Saoirse woke up on the floor of the Gumshoe Office, wrapped in a tablecloth that smelled faintly of beer and worse things, with Gerald the dust bunny resting peacefully on her forehead like a tiny gray crown.
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"...Why am I on the floor...?" she asked, to the ceiling.
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"You insisted the floor was safer than the couch," Kraus said from his desk, not looking up. "You said the couch was 'plottin' against you.'"
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"...The couch was totally plottin'."
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Roby was already up, disgustingly cheerful, eating a bowl of cereal dry with his fingers because nobody had gotten around to buying milk and because he'd always eaten it that way. Yuhuan sat across from him with both hands wrapped around a mug of tea he hadn't sipped yet, staring at a spot on the table as if it owed him an explanation. Mori sat next to him, half-dressed in yesterday's coat, the tin Gumshoe badge still pinned crooked from the night before.
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Oliver came in last, holding the door for Angelika, who swept past him in a fresh lolita dress like the previous night hadn't happened.
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"Morning," Oliver said, far too loud for the room. "What's with the sour faces?"
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Yuhuan set his mug down.
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"I ran into Qiang last night," he said. "Outside."
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Roby stopped chewing. "Qiang? Like, our Qiang?? Unit C Qiang???"
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"That Qiang." Yuhuan's hands went flat on the table. "He came to tell me something Haddler found out. About why we were all fired."
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The room went quiet, the kind where everybody stops moving so they can hear better.
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"Vance wanted a Fixer with a strong ARCH contract to get the Eye of Argus," Yuhuan said. "So much so that he ran Mori and a few of his friends he made through Adjunct-13 to get one. Now that he's gotten what he needed out of Mori, he doesn't need any of us around anymore."
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"What he needed," Mori repeated. "I don't get it."
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"He thinks your contract with Gun is too similar to something else," Yuhuan said. "Somebody called the Death Spinner. Qiang said Vance isn't sure he can hold your leash if you keep getting stronger."
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"My leash," Mori said, flat.
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"His words. Not mine. I think Antollio might have only allowed us to join the Argus Directorates with you because he knew we would trigger some kind of emotional stimulus in you, which we did, helping you get Schmeisser's Scarf. And from the story you told us all in the hospital, I'm sure the scarf proved itself useful in your fight against Alighieri."
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Saoirse sat up straight enough to dislodge Gerald, who tumbled off her forehead and landed in Arnold's mouth with a small, resigned squeak.
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"So we got kicked out," Saoirse said, "'cause some scary Death guy exists, and Mori might turn into him?"
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"That's not what I said," Yuhuan said.
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"IT'S WHAT I HEARD!"
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"...She's not wrong," Stuffy said. "...That is more or less what happened..."
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Kraus set his tea down with the exaggerated care of a man protecting himself from a headache he could already feel coming. "So Vance is comparing Mori to some legendary killer nobody's ever heard of? Sounds like this Haddler guy was just making up an excuse."
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"I've heard of him," Angelika said.
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Everybody turned to look at her.
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"Not well," she said. "I've heard his name from a few rumors." She was already crossing to the cabinet in the back corner, the one that never fully closed. "Give me the morning. I'll have more than rumors by lunch."
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The morning turned into most of the afternoon.
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Angelika worked from her own desk, glasses pushed low, flipping through three years of back files with the patient, mechanical speed of someone who'd clearly done this before. Kraus pulled a second stack from a locked drawer nobody else had a key to, muttering under his breath every time a page came apart at the fold. Oliver sat on the edge of his own desk, tossing a rubber ball against the wall and catching it, which he claimed helped him think and which everyone else quietly agreed was just annoying.
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Saoirse helped.
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This meant, over the course of two hours, she reorganized an entire filing cabinet by color instead of case number, held one photograph up to the light and declared the man in it "shifty," interrogated a second photograph directly ("WHERE WERE YOU ON THE NIGHT IN QUESTION?!"), and got Stuffy and Arnold into a heated disagreement over whether a coffee stain on page forty was evidence or just a coffee stain.
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"It is a coffee stain," Stuffy said. "...It has always been a coffee stain..."
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"IT COULD BE BLOOD, STUFFY! HAVE SOME IMAGINATION!"
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"...I would prefer not to..."
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Kraus, three desks away, put his head down against the wood and did not lift it back up for a solid ten seconds.
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Roby had given up trying to help entirely and instead lay across the couch with his boots hanging off the armrest, tossing his tin top up and catching it without looking. Mori sat near him, turning the peeled-off label from last night's beer bottle over between his fingers, though he couldn't have said why he'd kept it. Yuhuan stood by the window, arms crossed, watching the street below like Qiang might still be standing on it.
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"You've been quiet," Mori said, without looking over.
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"So have you."
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"Yeah." Mori turned the label over again. "Guess we both got somethin' stuck in our heads."
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Yuhuan almost said something. He let it go instead.
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"A week ago," Yuhuan said, after a while, "our biggest problem was an elevator that wouldn't stop looping."
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"Yeah."
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"Now we're an unlicensed detective agency hunting a criminal."
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Mori looked down at the label in his hands, worn soft at the corners from how long he'd been fidgeting with it.
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"Yeah," he said again. "I know," he agreed.
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Neither of them said anything else. It didn't need saying twice.
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It was Oliver, around three in the afternoon, who finally put the ball down.
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"Wait," Oliver said, sitting up straight, flipping back two pages in the stack Angelika had handed him an hour ago. "Wait, wait, wait."
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"What?" Kraus asked, without hope.
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"This name. 'The Death Spinner.'" Oliver tapped the page. "I know that name. Not from a case file. From a bar."
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Everyone looked at him.
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"There's a place in the 8th," Oliver said, "underground. It's a club that doesn't have a sign out front 'cause everybody who's supposed to find it already knows where it is. A year back, a snitch of mine swore up and down he'd seen an Elegy called the Death Spinner drinking there like it was nothing. I never believed him. Figured he was drunk, or lying, or both."
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"And now?" Yuhuan asked.
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Oliver held up the page. Angelika's neat handwriting filled the margin: three separate, unconnected incident reports, each mentioning a man with no clear description, each traced back to streets within two blocks of the same club.
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"Now I think my snitch wasn't lying," Oliver said.
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Mori sat up.
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"Then that's where we start," he said.
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"That's where you get yourselves killed," Kraus said, not unkindly, already reaching for his tea as if it might steady him. "That's a bounty of five hundred forty million Nanum sitting in a bar. You walk in there waving a magnifying glass, you're not solving a case, you're volunteering to make yourself into one."
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"Then we'll wear disguises!" Mori said.
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Angelika looked up from her desk for the first time in an hour, glasses sliding another half-inch down her nose.
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"You want to go undercover," she said, more statement than question.
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"I want to find him," Mori said. "Alive. And bring him in. I'm not letting Vance be right about me."
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Nobody said anything for a second. Roby sat up on the couch. Saoirse, for once, put both puppets down in her lap instead of waving them around.
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"That's insane," Roby said.
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"Probably," Mori said.
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"I mean, like, certified. Actually insane."
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"I know."
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Roby looked at him a moment longer, then grinned, slow and a little disbelieving, like a man watching a friend jump off something he'd normally talk them down from.
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"...All right," Roby said. "Guess I'm insane too, then."
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Oliver clapped his hands together, already smiling in a way that suggested he'd been hoping somebody would say something exactly like that.
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"Then we've got some shopping to do," he said. "You four are gonna need better disguises than fake mustaches."
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"HEY!" Saoirse said. "The mustache is ICONIC!"
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"The mustache," Angelika said, closing her file with a snap, "is going to get you killed."
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Saoirse pulled it protectively closer to her own face with Arnold's mouth.
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"...We'll see about that," she muttered.