The night came and went, and Kuroba Kaito found himself gulping down his breakfast the next morning. All was practically calm in the world.

His mother took his plate about two minutes after she'd given it to him. "My, somebody's hungry!" she said. "Is there something special happening at school?"

Kaito shook his head, face buried in the mouth of his glass of orange juice. Seconds later it had disappeared down his throat. He gasped for breath, thumping his chest lightly with his fist lest he end up purging himself all over the table. "Nope, there isn't," he replied happily. "I'm just hungry. A kid can be hungry, can't he?" He glanced over his now empty glass. "...And thirsty. And now I should be fine for the day!" He sprung up from his seat, cup disappearing from the table and reappearing in the wash basin with a little pink burst, and hurried out of the door.

The woman smirked, before holding up the abandoned gakuran jacket. Within moments Kaito had legged it back into the house, slipped on the dark article of clothing, muttered his bashful gratitude and proceeded to flee once more. He would have done so if not for the hand on his shoulder.

"Remember, Kaito-kun, I'm going out to a friend's at twelve, and I might not be back until very late," she said. "I don't want you staying up too late, alright?" She winked at him; Kaito raised an eyebrow suspiciously before continuing his trek out into the great unknown.

As soon as he was outside of the building and onto public property, he reached into his schoolbag, stopping besides the nearest telephone pole. He leaned back on the thick wood, catching his breath. There were only two reasons that Hakuba would have given Aoko a message yesterday, although the means of delivery still startled him. Hakuba was onto him like a hound on a scent, like a lid on a teapot, like a... okay, he was out of similes. But the ainoko was a smart one, he had to admit, and realised that if he told Aoko who Kaito was he was likely to get laughed at. That scratched out one theory of having his secret revealed to his best friend, leaving one other theory left. Kaito's message – sorry, KID's message – was bound to have put Hakuba on the edge of his seat. KID didn't warn anybody of danger. So, if Hakuba was telling Aoko anything, it would be to keep an eye on him.

And, if Hakuba had told Aoko to keep an eye on him, that meant Kaito leaving his house early so that she didn't suddenly latch onto him until school at least. As for the trouble of dealing with her after school, he'd have to think about that one. Maybe, if he disguised himself as his mother and walked out of the house...

Hang on; his mother was going to be out tonight, wasn't she? Goddamn it all. He'd just have to escape her after rescuing his costume and props from the house and pop onto the shinkansen straight after school. It only took two hours tops heading to Shimoda from Tokyo main station via Ito Station, and it couldn't be more that another hour to get to the Matsuzaki Spa by bus, so he'd have to figure out what to do for the whole of the afternoon.

He spotted Aoko's silhouette in the ground floor window, and darted off around the corner before she'd even reached her front door, having made his decision. If he was going to have to deal with her at school, there was only one option.

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Conan had been forced by Ai to stay at their instead of going to school that morning (that he was still ill and needed rest was the phrasing that she had used). Calls had been made to the Mouri Detective Agency to confirm that this was indeed possible – it was – and Ran popped over that morning to deliver some of her famous porridge. The miniature detective sat on the couch, listening to her.

"Ai-chan didn't tell me exactly," she said after a few minutes of ranting mostly to herself. "You've been falling asleep a lot, but... is there anything else that's wrong?" she asked.

Conan took a quick look over himself. "I don't know," he replied. "Ran...-nee-chan?"

The girl looked down at him. Mouri Ran was possibly the most beautiful girl Conan had ever known in his eighteen years of life, and during the last few years he had gotten to know her much better than before. She was tall, naturally pale skinned like a geisha, with a strong body and a shapely figure. Her long black hair was waist length and her eyes sparkled with the gleam of a thousand sapphires. Before the big incident she had been many things to him: a cute best friend, a first crush, an imposing enemy force and, the one he was not proud of, an obstacle. Now she had to play just one role, the role of a caring older sister.

"What is it?" she asked.

He nervously wound his small thin fingers together. "Eto... Do you still like Shin'ichi-nii-san?"

Ran jumped at the odd question, but her startled look quickly turned into one of... it was hard to explain, but Conan had observed all facets of her relationship with Shin'ichi for two years. First there was how annoying she found him, then how handsome, then how weak, then how stupid, then how independent, then how pathetic and so on. For the boy who had watched for so long without much interference, it only took him two seconds to realise that maybe Ran was thinking of all of these at the same time and thoroughly confused herself at how she sound look and sound.

"I do," she replied. "But he's starting to scare me. He hangs up quicker; he always tells me less and less about what he's doing; any time he shows up he runs. I wish he'd just stick around for a while, so we can talk, and hopefully he'll explain to me just where he keeps going..." She raised a finger to her eye to wipe away a few gathering tears.

Conan bowed his head, and then looked up again. "Ran-nee-chan, what if I... be Shin'ichi-nii-san for you?"

Ran smiled meekly. "Thank you for the offer, Conan-kun, but I have to decline. I can't force you to be who you're not."

Who you're not.

And he ate a spoonful of porridge.

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When Aoko got to school that morning, she had expected to meet Kaito somewhere along the way. That was her plan, after all: stick to Kaito no matter what happened, even if he went into the boy's toilet (in which case she'd stand outside the cubicle waiting for him). However, there had been a distinct lack of Kaito on her school route. Quite odd considering that they lived next door to each other, correct? She came up with the idea that maybe Kaito was already at school for some reason or other, and so hoisted her satchel higher onto her shoulder, walking on.

Well, it became so much more mysterious when she stepped into the classroom and discovered to her own personal horror that not one, but two, seats were empty, namely those of Hakuba and Kaito. Hakuba, she understood, as her father had popped out before breakfast that morning to get the Shizuoka prefectural metropolitan police on the line; that was all to do with Kaitou KID's heist. Kaito, she didn't, as he had nothing more important to do than his education. She had a feeling nagging in the back of her head that both of these disappearances were related to the Shizuoka anomaly. It was a theory that was proved when her best friend, a brunette named Momoi Keiko, walked over with a newspaper in her arms.

She nodded over to Kaito's seat. "Would you know what happened to those two?" she asked.

Aoko sighed. "Hakuba-kun's away for tonight's Kaitou KID heist, and I don't know where Kaito-kun is."

Keiko moaned. "Oh, damn it!" she said. "I was going to show off to Kaito-kun that found out where he hides those newspapers of his!" She threw down the paper. "And then I was going to grill Hakuba-kun to figure out how he gets the newspapers the day before!"

"Day before?" Aoko's head snapped up and she scanned the newspaper's headlines. "This is this morning's. But how did he get this(?)... Where did you find this, anyway?"

"I found it in his desk," the other girl explained, pointing at the vacated seat and scratching her head. "Why?"

However, her words were lost upon the black-haired girl as she scrambled through the desk. A number of things flew past her head, everything from an old hat to a two kilogram weight covered in Sharpie coloured pen ink. And come to think about it, the desk did seem a little deeper than usual... she knelt down and softly kicked what should have been air underneath the desk.

Her foot collided with something. The legs of the chair appeared to shake. But the top part mysteriously stayed still.

Smirking, she removed the many-faceted trick mirrors from the desk to reveal its true depth – right down to the floor. "He's been hiding everything in here the whole time," she muttered, ignoring the expressions of the rest of the class, and then suddenly dived headfirst into the desk again. After some time, she forced herself out, a grim look on her face.

There were no other newspapers in the desk, but there had been something alarming: a panel where the floor of the classroom should have been. Which lifted to reveal a tunnel leading underneath the building.

She growled. "I'm going to find anata and destroy anata if it's the last thing I ever do..."

Just then, the teacher walked into the room and regarded the classroom or, to be more specific, the giant desk in the room. "What on earth is that?" she asked. "And why is it where Kuroba-kun's desk should be?"

"It is Kaito-kun's desk," Aoko replied. "This has been his desk for over two years... which means that for two years he's had an escape route hidden in the school. But why would he need an escape route from school?" It wasn't as if he would be able to jump in at any point at time with Hakuba sitting behind him. Hakuba, who always kept a trained eye on Kaito no matter what he did... wait, why on earth did Hakuba watch Kaito so much?

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Peering out of his nice dark space in the bushes of his back garden, Kaito sighed. He hadn't expected to get past Aoko so quickly and easily.

He poked his head over the top, relieved, to meet a familiar face.

"I said 'twelve', Kaito-kun," his mother said. "Not 'ten'."

Kaito poked his head down again, and then flew back up. "Mom, how the heck did you know I was in here?" he asked, removing leaves from his head. Damn vines were choking the garden again.

"I know all of your little hiding places," she said, kneeling down to pick up some more school shirts from the basket. "I live with you, remember?" She took a pair of clothespins out from the small plastic bin on her other side. "Your father liked to hide in there too when he thought he was being smart. You take right after him."

Kaito raised an eyebrow. "Tou-san hid in here?"

"Yes," she repeated. "He liked to surprise me with flowers from inside my bushes. I learned after the first few times."

"Oh."

"And don't worry, Kaito-kun, once I go out, you're free to go to Shizuoka," she added, ducking down once more. "I know I can't hold you back when you're determined."

Kaito blinked. "Determined to do what?"

His mother laughed, "Oh, never mind. You can still go, though – on the condition that you call school to tell them you're sick, bring in the washing and do the dishes. Is that alright?"

The teenage boy watched her, thoroughly stumped. His mother had never been one for breaking rules, had always made sure he went to school on time, didn't like him going off to strange places on his own (especially when it came to trips across Tokyo)... and now was allowing to do all of those things? Granted, she was making him a deal in exchange for a spot of housework, but this was extremely out of character for her. Blinking, he regarded her back as she moved away into the house again.

Just how much did actually she know about her son's relation to Kaitou KID?

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Hakuba adjusted the lenses on the binoculars he would be using tonight, peering out of the window. "I'm sorry to make you drive all this way Baaya-san. I should have saved you the trouble and used the trains," he said, looking out at the edges of the city.

"Nonsense," she replied. "It's my job after all. If I didn't do this for you I'd be out of work."

He leaned back into the leather seats. It was certain he would bump into Kuroba at least once during all of this. He'd gone against the warning and set out for the Suruga Bay, right into the danger zone. There'd be snipers flitting about on fishing boats, regular dark presences at any KID heist, and the waters of the Bay themselves weren't entirely safe, not to mention the giant spacial anomaly that was going to be above his head. And the other would know that he would go despite all of that. Of course Kuroba would want to apprehend him at some point during the heist and give him a stern talking-to or whatever it was KID did to people who went against his word.

Well, he didn't kill them. Nobody got hurt except for KID. That was the promise.

And Hakuba had just broken it by letting his curiosity lead him.

Kuroba clearly realised that Hakuba knew ('heavily suspected' was also an acceptable term) he was KID. He'd still given him the note. He didn't want him there. And according to the books of Arthur Conan Doyle, there could only be one reason behind everything, no matter how stupid it seemed, when eliminating the others. Kaitou KID didn't want Hakuba there because it was apparently a given that he'd get aimed at and killed.

Wow. Kaitou KID caring for an insignificant detective... Amazing. He'd do best to watch out before the Fan Club found out about this. It was likely they would, considering that one of their school colleagues ran the club's Ekoda High School branch. And then – well, he didn't want to picture it. They could save their perverted fantasies for the minds, thank you very much.

"Baaya-san, is it possible that a criminal can look out for a detective?" he asked.

"I suppose it could be," Baaya answered. "After all, in this day and age, anything is possible if you can find enough reasoning for it."

"Ah. I'm having trouble with Kaitou KID," the teenage detective admitted, running his hand through his fringe. "I don't understand why he sent me a warning. His heists have always been dangerous, with plenty of gun-fire and sometimes even... explosive results. He has never asked me to stay away once. I may not know as much as he does in this case, but neither do his assassins. He also has the ideal method of travel towards the anomaly while I'll be forced into a tug-boat waiting for him to appear alongside the police's official ships. He literally holds all the cards this time. Normally, this would be the time for him to start 'rubbing it in my face', yet he took the time to ask me to step aside."

"Maybe it's his intent to preserve his enemy?" his servant suggested.

"Kaitou KID is a showman. If anything, he's more likely to be preserving his audience," Hakuba groaned. He stuffed his hand unceremoniously into the door pocket and pulled out another piece of surveillance equipment: a miniature camera. "A magician can't perform if there is no-one to perform for, after all... Plus, KID might be a pompous git, but he is intelligent. There's something specific that he's targeting and if those snipers, the police and the detectives are going to stop him, then it will strike him that the best course of action would be to eliminate those threats.

"Of course," he added, "Kaitou KID does act either completely spontaneously or on plans that were drawn for every possibility."

"That would mean that either he planned for you to come," Baaya said, "or that he will somehow work around you when the time comes."

"Of course he would have worked out that I would be present, at least," Hakuba muttered. "That was what I was just thinking about."

Baaya nodded, peering into the windshield mirror to look at her charge. He was sprawled across the back, leaning on the armrest in the centre of the two seats. The binoculars had been dumped onto the opposite seat; he was currently toying with the camera while he rested his head on his free hand. For any other teenager, this might have been a regular stance in the car, but for Hakuba this was a new behaviour brought on by worrying over Kaitou KID's note. Baaya had to agree that it was something to worry about, but she reckoned that KID wanted to protect those he wanted to impress the most.

And so she voiced this concern a few moments later. "What if KID's intent is to keep his favourite audience, then?"

"I..." Hakuba closed his eyes. "Your theory is that KID would protect his critics. That's not an impossibility judging from his character, as he would want the last laugh, but I guess I have reasoned differently."

"What is it that you believe, then, bocchama?"

"That whatever he plans to do tonight, KID was hoping that I would not come because he has predicted crossfire. Invariably, if I get caught in that crossfire..." He peered out of the window at the stunning late morning sky.

"...Then it destroys everything – whatever that may be – that he's working for."

A/N: I did a lot of research as to the time it takes to get to the Suruga Bay. I eventually found the way to the Matsuzaki Spa. Hakuba will arrive in a different town on the peninsula, but Kaito's closer to the anomaly's actual position.