-26: Impatience-

"Now the girl?"

"Yes." Exactly the response I didn't want to hear.

"Why didn't we stick around and canvas the area?"

"Kureo's call, not mine."

He leaned over the map-strewn table.

"We'll either find her in the next couple days," I predicted, "or not at all."

"What makes you say that?" Amon glanced up from a map.

"Small kid alone in the middle of a city? This isn't urban warfare; she'll get noticed quickly by some concerned citizen," Who probably wouldn't be too concerned with what Kureo would do to her, "and we'll get a tip, whether or not she tries to hide for a day or two."

"And if we never find her?"

"Two options there; she either flees to another ward—unsurprising, after our meeting today—or gets killed by another ghoul because she's easy pickings." Or her family had some kind of support network and she disappears into that.

"I had considered about the same, minus the last option. We'll have to work fast to spread the info before she can disappear; I'll get some materials together for a poster if you want to start on figuring out a search radius."

I had actually liked working with maps, once I had started seeing them as huge wiring diagrams, with each street a breathing circuit of a city. The other investigators had sketched out their diagrams of Fueguchi's movements into long wires of red marker and soldered points of interest into place with bits of tape. It wasn't perfectly recorded; many places looked more like perforated lines than actual pathways. Perforations. The bone-white quinque tore into a tear-stained neck. I bit down on the inside of my cheek.

With a quiet squeak of hinges, Amon was back.

"No posters?"

"Printed, and given to the others. They'll post them around the spot where we made the intercept and in a radius as well as the other areas where they were spotted regularly."

Posting where we made the intercept was a forgone idea, in my opinion. It was basically in the middle of a residential area, meaning no good places to hide unless you started kicking in doors. Most of the places on the map were likely dead ends as well; coffee shops and assorted boutiques, subway stations and bus stops. No location that could be 'home' jumped at me. I had to applaud Fueguchi posthumously for her secrecy.

"Any ideas with the map?"

"Not many. The records are incomplete and what is there doesn't point to a permanent home." I couldn't resist a dig. "We should've stuck around and canvassed while the trail was fresh."

Not rising to the bait, Amon only grunted.

"In any case," I mused, "since this happened during the lunch hours, we'll probably have to wait for evening for more people to come through and see the posters. Maybe we'll get lucky."

Luck. I hated that idea of relying on random chance. It was a philosophy that had kept me out of poker nights. But now? Luck was all we had: it was too late to go back and canvas the area and far too late to bring more people to the intercept. Personally, I considered out chances of getting a tip to be maybe forty percent, though certainly more if the kid had started crying while fleeing. Now, all we could do was wait for the odds to play out.

I should've been the patient one and after three years of disarming stuff, I thought I knew how to be patient as a boulder. That was Amon's role; he did a few things, but mostly sat back and read the case files. After what felt like a silent hour, I turned to him, halfway through a new sheaf.

"I need to go down and walk the track, clear my head."

"All right." Amon nodded, "Let's swap numbers first: if anything comes up, I'll give you a ring."

Five minutes later I was walking the track in the basement. This time, I had opted to keep my suit on, just in case Amon called in with something time-sensitive. On the bright side, I was basically back to being bone dry. In contrast, the minutes in the rain were just impossible to wring out of my head. Especially the last few. My feet tapped out a rhythm on the rubber-grit surface. Ther-mite, ther-mite, get the ther-mite.

What were you up to, Fueguchi? Shopping, coffee, visiting, collecting frozen limbs from a fridge? Perhaps the better question was where she had been coming from. Rebuilding the map mentally, I couldn't remember seeing much in the area where the path started. But then, that was only the first sighting; not necessarily where they had started walking from. I needed to take another look at the map.

Where were you coming from, Fueguchi? Hunting could be ruled out; only a few days between hunts would peg her as a binge eater and would've given an outsize impact to match. Socializing then? That was the most likely possibility, at least from my experiences back home. While the popular vision was of ghouls as solitary creatures—and in some cases, they were—the reality was that was mostly untrue.

Didn't stop the occasional mob from attacking the local recluse though. Agoraphobia accounted for some of the false calls we got as well.

Who were you visiting? Hunting partner was a possibility, given that she really couldn't fight, but that made it odd to bring the kid along—too young to properly learn to hunt. The much more American option was that she was paying respect to whichever ghoul had set himself up at the top of the hunting hierarchy. That I wasn't sure about at all as I had no idea how ghoul society here functioned and even if it did, several trips a week was much more frequent than anything I had encountered. Old friend was another—and in my mind, most likely—possibility and explained the frequent trips.

That left more options. Coffee shops were one possibility and were nice and easy to spend time at without raising eyebrows. Restaurants were another possibility, given that she could eat human food without triggering a gag reflex and would be perfect if she was a normal human's 'ghoulfriend'. Both very likely and enough to make me jealous of her on both counts. Private dwellings were another matter entirely; near impossible to get into without a warrant, though here it would probably be much easier. Fueguchi was very probably not visiting a lover, what with bringing the kid along.

Wait. What was that Kureo said? I dredged up that conversation from a short eternity ago. What had he explained as we had headed out that day? Remembering conversations was harder than remembering maps.

Asaki. I stopped. A group of jogging investigators flowed around me like a school of white fish.

"Crazy foreigner." I heard one mutter. But that didn't matter.

His name was Asaki. Asaki Fueguichi.