The streets of New York city bustled, and Hazuki Kashiwabara had to shimmy her way through the crowd to make progress along the line of shopfronts. At least that was something she was adept at: regular exercise had kept her limber and ready to take advantage of gaps, while her quickness of mind had her apprehending the flow of people and capable of anticipating the best route forward. So it didn't take her long to reach the end of that block, where something finally brought her short by catching her attention.

A fancy-looking bookstore stood out among its neighbours. Hazuki quickly decided that this was an excellent place to browse next. Perhaps she could get Ennea's and Nona's Christmas presents early? It would be a surprise if she couldn't find any books at all that would interest her daughters.

Once inside, Hazuki found that the back area of the bookstore had been given over to some sort of book promotion. A slick-looking presenter stood on a slightly raised platform, brandishing a microphone in one hand and gesturing towards a display board with the other. Another man – presumably the author – sat at a table to one side, stacks of the book in question piled in front of him. A small number of people had gathered in the open space in front, drawn in by the presenter's spiel.

Hazuki had arrived just in time to catch the end of the presenter's opening announcement. "– and the scientific basis of telepathy. This, and more, can be learned from this amazing compendium of the secrets of the universe!"

Hazuki sighed, and looked away. Once she had found such topics an amusing diversion that was fun to read about, if not actually believe; these days it hit too close to home. She turned away from the presentation and headed over to the shelves of fiction. And though the presenter's microphone caused his speech to carry across the store – "Thank you, kind volunteers! May I please have you split into two groups so we can recreate this famous experiment." – Hazuki kept herself from paying it any attention at all.

Just after finding a newly-published book by an author her daughters had enjoyed before, while she was mulling over whether it would make a good gift, the ringtone of Hazuki's phone began to emanate from her handbag. Somehow, the tones sounded even more urgent than normal. Hazuki hurriedly extracted the phone and read the name that had appeared across the screen: 'Nona'.

In an instant the phone was at her ear. "Nona?" Hazuki said, ignoring the pointed looks from the other shoppers around her. "What's going on?" Even without being allowed to know the full details, Hazuki knew that it was too soon to expect a routine call.

"Mom!" The voice on the other end of the call was breathless, hurried. "I'm not supposed to tell you this, but… You have to get out of there! I can't tell you why, but it's not safe. Something's about to happen. Please…"

Hazuki had sworn to herself that she'd always trust in what her children told. "I will," she replied. "Thank you."

The phone hung up just after. Hazuki had no idea what it had taken for Nona to steal those few moments for that call.

That just added to the urgency of the warning. Not even checking to see if she'd put the book back in the right place she headed back towards the entrance in as brisk a walk as she could manage. The path back to the door took her back through the central space, from where Hazuki could see over to the book promotion once more. There, the presenter was just finishing up the experiment he'd announced earlier.

"And so, let us see how many of you are now aware of what this pattern is. Though you had no ability to know about these images before today, that knowledge should now be available through the mysteries of the morphogenetic field." The presenter pointed at the display board on his right, with now showed an abstract looking pattern of black and white shapes. He then reached for the first of a pile of folded-up pieces of paper and flourished it in the air. "And just as expected, our volunteers now recognise this picture as a…"

The presenter opened the folded paper with a dramatic snap. He glanced at some writing written upon it; his eyes went wide.

What the presenter said next had been intended as just a whisper to himself. But the microphone carried his alarmed and confused mutterings across the entire bookstore. "Huh? That's not supposed how it's supposed to go…"

As the rumbling commotion of the spectators grew into agitated shouting, and then yells and screams, Hazuki doubled her efforts towards the exit. Was this the danger Nona had tried to warn her about? It was best to get out while she had the chance.

Hazuki stepped out of the bookstore onto the bright New York street, only to find that both ends of the block had been cordoned off. On the other side of the streams of bright yellow tape stood ranks of riot police, equipped with shields and Kevlar and batons. As blinding spotlights were directed her way, Hazuki put her hands in the air and sank to her knees.

o-0-o

She'd barely been able to keep track of the storm that followed. What Hazuki remembered: as the riot police had swarmed and surrounded her to take her into custody, yet more phalanxes of them had stormed into the bookstore she'd emerged from. In handcuffs, she'd been dragged along the pavement and into one of the canvas tents that had been erected beyond the cordons. And there she'd been left, sat on a rickety metal chair, long enough that she thought she'd been forgotten about.

It was only after what had to have been hours – Hazuki had no way to tell the time, her wristwatch having been inaccessibly stuck behind her back when her wrists were cuffed together – that something happened. Two officers – a man and a woman, dressed in military khaki – ducked their way under the flap of the tent's door and sat down on the opposite side of an equally rickety trestle table. The two of them stared Hazuki down for a while, an evidently practiced interrogation tactic, before the woman retrieved some papers from her attaché bag, placed them on the table, and opened her mouth to speak.

"Hey!" Hazuki got there first. "Get me my lawyer! I'm not saying anything until then."

The male soldier scowled, and the woman rapped her knuckles harshly against the papers in front of her. The metal table resounded with a sharp ring, one that would have been uncomfortable to the ears if the sound hadn't been dulled by the soft material of the pavilion that surrounded them. Hazuki did her best not to look intimidated.

Eventually, the woman said, "That's no longer relevant. The Special Emergency Powers Act sees to that. You need to tell us what we need to know." She paused, and Hazuki could feel the way her questioner was trying to make the implicit threats sink in. "What do you know about the incident that just occurred?"

Before Hazuki could even process that question the man jumped in as well: a staccato rhythm of interrogation that kept her off balance. "You stepped out from ground zero of what they're telling us is a category nine mind-virus. You just strolled out of there without suffering any effects at all. How do you plan to explain that?"

Then back to the woman. "None of the other civilians we picked up are in any state to ask for their lawyers. Not from in the bookstore; the ones we picked up from the sidewalks outside aren't looking good, either. All we're getting from them is wails and yelling and babbling about some fu– some fucked up nonsense. What makes you special?"

Hazuki didn't know what to say to any of that. She glared defiantly back at the level stares of her interrogators, just hoping that they wouldn't jump to the worst possible conclusions about her and knowing that nothing she said could prevent that.

Reprieve came from a blithe but commanding voice, speaking from just outside the tent. "I'll take it from here," came a statement that was just as much an inviolable order.

The woman seated opposite Hazuki sighed and shook her head, but she gathered up her papers without complaint. As her two previous interrogators stood up and filed out towards the exit, the speaker from outside raised the tent flap and strode in. The shining glint of her necklace's golden ring, sitting as it did over a practical but well-tailored beige suit, heralded Alice's arrival.

When the two of them were alone Hazuki breathed an exhausted sigh of relief. "It's good to see you," she said to the woman who'd been the first person they'd seen after escaping from that horrid death game.

Alice nodded in reply, a warm smile spreading across her lips. "I figured a softer touch would be better for all of us, not whatever those two clowns thought they were up to."

"Thanks. I appreciate it," Hazuki said. After stretching out all the tension in her shoulders – tension that she'd only just realised had been coiling up throughout her time in the emergency response pavilion – she glanced up at Alice and jingled the handcuffs that still held her wrists together behind the hard back of her chair. "Any chance of getting these off?" she asked.

"Unfortunately, no."

"What?!" Hazuki gasped. "You can't be–!"

"You're a friend," Alice said, "but that doesn't mean I can take liberties." She sighed, gesturing towards the exit of the tent and the New York streets outside: an outside world that had barely seemed to exist while Hazuki had been left to stare at plain white fabric. "Those two might have been ham-fisted, but they weren't lying. It's a nightmare out there. And across the country, too: I'm barely catching up to events in time to put out fires, not getting any chance to get ahead of this thing." She leaned over the trestle table, locking eyes with Hazuki. "I need some reassurance you're going to be safe. Not add to all our problems, even if you don't mean to."

Hazuki recalled the questions that the two soldiers had been asking her. "I-I don't know why nothing happened to me. Some sort of weird buzzing in my head, then I left the store and that was it!" She forced herself to concentrate, digging up every last detail she could have subconsciously picked up along the way. "Maybe I've seen… whatever-it-was... before?" Would that have made her resistant, by inoculation?

Alice shook her head, sternly. "That's not it. This was a book announcement by a world famous parascience advocate. Half the crowd in there had to be familiar with the Sheldrake experiment."

But something was making Hazuki even more certain. "No…" she murmured. "I think I've seen all of it before. Including that bit extra, at the end, that made it happen." Though what that extra was, and where Hazuki had seen it before, she couldn't quite recall.

Alice pursed her lips tight. But, eventually, she nodded. "It's worth looking into," she said.

From there it was only a few bureaucratic hurdles before Alice arranged for Hazuki's release, though it felt to her like an hour. When Alice knelt down behind Hazuki's chair to finally uncuff her wrists she whispered into her ear.

"Thanks for this. I'll make sure to overlook what Ennea did to give Nona that distraction. For a friend."