Bright and early that Sunday morning, Rin and Daphne met a sleepy receptionist outside the doors into the Hiroshima field office. He was wearing a suit, but his hair was uncombed, and he looked like he'd been scared out of bed by some kind of natural disaster. Daphne didn't give the poor kid a passing glance after he unlocked the door, she just went right inside, grumbling about how a place could be so slow with demon manifestations that it didn't need full-time round-the-clock staff. Rin thanked him, though, and followed his wife.

The office itself was dark. Only the emergency lights lit the halls and rows of cubicles. None of the managerial staff came in on Sundays, and the team of exorcists on call for manifestations worked on a different level of the office building. Rin and Daphne had the whole place to themselves. Even so, they put on the ruse of going to their makeshift office in the file room. Daphne shut the door.

"We have to be careful about this," she said.

"Well, obviously."

She gave him a flat stare. "This could get us in trouble, Rin."

"Mephisto basically gave us free reign to do what we want."

Daphne snorted. "And you think he'll corroborate that if we get caught? That guy's like a walking poster for double-crossing."

Rin had to concede the point.

"Besides, we don't want Akiyama to catch wind of what we're doing," Daphne continued. "She could tighten the clamps on security."

"Maybe you should have thought about that before you grilled her yesterday."

"Shut up. I haven't slept in a week."

Well, she'd slept, but not restfully. The stress of the situation had finally brought some of her old nightmares to the surface. Rin had woken to her murmuring the names of her old squad in her sleep like she'd used to when they'd first met. He'd been wondering if that was going to happen. It usually did when work got crazy.

They made a show of swapping reading, Rin glancing over the new profiles on the dead exorcists and Daphne taking a look at Akiyama's research article. They'd worked out their plan for the day the night before in the hotel. Daphne would get up and go to the bathroom at eight forty-five. Rin would head to the break room at eight fifty and put on a pot of coffee. The two of them would meet in the hallway that led down to the lab at eight fifty-two, break in, and be back in time to get the coffee before it cooled. They'd worked out the location of the lab before leaving the night before. Now it was just a matter of getting inside.

The first portion of the plan went off without a hitch. Rin met Daphne in front of the door to the lab without seeing anyone, and she'd done the same from the bathroom. They'd watched a couple of YouTube videos on picking locks with hairpins at the hotel the night before, but come the third failed attempt, Daphne just straight-up busted the handle off.

"Daph!" Rin hissed, laughing a little despite himself.

"Needs must," she replied. "We can call a repairman and get it fixed before the end of the day."

She pushed open the door and slipped inside. Shaking his head, Rin followed suit.

The inside of the lab was mostly non-descript—big empty tables and walls lined with counters with built-in shelving beneath them and cupboards up above. Two doors on the far side of the room had windows along their tops. On the other side of one was a space filled with desks and computers. The other went into some kind of storage space, maybe for specimens or supplies. It was full of shelves and shelves of boxes and bottles.

He and Daphne scoured every inch of the room as quickly as they could—they only had a few minutes—and they found nothing. Even so, Rin didn't think there was anything much to find. They met up at an emergency eye wash station in the middle of the counter, having gone opposite directions around the room.

"Well, damn," Daphne said. "I fully expected to find something sinister."

"I told you they wouldn't just leave a corpse out."

"Isn't it kind of weird, though, that they don't have anything out? Don't labs usually have some long-term experiments going on?"

Rin glanced around the empty room. "I mean, yeah, but this is exorcism and science. I don't really have a reference for how that works."

Daphne shook her head. "Me either."

They lingered for a moment, but the coffee would be done soon, and that was their alibi. Not particularly convincing, but it was the best they could manage. Daphne nodded her head at the eye wash station.

"I've always wanted to try one of these," she said.

It was pretty weird—just a little bowl like a drinking fountain that stuck out from the wall, but with two spouts instead of one. There was a big handle on the right-hand side that said PUSH. Grinning, Rin did just that. Water sprayed up from both spouts and Daphne gasped, whacking his arm and shoving him away from the bowl.

"Don't," she said, and laughed. "We're not supposed to touch anything."

All the same, she reached over and pushed the handle herself. She smiled for a split second, then the expression disappeared. Daphne stared into the bowl in absolute shock.

"What?" Rin said, coming over. "It's not like they're gonna—"

He'd been about to say "dust for fingerprints," but one look at the bowl and the words got swallowed up in the back of his throat.

The water was draining in the shape of a five-pointed star.

"Holy shit."

Rin looked at Daphne. Her expression was grim.

"We need to see if this is happening at the murder site on Miyajima," she said. "Right now."