There was a tapping on the two-way glass behind me, and I turned to see Mia, peering in as if she could see through the mirror. Who knew? Maybe she could."Phoenix? Phoenix, you can hear me, right? Please come in."

I scrabbled for the microphone button. "Okay, Mia. Let me find Meekins so we don't get locked in."

It only took a moment to find him (cowering outside the door), and by the time I stepped into the interrogation room, both of its occupants had themselves under control. Armando was standing aside, arms crossed, once more coolly masked; Mia came over to me.

"Good-bye, Phoenix," she said softly. I swallowed: the thought had fled my mind that this was probably the last time I would ever see her.

I forced myself to forget that for a moment: after all, it had been this way for a long time now, hadn't it? "Good-bye, Mia. Thank you… God, I can't thank you enough. For everything you've ever done." I cleared my throat, barely even embarrassed that tears were starting in my eyes, and smiled at her. "I'll miss you."

She smiled back: I knew she wouldn't miss me, because where she was going, she wouldn't have to. "Take care, Phoenix. Give my love to Maya."

And without another word, Mia was gone. Unfortunately, she hadn't sat down.

I tried to catch Maya as she slumped against me, but naturally she had fallen against my immobilized left arm. Half a second before I was certain she would hit the floor, another pair of hands caught her, cradling her.

I looked up at Armando; we'd never stood this close before, and I could actually see his eyes behind the lights in the mask, oddly pale and fixed on me. I slowly took my hand out from under Maya's arm, and when she looked up, it was into his face instead of mine: our eyes were still locked.

"Mr. Armando…?" she said, not weakly, but somewhat uncertainly. Disengaging herself, she stood upright, automatically moving closer to me. Then she looked at my face; and back to his. "So… are things okay now?"

We were silent, still so close together that our colognes were swapping addresses. Nothing had changed for me, and I remained silent, daring him to say otherwise.

Finally Armando looked away from me, and to her; the changing angle of his face once more obscuring his eyes. "Yes, Maya," he said, voice less deep and sure than usual. But abruptly he grinned: Maya visibly relaxed, pulling Mia's too-big clothes around her and snuggling into the crook of my elbow.

He added, "Yes. I think we'll be all right now."

Less than twenty-four hours later, I was seriously doubting the merit of that statement.

"Mr. Phoenix Wright," she said softly, her silky young voice carrying only the hint of a threat, "what are you trying to pull?"

I swallowed for a moment as her fingers tightened with an audible squeak of well-oiled leather that reached all the way across the courtroom.

Then my indignity got the better of me. "I believe I am merely pursuing justice down a less-trod avenue, Ms. von Karma." I took a deep breath and added, "Certainly you read the defense's pleading. I am establishing my client's innocence through application of precedent to existing statues."

"Whew," Maya said beside me, and whistled appreciatively. "That sounded really smart, Nick!"

Franziska glared at me. The hush over the courtroom was that of a gladiatorial arena. The spectators were expecting violence, and anything leading up to it was just suspense. "It's not just me trying to be smart, Maya," I said to her under my breath, grimacing. "It's how the law used to work, back before the judging process was cut down to three days. Cases were sometimes judged by how other cases turned out."

"Regardless," said Franziska, more loudly now, "I do not accept this." She walked up to the judge's bench and, as he cowered back a bit, plopped my memorandum down on the bar. I'd wanted to write such a long treatise on manslaughter that the paper would land with a thunk, but for the judge's sake had cut it down to three concise pages.

The judge himself opened his mouth momentarily, ostensibly to protest that he already had a copy of the brief, but Franziska cut him off. She snapped, "This is a flagrant waste of the court's time, and its points are... they lack... the whole thing is a foolish waste of a fool's foolish effort!"

There. I'd gotten to her.

As she crossed back to the prosecution's bench, I could see the fury in that delicate little face, the tendons of her arms standing tight against the cloth of her sleeves. I knew Franziska had studied American law extensively, and with a father and master who had practiced forty years in the courtroom, she surely knew just how weighty the decisions of previous trials had once been.

Armando had told me about the sudden change just after he had come to work for Mr. Grossberg: how abruptly, no lawyer worth his salt was supposed to care about anything but statutes enacted by the government, as distinguished from common law, the laws established by the courts themselves.

"Totally crippling," he had said last night, shaking his head. "Law schools taught us to read cases and argue them. But now every criminal case I'd ever memorized… didn't matter." Then he'd grinned. "You know, that's what makes great prosecutors, Wright. And I'm not talking about me. Anyone who's had to learn case law can argue their ass off. Prosecutors they train nowadays are obsessed with the rules… and more often, how they can bend them."

I had been up all night long, researching printed cases that hadn't shown their face in libraries for years, and had been erased from electronic record before I ever took the bar exam. Armando hadn't been able to sit next to me and find the cases, though he had amusedly suggested more than a few that could support an argument against conviction for murder in the first degree.

It had been Edgeworth who really helped me, having had experience with this kind of research in his training under von Karma: in fact, it was only due to his aid that I could be assured Franziska knew even more about this subject than I did. Armando was right: she and Edgeworth were fantastic prosecutors, because they knew what logical argument to use to convince the judge.

The difference was, she hadn't prepared anything to fight precedent, and her expression as she glared at me was priceless. If the judge decided to let me argue this avenue, she would lose.

All this passed through my head in the blink of an eye, as the judge quailed before making a decision. He knew I was right, too. My evidence was not only convincing, but at one point it would have been mandatory authority over his courtroom. The California Supreme Court—which no longer existed, but at one time had decided all the cases in my brief—would overshadow anything but a federal statute on murder and manslaughter. And, as I'd made sure to check, that didn't exist.

"I don't think I've ever seen the courtroom this quiet," whispered Maya nervously. I noticed she was holding hands with my defendant, and my stomach lurched a little. I had seen the court this quiet: but it had been a particular assassin's testimony, during the admission of not only a murder but a kidnapping.

I cleared my throat, addressing Franziska once more. "And besides that, Ms. von Karma, I have studied the Model Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Liability for the State of California… and am prepared to argue a plea of justified protection of a third party."

Maya was gaping at me again. Okay, now I did feel a little like smirking. It wasn't often that I was this prepared for cases—in this instance, it was because I'd had expansive amounts of time to look at the rules before I'd ever come to court, rather than twenty-four hours. It was the first time in my career that I hadn't put forth a plea of "not guilty,"

With less dignity, Franziska's expression would have borne a distinct resemblance to Maya's angry blowfish glare. Her nostrils were dilated, her cheeks white with a tiny spot of pink. In a movement so quick I barely saw it, she flicked out the whip; I cried out and grabbed my face in pain. It never got old for her, did it?

"Foolishly— foolish— fool's— fool!" she thundered in that cute little soprano voice, using the whip in time to her words (and with increasingly terrifying accuracy) to actually shred the papers sitting in front of me.

"Ms. von Karm-aahhhhh!" The judge, in the midst of disgustedly remonstrating Franziska, caught the tip of her whip as well, and vanished beneath his bench. My eyes watering, I glanced up at the empty bench, wondering why he'd bothered. Stopping a raging von Karma was like putting traffic cones in front of a bullet train.

At least Franziska hadn't gotten to the point of whipping me unconscious again: she reeled in the whip, tugging it between her hands in an attempt to calm herself. Taking a deep breath, a few more muttered "fools" escaped before she managed to understandably declare, "You may not argue any such thing in my court, Mr. Phoenix Wright! We are debating the points of murder, of which your client is guilty!"

I glared across the courtroom at those blue-grey eyes: I didn't care if the judge supported a shred of my argument, but I wasn't about to let Franziska tell me what I was or wasn't allowed to argue as a lawyer. "Maybe so, and you can whip me silly for being informed, Ms. von Karma, but under the laws of this country, the law of protection of a third party is clear-cut and has been used to justify not just one or two cases of second-degree murder but scores of them! My client may have killed someone but he does not belong on Death Row for it!"

Franziska glared right back at me, teeth gritted and hands twisting the whip into knots. There was really no way for her to legitimately argue, and she knew it.

"Ahh..." The judge peeked from beneath his bench. "Mr. Wright m-may have a point. C-can we just present the cases, and then I'll decide?"

"Arrrrrrgh!" Franziska screamed, and I hastily put an arm up to defend myself.

The first crack of the whip missed me entirely, striking Maya's sleeve. She shrieked: and before I knew it, my defendant leapt out of the dock and dove in front of us, catching the next strike in his hand.

There was a gasp from the spectators, then utter silence. Franziska gaped, panicked into wordlessness. "You can beat your opponent into a puddle for all I care, but don't touch Maya Fey, Lady von Whippingberg," said Armando quietly: the whip was tangled, almost imbedded, around his hand, and the muscles under his shirt bunched as he yanked it from Franziska's grip.

The bailiff was paused halfway across the room, obviously unsure what to do. Armando tossed the whip to the judge, its tip bloody from his lacerated palm, and calmly made his way back to the dock. As he vaulted the rail and resumed his seat, silence reigned again.

The judge looked back and forth from me to Franziska, back to me and again to Armando, coolly ignoring everyone. Then, hesitantly, the judge clambered up from under the desk. "Er... are there any opening statements, or should we begin with witnesses?"

"That... was too cool," Maya whispered, with a huge, shaken grin.