lot of help."

"Even so," she said, smiling, "I'm grateful. It's been fun being here. I've enjoyed it. I've met good people—the kind of people I wasn't sure still existed. I'm going to be a little sad that it's over."

I bolted upright and stared her down. There was no way in hell I would let her just walk out of all our lives. The Professor would be heartbroken. Ayumi-chan would be devastated. Mitsuhiko would pine for her for years.

Thankfully, Haibara wasn't planning anything so drastic. Her fear was for something more inevitable: even if people don't want things to change, they inevitably do. Rather like the frog in a pot, oblivious to the rising heat, it's easy for people to grow apart over time. A shock like what we were about to drop on the Detective Boys would shake things up for sure.

"And as things change, people have to find a new status quo," she observed, "a new equilibrium. Things are going to change between you and me, too, Kudo-kun. That's why I have one more thing to ask of you, even though you owe me nothing: I'd like to talk to your girlfriend, to know what she thinks of me being in your life."

I scoffed at that, sitting back down again. "Why on earth would Ran care about that?"

She raised an eyebrow, like I'd missed an obvious deduction. "Because I'm desperately in love with her boyfriend?"

There's trolling, and there's trolling, and Haibara had taken it much, much further than too far. She'd gone so far that she'd wrapped this joke around the world only for it to come back from behind me and smack my head.

"Did I mess something up with the code? It should say exactly that on the card."

No, it definitely said ILOVEYOU. That wasn't the problem. Let's analyze this statement for a second, shall we? "Desperately in love"? With me? Haibara was one of the iciest people I'd ever known! We spent most days trying to one-up each other or trading barbs. I had a scorecard in my bag, for goodness' sake! She was guarded with everyone she interacted with—she nagged the Professor to keep him on a diet, and while she was genuinely nice to Ayumi-chan and polite to Mitsuhiko and Genta, she couldn't exactly be called affectionate or warm. If I pictured someone desperately in love, I expected at least something like a nervous giggle or some doe eyes or something—even from her!

"My, my," said Haibara, stifling a laugh. "It seems I'm one of the few who can deceive the great detective Kudo Shinichi with the absolute truth. Maybe I should use this talent more often. It would make me your perfect archenemy."

You see what I mean? 110% mischief, that woman. "I don't want to be your enemy, Haibara," I told her, sighing.

"That means I'm sufficiently intimidating," she said, still wearing a silly grin. "Good."

There was a silence between us for a time. To all the people milling about the square in front of the train station, we were just two little runts sitting by a fountain. Someone may have even said that Haibara's confession was cute. And to any ignorant observer, Haibara was looking fairly cute at the moment. I didn't feel that way, of course, because her satisfaction was coming at my expense. Haibara was too kind to toy with the children, but I was fair game. Could she really fall in love with a toy?

"We should go soon," she said, glancing down the road. "The Professor will need help finishing preparations for the party. Is there anything else?"

She called me there! But she explained that she was finished. It was only a matter of whether I was satisfied. And truthfully, I wasn't. I had a thousand questions, but I settled for just a handful.

"You want to talk to Ran," I said, "but what about me? Don't I get a say in this?"

"Of course you do. I'm sure you're regretting that offer from yesterday. I'm sure I'd be fine without the opportunity to consult at your detective agency, whenever you start it. I'd manage, and I'm sure the perception of having a ravishing assistant would do you no favors."

"Just who exactly is supposed to be ravishing here?" I asked.

"It surely wouldn't be you." She got up and bowed to me, still wearing that false smile of hers—the one she wore when she ran circles around you with her deflections and mind games. Sometimes Haibara genuinely enjoyed these games, but in that moment, her face was 0% true. That smile was her shield, and she wouldn't drop it. "There's nothing I would ask of you, Kudo-kun. You owe me nothing." And she started walking away.

"Nothing at all?" I called after her as I hopped off the fountain.

"Not a thing," she said, showing only her back to me.

#

We didn't say anything else for the rest of the walk to the Professor's, and thankfully, there were plenty of things to do. We strung up ribbons and streamers for our own party. Haibara took care of ordering the cake—the Professor or I would surely get one of the details wrong. Beyond that, there was the schedule to work out, and we walked through the plan for the evening: the Detective Boys, Ran, and Sonoko would stop by, and we'd play games for a little while. Then, we'd get to gifts, food, and cake. After all that, we'd reveal the truth, and I'd take the antidote. Haibara had gone so far as to establish a timetable for tests—when to check my blood pressure, exercises to verify cognitive function, all of that. To tell the truth, it all sounded like overkill to me. There was no way to know what would be happening at the time. Aside from a general checkup, it seemed more efficient to just react to the situation as it came, but Haibara wouldn't allow that.

"This is what's needed to make sure you're in good condition," she insisted. "So that's what I'm going to do."

Still seemed like a lot of work to me.

"I don't mind it," she said. "It's for the sake of the person I love." She laughed and shot me a quick glance, like she wanted to see what kind of rise she could get out of me. How irritating. I didn't think she'd be the type to play games like this. Haibara could be coy, but I really thought she had a limit to what she would do in good taste. Apparently, if she did have a limit, it was beyond what I'd expected.

She was willing to go that far to hide what was really going on in her head from me. Well, two could play at that game.

"I'm afraid the only way I can thank you for that," I said, "is as a patient thanking his doctor."

Haibara raised both eyebrows at that. "My my," she said. "I don't know how I should be offended by that—that you would say you're just my patient, or that you would lie to rub salt in my wounds. That's very hurtful, Kudo-kun. It's not like you to be so cruel."

"You're the one being cruel!" I cried. "I'm trying to reach out to you, and you just keep walling me off. I thought I felt bad about not returning your feelings, but this is ten times worse!"

At that, Haibara gawked at me. Finally something seemed to shake her from her performance. "Kudo-kun…"

The Professor poked his head in the door and started to ask if everything was all right, but Haibara and I silenced him with one look. "I'll just go check on the streamers," he said, knowing well that we were done with the streamers an hour before.

The moment was over. Haibara regained her composure, though her wall of a smile had come down a bit. The corners of her mouth wouldn't curl up as much, and there was a tension or fatigue in her face. She was straining just to look that way. "You shouldn't feel hurt about any of it," she concluded. "You're the great detective Kudo Shinichi. What could I possibly do to hurt you?"

I scowled. I couldn't even bear to look at her. Haibara pressed two fingers to her temple and sighed.

"I'm sorry, Kudo-kun," she said. "Can you forget what I just said?"

I could. I didn't know if I would, but I could.

"Thanks," she said anyway. "Putting that aside, I've been thinking—you might need to talk to your girlfriend tonight, or at least sometime before the party. I doubt she would appreciate seeing you pop back into existence all of a sudden. She could make a scene."

I sighed, and I pressed a palm to my forehead. Haibara was right. Springing this on Ran all of a sudden was bound to cause problems. The Detective Boys wouldn't understand without really showing them, but Ran would—and she'd need the time.

"If you'd like someplace private, you can use this room," she said, offering her computer chair. "I can go into the living room with the Professor for a while."

"Haibara," I said, catching her before she left. "I don't know—what should I say to her?"

She cocked her head. "Tell her the truth. You lied to protect her from dangerous people. The danger is over. You're about to be cured. That means it's time to set things straight. You never once wanted to be away from her." She looked away and nodded, as if to convince herself of something. "She's an angel. She'll understand."

I took out my voice-changing bowtie and Shinichi's phone, and I looked back at her. "Thanks, Haibara."

She smiled—in my estimation, an 80% true smile. "You're welcome." Her gaze hardened. "But what I have told you?"

"I'm not calling you Miyano while you look like that."

With a sigh and a shake of her head, Haibara gently pulled the door shut. "You'll have to get used to it eventually." And she was gone.

Truthfully, I was thankful Haibara had given me something else to worry about. I'd been putting off dealing with Ran for too long, and Haibara was quite right that Ran would appreciate some advance warning. At that moment, Ran believed that Conan was staying over at the Professor's for a while, just before he'd be leaving town. She must not have liked that idea, either. Already I'd begun to sense that she was uneasy about things. Hopefully, once she got over the shock of what I'd tell her, she'd like the idea that Shinichi was coming back into her life and that Conan wouldn't actually leave.

I turned on the bowtie and tested it, and I called Ran on Shinichi's phone. She picked up right away, knowing it was me. I asked her how she was doing, and she was practically disconsolate. Dear Conan-kun was leaving, she said, and she was gonna miss the little guy. The last thing she needed was to have another void in her life. Gosh, she'd grown seriously attached to me as that little kid.

"Well," I said, "here's some good news then. I'm planning to come home that night—the night of the party. Hopefully I'll even be able to stop by."

"You are?" Ran could barely contain the excitement in her voice. "Really, Shinichi? Is this just a visit, or—"

"It's the real deal," I said. "The case I've been working on is over. I'm coming home for good." We could put off dealing with the detail that if the antidote didn't hold I'd be Shinichi only for a little while. "And there's nothing I want more than to spend some time with you."

"Oh, Shinichi—I've been wanting that for a long time, too. In fact—" Uh-oh, here we go. "It's been a long time, hasn't it? Someday I'd like to hear about this big case that was worth staying away for so long."

I sighed. "It was a big one all right, and I didn't leave just because I wanted to pursue it. I was poisoned for getting involved in this!"

"Poisoned?"

Okay, so maybe it's a better idea to have a good idea for a cover story to try to ease your girlfriend into the idea that you've actually been living as a 7-year-old in her home. "Yeah!" I said, trying to come up with a coherent story. "I was poisoned. You remember that night, right? At Tropical Land? I ran into these guys and they poisoned me. I've been dealing with the effects of that for a long time. I'm still dealing with it. The last thing I wanted to do was put a target on your back, too. So I kept it quiet, and I stayed away. I know that was hard. I just really felt it was the only way to keep you safe. They knew who I was. You understand?"

"That's all so very serious—I can't believe you've been involved with something that could've cost you your life, even if you didn't have a choice! I would've wanted to be there for you, Shinichi! It's hard, isn't it—trying to deal with all of this all on your own?"

"It has been, yes; I would've liked for you to be a part of it, just to be able to talk to you, but I didn't know how to do that and keep you safe, too. It sounds lame, but that's the truth. That's the only reason. I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry, too." Her voice was shaking. I could tell she'd cried a little. "All this time I was really frustrated with you. To think you were in serious danger—it makes me feel like I was being petty."

"It was hard on you; I don't blame you for that."

"Thanks." A pause. "But you're all better now, right? The case is over, and you're better?"

"I'm going to be taking the antidote and coming back that day," I told her. "Luckily, the scientist who created the poison defected to our side. She's been a big help, not just for creating the antidote but for helping us take the bad guys down."

"She has, has she?"

I winced. "Ah, no, it's not what you think." I winced harder. "Well, I guess it's a little bit like what you think. She told me she was in love with me. I turned her down, though. She knows about you."

"Ah, she does, does she?"

"I know it's weird, but—" I glanced at the door. I hoped Haibara wasn't listening. "She's going to be coming with me tomorrow. Her family's gone—killed by the people who poisoned me. She defected from them, and people were trying to kill her, too. She doesn't have a lot of friends, but she's a good person. We've been working on taking these guys down, and she was a big part of that. I want to see her find some friends and be able to build a life for herself, away from all that mess. I, uh, actually hoped you'd be able to help her. There's no one I trust for that more than you."

"Oh, Shinichi," she said with a sigh. "Sometimes you just know how to sweettalk a girl, don't you?" A pause. It sounded like she was shifting position her seat to get comfortable. "There's so much I want to say to you right now. I'm still not happy that you were out on your own in danger. If we're going to have a relationship, that's the kind of thing we have to talk about. I'd never try to take your detective work away from you—I know it's something you love—but I love you, too, so I hope you won't take yourself away from me, you know? I know that's not simple. We have to find a balance there. But we can do that, right?"

"I hope so," I said.

"I hope so, too. Now, as far as this—what, 'colleague' of yours? It sounds like she has a terrible background. If she really did help you that much, and you trust her—I'd do everything I could to help her get on her feet. I mean, as long as she respects we're together, right?"

"Absolutely."

"Good," she said. "But still—I have to admit, from what you've told me, I'm a little jealous of her. You two worked together on this case, and on the cure for the poison you took, right? You worked pretty closely together?"

"We did. She can be a little difficult to get along with, and I wasn't sure I could trust her at first, but she helped a lot. For all her tough facade, she could get pretty scared, and I tried to make sure she'd be safe. Sometimes when I was down about things and just wanted to see you, she made sure I wouldn't endanger all our lives in doing it. I enjoyed working with her. I even offered her a job at home, once I start my own detective agency. That was before she told me her feelings, though."

"You shouldn't take that back," said Ran. "It sounds like she wasn't just a great colleague—she's a great friend to you."

I let the bowtie drop from my hand. I didn't know what to say to that.

"So this woman will be coming with you," said Ran, her voice betraying a hint of uneasiness. "Is that right?"

I picked the tie back up. "Well, in a manner of speaking."

"And what manner is that?"

"Well…" I scratched the back of my head. "She's coming with me, but she isn't coming with me. It has to do with the side-effect of that poison, you see…"

#

Ran was at the Professor's in less than 15 minutes, and she barreled through the door like a rhinoceros. "Shinichi!"

I was fairly sure I was going to die. Ran's karate moves inflicted on a 7-year-old would surely be fatal. After me, the Professor would probably go next. He'd been complicit in my deception, after all—giving me all these gadgets to help me investigate crimes and trick Ran at the same time.

What I didn't expect was that she'd barge through the Professor's door and hug me—hug me as Conan—even knowing who I really was.

"I've missed you, Shinichi," she said, about moved to tears. "I might never forgive you for what you did, but I will say that I've missed you." She pulled away, locking me in place with her tearful gaze. "Now, are you really going to take an antidote that you're not sure will be safe? Not sure will be permanent? Not sure it won't kill you?"

I started to babble at that, but Haibara saved me. "Please don't worry," she said. "We've run trials on mice for the past month. They're all alive. If I had the slightest inkling that Kudo-kun would be in danger, I wouldn't give him the new antidote. We didn't take down the Organization just to see him die from a pill. I won't accept that."

Ran's gaze met Haibara's. "It's you…"

Haibara hopped off the Professor's sofa, and she extended a hand. "I'm Miyano Shiho. I'm sorry I didn't have the courage to introduce myself properly before."

Ran took Haibara's hand. "It's all right," she said, before shooting a pointed glance at me. "Are all your friends really shrunken adults?"

No, no, it was just the two of us, really! Well, there was the matter of Mary Sera, but that was neither here nor there.

"Wow, this is a lot to take in," said Ran, looking exhausted, and she laughed deliriously. "Sonoko's gonna flip when she finds out. She'll insist it was KID with some magic trick."

That's why I almost didn't invite Sonoko to the party. If Ran didn't need her for support, I wouldn't have even dared.

"You and I," Ran said to me, "have a lot of catching up to do, but I think we're intruding on the Professor?"

Not at all, said the Professor. Ran and I could stay as long as we needed to talk things out. Ran was thankful for that; she didn't know if she could keep up any kind of charade around her father. But in point of fact, she wanted to talk to Haibara first.

"I understand there's something you want to talk to me about, Ai-cha—er, um, Miyano-san?" said Ran.

Haibara nodded, and she started showing Ran to her improvised lab. "Shiho is fine."

"Shiho-chan, then!" Ran clapped her hands. "Thank you so much for taking care of Shinichi. I know he can be a real handful!"

Haibara smirked. "And totally ungrateful even when you're taking care of him properly."

"Right?"

Introducing them was a bad idea. I never, ever should've agreed to it.

Mercifully, Ran and Haibara were done after half an hour, and Haibara and the Professor thought they could finish up the preparations without me, so I walked Ran home. On the way, I asked Ran a little about what she and Haibara said to each other. Ran said that they'd come to an understanding—they were going to share me, with Haibara having me on weekends and Ran during the week. I think my barely concealed shock was enough to make Ran burst out laughing.

"She said you'd react that way!" said Ran, still laughing up a storm. "I'm sorry, Shinichi, but I just had to go along to get you back for some of the things you've done."

Well, if it was just for that, I could take a little abuse. Something told me that Ran and Haibara, despite their polar opposite personalities, could actually become good friends. Haibara's scheming could give Ran another outlet for her frustrations, and Ran's good heart was just the right sort to put someone like Haibara—who was cautious and guarded more often than not—at ease. Haibara did like Ayumi-chan, after all. I could only hope that Ran and Haibara wouldn't tag-team me like this all the time.

"Seriously, though," I said to Ran, trying to finish the conversation up before we made it back home—her father was the last person I wanted overhearing this—"what did Haibara want to do in the future, about you and me?"

Ran cocked her head and thought for a moment. She wasn't really sure. As long as they'd talked, with Haibara explaining some things and being adamant that yes, she was indeed in love with me, Haibara wouldn't ask for anything. She even told Ran to consult Sonoko about it—though perhaps without all the details just yet—because Sonoko would be better at protecting Ran's relationship with me.

"I thought that was a little much," Ran explained. "Times are changing. Men and women can be good friends without people getting worked up about it or assuming something is going on. I told her she shouldn't worry about seeing you every now and then. We could all hang out together, and I thought the two of you would like to take the children camping or on other trips, too. They're your friends, after all. Shiho-chan wouldn't commit to anything, though." Ran sighed. "To be honest, that made me more nervous than her saying she was in love with you. If the situation were reversed, I don't think I'd be so accommodating."

I thought so, too—there was something very off-putting about Haibara's attitude. Despite her apparent confession, confirmed with Ran as a witness, I felt no closer to solving the case of Haibara Ai. Far from it, the suspect had presented a totally different side of her personality in these past few hours, a side that didn't fit at all with my previous profile of her.

Once I'd grown less suspicious of her, I'd always felt that Haibara was a caring and compassionate person. She just didn't bother with those loud and obnoxious signs of affection, but you could often get a good read of how people really are in how they treat animals. Haibara talks to animals; she recognizes when they're upset, frightened, or scared, and she tries to reassure them—for no reason, I think, other than that she doesn't want them to be unhappy. She shows animals more overt affection and love than she does people.

Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, then. Haibara had always acted that way; she kept her feelings hidden beneath a facade of a cool, aloof, and acerbic girl. Of the rest of the Detective Boys, the only person she wouldn't never be acerbic toward was Ayumi-chan, who was too soft not to let Haibara's barbs stick to her. Even with Mitsuhiko, while Haibara maintained some distance, Haibara was judicious in teasing him—she knew well he was infatuated with her.

Beyond that, it was in her nature to be self-sacrificing. More than once I'd feared she would run away to spare us the pressure of being on the Organization's radar. At least once I'd had to intervene to keep her from committing suicide—and that wasn't counting that she'd taken the APTX drug willingly, knowing most subjects died instead of becoming younger. It was, she felt, her only way out of a more painful death.

So maybe this pattern of behavior did fit, but to tell the truth, I still couldn't quite wrap my head around what Haibara would see in me. As restrained as she was, she'd often told me I was too exuberant—that I could be childish, that I pursued criminals too recklessly. I'd tried to be a little more thoughtful, respecting her fears. I didn't think I'd changed so much as to make her find me acceptable all of a sudden.

Ah well. That was a case for another time. Getting Haibara through the next few days was much more pressing.

#

The next day, I managed to corner Mitsuhiko, Ayumi-chan, and Genta away from Haibara at school. I enticed them to listen by giving them a little taste of the truth: Haibara wasn't really going away. She had a secret she'd kept from them, and she'd be sharing it with them the night of the party. Though our friendship would change, I hoped they would still count on her and rely on her, and that she would do the same.

"Of course!" Ayumi-chan was first to say. "Ai-chan is the best. She looks out for all of us. You can always depend on her!"

"She's super cool and smart," said Mitsuhiko, clearly daydreaming a little too much. "I wish I knew half of what she knows!"

"Haibara's got a rough personality sometimes," Genta observed, "but she's only ever been mean to you, Conan, so I think it's your fault most of the time."

Those kids gave her way too much credit. If Haibara wanted to stage a coup and take the Detective Boys from me, she could probably pull it off—well, if Genta didn't insist he was the real leader of the Detective Boys, anyway.

Mitsuhiko, Ayumi-chan, and Genta had more questions, of course. What was Haibara's secret? Did it have to do with me? All I could promise them was that they'd get answers at the party, and they needed to support Haibara no matter what. While the circumstances of our relationship had changed, Haibara was no less the steady and dependable friend they already knew. Of course, if they were smarter, they would've realized that this was exactly what I was afraid they'd feel, but elementary school kids aren't always so perceptive.

#

I let matters sit until the night of the party.

I arrived at the Professor's house only right when the Detective Boys were getting settled. The Professor was quick to hand out drinks and snacks, but there was already something amiss: Haibara was downstairs, in her lab, and though the Professor had tried to convince her to come up, she insisted she still had some things to take care of. Haibara could be brusque, flouting social convention, but she would never be rude to her friends. Since the Professor hadn't had any luck talking to her, I headed downstairs and knocked on Haibara's door.

"You got another science experiment I don't know about?" I asked, knocking on the door.

Haibara answered. "What do you want?" she said, only cracking the door open far enough to hold it with her hand.

Well, let me see, the Detective Boys were already there. Ran and Sonoko would probably arrive soon. She wasn't being a gracious host by staying cooped up in that improvized laboratory of hers.

"I'm just checking some data on the antidote one more time," she said, going back to her chair, and I followed her inside. "It wouldn't do if you had a complication because of something I missed."

She'd checked over that data eight times, waited over a month conducting trials on lab rats—which were not easy to get!—and still she had something to check? I doubted it, but Haibara insisted on the point. I could stay or go as I liked. She had data to examine. She was going to do it. She sat stiffly at the computer desk, not even bothering to look at me while I was in the same room with her. "You should go upstairs," she said. "It'd be even worse if neither of us is there to entertain the kids."

"Professor's got it under control," I said. "If something's bothering you about the antidote, maybe another set of eyes would help."

Haibara laughed. I knew only rudimentary biochemistry; there was no way her concerns would make a shred of difference to me. And that was true, to a point. I'd probably picked up more tidbits about the human body from Holmes novels than anything else.

"Maybe you need to think differently about it, then," I offered. "Something I like to do is think about something completely off-topic to change my frame of mind. Something like this: my mom told me about a cocktail party question that comes up from time to time in New York. Is a hotdog a sandwich or not?"

Haibara turned 180 degrees in her seat and stared at me. "You're not serious."

"I think it is," I told her. "It's a piece of meat put in-between bread. That's a sandwich."

Sighing, Haibara pushed herself away from the desk and keyboard. "First of all, meat is a generous word. Second, lots of things are considered sandwiches despite having no meat or bread involved: ice cream sandwiches, for example, or open-faced sandwiches. And yet, I would say that ice cream sandwiches are sandwiches but open-faced ones actually aren't—they're defined by how they're different from a sandwich, not the same."

"So a hotdog is a sandwich, then," I concluded. "It's just as much a sandwich as an ice-cream sandwich."

She scowled. Clearly, I was being ridiculous. There was a huge and insurmountable difference between the two. Ice-cream sandwiches had the same structure as regular sandwiches. By contrast, you would never close a hotdog the way a person closes a sandwich. Hamburgers are sandwiches. Hotdogs, in her view? "Definitely, positively, absolutely not. There is no question, and you'd be a fool to think otherwise."

I shrugged, leaning against the doorframe. "That's what my mom said, more or less."

"She has good taste." Haibara eyed me up and down. "Unlike her son."

"Being fashionable never solved a case."

"But if you looked good doing it, you could influence people—perhaps even convince an unrepentant murderer to confess. Fashion can be a weapon, Kudo-kun. You just have to be willing to use it."

"Yeah, well, my mom's a bit far away to be teaching me about all that."

"I could teach you."

I raised an eyebrow. "Is that what you want from me?"

Haibara blushed. If we were still playing our game, I'd have to mark that down as a point for me, but under the circumstances, it seemed kinder to let it go.

"Forget it," I said. "Come upstairs. Ayumi-chan and the others are waiting. I bet you don't feel even a tenth of the anxiety about it that you were feeling ten minutes ago."

Sighing, Haibara hopped off the chair and locked the computer. "This is how you cheer a girl up—arguing about hotdogs?"

Not every girl, I had to admit, but somehow, Haibara and I seemed to get along best when we were sparring about something like that. If I meant to cheer her up—and I'm not saying I did!—it would only be appropriate.

"And you wonder how a girl could fall in love with you," she said with a silly grin on her face. "Sometimes, Kudo-kun, your kindness surprises even me."

I backed into the room, pushing the door open for her while my hands were in my pockets. "There's only so much kindness in it," I admitted. "Seeing you be with all of them—there something in it for me, too. And if you don't mind me being a little more selfish than that?"

She shook her head, puzzled. "Go on."

"Don't be afraid to ask for what you want, Haibara," I said, "even if someone has to refuse it."

Haibara stopped in the doorway, staring at me with an intense, scrutinizing expression. Then, she grinned wickedly, saying, "Your mother didn't go far enough. These foods that claim they're sandwiches but involve no meat, or not even anything that could really substitute for meat—they're the real problem! The meaning of a sandwich is drifting because of this abuse of language!"

She motioned for me to follow, and I let the door fall closed behind me. "One man's abuse of language," I said, "is another man's evolution!"

"You're lecturing me on evolution?"

"Don't be a doof; I'm lecturing you on the truth."

As we made it to the top of the stairs, our voices attracted some attention. Ayumi-chan came running to greet us, but she was aghast at our tone. "Ah, Conan-kun and Ai-chan are fighting again! Come on, you two; this isn't the time for that!"

I held up both hands, trying to put her at ease. "Relax," I told her. "It's not like that."

Ayumi-chan's eyebrows scrunched together. "Are you sure?"

"Positive," said Haibara, smiling as serenely as ever. "100% positive."

Just like how that smile on her face was 100% true.

"Now," Haibara went on, "I'm sorry I'm late. We have some games to play, don't we? Let's not lose anymore time." Haibara rounded up the Detective Boys for a few games before Ran and Sonoko arrived. Later on, Haibara would introduce herself as Miyano Shiho—a trained biochemist, a defector from a criminal organization, and more—but before she could give me the antidote and observe my reaction, I insisted she be introduced as one more thing: a good and dear friend to the Detective Boys…

…and to me.

Strangely enough, it took us only 20 minutes to convince Sonoko that there was nothing unusual between Haibara and me. That was half the time it took to convince her that there were no trap doors or other tricks involved—I was really Kudo Shinichi, back from his time as Edogawa Conan. That was longer than I would've liked, but I know some things are hard to believe—like me being friends with a prickly and stubborn girl like Haibara.

Then again, I don't think it takes a detective to see through that act.

End