Author's note: So I've learned that writer's block is a real thing. Sorry for the glacial update pace. But no matter what, I will finish this story! A new chapter will be coming soon. Thanks for keeping up with it!


"It looks like a gene lab," Yayoi Kunizuka said, disbelief making her voice an octave higher than it usually was. "But that can't be right."

Shion lowered her Dominator and stepped over the mound of shattered glass that, a few seconds before, had been a mirrored window overlooking the Senguji laboratory floor. So much for doing things the quiet way, she thought wryly. The room they were in contained a few chairs, a console, and several video monitors; it appeared to have been designed so that Senguji's executive team could observe the work being carried out below without being seen themselves.

"It is," Shion said, after giving the place a once-over.

Kunizuka looked at her in surprise.

Shion brushed some of the shards out of the way with her boot, the glass crunching underfoot like packed snow, and looked for exits. There was only one: a small, knobless steel door halfway down the length of the laboratory, set into the righthand wall. A soft red light pulsed above it. There was no obvious way to open it from the inside. Those wishing to leave would have to wait for the mechanism to be activated from, presumably, the observation room.

"I thought genetic engineering was illegal," Yayoi said, her nose wrinkling in confusion as she looked from Karanomori to the empty laboratory.

Yes, very illegal, Shion thought.

The genetic modification of the human organism had been outlawed decades before by the United Nations. Virtually every nation on earth had ratified the treaty, the only holdouts being those countries too technology-poor to employ such tech anyway. The agreement had occurred even before WWIII, before U.S. and Chinese nukes soared in gentle parabolae to kiss the edge of space and glide deathlessly to their chosen targets. The devastation's aftermath had done nothing to change the policy in Japan. Harshly proscribed, the MWPSB came down hard on suspected black market genetic alterations. Bio-synthetic grafts, the so-called cyborg implants, were another story—even fully mechanical organs were becoming popular with the middle class. But genes were forbidden, had always been forbidden. In sixteen years of medicine and law enforcement Shion couldn't recall ever seeing a gene lab in person.

And now she was standing in the middle of one.

As Ginoza would say, there's a first time for everything.

"A one-way mirror," Yayoi murmured. "Cute." Her partner stepped past her and walked down the length of the laboratory, her Dominator still held at the ready, night-vision visor carefully sweeping each aisle before proceeding. "Their CEO was tight with Makishima, right?"

"Yes. Toyohisa Senguji. A real freak."

"Do you think Makishima had anything to do with setting up this place?"

Shion saw a cluster of holographic screens near the center of the laboratory and made her way toward them. "He sent us here, Yayoi. If what Kagari says is true, the man is on our side."

The other woman snorted and shook her head. Even doing that, she managed to be beautiful, Shion thought with admiration. "I can only imagine what Kogami would do if he heard you say that."

An amused smile briefly curved Shion's lips. "He would be very upset, wouldn't he?" She left unmentioned what she had discovered long ago: that a furious Shinya Kogami was one of the better grades of aphrodisiacs. Jealousy and Yayoi Kunizuka went hand-in-hand, though. There was no need to stoke that particular fire.

"This isn't a small-time operation."

"No," Shion agreed. The laboratory, apart from the exotic gene equipment, looked like any number of others she had seen during her postgrad years: an eclectic mixture of the industrial and the academic, with just a few personal touches by the researchers—large holo-posters of Talisman hung from the rafters, alongside a shabby-looking brown couch that looked as if it had seen better, and springier, days. The equipment, however, was state-of-the-art. A Hitachi gene-splicing machine, held precariously atop an ordinary microwave oven, was connected to several workstations and dozens of bio-vats by long runs of fiber-optic cable. It looked like a bizarre, prehistoric cyborg offshoot of an octopus.

"These things creep me out," Yayoi said from three aisles over. She was poking at one of the vats with the muzzle of her Dominator, as if she feared that someone might be hiding inside. "They look like coffins."

"They were designed to keep you from needing a coffin," said Shion. "They were medical devices, back when."

The younger Enforcer blinked. "Then why'd they make them illegal?"

Shion slid into the chair that sat before the main holo-screen and pressed the power button on one of the workstations. After a silent moment, the networked computers began to rouse themselves and the holographic projectors sketched a desktop environment that hung in the air before her: composed of laser light and refracted echoes, folder icons, colored shapes, and nameless ideograms appeared like bright afterimages on low-flying Tokyo clouds. Like a skywriter's rippling trail, the words Senguji Industries Medical floated gently in the background.

"Well, after they cured most big diseases, they realized there was nothing stopping them from going a step further. Not just fixing problems, but preventing them from occurring in the first place. They wanted to second-guess natural selection, fix all of the problems that nature had left in our genetic code. At first it was harmless enough—insert a few genes in your baby and improve its IQ by twenty points. What parent wouldn't want that?"

Yayoi shrugged. "I don't see anything wrong with that."

Shion entered commands on the keyboard, her fingers curled easily over the keys, gliding smoothly from letter to letter. In less than a minute she'd found an unpatched hole, a suitable entry point for her own software. Her program went to work scouring the laboratory's database for records on whatever research had been conducted there.

"Shion?"

"Sorry. So, there was nothing wrong with that, Yayoi. But what if you could go beyond intelligence and fix the biggest problem of all: aging? Back then scientists didn't realize that there was a cap to the human lifespan. They believed hundreds or thousands of years of life could be attained if only the technology could be mastered." Shion rolled her eyes. "It was a primitive time, okay? Anyway, they tried everything they could think of. Telomere therapy, resetting the genetic clock, even splicing salamander genes into the human genome. Nothing worked."

"Why?"

Shion grinned. "If I knew, I would be very rich."

Suddenly Shion's radio squawked, and a voice echoed through the laboratory. Scratchy and hard to understand, it was nevertheless recognizable as Ginoza. "Karanomori, are you there?"

"Yes, Ginoza, we're here. Is everything all right?"

"It might be nothing, but traffic just dropped off outside your building. The intersection is empty. Seems unusual for this time of day. Have you found anything yet?"

"I've accessed their network and should have something downloaded in a few minutes."

"Roger that. I'd make it as quick as you can. Hound Three out."

When the radio had fallen silent, Kunizuka rolled her eyes. "I tell you, Shion, that man still believes he'll get his job as Senior Inspector back someday."

Shion lifted an eyebrow. "And how do you know he won't? Look at us now—three hounds off the leash and running wild."

"We have Tsunemori's authorization to be here," Yayoi pointed out, and went over to a row of steel cabinets. Picking one at random, she opened it and peered inside. It held dozens of glass spheres. She grabbed one and lifted it up to the light, squinting. "Hey, what's this thing?"

"It's a dissection vessel. It's meant to hold a human brain after autopsy."

Looking ill, the Enforcer carefully replaced the sphere in the cabinet, depositing it as gently as a priceless gem. The workstation beeped.

Shion turned back to the holographic cloud. With the finesse of a symphony's conductor, she flipped through pages of digital print-out, skimming as best she could, trying to discern the overall pattern or meaning. The data held everything—there were references to American neuroscience textbooks, Okinawan political tracts from the Fifties, even a table of the culinary likes and dislikes of a specific Tokyo neighborhood's citizens. None of it seemed to make any sense whatsoever. Who would go to the trouble of compiling such useless information?

"I give up," Shion said finally. "I don't know what any of this means."

Yayoi rested her chin on Shion's shoulder and peered at the floating lists of data. "Why not search for something specific?" she suggested.

"Like what?"

Yayoi bit her lip for a moment, thinking, and then said, "Makishima."

Shion tilted her head for a moment, considering. Then she nodded. As she input the query, she said over her shoulder, "You'll never trust him, will you?"

The Enforcer put her mouth closer to Shion's ear and said, "Never."

The results appeared in the cloud like a gathering storm. One was a high-resolution photograph of a clearly deceased Shogo Makishima. Autopsy photos. Makishima's chiseled features were somehow equally cold in death as they had been in life. His lifeless eyes seem to stare at them with frigid promise. Other photographs showed his brain being removed and encased in one of the glass spheres that Yayoi had discovered. And there were more than photographs. A 3D scan of Makishima's entire brain had been taken, along with a record of his nerve impulses, his blood type, his neuron count…

"Is this what he wanted us to find?" Yayoi asked, unsettled. "His own records? Why?"

"I don't think so. He would have told us." Shion entered a command that made the gory photographs of Makishima vanish. In their place floated lists of dozens of names. "'Criminally Asymptomatic Candidates,'" Shion read slowly.

"Candidates for what?"

"I don't know." Shion ran a thumb across her lip and stared at the holograms in silence, seeing past them. "Let's backtrack a little, shall we?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, we're opening this database at random and hoping to understand it. What if we search for the first thing they did after getting their hands on all this fancy equipment?"

The answer was unexpected. Both Enforcers frowned. Yayoi was the first to speak.

"Cloning," she said thoughtfully. "I thought it was illegal to clone human beings."

Shion nodded. "Not just any human beings. They wanted to clone only criminally asymptomatic people. In fact, no one with an acceptable Crime Coefficient is a part of any of these data-sets."

Yayoi made a face. "What would a company like Senguji want with a bunch of freaks like Makishima?"

"Like Makishima," Shion repeated slowly. "Wait a second."

She did another search, this time of the last experiments conducted in the laboratory. Dozens of files appeared, with names like Makishima.1, Makishima.2, Makishima.3, and so on. The experiments had been carried out regularly until just three days before, when the word Discontinue had been appended to each one.

The hair on the back of Karanomori's neck began to prickle. "Yayoi," she said slowly.

"Yes?"

"Go over to those bio-vats and open one of them."

The Enforcer peered over her shoulder, trying to make sense of the mass of data. "Why?"

"Just do it."

Shrugging, Kunizuka holstered her Dominator and went to the nearest vat. It took her a few tries to discover the trick of unlocking the door mechanism, but when she did, it slid open soundlessly.

Then she screamed.

Staring out at them, his eyes the gray of the ocean just before a typhoon, was Shogo Makishima. He neither saw nor heard a thing, and when they cut him open they discovered that he had been dead for three days.

In the other vats they found more clones of Makishima. Twenty-six of them.


Rapping politely on the mahogany-paneled door, Makishima opened it and stepped through. A false smile was already on his face, adhering to the skull like a clay-formed mask, but it was indistinguishable from the real thing. His body, like that of an athlete, was as rigorously trained as his mind.

The room into which he had entered was different than it had been two days before, which was not unusual in the Sibyl System. The blueprint of the System was Tokyo, always, but the details were subject to change. Places and objects resoundingly familiar became strange and new, depending on the day of the week, on unknown rhythms, on an unconscious collective urge that passed unnoticed in a state of unreality; and sometimes changed their very nature. Chronology, too, was haphazard at best. It was as if the occupants of the Sibyl System, those who were dreaming it into being, were themselves dreaming of a time before its creation… or perhaps that, in the first place, they could not agree what to create—that their imaginations fought for precedence or influence.

The idea intrigued Makishima, so he filed it away for later thought.

In the room was a large glass-topped desk, at the head of which a captain of industry might sit before his loyal officers. In the captain's place sat Kurou Yamato, who seemed pinched and a little bit shrunken, as though he'd lost a few pounds. Has he been hitting the gym? Makishima wondered, and thought: No. He's ill, for sure. But from what? There are no diseases in the Sibyl System. The Vice-Chairman's face was hollower than it had been at their last meeting—gone were the crinkled eyes like gobs of secretive honey and the reddish healthy-looking cheeks.

"Shogo." Yamato greeted him with a seated bow. "Please, sit down."

Makishima pulled out a chair roughly halfway down the length of the unnecessarily long executive table and plopped into it. The chair's leather armrests were cold and stiff, and as he'd just left the swimming pool, they clung to the skin of his elbows with an unpleasant sticky sensation. "Thank you," he said, and decided to bring his suspicions right out into the open. "Are you well?"

Yamato smiled, an expression that accentuated the dark rings shading his eyes. He seemed to be having trouble breathing. "You can't fool Shogo Makishima. No doubt the Public Safety Bureau had their hands full when you were running amok."

"The timing is what intrigues me," said Makishima pointedly.

Yamato nodded. "It was a massive strain. Chambers did his best and expended a great deal of effort."

"And that affects you?"

"I allow the Chairman to use my mind as a—as a crutch, yes," Yamato explained with a wan smile. "It's tough on a man of my advanced years, I won't deny, but otherwise he would need to sleep for many days. And at this crucial juncture, that would be unacceptable, of course." The older man sighed. "I only wish his contact with you had been a success."

"Contact?" said Makishima, and lifted both of his eyebrows. "That's what you call it?"

"Well, yes." Yamato blinked. "Don't tell me that you resisted him? For god's sake, Shogo, why? You were chosen!"

"Chosen to be devoured by a monster?" Makishima inquired. "I would prefer a different way to die, thank you."

"Monster?" Yamato echoed. "Is that how you saw him?" The politician's face fell. He seemed genuinely disappointed in Makishima, though not actually angry with him. "Oh, Shogo, Chambers is not a monster. Far from it! He is different, yes, and his kind may not be able to live in our plane of existence for very long, but that does not make him a monster. Is a colossal squid a monster simply because a fisherman pulls it out of the sea? Of course not. I can't believe that you fought him, Shogo. He spoke so highly of you."

"Are you telling me that when Chambers speaks to you, he doesn't look like a child's nightmare?" Makishima neglected to mention the fact that Chambers' appearance had preyed upon his own deeply-held fears.

"It is the imagination that decides what Chambers will look like. He can appear to be a beautiful young woman, a calm seascape, even a mirror image of oneself. It depends upon the individual's temperament, and, perhaps, his unique phobias and prejudices." The Vice-Chairman's tone made it clear where he ascribed blame in Makishima's case.

It all sounded plausible enough, but Makishima couldn't bring himself to believe a word of it. The spine-chilling terror that had crept up his legs when the creature swam toward him lingered outsize in his memory. He'd had the distinct sensation of somehow piercing a veil, of seeing past an illusion meant to ensnare him. He thought it likely that it was Yamato who had never seen the true Chambers.

"What does Chambers look like?" he asked. "To you, I mean."

A beatific smile instantly appeared on Yamato's face, almost as if he had been overcome by physical pleasure. Makishima saw the businessman's normally-astute eyes go dreamy with ambition and gratification. It was an expression that Makishima had seen often in the real world—it was the surest way for him to know that he had found a tool that he could use in his important work for society.

"Chambers is…" Yamato hesitated, and Makishima could see words of adulation drip through his head, each one inferior to the emotion welling up inside him. "He's like the day when you first graduate from university and take the train into the city. You see people milling about, from all walks of life—young, old, male, female—and you know that soon enough you'll be one of them, ready to make your mark on the world. That's what Chambers is. Anticipation for the future."

No, that's what Chambers is using to blind you: an old fool's nostalgia for the days of his youth, when the book of life wasn't yet written. Makishima nodded and smiled. For a minute or two Kurou Yamato was in another world, another lifetime. It would almost be pitiable, except that you've dragged other people along for the ride. You've taken away their right to make decisions as free individuals.

After indulging Yamato for as long as he could bear, Makishima pointedly cleared his throat. The older man gave a start and pulled himself back to the present. He looked at Makishima with widened eyes. "I apologize. When I think of Chambers… Well, you will understand yourself soon enough. Everyone will." The Vice-Chairman glanced at the table as if gathering his thoughts, then looked up at Makishima. "You must be wondering why I've invited you here."

"The thought did cross my mind."

"I'm here to tell you that I know—we know; that is, Chambers and I—what you're planning. We know that you met with the young Enforcer. What's his name?"

"Kagari," said Makishima slowly.

"Yes, Shusei Kagari." Yamato nodded. "We know that he and his friends have enlisted you in yet another plot against the Sibyl System, and that you, being you, will probably agree to help them along."

Makishima watched him in silence.

"That is all fine. We don't care. Chambers doesn't care. Please don't take this the wrong way, but you're fighting the last war. There is nothing that your attempt to destroy this little brain farm can do to stop Chambers from his ultimate goal, and so what you do doesn't, strictly speaking, matter."

"Why are you telling me this?"

Yamato gazed at him sharply. Despite his illness, his eyes were still capable of a surprising amount of insight. For a brief second, Makishima glimpsed an active, cunning mind at work, before the moment passed and the other man's lethargy returned. "Because I want you to know that we won't stop you."

Makishima tilted his head. "Oh?"

"If you agree to help Chambers willingly, he will allow you to do anything you want. Destroy the Sibyl System? Hell, Chambers will dynamite it for you. Bring down the Ministry of Welfare? Consider it done. If you want to tear down society's structures as they currently exist, you are free to do so."

The offer, Makishima sensed, was genuine. There was no malice or duplicity in Yamato's words. And that made the stakes even greater, for what else did he want? To tear down the Sibyl System and restore freedom to Japan had been his lodestar since before he'd read a single book, since shortly after his birth. As a child he had instinctively recognized the injustice of Sibyl, and matriculating at his local high school unconstrained by a Psycho-Pass had only served to reinforce his hatred of it. The women and men he dated had said not a word of sense to him—it was as if they spoke two different languages. When he asked, Would you like to go fishing one day? they would look at him quizzically and respond that they couldn't be fishermen; they had been selected by the Sibyl System to be accountants, or data analysts, or software engineers. If he asked if they had ever dreamed of being an astronaut as a child, they would laugh and shake their heads and say to him that Sibyl had calculated their aptitude for zero-G flight and selected them for another career path. That was what Sibyl could never do to him—as an undefined variable Shogo was insoluble in the System's master plan. He was grit in the gears. A squeaky wheel.

After all these years, he was handed his victory on a silver plate. He could bring down the Sibyl System and move on to the next phase of his life—living it.

There was only one question left to ask, so Makishima asked it.

"What do you want me to do?"


"Are they all him?"

Yayoi, a distant speck at the far end of the laboratory, pulled her head out of a bio-vat and nodded. "It's like a convention of naked, psychopathic mass-murderers," she mused, returning to Karanomori's console.

Shion curled a few strands of blond hair around her fingertip. "He's naked?" she asked thoughtfully.

"Of course."

"And?"

Yayoi shrugged. "He's no Kogami."

Shion stared at her. "How do you know what Shinya looks like?" Her tone was frosty.

Kunizuka pinned the data analyst with a mischievous smile. "You know Azumi in Division Three? The tall Enforcer, judo expert? She dated Kogami for nearly a month. We're friends."

Shion's fit of pique vanished. "Oh," she said.

"Yeah," Yayoi said dryly. "Anyway, what do you suppose this is all for? They wanted Makishima bad, I mean, I remember Chief Kasei's briefings. The brass were all over the idea of capturing him alive. But they did. Kogami got him. So why did Senguji make all of these clones? What's the game?"

"Well, for one, they aren't all the same." Karanomori went over to the holographic cloud and made a few expansive gestures. A depiction of Makishima's actual DNA strands appeared and spun like a cheesecake on a lazy Susan. Alongside them were lines of genetic code. As Shion advanced between each successive clone version of Makishima, there were noticeable differences.

Yayoi came closer. "What did they change?"

"It's hard to tell," Shion said. "Whoever is doing this doesn't seem to know what he needs to change to accomplish whatever he wants to do, so he's starting from scratch each time. All of the alterations involve the neuroarchitecture of the brain, though." She went to the very last Makishima-clone. Stamped over the filename was a simple statement: LAST ATTEMPT FAILED. PROJECT CANCELED. "This is the last entry. It seems they gave up in the end."

"Or they found another way to accomplish their goal," Kunizuka suggested.

Shion nodded. "It's certainly possible."

Kunizuka lifted her arms above her head and stretched like a cat. Her shoulders popped and she yawned sleepily before giving the laboratory a last once-over. "Is there anything else Makishima wanted us to do here? I'm sure he'll want to know about the… clones." She shuddered.

Shion waved the holographic cloud away and it vanished with a cool smoke effect. "I need to download these files. Give me a second." She took a portable drive from her pocket and stuck it, limpet-like, on the front of the computer.

"Do you think we should—" Yayoi began, but the lights in the laboratory suddenly switched off, casting the room into near-complete darkness. The only illumination came from the bluish glow of the two holstered Dominators.

Shion swore. "I think we should leave, if that's what you were about to say."

"It's close enough."

"Hound One, do you read me? Are you there?"

"We copy, Ginoza. What's going on? We're in the dark here."

"You're not going to believe this." There was an emotion close to betrayal in Ginoza's tight voice. In the background, fuzzy through the static, Shion could hear the sound of police sirens. "There's a rapid reaction force en route to your location. Ordered by the Chief herself. It's Division Two." The bitterness in the Enforcer's voice became even more apparent.

Division Two was the B-side to Division One's greatest hits compilation. The stars, the cream of the graduating Academy class, all petitioned to join Division One, which got the plum assignments and the more daring details. Division Two had long lived in the shadow of One; they were in some ways, Shion thought, like rivalrous siblings.

And now Division Two were coming to ensure they got their comeuppance. Kasei's lackeys, she thought grimly.

"Are they going to arrest us, Hound Three?" Yayoi asked.

"They've dispatched LEAs to all major thoroughfares around your location. They're blocking off pedestrian walkways too. It looks like it. They're bottling you guys up tight."

Shion and Yayoi exchanged grim looks, their faces blue-lit and edged with shadow. Then both moved. Shion rolled her chair to the nearest keyboard and began entering commands furiously, her fingers a blur.

"I'll cover you," Yayoi said.

"Right."

Yayoi sprinted back to the observation room where they had entered, vaulted over the broken glass, and approached the door with her Dominator held at the ready. She peered around the corner with one eye visible, then threw herself backward in one desperate lunge. She slammed against the low wall opposite the laboratory, wincing as sharp pieces of glass sliced through her shirt. "Should have worn tactical kit," she muttered to herself.

A cone of furious blue light erupted like a firehose, blasting the doorway where she had been standing seconds before. A Paralyzer round.

"Not even a verbal warning," Yayoi said under her breath. "So much for policy."

She gained her feet and held the Dominator with both hands. Skipping over to the right, she took a deep, steadying breath, then stepped into the doorway. There, at the far end of the hallway, she saw her targets: two men and a woman, Enforcers and their Inspector. She thought she recognized the Inspector. They'd eaten lunch together in the cafeteria a handful of times. "Sorry," Yayoi whispered.

Lining up the shot, all of the tension went out of her body. She was one with the Dominator—it became an extension of her hands, an outgrowth of her will. She aimed and pulled the trigger.

Sharp intake of breath. The Dominator seemed to pulsate with charged energies, then—

The blue glow inlaid along the Dominator's sleek black barrel faded. The weapon powered itself down, closed in on itself like a flower's petals after dark.

"No," Yayoi said. "No, no, no." She pulled the trigger several more times, desperately, but it might as well have been a toy gun. The Dominator stubbornly refused to fire.

"Target identified as Ministry of Welfare Public Safety Bureau officers. Target invalid. This weapon will now shut down. Have a nice day."

Yayoi saw the two Enforcers gesticulate wildly in her direction, and their Inspector nodded, clearly giving permission to fire. Then both hounds raised their weapons simultaneously, and Yayoi knew she had to move.

This time she threw herself clear over the shattered partition, tucking her shoulder into a spine-shattering roll. She came up in a sprint and raced back to her partner. Behind her, dual Paralyzers turned the remnants of the observation room into rubble with a sound like a miniature earthquake.

"Almost done?" she panted, throwing a glance over her shoulder.

"A few more seconds." Shion looked at her, saw the blood seeping from her shirt. "What happened to you?"

"Dominators don't work."

"Oh."

"Yeah." Yayoi picked up one of the glass dissection vessels and hefted it thoughtfully. "Could throw these at them. What do you think?"

"I'd rather use the other door, thanks."

"I thought it was locked."

Shion entered one last command, then removed the portable drive from the computer and stood. The light pulsing above the main exit changed from red to green, and there was a loud grinding sound, as of metal sliding against metal.

The door slid open silently.

"You were saying?"

Yayoi shrugged. "I'm not complaining."

Shion nodded to the door, and the two Enforcers jogged over to it. "How many were there?" she asked.

"Three of the Bureau's finest," Yayoi said. "Two Enforcers, one Inspector. Thought I recognized her."

"I heard a Paralyzer round," Shion said, as they peered through the exit and saw that it was dark and completely deserted. They made their way into the hallway, which extended about a dozen yards to another door. The walls were spare and steel, featureless apart from regular two-inch by two-inch patches of glass, like miniature windows. Motion detectors. On the ceiling hung glossy orbs of black plastic. Omnidirectional security cameras. They've got this place locked down tight. "Thought it was you firing."

"No, it was them."

"If their Dominators work and ours don't, then it's official," Shion said grimly. "Sibyl knows which side we're on."

"It was bound to happen sooner or later. I just hope Tsunemori knows what she's doing."

The door at the end of the hallway had a knob, and it wasn't locked. It opened onto what appeared to be a dormitory, as austere and spartan as the rest of the building. Smooth gray concrete floors gleamed underfoot from the reflection of eight light-bars set into the ceiling. The bare walls, also concrete here, were studded with motion sensors, and bordered rows of military-style cots aligned with institutional precision. Along one wall, tile replaced concrete beneath steel toilets that lacked the privacy of partitions or doors. In one corner of the room hung a steel showerhead; drains were set into a concavity of the floor.

"They had people living here?" Yayoi asked.

Shion went to the only other door and tried the knob. Locked. "They probably killed whoever was responsible for the research here, once they were no longer useful," she said coolly. "Why leave any loose ends to tangle up? Neater, that way."

She pulled a device out of her breast pocket, about the size and shape of a handheld calculator. It looked like a calculator, too, except it ended in an array of cords tipped with ports, cables, and connectors, almost like a digital cat-o'-nine-tails. Next to the locked door was an iris scanner with a small jack. Shion selected the corresponding plug and inserted it into the jack, then held the calculator up. "Your eye, please," she murmured.

Yayoi shrugged and widened one eye to peer into the calculator's lens. After a few seconds the calculator beeped, the iris scanner acknowledged the beep with one of its own, and the door popped open. Shion pocketed the calculator and pushed the door open. Behind them, in the direction of the laboratory, they could hear low-pitched urgent voices. A sweep. "Let's go."

The door led into a stairwell. They took the steps two at a time and descended four flights. The exit at the bottom of the stairwell opened into a below-ground parking garage.

"They aren't waiting for us?" Yayoi asked, gazing around the expanse of asphalt in surprise.

Shion unholstered her Dominator—an old habit from her training, even if the thing was useless—and crouched, peered under the tires of the dozen or so parked cars. There didn't seem to be anyone lying in wait for them. "I'm starting to get the feeling that this isn't a sanctioned Bureau operation," she said. "Like maybe the Chief, or Sibyl, or whoever is calling the shots wants to keep this nice and quiet. Maybe they don't want anyone other than Division Two involved in this."

"If that's true, then we have a chance."

Shion carefully closed the door leading into the stairwell behind them. "Maybe. Ginoza did say there were LEAs cordoning off this area." Law Enforcement Automatons were incapable of delivering lethal force, but they did carry a full suite of cameras, sensors, and radio equipment. They could track and run to ground any suspects that tried to flee from the MWPSB.

They made their way across the floor of the parking garage as quickly and as stealthily as possible, which wasn't very. If the sweep team showed up now, it would be a turkey shoot for their Enforcers' Dominators—less than five hundred feet, twin targets, no cover? They would be Paralyzed instantly. But through some form of luck or providence, the Division Two tactical team exited the stairwell at the same time that Shion and Yayoi were most of the way up the driveway.

The Division Two team began shouting after them, but they didn't wait around to hear what their pursuers wanted. The parking garage had barriers designed to keep cars out, not people, so they vaulted over them and sprinted into the warm summer night. Okaba street was near a public park, and the smell of cherry blossoms filled the air. "Get Ginoza on the radio," Shion began. "Tell him to meet us—"

The Paralyzer round hit Yayoi in the legs. She went down in a tumble, instantly unconscious, her arms splayed wide on the asphalt. Shion dove to the right, toward the curb and a pair of trees, causing the second shot to miss her. But before she could get to cover, a sonic grenade landed a few feet away. She looked at it in horror, knowing that there was nothing she could do. The grenade buzzed like wind-up toy and began to emit a high-pitched scream. Then it, and all awareness, vanished as Shion crumpled to the ground.