November 28

Makoto frowned as she looked Akira up and down. "We don't have to go in today."

Akira gave her a grimace of his own. He was learning more than he would have liked about the consequences of what the police had done to him. The pain in his left shoulder, for one. He was fine most of the time, but on cold, damp days like today, it was a dull ache that flared up and do something that hacked and his capacity for rational thought like a machete. "I'll feel better in the Metaverse. Besides, your sister needs information."

Ryuji snickered beside him. "Right, information." He looked down at his leg. "You've got a point about the Metaverse, though. Having a Persona is the best rehab I've ever had."

Makoto rolled her eyes, but twenty minutes later they were standing in front of a restaurant that looks like something out of Lifestyles of the Rich and Sociopathic. There was too much gilding to be called elegant, and the shadowy waiters spoke with exaggerated French accents. Even the name—Café d'Elite—spoke of exclusion and snobbery. But, of course, if Shido and his followers cared about the lowly masses, the Phantom Thieves wouldn't be here.

At least he did feel better. Pain slid away until it was only a memory. He was stronger, faster here in the Metaverse. He had the power to summon fire or lightning or to bring someone back from the brink of death. Something shone on the ground in front of him. A diamond, not especially large, but brilliant and flawless and cut to show that off. He pocketed it. The Metaverse could make you more than what you were, more than a despised high school student. Powerful and wealthy enough to impress even a public prosecutor.

"So we just find this politician and start talking?" Ryuji asked. "And then probably punching?"

Makoto pointed to an empty table bearing a blue flower. "That's where he'll be. We just sit at one of the nearby tables and wait for him to show up." Another frown. "It'll look suspicious if one of us goes to the table alone."

"I want in on this! Big fancy restaurant probably has steak, right?"

"You know that you can't actually get full from anything in the Metaverse, right?"

"It's steak!"

Akira cleared his throat. "I'll go with you, Queen. We want more than just the letter of introduction. We want information on Shido's activity to build the case. Skull, you can't interrogate for crap."

Ryuji glared at him beneath the mask. "Just because you have a crush on the prosecutor doesn't mean you get to do everything."

Six pairs of eyes turned towards them, and the sounds of the restaurant fell away. Akira's face burned as he looked around for a nice dark hole or an eight-headed demon or anything that wasn't his friends staring at him. "I—I—" he squeaked. Wonderful.

"Don't look at us like that." Futaba smirked. "You haven't exactly been Mr. Subtle for the last few days. Personally, she's way too cold and serious for me, but whatever makes you happy. Or are you hoping that was a little bit of her Shadow left over?"

"Joker has a crush on my sister?" Makoto's fingers flexed, and Akira had a sudden mental image of a flash of light and rush of wind that had left an entire room of Shadows is nothing more than seared husks.

Morgana blinked at him. "I didn't know you were in love with her. Is that why you been looking at her like that? Ms. Niijima is your Lady Ann?"

Akira raked his hand through his hair. "Can we stop talking about this and focus on the politician and the fact that Skull is probably right about it ending in violence?" He hoped it would. Battle was a few minutes of hyperfocus as your world narrowed to sound and smell and how you were going to kill the thing in front of you before it killed you. No time to think of traitorous detectives who might have been your friend or imperious prosecutors who made your skin tingle and your breath come fast. He mentally sorted through his options before picking a Persona: Satan, hulking and terrifying even to the denizens here. If there was anything human in this politician, he would be wetting his pants.

Akira froze. Satan. The adversary. The prosecutor. Maybe Michael? You couldn't get less prosecutor-y than an angel. The angel who brought the dead to stand in judgment before God. He buried his face in his hands. "Oh, no."

It was going to be a long afternoon.

It did of course, end in violence. The demon was even an eight-headed snake. Even better, they had learned his name. Ooe, until recently LCPP backbencher with a nationalist bent and no particular legislative accomplishments and now United Future Party bigwig and future Minister of Transport. He'd bragged about sucking up to Shido so he could murder that CEO and diplomat. And that Shujin's principal had been murdered when he was no longer useful. Not that Akira had ever liked the guy, but people weren't tools to be thrown away.

Coming back to the real world always felt like being squeezed through a tube of toothpaste. The pain in his shoulder returned as a dull ache as he and Morgana rode the train back to the café. That was the thing about the Metaverse: everything there was temporary except the death and the treasure. He patted his pocket for the reassuring weight of the diamond. Bit by bit, he and the others had become true phantom thieves and not only punished the wicked, but made money doing it. Most would go back into purchasing needed supplies but he'd been able to build a small nest egg. Enough to dream of buying a new telescope and saving for university. University. He'd resigned himself to some third-rate school desperate for talent of any kind, but Sae seemed so certain that the University of Tokyo was still within his grasp.

It would be nice to stay here. Sojiro is here. My friends are here. She's here. And idiot that he was, the last bit mattered.

He wasn't alone when he and Morgana entered the café. Sae had commandeered a booth in the far corner and was typing furiously on her laptop. She had come here almost every night since he had offered the café to her as a sanctuary, and he had learned to read her face and posture the way he had learned to read star maps: that exactly two lines formed between her brows when she was concentrating, that she twirled her pen when she was bored, the twist of her lips that was so like Makoto's when she was angry and trying not to show it.

Morgana popped his head out of the bag and looked between them. "I see now. She really is your Lady Ann. What are you going to do?"

Akira ground his teeth. Do? What was there to do? He had a crush on her, apparently. He liked to watch her work, liked the way her eyes sparked when she had made a breakthrough and the newfound softness in her voice when they talked about Makoto. Electricity coursed through him. He felt as if he had shaken off more than drugs after the interrogation, as if some part of himself that had been dead for the last year had come roaring back to life. If it had been anyone else, he might have done something about it, but Sae wasn't anyone else. She was Makoto's sister and the only hope he had of Shido ever seeing justice. And he was a second-year student with a criminal record. Even he knew when not to press his luck.

But still, he could want. "I'm going to send you to bed. And don't say anything about me going."

But Morgana smiled his cat smile. "Spend time with your lady love. Just don't exhaust yourself."

One of these days someone was going to throw that cat off Sky Tower and he was going to deserve it.

"I wish I could understand his meowing," Sae said without looking up. "I'm always afraid he's talking about me."

Akira ran a finger around his collar as heat spread across his cheeks. "Just discussing some fallout from the infiltration. I got a name for you: Ooe."

That earned him a look up. Her eyes were hard and glittering, another expression that was becoming familiar to him. "I knew it. And let me guess: he ordered the subway accident back in April? He had the most to gain from the Minister of Transport's resignation. And, again, a nationalist politician drawn into Shido's orbit. At this rate I'm going to vote Progressive."

Akira raised an eyebrow. Murder seemed an infinitely safer topic and he slid into the booth opposite her. "If you knew he was responsible, why didn't you do something? I mean not that your director would have let you but..."

"At first, because I was a self-obsessed coward." Her voice was acid. "You don't rock the boat or go after unsafe targets unless you want to get fired. Bringing him down would have killed my career even if he wasn't involved in a conspiracy to take over the country." She shifted and her expression changed to something softer and almost haunted. "And now, it's because I wasn't certain. I've been wrong about so much. I won't crush someone based solely on my feelings. I have to follow the evidence."

Akira remembered something Akechi had told him when he had presented his plan to steal Sae's heart. "If you don't, she'll either discover who you are or she'll frame some poor soul to be the Phantom in your place. All that matters is the victory." He wondered if it was true and decided that it didn't matter. No one was punished for what they might have done. "Well, now you have the queen of evidence. And solved Kobyakawa's murder too."

But Sae was frowning at her screen again. "A pity Shadow testimony isn't admissible. To convict him of the murders per se, I'd need to prove the mechanism of the rampages and mental shutdowns. And that would require testimony from either Akechi or a Phantom Thief."

Akira felt as lightheaded as if he had just entered the Metaverse. Testimony would mean revealing their identities. Being branded as murderers. Their future dashed upon the rocks as prison or even the death penalty awaited them. "That's what it'll take to bring Shido down? We go down just as hard?" Bile burned in his throat. It was too much to ask of anyone.

"Easy there," she murmured. "The only ones going down will be Shido and his conspirators. May I tell you that dirty secret of prosecutors? If we can't get you on the most serious charge, we'll be happy to get you on the small ones. The sheer number of yakuza we've finally put away for tax evasion would boggle the mind." She turned the screen so Akira could see a column of numbers. Bank statements, far more complex than what his mom had to deal with. "These are a record of Ooe's finances dating back several years. A bunch of small irregularities. Nothing on their own, but together they are consistent with him laundering money. Maybe money he funneled in exchange for a shutdown, maybe something more mundane. Either way, it can and will land him in prison for years. And much more provable to a panel of judges than the Metaverse." Her smile was grim. "Of course, if you can capture Akechi and convince him to testify, I won't turn you down."

Akira leaned back. "That was downright subtle, Ms. Niijima. Clever, even." And it meant never having to choose between pursuing justice and keeping his freedom. "I'd forgotten that you are actually a good investigator."

Once, that would have earned him a furious roar at best, but tonight she only smiled. "We poor mortals aren't completely useless. Give us some credit, Mr. Kurusu. Someday we may be able to tie our own shoelaces." Another thing he was learning about Sae: she could be funny. Not the way Ryuji or Futaba were: her humor was bitter, her jokes over so fast that you might miss them if you blinked. But humor.

"I didn't mean it like that. I'm just used to your methods involving a little more, er, brute force."

"You mean threats and blackmail. Call things by their proper names. You don't need to spare my feelings." She sighed. "I thought it would be the easiest way to get what I wanted, and it was. People gave me exactly what I expected to see. Only what I expected wasn't the truth. And then I started to believe it was the only way way I could get information. And then you showed up." She chuckled to herself. "Are you sure that you didn't do anything to me in that other world? Because I feel like I was in a mental fog these past three years and I can finally think straight. Put two and two together. Even be downright subtle."

"I'm…glad." Akira's mouth was dry. Maybe that was why he was losing his mind all of a sudden. If Sae were only gorgeous, that would've been one thing. Ann was gorgeous, and they got along fine. But gorgeous and darkly funny and just as smart as he was? A thief could only take so much. "I like this version of you."

A flush spread across her cheeks. "Thank you." Silence settled between them, warm and quiet. The kind that could lull you into a deep sleep even when the world was going to hell.

So of course the pain in his shoulder picked that moment to come spiking back. Akira hissed and cringed. He'd felt far worse right after he'd come home, but that was a blur from the sodium penthenol. This pain could sneak up on him at any time, and he hated it.

"Mr. Kurusu? What's wrong?" But before Akira could reassure her, Sae was on her feet and at his side. Her brows knit together and her lips pursed. "Is it from the Shadows?"

"No. It just flares up sometimes. I'll be fine." He held up his hand to shield himself. Sae shouldn't see him like this.

Why not? She's seen me worse than this. She's seen me cry. Akira took a deep breath to steady himself. In this world he was usually the one seeing people in pain or frightened and trying to soothe their problems. It seemed the least he could do when their bonds with him were what powered the Personas that kept him alive. But Sae had been the one to see him half-dead. Maybe it would be all right "My shoulder's been bothering me a lot lately. Ever since…" Ever since the police tortured me hung in the air. Torture. One thing he couldn't call by its proper names.

He didn't have to. Sae's eyes darkened until they were like flames barely controlled by a grate as she trembled. "Those bastards!" Her hands clenched and unclenched. "I'm going to them and I'm going to—" She inhaled. "No. I will not resort to vigilantism like a barbarian. Do you remember what they looked like?"

Akira stared at her. "What? The police? There's not anything you can do, is there?" But through the haze, he had a pleasant vision of the tall police officer who had kicked him in the ribs rotting in prison.

"Not with Shido running around, no. But after...there are limits to the brutality that's tolerated. And they've crossed that line. And one thing my father taught me: a bad officer is never bad just the one time. SIU is supposed to be bringing to justice public servants who have abused their trust, not perpetrating those abuses!"

"Angling to be promoted straight to Director?" he asked through gritted teeth. "I hear that the reform platform is really popular these days."

"You really are something." Her hand hovered over his good shoulder. "You should get some rest."

"And you are worse than Morgana." Akira shook his head. "I can never sleep when I'm like this." He had tried, but the pain had been there scraping at him until he had dug out a DVD just to have something to distract him. "Can we just talk for a bit?"

"Of course." She slid in the booth beside him, her knee brushing against his. The warmth of it spread over Akira and filled him until the pain was at the edge of his mind. "What about?"

"I don't know. We did kind of skip the small talk stage, didn't we?" He thought. They had seen so many sides of each other in the last few days. Maybe…maybe that was another reason that he was treasuring every glancing touch and why Sae Niijima of all people was the one rousing him from the stasis of the past year. He could show her everything. He could geek out about astronomy and talk about the Metaverse and wince in pain and she would be here sitting beside him. There was no pity in her eyes, just anger and the awkwardness of someone remembering the ordinary rhythms of life. She was comfortable. "So what's being a prosecutor like? You know, when you're not putting your life on the line. Makoto said you really loved it when you started, and the way you talk about putting people away, well, it's like when Yusuke talks about art."

"You're ridiculous." But she smiled when she said it.

"What are friends for?"

"You're the most extraordinary friend I've ever had." She stumbled over her words like a blind man feeling his way down a street without a cane. "I'm glad you consider me a friend."

"I think we are." Friends. His world was growing bigger and richer just like hers was. He was learning to dream again and it was because of her. She would probably never get the butterflies in her stomach that he did when he looked at her. It didn't matter. "I'm glad I met you."

"I am too." Her hand covered his, and the last of the pain faded away for the moment. "So you want to hear all about the boring life of a public prosecutor?"

"How can it be boring? It's your life." He looked down at their hands, her long, pale fingers atop his calloused ones and shivered. There was so much power in these little things. Not the flashy stuff of Personas, but then the forces that governed the universe wern't flashy until one day he looked up at the sky to see the light from a thousand-year-old supernova. "I think you can call me Akira now."

"I guess we are past formalities." She smiled, as small and bright as the diamond he carried. "Akira."

"Sae."