Shotaro's first idea was to see if throwing enough keywords at Philip could get him to spit out Eiji's current location. "It's perfectly reasonable," he said in response to Philip's dubious expression. "You do this sort of thing all the time."

"I do this sort of thing in this city all the time," Philip said, but he tried anyway. Shotaro fed him keywords and the last known GPS coordinates for Eiji's phone, and waited for Philip to sort through the data. "I have an answer that has 78% certainty," Philip said finally. "But you're not going to like it."

It was Shotaro's turn to frown. "Because it's only 78%?"

"No," Philip said. "Because Eiji's most likely current location is the Sea of Japan."

"On a boat?" Shotaro hazarded, but he didn't need Philip's minute headshake to tell him that wasn't the correct guess. "Oh," he said. If that were the case, there was very little chance that what was left of Eiji would ever be found, even if it washed up on a beach somewhere. "No."

"No?" Philip said.

"No," Shotaro repeated. "I have a gut feeling."

"Right," Philip said, expression going blank again. "There are too many variables to gauge any other potential result with any sort of certainty."

"It was worth a shot," Shotaro said, and then his phone rang. Satonaka was punctual to the second, it appeared, and resigned when he told her that the possibility that they'd be able to solve the case with a simple data analysis wasn't viable after all.

"If that were possible, we'd know where he was," she said.

"One question," Shotaro said, and asked her whether anyone had known that Eiji was returning to Japan the previous March.

"Miss Izumi headed up a welcoming committee at the airport," Satonaka said.

"But you missed him," Shotaro hazarded, guessing that Satonaka had been part of the group.

"He evaded us," she said flatly.

"Evaded." Shotaro tapped his desk. "Can I verify some information with you?"

"All of the information in the file is correct, Mr. Hidari." Satonaka hung up before Shotaro could tell her what data he wanted verified.

"Cold doesn't even begin to cover it," he muttered. The file the Kougami Foundation had sent over held a not insignificant amount of data. Shotaro looked at the screen of the office laptop and set the file to printing. There was no way he could visualize a proper pattern if all he could see was what was currently on the screen, and he had the sneaking suspicion that there was something useful hidden in the mound of information, beyond the most recent data.

Although, Shotaro thought, there was something to be said for the most recent data. He scrolled through the file until he found the information he wanted; Satonaka had located the second most recent phone on the date of Eiji's most recent report via GPS. As far as Shotaro could tell, Eiji sent reports mid-month, at which point Satonaka made a note of where the report had come from.

"Hammerfest, Norway," Shotaro read from the file. "April 15th." Eiji had apparently gotten a new phone at that point; the file noted no contact for the following two weeks and Satonaka had pinged the GPS again. It had moved to Lake Baikal in the interim, although there was no information for how quickly it night have gotten there. "What were you doing in Russia, Eiji?" The next note on the file was that a GPS ping the following week had turned up nothing. "Philip!"

"Now what?" Shotaro couldn't tell if Philip was irritated or not.

"If I give you a phone number, can you tell me where the phone went on certain dates?"

"Probably," Philip said after a brief pause. "If you want Hino's phone, I can tell you right now where its last known location was."

"Wait," Shotaro said. In the back of the office was a huge world map; Akiko had bought it shortly after Philip had returned from his year away. She'd had some sort of project involving Philip, the map, and darts, but she hadn't touched it in months. Shotaro found Hammerfest on the map and stuck a pin with the date of Eiji's report in it, followed by a pin with the date of Satonaka's successful GPS ping. He opened his mouth to call Philip, closed it again, and added the year to both dates. "Okay, where was it on May 7th?"

According to Philip, the phone had been in the general vicinity of the world's largest freshwater lake for several days before it had moved slowly across the Russian mainland toward the eastern coast. It had been on or near said cost on May 12th, the day before Satonaka had tried to ping it again. There was no further information.

"What the hell," Shotaro said. "Philip, you have access to this file, right?"

"If you're asking whether I can search it via keyword, the answer is yes," Philip said. "What do you want to know?"

"Are there any periods of time during which Hino was out of touch with the Foundation?" He could practically hear Philip blinking. "Besides the last month," Shotaro amended.

"He went radio silent for the last two weeks of March," Philip said after a moment.

"Any other times?"

"Three weeks in November of 2012, all of August and September, same year, and two weeks in January, also 2012," Philip said slowly.

"Dammit." Shotaro crossed his arms and stared at the pins in the map. "Then it's a pattern," he said in response to Philip's unasked question. "It's harder to get him declared a missing person, if this behavior is consistent with a previous pattern." He tapped his toes a few times. "Has he missed a report before? There's a note in there somewhere about the report for this month being late."

Philip answered almost immediately. "Negative. Every month, without fail, on the 15th, he sent something. Even if he'd sent information the previous day."

"Ha," Shotaro said. "There's the abnormal behavior."

Attempting to get Eiji declared a missing person was a headache all on its own; Shotaro contacted Izumi as his most likely shot at getting what he needed done. Izumi, for his part, was as accommodating as he could be, but apparently did not feel that fellow Kamen Rider was appropriate for Shotaro's relationship to Eiji on official police paperwork.

"Has anyone tried asking his parents?" Izumi asked, after several frustrating minutes.

"They're still alive?" Shotaro sat up straight, knocking his hat right off his desk.

"You didn't know?" Shotaro could all but hear Izumi dragging a hand over his face. "It's not outside the realm of possibility that they just – dragged him home, like last time."

"Like last time." Shotaro felt he was spending far too much time repeating the statements of everyone else who knew Eiji.

"You didn't know," Izumi repeated, this time without the question. "Okay." He paused for long enough that Shotaro started to open his mouth to ask a question. "Okay," he said again. "I'm going to contact Eiji's parents; I'll forward their information to you, just in case, but I think it would go better if they received an inquiry in an official capacity that does not imply that their son is missing. I'll get things kick-started on the Russian side, see if he's anywhere near where the phone was."

"Understood." Shotaro retrieved his hat from the floor and twirled it around one finger. "I'll keep working on this end," he said, although an official investigation would technically have to be carried out by the Russian authorities and neither he nor Izumi had any real part in that.

"Good luck," Izumi said seriously; he had just about as much faith in the Russian police as Shotaro did.

Eiji's file had finished printing; unfortunately, the temperamental machine had simply dumped each sheet onto the floor. Shotaro gathered it up, depositing the pile on the desk. Some of it was the information Eiji had gathered while doing whatever it was he'd been doing while working for the Foundation; Shotaro set those sheets aside as he found them. There were bank statements as well – apparently Eiji had been paid through a company account, which circumvented the strict laws against accessing someone else's financial or ATM information.

"Handy to be working for a company that owns stock in banks all over the world," Shotaro muttered. Most of the statements were half in an impressive variety of foreign languages and half in stilted or outright incorrect Japanese.

The rest of the file consisted of a mishmash of plane tickets, the cover sheets for each of Eiji's reports – or lack thereof – plus Satonaka's notes on where he'd been when he sent them, and stacks of emails requesting either travel arrangements or meetings. By the time Shotaro had them in some semblance of order, his eyes were burning and the light outside was dimming. Philip stood in front of him with a cup of what smelled like coffee.

"Have you moved more than two feet since the last time I saw you?" Philip asked.

"I – yes," Shotaro lied, stretching and taking the coffee.

"This is usually my part of the job," Philip said, as Shotaro gratefully sipped at the hot liquid. "And I think you need a bigger map."

"I think I need a bigger map," Shotaro said. "I think we might have to go past the raw data on this one," he added, not because he thought Philip's ego needed soothing, but because a lot of the information wasn't adding up.

"I might have one downstairs," Philip said.

"Of course you do." Sometimes Shotaro found it prudent to just not ask where Philip got some of the toys he casually just so happened to have on hand; for all he knew, they were stable projections of data, much like Philip himself.

"It can wait until tomorrow," Philip added, when Shotaro moved toward the nearest messy stack of paper. "A few more hours probably won't make any difference."

That he was trying to be sympathetic was a world of difference from the Philip Shotaro had first met; he'd grown and changed over the intervening years, and it was this display of empathy that led to Shotaro abruptly hugging him tightly.

"He, uh, Hino might not be," Philip started, missing the point entirely, which was exactly what Shotaro would have expected.

Shotaro barked out a short laugh, though he had to admit that Philip was right on both counts. He shook his head at Philip's quizzical glance. There were some things he just couldn't teach.

The following morning yielded no information from Izumi, but Shotaro did succeed in migrating the ridiculous stack of printouts from the front office to Philip's lair in the basement. There was indeed a large map opposite Philip's wall of whiteboards, tacked onto an actual corkboard, complete with several boxes of multi-colored pins.

"You want to make one of those conspiracy theory walls, don't tell me you don't," Philip said when Shotaro reached for one of the boxes of pins.

It wasn't like he was wrong. Shotaro moved his labeled pins from the map upstairs, connecting them with red thread. Philip raised an eyebrow. "So I can see where he went," Shotaro said, and started working in reverse chronological order. If the official Russian investigation didn't find Eiji, and the official Japanese investigation didn't find Eiji, Shotaro might be able to guess where he'd gone from the coast of Russia based on a reconstruction of what he'd been doing.

"If I'd known you were such a goddamn ghost," Shotaro said, far too much time later, "I wouldn't have started doing this at all. No. I would have told Kougami Kousei to take his job offer to someone with a snowball's chance in hell of actually finding you. Someone psychic."

Eiji had somehow gotten from the extreme norther part of Norway to the extreme south of Russia; how he'd done it wasn't important, but the three weeks in between were a total blank. There was a slip of paper on the string denoting the time frame, because otherwise it was going to drive Shotaro slowly insane.

"Do you even speak Norwegian?" Shotaro jabbed another pin in the map. Before sending the report from Hammerfest, Eiji had been radio silent for nearly a week, but he'd apparently spent the entire first week of April in the city of Tromso before making a substantial withdrawal from the Foundation account and migrating farther north. He hadn't so much as accessed the account in Hammerfest, or when he'd presumably crossed into Russia. "What were you even doing there?"

"Buying coffee," Philip said from behind Shotaro, looking over his shoulder at the list of transactions. "Going to a museum. Buying more coffee. And shoes. Renting a bicycle."

"That was a rhetorical question, and since when do you speak Norwegian?" Shotaro eyed Philip and drank his own coffee.

Philip gave him a blank look. "I shouldn't speak Norwegian?"

Shotaro rolled his eyes and turned back to the map. "He asked to speak to these three people." He showed the names to Philip, not even bothering to try to pronounce them. "What do they do?"

"Biotechnology, broadly," Philip said after a moment. "All three of them are associated with the University of Tromso, though their specialties are quite different." He paused, and then added, "The university has a campus in Hammerfest, which might be why he went there."

"Biotechnology?" Shotaro blinked. The mental image of Hino Eiji's brightly patterned clothing inhabiting a laboratory was disorienting, to say the least, not to mention Eiji's projected image of cheerful and flighty idiocy. He added text to the sticky note inhabiting Hammerfest, and scribbled more notes on the bank statements associated with Tromso. "I guess Kougami wasn't kidding when he said Eiji was actually working for them."

"Kougami rarely jokes," Philip said, eyes still closed and fingers flicking rapidly over imaginary pages; it was how he visualized the act of accessing and crunching the huge amounts of data he could process.

"Uh huh," Shotaro said, not really listening. He documented the gap in Eiji's communication with the Foundation, before he'd surfaced in Norway; Eiji had flown from Japan into Copenhagen, only to vanish for two weeks. Shotaro made another note and stuck another pin into the map. That had been Eiji's last trip into Japan, the one where Hina had attempted to welcome him back.

Satonaka had said evaded, Shotaro remembered, and he duly noted it although he wouldn't have predicted Eiji having deliberately missed seeing his friends and loved ones. He reached for the one sheet of paper with a date between Eiji's flight to Denmark and his first ATM withdrawal in Norway. It was email, sent from the Foundation to Eiji, which Eiji had never opened. Shotaro frowned at it. It was a brief statement, telling Eiji that the most recent report contained enough information to recreate Core Medals.

"Philip, what, exactly, is a Core Medal?" he asked. He knew they were part of Eiji's Rider transformation system, and that they could be switched out for different capabilities; in that way, they weren't that different from the Gaia Memory system that Shotaro himself used. "Besides a way to transform a Kamen Rider, I mean."

"Error," Philip said. Shotaro frowned.

"What?"

"I can't – I don't know," Philip said, and while he wasn't as distressed as he might have been at his failure to retrieve information, Shotaro could still tell that he was annoyed. "I can't get to that information. It's locked down."

"Great," Shotaro said, and sighed. "Because I can't tell if the Kougami Foundation being able to make them is good news or not, even if the tone of the message trying to tell Hino that is annoyingly upbeat."

"How important is it?" Philip asked.

"Table it for now." Shotaro stretched, cracking his elbows and shoulders. "Hino didn't know anyway." He hung the email from the string between Copenhagen and Tromso, just for reference. "Now, this is interesting."

Eiji had arrived from Beijing late on the evening of March 14th, which was in the general vicinity of when people Shotaro couldn't be bothered to list at that particular moment had all said they'd gotten their last text from him.

"Reconstituted Core Medals," Philip read. "Reconstituted?"

Shotaro hunted down the blue thread and looped it between Beijing, Tokyo, and Copenhagen. "Philip, I need a phone number."

The case Eiji had handed over during his less than twelve hours in Japan had been placed in the hands of an intern, essentially in the middle of the night. Shotaro called the extension of the department where the intern had been working; with any luck, the kid was still there.

Luck was, for once, on Shotaro's side; not only was the kid still there, the kid was answering the phones. After ascertaining that this was, in fact, the employee he was looking for, Shotaro began to ask questions.

"I, uh, I don't know how much I'm really allowed to say," Yamamoto the intern said, sounding more nervous than Shotaro felt she should be.

"I'm not asking you to divulge trade secrets," he said in what he hoped was a soothing voice. "I just want you to tell me about Hino Eiji."

"Hino?" the intern said, and started to talk.

It was late – far later than Yamamoto had wanted to be at work. She'd jumped at the chance to work at the Kougami Foundation, particularly in one of its biotech research divisions, but the work they were doing was all sorts of weird. Not only was it weird, she wasn't actually allowed to talk about it. This was just one of a number of nights where someone had to stay to keep an eye on something for specific reasons that she was not allowed to talk about.

"Go on," Shotaro said, when Yamamoto paused to apologize for being so vague.

Security gave no warning before someone Yamamoto had never seen before showed up at the door of the lab. She'd been under the impression that the building was locked at night, that there was staff on site around the clock to prevent strangers from wandering in. And yet, someone was standing at the lab, looking at her with an expression of surprise. He really wasn't the one who should have been surprised, Yamamoto found herself thinking.

" Uh," said the intruder, and looked around the lab. "Are you the only one here?"

"Of course not," Yamamoto said.

"But you're supposed to be here, or you wouldn't be here," the stranger said, not quite looking at her. Since he wasn't really acting threatening, Yamamoto had time to notice a few more details. He was dressed oddly, in loose dark pants and mismatched boots. The laces on one boot had clearly broken and been knotted together at some point, while the laces on the other were an incongruous fluorescent orange. Despite the relative chill of the air, he wasn't wearing a jacket, just an oversized shirt over a gray t-shirt. His hair looked as though he'd slept on it and then ignored it entirely, and he was carrying a stick with a brightly patterned piece of cloth hanging off the top end. Except for the orange shoelace, the cloth on the stick was the only thing he had that had any color to it at all.

"I'm sorry," she said, trying to aim for somewhere between polite and authoritative and reaching behind her for the silent alarm. The lab was supposed to be more secure than the rest of the building, requiring biometric data to access; either the stranger was part of the research team and she just hadn't met him or he was really good at getting into locked places, but Yamamoto didn't want to take chances. "Who are you?"

"Hino," the stranger said. "Just Hino." He glanced down at a box in his hands; it was dull silver, and locked with a combination. "This is for Kougami," he said, holding out the box. Yamamoto noticed that Hino didn't add any sort of title or honorific to the CEO's name. She blinked, looking from Hino's face to the box and back again.

"What is it?" she asked, because she knew better than to accept strange packages from people she didn't know.

"Just take it," Hino said, shaking the box slightly.

Yamamoto's phone chose that moment to chime a message; its distinctive tone said it was work-related. She ignored it, but it chimed a second time, and then a third. "Excuse me," she said, taking her hand away from the silent alarm that she had not yet managed to reach, and pulled her phone out of her pocket. There were three messages from CEO Kougami, who would on occasion send personal messages to his employees, but had never sent one, let alone three, to Yamamoto. She opened the first one, then the second, then the third, all of which told her that if someone calling himself Hino Eiji showed up with a package, she was to take it.

"I'm so sorry to ask," she said, looking back at Hino, "but what's your given name?"

He blinked and tilted his head a little sideways, as if he hadn't understood the question, and then flicked his eyes sideways at nothing before answering. "Eiji," he said finally. "My full name is Hino Eiji."

"Ah," she said. "Then I am authorized to accept the package."

Despite his insistence that she take the box, Yamamoto had to tug on it to get it out of Hino's hand. He stared at his hand for a moment after she had stepped backwards with the box, flexing his fingers as though they were stiff or numb or both. "Thank you, Ms. Yamamoto," he said, although she hadn't introduced herself. It took her a moment to realize that he'd read her name badge, prominently clipped to her shirt. "Excuse me."

He was out the door before she could put the box down or ask him any questions, and it wasn't until the door had almost slid shut behind him that she could see just what the cloth he had strung up on a stick actually was; it wasn't a flag, it was a pair of underwear.

"Of course it was," Shotaro murmured. Eiji had been carrying his underwear-for-tomorrow around on a stick the last time Shotaro had seen him, as well, rather than in his pocket. "How did he get that thing on a plane?"

Out of sheer morbid curiosity, Shotaro called the airport to see if Eiji had actually been on his scheduled flight to Copenhagen – there had been no activity in the city to indicate that he'd arrived – only to find that Eiji had left a significant impression on the gate agent. He had expected to have to wait while the agent first determined whether or not information should be given out and then searched through records, but once Shotaro had been connected to the airline employee who'd been on duty the morning of Eiji's flight out, the man was only too happy to talk.

"He was crazy," the gate agent said.

"Could you elaborate?"

The gate agent hadn't wanted to check Eiji's staff as luggage, which wasn't entirely unreasonable in and of itself; it hardly constituted standard traveling equipment. Eiji had insisted. Not feeling that violence was in Eiji's nature, Shotaro pressed for further details.

"He wasn't rude," the gate agent said. "But something there wasn't right. If he'd been coming into the country instead of leaving, I would have called security. But he got on the plane, staff and all."

Shotaro forbore from pointing out that the man wouldn't have been interacting with an arriving passenger, or that if he'd really felt Eiji was a danger to someone, he wouldn't have allowed him to board a flight full of vulnerable people, and hung up the phone.

"So he arrives, drops off a box of 'reconstituted Core medals' along with his monthly report on a thumb drive, and goes right back to the airport." Philip was leaning against Shotaro's back as he spoke, a warm and comforting weight.

"Looks like."

"And then he goes to talk to people in Norway about biotechnology." Philip reached out to touch the pin stuck in Tromso with one graceful index finger.

"Right." Shotaro looked back down at his stacks of paper. "I'm beginning to think this may not be helpful after all."

"Instead of starting at the end," Philip said, "why don't you start at the beginning?"