A.N: Thanks for the reviews, you guys rock!

Chapter Ten: January 8th, evening

He's going to test us! And if we pass it we can go to a place with other smart children! It's an orphanage, but it's much better than the Willow!

The interview ended after two hours of absolute boredom, during which all I did was mope, and answer with monosyllables the half-hearted questions Mr Jumma occasionally chucked my way. His handshake at the end of the show was languid and indifferent, but really, I couldn't have cared less.

Olm's parents were waiting for him outside the studio. I had never seen them before. Mr and Mrs Whitebird were the complete opposite of each other, and yet exactly the same. She was tall and extremely thin, with a sharp nose and small, cruel eyes that her son had inherited; and wore a thick, expensive coat with a white fur lining at the neck that made her look like an ostrich. Mr Whitebird was short and round, with a ridiculous mustache carefully trimmed above his upper lip, and a golden walking stick which he carried like a scepter.

But they both had a way of moving, of breathing, that distinguished them from the people around them like rubies in a bed of coals. Wealth comes in different forms and it shapes a person in different ways, as I would learn over the course of my life. There are the nouveaux riches, the normal people that, by a stroke of luck, suddenly find themselves living among the high sphere: arrogant pricks who wear their money like a disguise, like a mask. Then there are those who have earned their position through their own sweat and blood, who have worked their whole life for that wealth and wear it with a quiet pride and the calm assurance that they deserve what they have. They are the cautious ones, the ones who know the true worth of money.

Finally, there are those who are so high above everything else that no one could ever hope to understand them. They are the ones who have had money running through their veins thicker than blood for so many generations that it has become part of their very nature. They are the ones who look at the world with the knowledge that it all exists only for their entertainment, the knowledge that every building, every tree, every person was made and placed there for the sole purpose of serving them. They are the ones you can't blame for their arrogance, simply because it comes to them as naturally as breathing. They believe the world moves only because they wish it so, and should the fancy strike them, they could stop the sun's path across the sky with a snap of their fingers.

In another era, only the most ancient of noble bloodlines would ever wear this kind of aura. That was what I thought when I saw Mr and Mrs Whitebird standing there, surrounded by bodyguards, watching the people around them with an apathetic detachment. It wasn't until that moment that I realised how wealthy Olm really was. Curious, I sneaked a look at him from the corner of my eye, surprised to see his lips set in a grim line of distaste. Immediately he straightened, and, without even a glance at Sandra or me, started stalking harshly towards them. As I watched him leave I noticed for the first time a hint of the same aura as his parents set in the square of his shoulders and the tilt of his chin.

Only once he had entered the sleek, black car did he turn towards us and make a grimace through the window, shattering it all away. Sandra giggled, waving back at him.

It occured to me then how unusual Olm's behavior really was. Despite having everyhting he could ask for at his fingertips, he preferred to spend the day walking the streets, getting mud on his clothes, bullying two insignificant orphans and drooling after the third. It was an interesting realization.

But I didn't seem to be able to care about Olm, or his parents, or anything else, really. The L fiasco had me in one of my worst moods. Not that I would have cared under normal circumstances either.

"Inspector Gwenn went to the doctor with Haru," I informed tonelessly. "We have no one to take us home."

Sandra looked around. "I'll ask." She drifted over to one of the adults standing around outside, while I jammed my hands in my pockets and glared at the floor as if it were the reason why my idol had destroyed every drop of the respect and admiration I held for him. Or her.

It wasn't so bad, I tried to convince myself. He must have some sort of plan. I moodily kicked a stone away, not seeing it at all, my mind spinning in circles. Bait again? No, not without a way for Kira to react directly... No sense to throw the bait in the lake without a line attached to it.

My thoughts were interrupted by Sandra grabbing my arm and spinning me around merrily. "Bishop, stop daydreaming! We're taking a test!"

I blinked.

"This old man here is going to give us a test for detectives!" she sang, before leaning in to add excitedly, "only smart kids get to do it."

I looked at the man behind her. He was dressed in a long, thick coat and a hat over his eyes to ward against the cold, and he carried a brown case. His nose was big and rounded and a pair of small circular glasses hung off it, about to fall off. Underneath the hat and behind the glasses his eyes were a pale blue. He looked like a thinner version of Bonman. Maybe a countryman? "Are you English?" I asked.

He didn't seem too thrilled by my question. "Yes," he answered simply, in a deep voice.

"Do you know Eraldo Coil?" I don't know what prompted me to ask that question. But hearing the words English and detective so close together had that effect on me. Besides, I was still distraught and not thinking properly.

"No," he replied in the same tone, and then added, "My name is Roger. I'm here to discuss with you your future after this," he gestured sharply around himself, "is over."

"He's going to test us!" Sandra exclaimed excitedly. "And if we pass it we can go to a place with other smart children! It's an orphanage, but it's much better than the Willow!" She dropped the act to whisper seriously, "Or at least, that's what he said. Just go along with it for now."

I nodded slightly to show her I understood, and we both turned to Roger, who was watching us blankly. "Yes, that's right," he confirmed. "I'll be testing your deductive skills. The studio has lent us a room. Come with me."

Sandra sighed quietly, relieved he wasn't taking us anywhere strange, and we returned to the studio, leaving the night settling behind us. He brought us to a door guarded by two men in dark suits, and opened it to reveal an empty room, save for two desks and two chairs set far apart from each other. It reminded me oddly of the interrogation room at the station.

He told us to sit at the desks and gave each of us a paper he'd gotten out from his case, and a pen. "You have ninety minutes to complete it," was all he said, and then he went to stand quietly in a corner and didn't move. I got the impression that he didn't really like his job. Or maybe he didn't like children.

I was curious as to who he was. He showed up out of nowhere to test our deductive skills? I had expected we would receive numerous offers of adoption after we captured the Director, but this was different. He didn't want to adopt us, he was testing us to see if we were smart enough to be accepted into his orphanage. And what about Olm and Haru? We had implied, during the couple of interviews we'd had so far, that catching the Director had been a joint effort, of all four of us. If he was looking for smart kids, like he said he was, Olm and Haru should have made the list. "What about Knight and Rook?"

"Oliver Whitebird has parents, and I doubt they will die anytime soon," he replied brutally from his corner. "And the one you call Rook has been tested in a previous occasion and deemed unsuitable. Time is ticking." That was all. I frowned. Haru had been tested before? I shook my head. No, that wasn't important. I felt like there was something I was missing, some vital connection that was there but I couldn't see...

"If we pass, we'll be accepted into your orphanage? What's it called?"

He frowned at me, annoyed at being asked so many questions. "There may be other tests for you," he said curtly, his tone indicating that he wouldn't speak one more word.

Perhaps, under different circumstances, I would have caught it. Perhaps, if I had just gone one step further than Eraldo Coil, if I had asked just one more question, I would have saved myself many years of time and effort. But the suddenness and mystery of it all had me focused on questions that related only to me, and Haru, and Sandra, and what would happen if I actually passed the test, so much so that I failed to see the larger picture.

It is one of the moments I most regret in my life. Now that I look back on it, I realize that the connection was so obvious that even a blind iguana would have been able to spot it. After all, an orphanage for detective children? But let us say that I was young, and inexperienced, and upset, and also slightly overconfident, and let us drop the subject.

I looked down at my paper curiously. Whatever the case, there was no harm in looking at the test, was there? Surprisingly, I found no instructions at the top of the page, no questions, no rules.

Only the patterns.

Pattern recognition was the basis of a detective's thinking. A pattern was what had led L to believe that Kira couldn't kill him, a pattern was what had led Jun to uncover the Director's crimes. The test consisted of twenty patterns, made with varying shapes, lines, and dots. After each pattern there was a set of multiple options. What we had to do was obvious: choose the one that would complete the pattern. I grinned. Deductive skills, he'd said. But, compared with real life, it was nothing more than a child's puzzle.

The first five patterns were easier than breathing. A toddler could have done them - square, triangle, circle, square, triangle, circle. The next five were harder, but each of them barely took me more than a couple of minutes to solve.

Pattern eleven and onwards, though, were a completely different story. They were grids, and they had squares and half-squares colored in and dots drawn in and blanks and different colors. The abrupt change caught me off-balance. After ten minutes of looking at pattern eleven I finally admitted that it was a whole new level, took a deep breath, blocked out everything around me and turned my mind into a flat, smooth, undisturbed mirror. My fingers found my elastic subconsciously and I dove straight into the puzzle, the same way I lost myself in a chess game.

Forty minutes later I had worked my way up to number sixteen. But this one I simply couldn't seem to solve. When I thought I caught a glimpse of the pattern, it contradicted itself and I had to start again from the beginning. The same applied to number seventeen. I couldn't seem to fully catch them, so I decided on the answers based on pure intuition.

But at least I had intuitions. Eighteen, Nineteen and Twenty were absurd. I felt like I was staring at a mass of disorganized chaos, and it frustrated me. I couldn't make out anything, there wasn't a single solid square I could predict in that grid. It drove me mad, making me grind my teeth in frustration. I'd grown accustomed to being right, to having all my predictions be fulfilled. Bonman's voice at the back of my mind said he needed to empty my cup again.

There simply was no way to find the answer to those three. Five minutes before the end of the test, I gave up, for now, and leaned back in my chair. My narrowed eyes raked over the previous seventeen patterns. Then I breathed in again... And filled in all the wrong answers.

Let me explain. I was in a dark mood, and I still didn't trust Roger. Besides, I didn't want to go anywhere if Sandra wasn't coming with me. As I looked at her from the corner of my eye, her eyebrows pulled together in a confused frown, I knew she hadn't made it beyond pattern ten. And number eleven was the marker; the rest didn't matter, they were complements. If you worked out number eleven, you passed the test. I knew, by her expression, that she hadn't. She wouldn't pass. And if she didn't, then I wouldn't be any different.

I guess it was just proof of my loyalty towards her. In my place, Olm and Haru would have done the same thing. It just didn't make sense to be separated from the one person who had protected me, been with me for as long as I could remember.

So I flunked that test on purpose.

Later that night, while I lay awake in my bed in Gwenn's house, I remembered Bonman again. Has anyone ever offered to adopt you? My thoughts whirled with images of him, and a thousand FBI investigators, and how writers got their best ideas right before going to sleep. I closed my eyes, and for the first time, I didn't visualize a chess board, but patterns eighteen, nineteen, and twenty, side by side.

That night I dreamt about those three patterns, and a capital letter L in a blank screen.