A Brother and Sister Meet
"What we can do right now is get Kir conscious again as soon as possible. Once she wakes, she can give us more leads on the Organization." Akai Shuichi walked to the door of the hospital room as he spoke and slid it open, his voice low as he gazed at Kir lying quietly on the bed.
Judy and James followed him inside at the sound of the opening door, gathering at the bedside to look down at Kir's unconscious form. James furrowed his brow, a note of worry creeping into his voice. "Kir may be out of danger now, but her consciousness still hasn't returned. There's no telling when she'll come to."
"Looks like all we can do is wait for her to wake up." Judy glanced over at her superior. "I wonder if that director of theirs might have some way of rousing her?"
James sighed. "He's done everything he can. He told me that for now, all we can do is wait for Kir to wake on her own — there's not much anyone else can do to help..."
Then something seemed to occur to him, and he paused before continuing. "Although... he did mention to me a while back that a physician their hospital went to considerable lengths to recruit will be joining Haido Central Hospital soon. According to him, that doctor's skill is truly exceptional — he once succeeded in waking a patient who had been in a coma for years."
James turned his gaze to the wound on Kir's head. "If Kir stays unconscious for a long stretch, perhaps we could arrange to have that doctor take a look at her later on."
"Mm. That's all we can do," Akai said.
"Still, if Kir stays away from the station for too long, the TV network is bound to start asking questions, no?" James sounded puzzled.
At that, Judy stepped around him and walked to the window beside the bed, drawing back the curtain. There, just outside and a little below, was Conan, speaking into a voice changer and impersonating Mizuna Rena to request her leave of absence. Judy smiled faintly. "It's fine. That boy will handle it all neatly for us."
Akai and James followed her to the window and watched Conan at work below. Akai's eyes grew deep and searching as he studied the child who was no ordinary child. That little boy again. Just who is he?
"Some kind of detective, I'd say. And the girls around him are quite capable in a fight, from what I've seen." Judy thought of Mouri Ran and Xia Yu at Conan's side, and shot Shuichi a sidelong glance, the corner of her mouth curling.
"So I've noticed." Akai, too, remembered their brief clash on the bus not long ago.
Aside from the Organization's own people — and that mysterious syndicate that had surfaced lately — he had rarely come across girls with skills that sharp.
"Ah, that boy. He really is clever — practically a Holmes, isn't he?" James nodded in agreement, recalling the incident he'd stumbled into when he'd once crossed paths with Conan and the other children. "Even the protection detail for Mouri Kogoro and his family took a few pointers from him."
A café.
"So the rare occasion you finally come to see me, and it's to ask about something this trivial? Big. Brother?" Xia Yu ground out those last two words one syllable at a time, bristling with menace.
"Ahem — of course not." Cointreau waved his hands hurriedly, visibly flustered, and rushed to deny her guess. His instincts told him that if he actually admitted it, his prospects would turn rather grim.
Besides, it wasn't a trivial matter at all, he silently protested.
Before his little sister's temper could climb any higher, Cointreau quickly relayed the information he'd gotten from Vermouth, pretending that this was the real reason he'd come looking for Xia Yu — and that his concern over the love letter she'd received was merely incidental.
The man standing before Xia Yu now — her older brother, Sora (henceforth his name will simply be written as Sora whenever he's with Xia Yu, for the sake of readability) — was still wearing Morikawa Shiro's disguise.
The two of them sat in a corner booth deep inside the café, surrounded on all sides by potted greenery. Unless one looked closely, their figures were all but invisible.
"And anyway, I'm worried about you. You're still young — you don't understand just how slippery the male of the species can be." Sora lowered his voice slightly, his tone gentle, his eyes brimming with concern as he looked at Xia Yu, as if the sister across the table had already been deceived by some scoundrel.
Xia Yu's mouth twitched. "...Setting aside the fact that you're a man yourself — you're insulting your own kind here — it's just a letter. I don't even know who sent it. Why are you getting so worked up?"
She couldn't understand why her brother was so invested in a letter from a complete stranger. Still, she had taken careful note of the intelligence he'd just shared, intending to pass it along to Ningguang afterward so she could prepare in advance.
Curaçao especially. According to the files, she possessed the ability of instantaneous short-term memory — which meant Ningguang and the others would have to be extremely careful when making contact with her never to let her see anything she wasn't meant to see.
"Oh, so you don't know who it is. Good." Sora let out a breath of relief, though he couldn't quite relax completely. If Xia Yu ever did learn the sender's identity, it was entirely possible she'd start taking the matter seriously.
"So what exactly did the letter say? Did it ask you for a reply?"
Just then, the waiter arrived with their desserts. Their tastes ran similar, and both had ordered tiramisu.
The moment the food she'd been craving landed on the table, Xia Yu's eyes lit up, and whatever attention she had — meager to begin with — for the love letter evaporated entirely.
When Sora's question reached her, she merely cast her mind back between bites of tiramisu.
Then something surfaced in her memory, and she swallowed her mouthful of dessert with a slight frown.
"What is it? Did he write something in that letter that upset you?" Seeing her reaction, Sora set down his spoon and asked with concern.
"No, nothing like that. It's just... the things he wrote were a little sappy, and there were grammatical slip-ups here and there. It read rather... awkward." Xia Yu thought for a moment before landing on a word to describe how the letter had struck her the first time she read it.
That was precisely why — that faint sense of oddness on her first read-through — she hadn't given the letter a second thought.
But while she hadn't taken it seriously, she'd never imagined that Sora of all people would be this preoccupied with it — or that this brother of hers, missing for so long, would finally reappear in front of her because of it.
"Oh, and one more thing — the letter asked me to meet him tomorrow at the restaurant on the second floor of the Beika Hotel. He said there were things he wanted to tell me in person."
"You can't seriously be planning to go." Sora's expression darkened at once.
"That is the plan." Xia Yu polished off her dessert, then looked up at her brother and finally registered the reluctance written across his face. All she could do was offer a few words of comfort. "Come on, things like this are better settled face to face, don't you think?"
"I suppose that would be for the best," Sora muttered under his breath.
Having passed on the key information, Sora didn't linger on the subject any further.
He had already made up his mind, after all: tomorrow he would find the time to come to Beika himself, and see with his own eyes exactly who this man was — the one who dared send love letters to Xia Yu, the one with designs on her.