Ishizaki Kanami studied the array of monitors and readouts, hoping to see some change. A myriad of tiny lights blinked back at her amid the general hum of ventilation tubes and oscillographs.

They were the same as they had been an hour ago - except for one. She leaned in closer; the needle on the gas exchange pressure gauge had moved almost a whole millimeter to the left. She tapped on the glass faceplate; the needle didn't budge.

"Still here, Chief Ishizaki?" a voice behind her asked. "I thought you clocked out already."

The Astronomics chief turned to see one of her colleagues enter the quarantine room with a clipboard. Mizuta was the third shift supervisor; despite working with him for almost five years, Kanami hadn't ever been able to warm to the man.

"I did," she told him, turning back to the monitors. "But I wanted to take one last look, in case there's something more I can do."

Mizuta joined her, and checked the readouts against the sheet on his clipboard. "We've done all the mandated interventions, performed all the adjustments possible, and there hasn't been any improvement. Frankly, I'm surprised the medium has lasted this long."

He squinted at the gas exchange needle. "Ah, oxygen consumption has decreased. I've never seen a medium recover functionality with such poor vitals; it would be most cost effective to terminate."

Kanami tried to keep her posture relaxed, placing her hands in her lab coat pockets to hide her irritation. "She's not gone yet. Her core temperature has remained stable for the last six hours. Adjusting the salinity earlier seems to have helped; I'm sure she'll at least stay with us until morning. I want you to keep a close eye on her tonight and let me know of any changes, no matter how small."

Mizuta pursed his lips. "You're the boss."

Kanami walked over to the stasis chamber that held the medium in question, the only one in the small quarantine room. Floating in a solution of buoyant salt water, her head shaved, eyes closed, mouth and nose covered by a respirator, the medium looked nearly identical to all their other female mediums. But Kanami could tell at a glance who the doll was, if she hadn't known already.

She laid her hand on the glass of the chamber, above the medium's heart. "Hang in there, Eunice," she said quietly. "I'll figure something out; I won't lose you."

Ignoring Mizuta's disdainful look, Kanami left the room. She stopped by her office to hang her lab coat on its hook on the back of the door, then grabbed her keys and jacket.

Sheets of cold rain greeted her outside. Kanami lingered under the portico and lit a cigarette while she waited for the downpour to slow. The lights of the city illuminated the undersides of the clouds in a dull orange glow, but the area surrounding the observatory was dark and black. The burning end of her cigarette was the only spark of light in the darkness.

"Damn Mizuta," she muttered, exhaling a long stream of smoke. She was sure that if she hadn't directly told him that she expected Eunice to last the night, he would have pulled the plug and let the doll die. To him, and to several others on her staff, the mediums were nothing more than expensive pieces of equipment, to be discarded when they couldn't be repaired.

Maybe the mediums were tools, but they were living beings as well. It was only by treating them as such that they performed to their best ability. It was Kanami's ability to almost intuitively understand the workings of the mediums as individuals that had earned her a top position at such a young age. Her knowledge of Eunice's particular quirks and characteristics had so far kept the doll from slipping away, as the delicate beings so often did. They couldn't be treated with such callous indifference.

Thunder rumbled in the distance; the rain wasn't letting up, and the nicotine wasn't doing its job. Kanami sighed, and stubbed the cigarette out on a post before flicking it into the trash can. Then she held her jacket over her head and made a dash for the parking lot.

Instead of driving straight home, she made a detour through Shinjuku and pulled up outside of a familiar apartment building. Kanami counted windows through the rain. It was past midnight; Misaki's rooms were the only ones that showed light on her floor. Doubtless her friend was going over files for her current cases. The past couple of days had been pretty heavy with contractor activity, including Misaki's obsession: BK-201.

It looked like there was something hanging in the bedroom window, in front of the blinds, but she couldn't make out what it was. Maybe Misaki had run out of floor space, and was using the walls to organize her case notes; Kanami wouldn't put it past her.

She had begun to hope that now that her friend was finally dating again, she would rein herself in a little and stop being such a workaholic. Enjoy life a little more. However, Kanami hadn't seen any evidence of it yet. She wondered uncharitably how many times poor Li had been stood up so far. She hoped, for his sake, that he wasn't as diffident as he appeared. Otherwise it would be all too easy for him to end up as Misaki's bottom priority, no matter how much she liked him. Kanami had seen it happen before.

Within a few minutes, she had parked her beat-up old car and dashed into the building out of the rain. She made her way up to Misaki's door, dripping jacket in hand, knocked three times and waited.

And waited.

She was about to knock again when she heard footsteps rapidly approaching. A pause as the person on the other side looked through the peephole, followed by the snick of the deadbolt. The door opened at last to reveal her friend in wrinkled shorts and an inside-out tank top, bleary-eyed and disheveled.

"Oh, geez," Kanami said. "I'm sorry. I saw your light on, and I was sure you were still awake."

"I was awake," Misaki protested, holding the door open for Kanami to enter.

But Kanami hesitated. "It's not that important; I'll let you get back to sleep."

"You wouldn't be here if it wasn't important. And anyway, I wasn't asleep." She stifled a yawn.

Kanami quirked an eyebrow. "Liar."

Misaki smiled. "Fine. I'd dozed off, but I hadn't meant to be asleep yet; I still have work I want to finish up tonight. Here," she held out her hand for Kanami's jacket. "I'll hang that in the bathroom. There's a new bottle of wine in the fridge."

"Thanks, a glass of wine would be perfect," Kanami said as Misaki took her rain-sodden coat. She walked in and kicked off her shoes, then headed to the kitchen where a mess of files was spread out on the counter.

Her friend returned as Kanami finished pouring out a second glass of cheap chardonnay, both her and Misaki's favorite. Misaki had combed her hair and turned her shirt around, and was looking a little more human. The two women took their wine and settled onto the sofa. The rain made a dull drumming sound on the balcony.

Kanami felt something lumpy against her back; reaching behind the cushion, she pulled out a pale blue bra that she recognized as part of the set that Misaki had bought on their shopping trip a few days ago.

"Oh!" Misaki said, turning bright red. "Sorry!" She leaned forward and snatched it from Kanami's hand, then looked at it in her own hand, clearly unsure what to do with it. After a moment she got up and disappeared into the dark bedroom.

Kanami stared after her friend. Misaki wasn't a prude, but she'd always been extremely straight-laced and almost shy when it came to relationships. Li had seemed pretty shy too. Finding an errant piece of underwear in her own apartment was nothing unusual, but in Misaki's?

"Please tell me that that was there because Li couldn't wait to get you out of it, and not because it fell out of the bag and you never noticed," Kanami said when Misaki returned to the sofa.

Misaki picked up her glass and took a long sip. "I didn't know it was there," she said, as usual ignoring the actual question.

Kanami raised her own glass to hide her amusement. "Did you see him last weekend then?" she pressed.

"You didn't stop by so late to ask me about my love life," Misaki pointed out, not unkindly.

Kanami sighed, and swirled the wine in her glass before drinking. She'd almost managed to forget her own problems for a minute there.

"We're having trouble with one of our mediums," she said.

"What's going on?"

"I'm not sure, exactly. I started noticing small changes in her specters a couple of weeks ago - slower response time, reduced range, things like that. None of our mediums are one hundred percent consistent, so it didn't seem like anything to be worried about," Kanami said, inwardly berating herself - again - for not picking up on the significance sooner. "Then her vitals started slipping. Again, the changes were small, but they never fully recovered before they would drop a little more."

"What causes that?" Misaki asked, frowning.

Kanami shrugged. There was a faint red spot on the carpet in front of her; she rubbed at it idly with her toe. "When we see gradual changes like that, it usually means a malfunction in the equipment, like a slow leak in a piece of tubing or a faulty connection. But we checked everything out, even moved her to a new stasis chamber and flushed the system, and didn't find any problems."

"Then what do you think the problem is?"

"I don't know. Sometimes, dolls just…slip away, for no reason that we ever discover. They're incredibly frail, and we do work them hard in Astronomics. Older dolls are especially delicate, and Eunice is one of our oldest - she's been there for longer than I have. In fact," Kanami added with a sad smile, "of the mediums I trained with when I was first hired, she's the last one left. I hate losing any of them, but I guess I'm more sentimental about Eunice than the others."

"Eunice?" Misaki asked, raising an eyebrow.

"What? I heard the name when I was visiting the observatory in Hawaii, and I like it," Kanami said defensively. Eunice was the first medium she'd given a name to; she'd gotten some of the younger techs to start using names instead of ID numbers, but most of the staff would just look at her as if she was talking about naming a refrigerator.

"Anyway," she continued, "Mizuta thinks she's at the end of her useful life, and should be terminated."

Misaki snorted. "Mizuta." She'd heard plenty about him over the years.

"I hate to agree with him, but I just don't know what else to do. If there was something physically wrong with her, I could find a way to treat it. But it's almost like…" she trailed off.

"Like what?"

Mizuta would laugh at her if she said this to him, but she knew that Misaki never would. "You know when elderly people go into the nursing home, and their families never visit, and they start getting depressed? It gets worse, but gradually, so that no one really notices. Then one night they pass away quietly in their sleep, and no cause of death can be determined. Like they just give up on living. It's like that."

"You think the medium is depressed?" Misaki considered the idea thoughtfully, as if it actually made sense.

"There's aren't any physical signs that I can read, but that's what my gut tells me, as impossible as it is." Her wine glass was almost empty. She got up to refill it. "Want another?"

Misaki handed her half-full glass over absently. "How old is she? I didn't think there were any elderly dolls, aside from Madam Stargazer."

Kanami poured out two more glasses and left the bottle on the counter. "Sorry, I don't mean old as in biological age. When we talk about dolls being 'old', we're referring to the length of time that they've been dolls. The oldest, dating from the first appearance of the Gates, have been dolls for ten years. There aren't many of them left in the world; most of our mediums are newer."

"Why not? Thanks," Misaki said, taking the now-full glass back as Kanami returned to the sofa.

"A number of reasons. A lot of them were used in early, unethical experiments, before the UN got its act together and banned that sort of thing," Kanami said in distaste. "They can't defend themselves, so many are killed in contractor-related operations. And now we have to worry about the older ones just…getting worn out. Fading away."

"Eunice doesn't have much time left, does she," Misaki said gently.

Kanami shook her head and sighed glumly. "Probably not."

"I wish there was something I could do to help." Misaki tapped her fingers on her knee. "Are you sure it's impossible?"

"Am I sure what is impossible?" The wine was filling her head with a pleasant, warm buzz, dulling the frustration she'd been feeling all day. But it was also dulling her ability to track the conversation.

Misaki's brow was furrowed in that way it always was when she was connecting dots. "For dolls to be depressed."

"Well, like I said, there aren't any physical signs that we can read, and their limbic systems are completely offline. Eunice is no exception. It should be impossible. But…I don't know." She shrugged despondently. "Unfortunately, it's not like we can just ask them how they're feeling."

"What if you could?" asked a new voice quietly from the hallway. Both women looked up in surprise; Kanami nearly dropped her glass.

Li was standing at the entrance to the living room.

At least, she thought it was Li. The open smile she remembered was missing, and in those slim-fitting black pants, he looked less like a college student and more like he'd just walked off the set of a Bruce Lee film. He looked more serious, more…dangerous than he had the other two times she'd seen him.

…Of course, he'd been wearing a shirt those other two times.

Li moved to stand next to Misaki, who had recovered from the surprise first. "I thought you were going to go back to sleep," she said apologetically, reaching up and touching his arm. "Were we talking too loudly?"

"No. I was listening. Sorry."

This didn't seem to bother Misaki. "Well, if you're going to stay and talk with us, go put a shirt on," she said with a smile, "so Kanami can close her mouth again."

Kanami huffed. Her mouth was closed.

Li looked down at his bare chest as if only now realizing that he was shirtless, and blushed faintly. Adorably. "I only have my uniform shirt tonight, remember?"

The statement didn't make any sense to Kanami - why couldn't he put on a work shirt? - but Misaki evidently understood it. "Oh. Right. Look in the bottom drawer of my dresser, I have an old shirt that should fit you."

He returned to the bedroom without a word. Obedient, Kanami mused as she watched him go. Then she turned to her friend.

"Misaki!" Kanami hissed, leaning forward and pushing her shoulder. "Why didn't you tell me he was here, we could have talked tomorrow instead!"

Misaki picked up her wine glass and took a large gulp. "You don't really think I'd let a guy get in the way of my friendships, do you? Besides, I thought he was asleep. He needs it," she added quietly, mostly to herself.

"It's the middle of the work week," Kanami said. Misaki never did anything social on work nights if she could avoid it; Kanami was dying to know the circumstances that had led to Li crashing at her place tonight. Caught in the rain, and invited in for dinner?

But Misaki refused to rise to the bait. "Yes," was all she said, a little defensively.

"Who are you, and what have you done with Misaki?"

"Oh, come on," Misaki said, cracking a smile.

Kanami drained the rest of her glass. "I mean it. Bras under seat cushions, sexy man-slaves at your beck and call - don't get me wrong, I approve one hundred percent. It's just…unexpected."

Misaki looked down at her wine awkwardly, and tucked her feet up underneath her on the sofa.

"Want some more?" Kanami got up to refill her glass, at the same time that Li reentered the room.

"No, I've had too much already," Misaki said, with a hand to her temple.

"Less than two glasses," Kanami needled her.

"It's a work night - and I'm not twenty anymore."

Some things will never change, Kanami thought with a smile. "You never were twenty, even when you were. Li, what about you?"

"No, I don't drink," he said.

Misaki glanced up at him then, and burst out with a laugh. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to laugh. Pink looks good on you."

Kanami recognized the shirt as a souvenir that Misaki had gotten for free at a pop concert that she and Alice had dragged Misaki to in high school; it was so big, Misaki had used it as a nightshirt for years.

It wasn't big on Li though, lean though he was; it fit him like a muscle tee. A bright pink muscle tee.

Any other guy would have been embarrassed to be seen in it, she was sure, but Li didn't look the least bit uncomfortable. There wasn't a smile on his face, but he was looking at Misaki with such tenderness in his dark eyes that Kanami felt like a voyeur, intruding on an intimate moment.

"What do you mean, you don't drink?" she asked, to remind them that she was still in the room. "You bought beers for yourself and Misaki at the bar, I remember." She didn't remember a lot from later in that night, but she did remember that.

Li took a seat on the floor, sitting back against the sofa beneath Misaki's feet. "I didn't drink it."

"You didn't, did you," Misaki mused, letting her bare foot slip down to brush his shoulder. "Is that - " She cut herself off, but apparently Li knew what she was going to ask.

He looked up at her with an amused expression, and caressed her foot. "No. I had too much once, and I didn't like it. That's all."

"Just as well," Kanami said. "There's not enough for two more anyway."

She emptied the last of the wine into her glass, and contemplated the two of them. Misaki disliked public displays of affection (even close friends counted as public, for her). Yet there she was, allowing that intimate touch without any sign of embarrassment or disapproval.

They'd only been seeing each other for a month or so; knowing Misaki as she did, and based on her impression of Li, Kanami had been imaging a handful of dates, maybe one or two shy and awkward nights together. She could see now that she'd been completely wrong. Seeing them interact was like watching a pair of old, familiar lovers, for whom intimacy was as natural as breathing.

She wondered, not for the first time, why Misaki was keeping the relationship so quiet.

"What were you going to say, before I sent you back for the shirt?" Misaki asked him.

Li's eyes were on Kanami as she returned to her spot on the sofa. "You care about this doll?"

"Of course," Kanami said. Something about the question niggled at the back of her mind, like she was missing something important. But she couldn't figure out what it was, so she ignored it. "I care about all my mediums."

"Why?"

The question was direct and blunt, and without any inflection in his voice or expression on his face she couldn't tell if he was being derisive or if he was genuinely curious. Misaki was looking at him with an affectionate smile.

That gave Kanami the cue she needed to know how to answer. To any disinterested person or official, she would have said that she cared because the mediums were indispensable to their work at Astronomics. To Li, she said, "Because they were people once. They deserve better than the way we treat them."

Li seemed satisfied with that answer, though his expression didn't change. "Dolls can speak to each other," he said. "If you want to know how your doll is feeling, you can ask another doll to ask for you."

It was a naïve suggestion. The discovery that mediums could speak to each other psychically had ignited a fervor amongst doll researchers, but the excitement had died down quickly when it became apparent how limited the application of such an ability was.

"Yes, it's true that dolls can communicate," Kanami said patiently. "But only within the strictures of their programming. Relaying information, for example. To ask a doll how she feels would be meaningless; dolls have no sense of self. No concept of 'I'."

"I've heard dolls referring to themselves," Misaki said with a confused frown.

Kanami nodded. "It's just a grammatical construct, part of their language programming that allows them to communicate with us. Only words; there's no abstract meaning beneath them. They can be programmed to express preset emotions, and some of the more advanced programs - personality replacement, for example - certainly make it appear that they feel. But their higher brain function, including the ability to feel emotion, is lost completely. Strip away the program, and there's nothing there."

"Do you really believe that?" Li asked her quietly.

She opened her mouth to explain that brain scans always turned up negative, so yes, she did believe that, but then closed it again.

"I don't know," she admitted at last. "But it doesn't really matter. None of our dolls have any sort of language programming; they all function directly off of code. They don't possess knowledge of abstracts, like thoughts or feelings, any more than a computer does. I can talk to her all I want, but she can't understand me."

"You said your doll can't send out her specter anymore?"

"No. She's not even connected to the system right now anyway; we have her in quarantine." That feeling like she was missing something important in the conversation was back, but she still couldn't identify it. Maybe she had had too much wine after all.

"Is there any water in the room? Within her line of sight?"

Kanami had no idea where this line of questioning was going. Misaki was giving Li an odd look, but she seemed to understand more than Kanami did.

"She's in a stasis chamber," Kanami said, "that's seventy-five percent water. But her eyes are closed."

"I don't know if that would make a difference," Li said, apparently to himself. "I can ask Yin."

"Are you sure?" Misaki cut in, a look of surprised disbelief on her face. "I mean, is that safe?"

He shrugged lightly. "I think she'll want to help, if she can. It shouldn't be a problem if we're careful."

Kanami was starting to feel really lost now. "What are you two talking about?" she asked.

Li gave Kanami a piercing look that sent a chill down her spine, then turned to Misaki. "You trust her?"

"Yes," her friend answered without hesitation.

He nodded once, relaxing slightly. "It'll be easier if she's there, so she can talk directly to Yin. Meet us at the address in Roppongi in an hour, unless I let you know otherwise."

Misaki nodded, smiling warmly at him. "You really have a soft spot for dolls, don't you."

"I don't have soft spots," Li said in cynical tone, turning away from her.

Misaki's smile deepened, and she ruffled his hair. "Your things are still a little damp; they're in the bathroom. You can wear the shirt out." She yawned. "I'd better make some coffee, if I'm going to drive to Roppongi."