"Ah, Kurosaki-kun, good of you to join us," Tatsumi said.

Natsume just smiled at him silently.

Hisoka couldn't say anything in reply. He couldn't move. All he could do was stand there under the scrutiny of that trinity of bespectacled visages and wonder, what the hell had just happened?

"What's the matter, Bon?" Watari said. "You look as though you've seen a ghost." He snickered to himself.

Somehow Hisoka found his voice. "What the . . . Watari-san? But . . . I thought you were dead!"

"I was!" the other said with way too much exuberance. "For a little while. Too long, apparently, for some people 'round here." He glanced sheepishly at Tatsumi. "I guess I could have picked a better night. . . ."

Hisoka put his hands down flat on the table and leaned over it.

"Who did it?"

Watari blinked. "What d'you mean, Bon?"

"It's been driving him nuts all night," Natsume offered with a smugness that bothered Hisoka. "He's spent all this time trying to figure out the identity of your killer."

"O-o-oh. You were goin' t' avenge me, Bon? Well, that's sweet of you."

"So? You gonna tell him or not?"

"Well, I thought it was obvious," Watari mumbled, getting a shrug from Tatsumi. He turned to Hisoka. "It was me all along."

Hisoka just stared at him. He thought he must have misheard the eccentric scientist, who for the last few hours had been in his mind a hapless victim of the combined forces of depressing music and some unknown villainy. It was impossible. No one would so gleefully confess what he seemed to be confessing.

"I offed myself," Watari clarified in any case.

"What?"

"Yeah, I know, it's probably not what you were expectin' from me of all people—"

"You committed suicide?" Hisoka all but yelled.

"That's a rather clinical way of putting it," said Watari, wiggling his finger in his ear, "but yes."

Hisoka sat himself down in an empty chair heavily, suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of exhaustion. "I don't understand! Why would you do something like that?"

"Maybe the pendin' total lunar eclipse had somethin' t' do with it, or lis'nin' t' those old enka records again," Watari said with a far-off look. "Due t' my change of plans, I was unable t' witness the big moment; but there was somethin' about the anticipation of it that inspired the romantic in me. I was workin' on some old calculations and gettin' a mean headache for my troubles, when suddenly I was overcome with a sense of nostalg'a that hit me from outta the blue, and brought its pal melancholy along in the sidecar."

For a moment, listening to him, Hisoka thought he could feel a residual bit of that familiar emotion himself, just as he had in Watari's office, and was almost taken in by sympathy. He'd never trusted the moon or that music.

Then Watari smiled at him as though it had all been a joke, and Hisoka felt like a fool for buying it.

"Mostly, though, it was curiosity. I hadn't died in a while, and it seems t' be a popular way for people t' off themselves, OD-in' on painkillers, so I thought I'd give it a go."

"'Give it a go'? That's your reason?"

"It wasn't that bad, actually. You don't feel much — well, that stands t' reason, doesn't it?"

Hisoka groaned in exasperation. Could he be any farther from getting the point? It just wasn't right for someone to be treating his own death so lightly.

"I blame myself for this misunderstanding," Tatsumi said to him. "I thought you knew when we found the empty bottle of aspirin in his office."

"What empty bottle?"

Well, that explained something, thought Hisoka sardonically as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

Tatsumi sighed and turned to Watari. "How many did you take, anyway?"

Watari shrugged. "I dunno. Two dozen . . . maybe as many as thirty. Whatever was left; I didn't count."

"Thirty!"

"Yes," he said with a tone of triumph in his voice. "I wanted t' make sure I went through with it all the way. Don't need t' be waking up halfway through, feeling sick to my stomach; that'd take all the fun out of it. But I metabolized those little buggers pretty quick, wouldn't you say?

"And now I return t' you," he went on melodramatically, "in the final hour, resurrected—"

"You tell it!" said Natsume.

"Renewed—"

"Hallelujah!"

"Rebooted. For though my body lay dead, my mind was sealed for freshness, merely waitin' for the right key t' unlock the mysteries that remained buried in its recesses, hidden from even me, its material keeper."

Natsume applauded.

"And now?" Hisoka said, unimpressed, in the awkward silence that followed.

"Now?" Watari blinked, fixing his eyes on Hisoka's passionately. "Now, you say, my Doubting Thomas? Why, now I have the answer, the missin' piece I've been lookin' for for two decades! I ain't kiddin' when I tell you death was like a hard restart for my brain. It had become cluttered and chaotic in the meantime, and a total shutdown was just what the doctor ordered t' flush out the excess. T' get the synapses really flowin' again."

That was apparent by looking at him, Hisoka thought. Whether his mind had really been refreshed or not was not up to him to say, but he looked brighter — not just his character, but physically brighter in color and hue, from the slight flush in his face to the golden shine in his eyes and long, wavy hair. Maybe resurrection was not too extreme a word to describe it, though Hisoka would never admit it aloud.

"Of course," Watari added, "I may never rememeber all the crucial mathematical stuff, so these extensive notes were a big help too."

Saying that, he patted a thick stack of printer and legal pad paper that sat conspicuously in the center of the table, and Hisoka could see they were the same papers 003 had been writing on while he cooked up various things to whet her insatiable appetite in the cafeteria kitchen.

"I still can't imagine who else would have known so much t' be able t' compile them, though. They woulda practically had t' steal some a this stuff right from my brain. Natsume, you really have no idea?"

Natsume shrugged. "Like I said, they were lying next to the computers in the file room."

"So there was no killer all along. . . . Then," Hisoka said, just remembering, "what happened to Muraki?"

"Just as he said," answered Tatsumi, who, at a second glance, did appear a mite more ruffled than usual; "his appearance here was a complete accident. In his words, if you play with dark magic long enough you are bound to get burned by it sooner or later."

"And you believe him?"

"I did not at first, but he disappeared the same way, down one of those ubiquitous wormholes — though not before I could give him a good thrashing."

Hisoka raised his eyebrows. "Thanks, Tatsumi-san."

"Don't thank me." The secretary's mood suddenly turned dark. "I feel as though I have failed you and Tsuzuki by letting him escape. But rest assured, someday, I will have my opportunity for revenge. And when it comes, I shall enjoy it immensely."

A sinister smirk appeared on his normally unflappable face, and the fluorescent lights made his glasses glimmer dangerously. Hisoka scooted his chair a little ways away. "Th-that's good," he said; I guess. What in the world had happened out there after he left?

"Yeah," Watari rubbed the back of his neck. "I guess I should apologize for that."

"Why? You were probably already dead when that guy showed up—"

"Wait, let him finish." Tatsumi held out a hand to shush him. It wasn't often he heard an admission of guilt from the man, and Watari knew it.

"Gee, thanks, Tatsumi," he said sarcastically. "Naw, I mean the 'lectrical disturbances that've been poppin' up t'night. Ya see, it was my invention that caused all them wormhole things t' appear. Of course, I had no idea this would happen since I lost the blasted machine twenty-two years ago; but I guess I shoulda known that there was always the possibility it would one day return all on its lonesome. After all, I programmed it t' do just that."

—

"Where to begin? It was early July nineteen-eighty, the fifty-fifth year of Showa. An English band called Japan was on the radio, we were between PMs following the untimely death of Ohira Masayoshi, and we'd just learned that Darth Vader was Luke's father. It was an uncertain and excitin' time t' be alive, if you'll pardon the expression. I myself had just completed construction of a machine over which I was particularly excited that I dubbed the TVC-one-five after the song by the other Thin White Duke, and was ready t' put it through its first test run.

"The design I based roughly on a Moog synth. At the time it was gainin' a lot a underground notoriety from artists like Tomita Isao, but the use of it, sadly, remained limited t' makin' music. I had the idea of usin' the patch system oscillator not t' create new sounds but t' tune int' the frequencies of the universe. New advances had been made in the field of quantum physics; and even though most a the stuff comin' out in the media was just theory, I couldn't resist the pull it had on my imagination.

"We were in a sorta technological limbo then: the period of high economic growth in the 'fifties and 'sixties had petered off, but the future couldn'ta looked brighter what with the advent of personal computers and robotic engineering. The possibilities seemed truly endless. I myself had realized the marriage of the two just a year before in a small robot equipped with an artificial intelligence capable of processin' his environment like nothin' that came before him."

"That must be the ECRU-seventy-nine-exothree Natsume-san told me about," Hisoka said.

Watari looked up at the ceiling as he recited, "The Environmental Computation and Recognition Unit. But I never called him by that dehumanizin' name. T' me he was always Spock-kun."

Hisoka started. So that was Spock-kun! The thing that had so occupied Watari's thoughts before his death and his lost invention were one and the same! "So, it wasn't a character in a TV show."

"No, he was that too."

"Where do you think Watari gets the names for any of his inventions?" Natsume said.

"I just never imagined how appropriate it would turn out t' be — that in a little under a year's time he too would be lost somewhere in the unknown vastness of time and space. But I'm gettin' ahead of myself.

"So, with that triumph of engineerin' securely under my belt, I turned my sights to the question of the nature of the universe. Was it, like so many began t' believe, like a layered cake with untold numbers of other universes we, who lived in one layer, could not measure or comprehend? Or did we have our fingers 'n' toes in some a those other layers simultaneously and just never realized it? If it is true that possibility exists in a continuous, analog wave form, can we not devise a way t' read it? Can we not find some way t' observe the proverbial cat in all its states of being within its little box?

"Of course, all these questions seemed t' have only one solution: that we must open ourselves t' the mathematical truths that exist all around us and realize our brains' full potential, after which the rest will seem a walk in the park t' us newborn übermensches. But that seemed a little too simplistic and Buddhist t' appease my restless scientific mind. So I took the route I'm most familiar with: I set t' creatin' a machine t' do it for me: the TVC-one-five.

"Now, my scope wasn't so broad as all that, mind you. This wasn't some quest t' prove the existence of God through scientific method, or anything like that. I had a particular goal in mind buildin' that machine. Since my arrival in Meifu, I discovered an uncanny ability t' create material objects from a two-dimensional object drawn on paper. These objects are just hollow parodies of the real things, of course, no real substance t' them, but they're good in a pinch. And I began t' wonder if, if it was possible t' pull things out of a two-dimensional plane, was it also possible t' put things back in? Of course, a sheet of paper is in fact a three-dimensional object, and furthermore material, so rearrangin' it molecularly doesn't necessarily violate the First Rule of Matter; it's the two-dimensional essence of it, however, that leads me t' refer t' the phenomenon as paperspace.

"Consider, for a moment, the limitless potential. Landfills are runnin' outta places t' put all of civilization's junk and hazardous waste. Or better yet, say you get an apartment, but it has hardly enough closet space and no place t' park your car. What do you do? except sell your car, perhaps, and that's rather unpleasant, 'cause you'll never get back what you paid for it.

"But what would you say if I told you you could store it in . . ." He picked a piece of paper off of the table and held it up sideways for them to see. "An infinite space that, t' your limited human perception, is no thicker than this piece of paper?"

"I'd say that was impossible," Hisoka said. That and that he was absolutely off his rocker.

"Undoubtedly." Watari pointed his index finger. "For in actuality, your stuff would not even exist on the same plane as your apartment, but on a separate, parallel plane, addin' absolutely nothin' t' your atomic clutter. Whether it's been proven or not, we here tend t' believe that worlds like Meifu and Chijoh, Gensoukai and Hell, etcetera, are somethin' like parallel dimensions. Ev'ry now 'n' then they overlap one another in time or space, and bein's from one take a different state of existence in another, but generally they remain separate realities. In the livin' world, this may explain the seemin'ly random disappearance and reappearance of matter from the realm of perception."

"But we're talking subatomic particles, right? Not whole people."

"Correct. In order t' transport an entire body from universe t' universe you need t' open a large enough portal. That was the purpose of the TVC-one-five. By arrangin' the oscillator's patch cords in a specific fashion you create a unique sound wave, rearrange them and you get another. Find the right frequencies and broadcast them int' the ether and in no time you've dialed up your friend with the styrofoam cup at the other end of the universe, or maybe in another one all together." He folded the piece of paper he had been holding in half. "Presto-change-o, the space and time between the two points of connection boil down t' a superflat two-dimensional plane. Paperspace."

And to punctuate his point, he jabbed a pencil straight through the two planes of the folded paper, joining them together at the center.

Needless to say, at this point Hisoka was all but entirely lost, and felt like he would hurt himself if he tried to wrap his mind around what Watari was saying any harder. It wasn't the logic that confused him so much as the practicality of applying such logic. He had to remind himself that the spells he was so familiar with defied scientific method themselves.

"So," Watari continued, "with the TVC-one-five set up on the lawn, the total lunar eclipse high in the summer sky, and the portal now gapin' hungrily open before me, I sent Spock-kun off int' the unknown, knowin' his metal body made him less susceptible t' extreme environments than my fleshy one, and knowin' no one better equipped t' record whatever there was t' record on the other side. I proceeded with care, ready t' reel him back in should the experiment get outta hand. When suddenly the gauges went wild, patch cords snappin' outta their jacks. I tried t' stabilize the portal but it resisted my vain attempts. Spock-kun's tether went taut and snapped, there was a strong gust a wind swirlin' on-and-off hot and cold and a blindin' flash of light. And then I lost consciousness.

"When I woke they told me my invention had imploded. There was no physical trace of the TVC-one-five t' be found, whether material or trapped between my synapses. As for Spock-kun: unable t' retrieve him, I mourned his loss as a failure and vowed never t' pursue any serious pursuit in the engineerin' lab again.

"So now you know the whole story. . . . At least, up until tonight."

"And it never occurred to you," Hisoka said, "that Spock-kun, or any of that junk you were hypothesizing about earlier, could wind up in someone's backyard?"

Watari blinked innocently. "At the time, no. We thought the collective universe was generally empty. We certainly never thought it was so full. No one had really broached the subject of dark matter yet."

There the topic went again. Dark matter. But it no longer seemed like some eerie coincidence. No, Hisoka thought, one way or another, this dark matter thing is at the heart of tonight's events.

As though to confirm his fears, Watari said, "Now I see it as the grossest miscalculation I ever made. How could anyone have missed — how could I have missed the universe expanding at an exponential rate? Spock-kun was the size of a shiba dog when I lost him. . . ."

Tatsumi and Natsume nodded in grave thought.

"I don't understand," said Hisoka, looking between the three. "What does Spock-kun have to do with expanding universes?"

Watari raised his eyebrows. "Well, considering his mass has increased some hundred-fold, I'd say everything."

"Then . . . the thing that was lying on the shield, you're saying it's that little robot?"

As Watari nodded, Tatsumi said, holding out a hand, "I know it's difficult to believe, but we have hard evidence that suggests the ECRU-seventy-nine-exothree and the invader are in fact one in the same."

"Hard evidence . . ."

"Hai!" said a new, high-pitched voice from behind him. Now, leaning forward, Hisoka noticed for the first time the little girl sitting on the other side of the secretary, legs dangling off the seat, an uncomfortable-looking K held snug by one arm and the other raised enthusiastically. He recognized Kazusa, the girl who saw demons, immediately.

"Kazusa got notification of a monster in the area," she said, kicking her Mary Janes in slightly incongruous cuteness, "so she got her digital camera and followed it here through the cherry trees."

"I thought I felt like I was being watched," Hisoka said. "And you can tell it's Spock-kun from the pictures?"

"I'd recognize his face anywhere," Watari said as he leafed through a handful of printouts. "And — here—" He pulled one out and passed it across the table. "You can clearly see the name tag I gave him in this shot, still intact after all these years."

Hisoka looked closely. Sure enough, there on the pockmarked metal skin was a tag from an old label maker, that said simply in white-on-black Roman lettering: SPOCK. It was just as good as any patent number, maybe even better where one of Watari's creations — which never did get patents — was concerned. And the quality of the image was remarkably clear, especially for such a tricky shot, leaving no room for doubt about the machine's supposed identity.

"How did you shoot these?" he asked Kazusa, glancing at the others Watari passed him. "You must have had to get pretty close to that monster."

The little girl beamed. "He wasn't that scary. Besides, Kazusa's been practicing with zoom and exposure."

"You still refer t' yourself in the third-person," Watari said, "and yet you take professional-quality photos. What are you, four?"

She giggled. "I'm ten and a half, silly Yu-chan!"

Watari looked as though he would fall out of his chair when he started. "Y . . . Yu-chan?" he exclaimed, turning pink. Tatsumi chuckled. "Tatsumi, don't encourage her."

"I don't know," said the secretary. "I think it's rather fitting. Don't you, Natsume-san?"

Watari turned an even deeper shade at that. Not that anyone could have confused him with the literary Yu-chan, Mishima Yukio's young hero of the gay underworld, but Kazusa's innocent allusion brought some lightheartedness to the table that was much needed on such a night. Even Watari couldn't keep the bashful smile off his face as he pushed back his chair and rose as if to take a bow.

"Okay, okay," he said, "laugh it up, you two, but I didn't return from the dead t' be a target for you guys' ribald senses of humor."

"You're leaving?" Hisoka asked, standing automatically himself.

"Now that we're all here," Watari told him, once again down to business, the slight already shrugged off, "and you've all been filled in on what I do know, I thought we'd move out. Time's a'wastin', and I need t' pick up a few things for this little operation in my office."

"We were discussing our strategy before you came, Kurosaki-kun," Tatsumi said. "I'll fill you in on the way."

—

With that the two left the room, Watari talking Tatsumi's ear off in the process, Kazusa and a struggling K in her grip following close behind. Natsume stopped Hisoka with a stage whisper of his name and a pinch of his jacket before he could move to join them. "Got a moment?"

Something in his smile made Hisoka dread what he had to say as he turned. "What is it?"

"Someone left this for you," Natsume said and handed Hisoka a piece of legal pad paper folded into fourths.

He guessed what it was and where it came from before he even opened it. He had been so surprised to see Watari again that for a while he had forgotten the missing member of their party. Now he feared the note would confirm what he already guessed to be the case. The aura of regret around it was almost palpable. "Zero-zero-three?"

"Who else?"

He unfolded the paper and read the note written hurriedly on it to himself.

"Dear Hisoka," it read, "I feel I don't have much time left in this form so I am writing this to you while I still can. I want you to know how glad I am that it was you who came for me on the bridge. The time I shared with you and Natsume as fellow homo sapiens was short and chaotic, but I will always remember it as one of the happiest times of my life. You are a rare kind of person, with such a generous spirit, even if you don't want others to know it. And you cook up a mean omelette. Don't ever forget that. Thank you for everything you've done for me, from the bottom of my heart.

"I only ask one more thing. Please remember your promise to me and never tell Watari about my part in any of this. Love, you know who."

So 003 had reverted to her normal self. Other than that, Hisoka didn't know what to think as he skimmed the letter again. It resonated with such sincerity — love; she'd actually signed it with love — and simplicity that it was difficult to believe the person who wrote it had come and gone from his life so quickly. No, that wasn't precisely true, he reminded himself; she was still here, somewhere, and always had been as an owl. It was just immensely difficult to reconcile the two as one and the same.

"She also left this," Natsume said, holding out Wakaba's suit folded and stacked, with pumps lying on top, into a neat pile. "What do you want to do with it?"

"Just leave it here for now." Hisoka couldn't think of anything else to do at the moment. Once again he chided himself for the irrationality of his feelings, especially in light of what awaited them outside the walls of the complex, but it really did feel as though he'd lost a dear friend. In comparison to this, Watari's death earlier — it now seemed like eons ago — had felt a mere bother. "Natsume-san, you . . . you saw it happen?"

"Yeah." The young man's smile seemed sad to him now. The experience must not have been very pleasant. "Probably a good thing you weren't there."

"Probably," Hisoka agreed.

—

"So as you can see," Tatsumi was explaining to him while Watari worked the key pad on his office door, "we're in a bit of a bind not knowing exactly what we're up against. But Watari-san has the idea — and I agree it may be our best option at the given time — to use your reibaku spell to separate the core of the ECRU unit from the dark matter or whatever it may be that it has absorbed over the years. Before that, we will be instructing Security to corral the machine in the northwestern courtyard within the complex once Watari-san has lured it into place, theoretically with no danger to the surrounding buildings." At this point the secretary rolled his eyes. "He seems convinced he can talk the thing down, if you believe it."

"Knowing Watari-san, I can," Hisoka said. "I'm just not sure the reibaku will work. I've never tried it on a machine before—"

"I know it's asking you to do a lot, but will you give it a try?"

Hisoka wasn't sure if that was a sideways comment meant for Watari, whose invention had gotten them into the mess in the first place, but he said, pretending he hadn't noticed, "Why not?"

"And once he's subdued, the only question then," said Watari, "is what to do about the TVC-one-five."

The light blinked green on the key pad and he pushed open the door, inviting them into his office, which was no less a mess of files and blueprints and crumpled looseleaf than it had been earlier in the evening, disorganized to all but Watari who seemed to know just where to find everything. Wasting no time, he began to pull out empty file boxes, lining them up on one work table and immediately moving on to the next item on his mental list — wrenching open cabinets and digging under mountains of papers, unplugging things from the wall and placing them indiscriminately one atop the other inside the boxes.

"We know it still exists and is in operatin' condition somewhere," he continued as he did this, "and that someone or something is using it t' punch holes in the paperspace around Juuohcho. We can surmise that the other party doesn't really know what they're doin' because so far the holes don't seem t' have any pattern or purpose t' them that we can see. Or else there's a bug in the machine, which could be the only thing standin' between Juuohcho and complete destruction.

"Which leaves us with two options the way I see it," he said as he pulled out a bullhorn — what use it was going to have against a giant inflated robot, Hisoka had no idea — which he waved about to illustrate. "One: if we could reach the TVC-one-five and destroy it, that should stop any more wormholes from appearin', and the rest should collapse by themselves. Two: if there's no way t' get t' the TVC-one-five and destroy it, we're gonna have t' close the gate permanently ourselves."

He tested the bullhorn once, making the rest of them groan and cover their ears from the shrill blast, then threw it into a box with its compatriots.

"But doesn't that suggest we need the aid of a gatekeeper?" Hisoka said.

"That would stand t' reason, yes."

"Well, in case you haven't noticed, our resident gatekeeper is somewhere in Hakushaku's castle as we speak!"

Watari stopped his searching for a moment to ponder his words. "Huh. I didn't think of that."

"If you download me a tutorial on gate-sealing," Natsume offered, "I could probably work from that."

"Kurosaki-kun's right," said Tatsumi. "A tutorial isn't the same and you two know it. Kannuki's the only one among us who has been extensively trained in gate technique."

"But, Tatsumi," Watari said with a shrug, "we don't know that we'll actually need her."

"Just the same, I'm calling her back." Pulling out his cellphone, he moved away from the rest to place a call.

As though just remembering, Watari suddenly looked around himself in an almost frantic manner. "Where's Zero-zero-three?" he said. "Have you guys seen her?"

Hisoka wasn't sure how to answer. Yeah, she turned human and patched up the security system while you were dead? Not only was there something terribly callous about saying such a thing, truth though it was, 003 might never forgive him for it. Once again he was overcome with sympathy for the two: for 003 who was prevented by her own body from expressing her feelings, and for Watari who would never know them. Just as he was trying to find the right words to explain diplomatically, he caught a glimpse of something brown and fuzzy on top of the locker in the corner. 003's whole body was scrunched together as though from cold, and Hisoka wondered at the kind of shock that must come from transmutation. In a remarkably controlled human gesture, she looked Hisoka in the eye and slowly shook her head back and forth.

"Sorry, Watari," Natsume said. "I'm sure she'll turn up sooner or later. She always does, right?"

"That she does," Watari said with a fond smile. "With all the commotion t'night she's probably restin' somewhere."

You have no idea, Hisoka thought.

K, looking over Kazusa's shoulder, happened to catch a glimpse of 003 and managed to wiggle out of the girl's arms. "Hey, K-kun," she giggled, but the cat's attention remained riveted on the little owl. 003 started and moved farther back on the locker's top out of sight, and K looked as though he was gearing up to give pursuit. But he sat down on his haunches instead, his wide eyes perhaps suggesting he was thinking to himself: I knew it was the owl all along!

"Bon? Somethin' wrong?"

Then Hisoka realized he was staring. "Nothing. Sorry, Watari-san," he reassured the other man, and turned his eyes away from the locker.

"Good," Watari said, pushing one of the boxes into Hisoka's arms. "Then if we can just move all this stuff t' the engineerin' lab . . . I've got a surprise for the little guy he isn't gonna like."

Between whatever that was and the reibaku spell they'd be lucky if anything, machine or not, cooperated, Hisoka thought as he hoisted the box into a better position. Natsume grabbed another, while Watari gathered up his laptop and bundles of wires and cords and stuffed them haphazardly under one arm.

"Then the only thing that remains is t' find him."

"I don't think you'll have to go any farther than the lab," Hisoka said.

Tatsumi and Watari turned to him, the latter looking at him like he was brilliant. "What makes you say that?" said the secretary.

"I had this strange feeling as I was walking through there earlier." Even just thinking about it again gave Hisoka the shivers. "As though whatever was on the other side of the windows was looking for something or someone in particular, and it was studying me, trying to fit me in." He closed his eyes and tried to relive what he had experienced in that brief time. "There might have been a feeling like, I don't know, like when a kid gets lost in a department store . . . homesickness is the only way I can think to describe it."

"Of course!" Watari hit the heel of his free hand against his temple. "Spock-kun's memory bank would tell him t' return t' the engineerin' lab. It's where he was born! I don't know how or why now, but that of all the things t' happen so far is the one that makes the most sense."

And still balancing all his stuff with one arm, he pointed the other out the door. "To the lab!"

—
to be continue. .