A/N: I'm baaaaaack! First, let me apologize for the extended hiatus. As I'm sure a few of you may be able to relate, particularly if you identify with Ginoza or Tsubame, mental illness is a real bitch of a mistress, and she does not discriminate. No worries, though. I am well and ready to pick this baby back up where I left off.

Shocked screams and the sounds of people dropping shopping bags greeted Tsubame and Kogami as they approached the railing of the mezzanine.

"He has a gun! Look out! He has a real gun!"

"Somebody call the PSB! Set off a sensor!"

"No, look! They're already here! Get out of the way! Sora! Move!" A bystander shoved his friend across the hallway and out of the way as Shimotsuki crossed the distance between them, Dominator drawn, but not yet aimed.

Kogami did his best to pretend that he didn't notice her approach. He scanned the floor below, quickly finding Ginoza's anger-riddled expression in the crowd.

"He likes you a lot," he observed quietly in Tsubame's ear. She blushed, but didn't reply. "When this all plays out and I make a run for it, I need you to distract him somehow."

"What? W-why? You didn't have a p-plan for that?"

"Oh I do," he chuckled, "but, you see, I'd hoped he'd be the one I'd catch and get a chance to talk to. Now I've gone and pissed him off. And, despite the fact that he's always been a shitty tracker, Nobuchika Ginoza can outrun me."

"Fine. But don't expect me to continue to help you. Not l-like this." She shrugged a shoulder against his loose grip around her neck.

"Wouldn't dream of it. I really am sorry."

"Whatever. Here sh-she comes."

Inspector Shimotsuki slid to a halt a few meters away from them.

"Freeze! Put the gun down and step away from my Enforcer."

They both watched carefully as the gun scanned the helmeted trouble-maker. A confident sound escaped him when her eyes glowed blue and her face fell. It hadn't picked him up. SYBIL can't see him.

"What the Hell? Akane, it doesn't even register there's a person in front of me!"

"Perfect," Kogami reported over Tsubame's shoulder. "Until next time, Miss Maekawa."

With that, he pointed his gun over the rail and pulled the trigger, a flare sending thick smoke into the crowd below. It was followed by the firing of several other flare guns from the handful of Kogami's allies on the first floor. In the smoke, Tsubame lost track of Ginoza, but she knew he was coming for her. It wasn't a full second later that she heard his voice above the din.

"Gotta go," he mumbled, releasing her. As best she could, Tsubame faked a faint, only to feel the hard support of Ginoza's bionic arm catch her from behind, his other hand finding her face.

"Tsubame, are you alright?"

She nodded weakly. Remembering the item in her left hand, she lifted it to the palm on her face and slipped it discreetly under Gino's fingers. She tried to convey as much gravity in her gaze as she could. Shimotsuki coughed loudly through the smoke as she approached, Dominator returned to its holster.

"Damnit. He got away again!" She inspected the two of them briefly before spotting Hinakawa over Ginoza's shoulder.

"We need to get out of the mall. Spread out and find them. Now."

The smoke set off the fire alarms and, subsequently, the sprinkler system in the building. Tsubame watched Gino quickly stow the cartridge away into the breast pocket of his jacket so as to keep it dry. The entire building was promptly evacuated by drones. In the mass exodus, all helmeted individuals were lost to the crowd.

Division Two pulled up as the Division One Enforcers were being loaded back into Akane and Mika's vehicles. Mika and Akane moved to intercept their co-workers before they opened their paddywagon door. Having elected to sit in the back of Akane's car with Ginoza instead of in the front seat, Tsubame rested her head carefully on his shoulder, fatigue setting in for the day.

"He scared the Hell out of me," she admitted after a while. Ginoza agreed silently, gently leaning his head to touch his cheek to her hair.

"He tends to do that," Gino grumbled, glancing down at her. After removing the glove from his organic hand, he flipped it over on his own thigh in offering. Tsubame took a deep breath, but he could feel her smile against his shoulder. Her hand came to rest in his upturned palm, the icy reality of her fingers in his a welcome sensation, though not entirely comforting. That's when Akane silently took her seat in front of them.

"Ms. Maekawa, are you alright?" she asked as she entered the address for Nona Tower and looked over her shoulder. Ginoza smiled to himself, taking note that Tsubame stayed decidedly still, despite being caught in a rather vulnerable moment.

"I'll be fine. I'd just really like to go home now," she murmured. Akane glanced at Gino, trying to read the situation. In answer, he gently squeezed Tsubame's hand. Though she seemed calm, he could feel the occasional shivering of her body the longer they sat there. Akane nodded and they returned to Headquarters. By the time they reached the parking garage, Tsubame was falling apart. Silent tears fell down her cheeks and her body shook with the effort of suppressing sobs. Panic shone across her face, eyes glazed over by whatever nightmare was replaying itself to its hostage. Akane pulled open her wristband.

"Ms. Maekawa, I think you should take the day off tomorrow. Your hue…" Akane's voice drifted at Ginoza's warning glare. She watched silently, stunned, as Ginoza brought the back of Tsubame's hand to his lips and began speaking to her so quietly, the Inspector could barely hear what he was saying.

"List five things you can see," he instructed. Her eyes wandered around the interior of the car, her mouth ghosting over the names of the shapes in front of her: windshield, steering wheel, seat belt, Inspector Tsunemori, thermos.

"List four things you can feel," Ginoza whispered, pointedly keeping his lips on her hand. Along with the weight of her damp jacket, the pull of the seat belt, and the cool, smooth leather of the car seat, she looked at Ginoza for the first time since they left the mall and mentioned his breath of the back of her hand. Her ragged gasps for air began to subside.

"Three things you can hear," he prompted. It was rather quiet, so Akane fidgeted with her bracelet to give Tsubame something to hone in on. She also mentioned a passing car and her own heartbeat.

"Two things you can smell," he smiled. Tsubame was able to take a deep breath, which would help to slow her racing heart.

"Lingering cigarette smoke… Spinel?" Tsubame looked around and discovered the pack in Akane's center console. Akane blushed. "And whiskey," she continued, casting an accusatory glance his way. The scowl from Akane was worth it.

"And something you can taste?"

"Blood," she admitted, chewing on her chapped bottom lip. "Thank you, Gino," she smiled, though it lacked her normal mirth.

"Perhaps I learned a few useful things from my fake therapist after all," he winked at Akane. Tsubame quirked a brow, confused, but let it go. Akane rolled her eyes.

"Let's get her upstairs," she suggested, getting out of the car in front of them. She had to open the doors from the outside, as they were child-locked per PSB protocol. They crossed the parking garage to catch up to the other half of Division One who waited for them at the door to the facility. Yayoi had become the target of Inspector Shimotsuki's newest crusade, most likely for an ill-concealed eyeroll. Sho stood casually against the wall, his holoscreen flashing news reports in front of him.

"They're calling it a cooking fire incident," he observed aloud. "As if one of the robotic food pagodas in the mall could catch fire before the system's fail-safe would shut it down…"

Mika and Akane shared a look and stepped aside while the Enforcers read the story over Sho's shoulder. They would need to discuss this upstairs, possibly with Chief Kasei. Mika was convinced her Dominator had been tampered with. To prove it, she pulled it out of her bag and pointed it at Ginoza, who was too focused on Tsubame's mental state to really even notice.

"It's already been in for maintenance, but look!" She squeezed the trigger and it didn't budge. "Locked. It's reading him at 64!" she hissed.

"What?" Akane glanced over at Ginoza. His hand was still entwined with Tsubame's. To cross-check the data, Akane discreetly pulled her own gun and pointed it at Ginoza.

Crime Coefficient: 64. Target is a registered Enforcer. System error: re-calculating Crime Coefficient…

Akane shook her Dominator in disbelief as it ran the stats again.

Crime Coefficient: 64. Target is a registered Enforcer. System error… The gun's voice repeated.

"Weird, I'm getting his usual number," Akane whispered to her partner. The thrum of hope in Akane's chest perked her spirits. Perhaps her old mentor could be rehabilitated! But she had to be sure. For now, Mika needed to believe her gun was malfunctioning.

Akane ushered them all inside. The Division Two Inspectors and their team walked through the doors to the Bureau-owned vehicle garage. Inspector Domoto and Enforcer Sugo approached the group where Division One was waiting for an elevator. Akane noticed Tsubame drop Gino's hand and step so that she was mostly behind him.

"So what happened? Did they outsmart you again, Gino?" Sugo poked as he came to a stop next to Tsubame and Ginoza. Gino's silence relayed the answer.

"If we'd had backup sooner, we could've secured a perimeter." Ginoza's sharp eyes pierced back at his friend, and though he chuckled, Akane could tell he wasn't in the mood.

"What's that about, anyway?" Domoto asked, turning to Akane. "You could've given us a bit of a heads-up."

"We thought a covert mission would be most effective. There were no indications that our single helmeted culprit was in cahoots with a network of helmeted culprits. We weren't expecting an ambush." Akane crossed her arms and stuck her chin up at Domoto. He held up his hands in defeat.

"Hey, you don't gotta convince me." He was right, of course. It was SYBIL itself she needed to convince. She hoped she could. The elevator dinged and Division Two filed in, followed by Yayoi, Sho, and Mika.

"There's still room," Shimotsuki directed, holding the door.

"I think we'll just wait for the next one," Ginoza disagreed, glancing to Akane. He felt relief flood him as his superior seemed to agree that getting into a crowded elevator was not good for Tsubame. Mika shrugged and the door closed. Gino waited a few minutes before slamming his robotic fist into the wall. He quickly apologized when Tsubame and Akane both jumped. Whatever it was, and Akane had a few ideas, they couldn't talk about it here, especially not with their Dominators online. She pressed the homing button on hers to call over the weapons locker from the paddywagon. It rolled up through the sliding glass doors from the parking garage and each of them deposited the guns in their holsters.

"I'll have to turn in the rest of them on my way out," Akane noted to no one in particular. "Wanna go up to the balcony?"

Ginoza reached into his pocket, generating the flask from which Tsubame must've detected the whiskey smell in the car and took a swig in a very Masaoka fashion, though Masaoka didn't ever seem to have the temper that Ginoza toted.

"Can we talk up there?" Tsubame asked, reaching out to brush Ginoza's hair from his face. Akane nodded and pressed the button to recall the elevator.

They stepped outside on the balcony as the sun set over the buzzing city. The wind cut across the building like daggers, but the three of them were able to find space in a corner of the balcony that was shielded enough by the rest of the building. Ginoza leaned heavily on the wall and pulled open his holoscreen. A bitter laugh escapes him.

"If he keeps this up, I'll be sent to ISO before Christmas," he choked, turning the screen to Akane.

That's not possible, she thought, shaking her head.

"Just downstairs you weren't even a target for enforcement," Akane mumbled, just loud enough to hear. Tsubame scowled.

"Pointing your Dominator at your hunting dogs again?"

It seemed when it came to protecting Ginoza, all the stops were pulled with Tsubame.

"Mika noticed it," Akane defended. "I just double checked. Gino, you were down to 64."

But he didn't appear to be listening. In her anger, Tsubame's coefficient, which was also visible on Ginoza's screen, spiked to 300 and her panic attack resumed. He pressed his human hand to her face, holoscreen all but forgotten at his side. Akane watched in surprise as both of their numbers plummeted at the contact, Maekawa's to 135 and Ginoza's to sub-enforcement levels.

"What is going on?" she asked, exasperated. "Gino, look!"

"That's… odd." He pulled his hand away from Tsubame and their numbers climbed back up, hers to her average 180 and his to a slightly increased 146.

"Okay, we'll address that later. Now did he say anything to you?" Akane turned to Tsubame. She shook her head.

"Just that he wanted to test something. Whatever it was, it worked. That's when he decided to retreat." She shot a dangerous look at Ginoza as he reached for his concealed breast pocket. "He said not to…" she warned Gino. He appeared to get the hint, but now Akane was looking awkwardly between them. "I mean… follow him, that is," she covered. It worked, somehow. "He doesn't seem to want to hurt anyone, especially not you, Inspector Tsunemori. I… uh… recognized him. He's Mr. Kogami, the Inspector who was in charge of Masaoka the day they rescued me."

"Good, now we're all on the same page at least," Akane sighed. "I guess we just wait for his next move… Now then, about your Crime Coefficients. No PDA in front of Inspector Shimotsuki unless it's life or death. I don't want her to keep reporting faulty equipment to Chief Kasei, and I don't want her to know that there are times during the day when your number falls under regulation, Ginoza. Especially since we don't really know why. We don't need to bother the Chief about that." Akane flinched. What she wanted to say was don't tell the Chief anything because the Chief is actually SYBIL and if the floating brains find out that you can somehow override their judgement of you they'll come after you like they did Makishima and Kamui as asymptomatic criminals. Obviously, that was not a wise choice of information to let slip, though she had to admit it was getting pretty stressful being the only one who knew. Any time Ginoza got called into her office, Akane had to busy herself to distract her mind from the possibility that he wouldn't come back. But they had to keep up appearances to Gino. If Chief Kasei suddenly stopped talking to Gino for no apparent reason, it'd be suspicious to him.

"Do you think it could stick?" Ginoza wondered aloud. Akane shrugged, not wanting to get his hopes up in case it didn't. A change in the wind berated them with force and they had no choice but to take shelter back in the building where their conversations could no longer be as open as out on the balcony where the wind, as much as it tore at their skin at this elevation, kept their voices from being recorded effectively. Though neither Ginoza nor Akane had ever admitted that to each other, that is ultimately the reason they'd had so many conversations out there. Akane walked the Enforcers to the Division One suite, placing them on-call for the rest of the evening. She then went to collect Dominators from the remaining team members in the office. Once they were alone and behind the closed door, Ginoza found his way to Tsubame's side.

"Are you feeling better?" he asked, leaning slightly on the counter.

"Sort of. I'm glad you got my drift up there," she smirked, patting his chest where the device remained concealed. Gino nodded and turned to the kitchenette.

"Dinner?" He removed his jacket and slipped the little black box into his pants pocket before rolling up his sleeves. The level of discretion Akane had shown for their conversation earlier had put Ginoza on edge, and Tsubame was picking up on it.

"I'm not terribly hungry." Panic attacks did little for her already miniscule appetite.

"Would you eat some rice if I made some for myself?" He'd discovered the best way to get her to eat was not to guilt or force her into it, but to make it convenient for her. But even then, there was little pressure on her to finish the food, since it was technically his.

"I could maybe steal a little from you, yeah," she sighed. Ginoza set the rice cooker and grabbed a drink from the refrigerator, moving to the couch to sit with Tsubame while they waited. As they sat down, Ginoza pulled the device from his pocket and examined it, pleased to find it had an old-fashioned auxiliary port for corded headphones, which he happened to have in his room. He scooped the rice into a bowl, grabbed two sets of chopsticks, and they retreated to his bedroom. He grabbed the headphones and plugged them in, searching for a play button. Tsubame took one headphone and stuck it in her ear from where she lay next to him atop the body pillow. He examined the note stuck to the device. It appeared to be a random list of numbers scribbled on a notecard.

"What does that mean?" Tsubame asked, scooping a mouthful of rice onto her chopsticks.

"It looks like a cypher," Ginoza mumbled. He pressed a button on the side of the device and an holo keyboard with characters from a foreign alphabet appeared. "Damnit Ko…"

"I think Sho can help us with this," Tsubame suggested, looking at the time on her wristband. "He and Yayoi should technically be off soon. Division Three is overnight tonight."

Frustrated, Ginoza removed the headphone from his ear and buried his face in his hands. Where do you want me to start with this, Kogami? From where exactly am I supposed to pull what appear to be characters from the Latin alphabet in presumably a language I don't speak to create a word in said language that I don't speak?

"I think I've seen those symbols before," Tsubame mumbled behind the chopsticks pressed to her lips. "I can't read them, but I think they're from the script that people used to write in English with. I can't read it, but that one looks really familiar." She pointed to the "K" key on the holo.

"Why couldn't it just use kana?" Ginoza complained. He glanced at the cypher code on the notecard and counted. Ten characters, then.

They both sat up and turned towards the door at the sound of Kunizuka and Hinakawa setting their things down in the living room. Ginoza quickly got to his feet and peeked out of his door and down the hallway. Chewing on a chopstick, Tsubame stared at the keyboard, completely at a loss. Gino explained the situation as Yayoi and Sho entered his room, both of them shocked to find Tsubame sitting cross-legged in his bed. He waved away their bug-eyed expressions and warned Yayoi of the smile on her face before returning to his spot on the bed and pointing to the keyboard.

"I could try to just hack it," Sho offered. Ginoza shook his head.

"Knowing Ko…" he stopped himself, realizing he wasn't sure how much Hinakawa knew. Clearing his throat, he began again from a different angle. "This device was procured from the most intelligent, tenacious, and paranoid man I have ever known. I would hazard to guess that it is fairly tamper-proof at the expense of the data it contains."

"I read the file," Sho admitted, scratching his head. "After you guys lied to Shimotsuki about going to see Professor Sugo, I had to know what was so important." Ginoza and Yayoi's mouths both dropped open. "Don't worry," the redhead added, holding his hands up, "I was able to delete the log of which patient you went to see when I hacked into the Psych Ward's system. And then I covered my virtual tracks with a few proxys when I looked up Kogami's file."

First to recover from the shock, Yayoi strode over to the device and examined it.

"Isn't that an English keyboard?" She began to loosen the black tie at her throat. "Look." From under her button-down, Yayoi retrieved a small silver chain with a guitar pick hung on it. The words, "Ernie Ball," were etched in gold foil on the tiny plastic triangle. "Ernie Ball isn't in business anymore, at least that's what I thought since it was an American guitar string company. These are 3D printed copies of the originals. But they are absolutely authentic."

There was no denying that the guitar pick's script was from that alphabet that lay before them. Sho got to work pulling up the alphabet on his own holoscreen.

"Looks like there are twenty-six letters total. What are the numbers on the cypher?"

Ginoza rubbed his eyes and took another look at the card.

"There are ten sets of three data entries grouped together. The first one reads 2-17-1."

"And the letters need to be in English…" Tsubame thought aloud. Yayoi gasped, startling all three of them.

"The letters!" She ran to her room to retrieve the two mysterious handwritten letters they'd received in the mail. She set them down on the bed next to Ginoza in the order that they were received.

"Yayoi, you're a genius!" Ginoza smiled. "Sho, can you get this translated from kanji to whatever the Hell that is?" He pointed at the offending keyboard. Hinakawa nodded and got to work as he knelt next to the bed. Using the letters themselves to record his work, he was able to transcribe the first letter in about fifteen minutes thanks to a web-app he accessed through a backdoor in a classified sector of SYBIL's own foreign affairs server. Taking the first number of each data set to mean which document to use, Ginoza and Tsubame decoded four letters and wrote them down on the notecard. After another twenty minutes of the web-app processing the second document, it spat out the translation, which the four of them then used to decode the remaining six letters. Once they'd finished they translated the English word back into Japanese.

N

Ginoza shook his head.

"It's Kogami. Of course the password is panopticon." He typed it in and unplugged the headphones so that all four of them could hear.

"Hey Gino," came Kogami's voice, "there's a lot I can't explain right now, but I wanted to get some information to you so that you can help me keep Akane and our friends safe while this is going on. Please don't share this information with her, and pay attention. This cassette is programmed to self-corrupt once you've listened to it."

"Typical," Ginoza smirked.

"After I left Tokyo I was able to flee the country on a trade ship headed for Australia, because apparently that's still a functioning country. As a matter of fact, a lot of countries came out of the War a lot better than most Japanese civilians are aware. I was connected with one of Australia's high-ranking military officers, a woman named General Mattison Winston. Winston's task force had been trying for the last two decades, to no avail, to re-open ties with Japan for political alliance, but any time they would send correspondence, apparently SYBIL would snub them, that was, up until Australia's Prime Minister had expressed interest in Japan's form of government. That's when trading ties had secretly been reinstated without any sort of news regarding the alliance to the general public of either country. When SYBIL System servers started to go online in Australia, there was a dissent in their military regarding the morality of it. It's something to do with the way the main server works. No one actually knows because a Japanese tech assistant they brought in to work on Australia's system to get it online snuck in and burned the place down, as well as assassinated their old Prime Minister. My guess is that the guy realized the inherent issues with SYBIL once he got there to hook it up and decided to shut it down."

"Inherent issues?" Yayoi questioned aloud. "What's he talking about?"

"Kogami doesn't think that SYBIL fairly evaluates citizens, or at least that it doesn't act fairly based on its evaluations," Ginoza clarified. Yayoi nodded, glancing at the tracker around her own wrist.

"Since then, General Winston and her American allies have been gathering intel from traders traveling to and from Japan. And yes, I mean like United States of America. They agree with me that Japan has become a sort of prison to its citizens. One where Japanese people live under the guise of constant surveillance to be punished for crimes they've not yet committed."

"Panopticon…" Sho nodded.

"I was able to smuggle Makishima's helmet out of the country," Kogami continues. Yayoi and Ginoza shared a look of horror. "We were able to hone in on the specific technology and change it to scatter beams from scanners rather than reflect coefficients from other people. We tested it first at the university against street scanners. Considering the fact that I wasn't recognized, we assumed success, but we wanted to make sure that the device was strong enough to scatter more direct, concentrated beams from the SYBIL system…"

"HE TESTED IT ON A LIVE DOMINATOR?!" Ginoza shouted. Tsubame nearly tossed the bowl of rice in her hands.

"Yes, yes, Gino, that means I'm going to test it on a live Dominator. Shimotsuki's if I can swing it… I guess if you're listening to this that means it didn't blow up with my body, so it must have worked."

"That idiot," Ginoza grumbled. Tsubame placed a hand on his shoulder.

"From here my own movements will be more covert. What I need from you is information. We need to know what SYBIL is and where the server is located. That being said, that is getting way ahead of ourselves. If we can disarm the system by turning its guard dogs and shepherds against it, everyone involved will have a much higher chance of survival. Theoretically, SYBIL is some sort of AI. I don't completely buy that, but that's all I have to work on since no one alive has ever actually seen it. I'll be checking in periodically. Since I now know that I can avoid psymatic scans, I will easily be able to contact you. Stand by, Ginoza, and please, be careful."

The device's screen glitched and a small electrical current jumped from it to Ginoza's bionic arm, causing him to jump and hold his shoulder.

"Damn it," he grumbled.

"So, now what?" Yayoi asked, picking up the letters.

"Burn those," Ginoza instructed. "And I guess we keep our ears to the ground until we hear from Kogami again."

The three of them nodded and Hinakawa and Kunizuka retreated for the night, Yayoi's eyes meeting Ginoza's briefly with a pointed glance in Maekawa's direction. He rolled his eye and shooed her away, knowing he'd have to tell her eventually.

"Not hungry, huh?" he chuckled, glancing at the half-eaten bowl of rice in Tsubame's hands. She returned it to him hurriedly, not wanting to eat it all before he got the chance to have some.

"Do you think we'll actually be able to pull this off?" she asked, yawning.

"I think we will or we'll die," he sighed, his own appetite gone. "But that's sort of how it is already, so I guess it's not worse than before." He smiled reassuringly at her. "Kogami's one Hell of a detective. He always has been. Hopefully he'll figure it out before anybody gets hurt." It was more to calm his own nerves at this point, but Tsubame seemed to relax a bit as well.

"Here's to hoping," she whispered. She brushed his hair from his face before laying back in the bed, situating the pillow between them again. "Goodnight Gino."

"Goodnight, Mae."