Chapter Text
1.
Shinichi scrambled over a chain-link fence and dropped to the ground, careful to avoid the chunks of broken glass and concrete on the other side. The cold metal of the fence cut into his fingers, but at least it was easy to cram his tiny shoes in the holes. The early December evening was coming on fast. It was only four o’clock, but already the sunlight was waning, the chill nipping at him as he picked his way through the shadows of the rundown buildings and warehouses that lined the waterfront along the docks.
Rei wouldn’t have approved of Shinichi ducking out in just a T-shirt and his sleek blue and white bomber jacket, not even a scarf wrapped around his neck, when he’d been sick only a few weeks ago. But Rei wouldn’t approve of a lot of things he was doing.
After almost three months of chasing leads in the White Rabbit case, Shinichi finally thought he was close. Solving the first riddle had led him to an envelope of $1,000 cash stashed in a coin locker and another code—and another, and another, each more complicated than the last. And with every code solved came an envelope of a thousand dollars, and a promise of ten times that if he solved them all. Shinichi had already collected $12,000 in worn, non-sequential bills, all of them faded and grease-stained like they’d passed through more than a few dirty hands. He’d used Subaru’s powder foundation to dust for fingerprints, but the envelopes came up suspiciously clean.
He was positive now that the White Rabbit linked to something criminal. There was too much money involved for it to be legit. But he still hadn’t figured out what type of crime he was looking at. Every puzzle felt like it was testing for a new kind of thinking, another level of codebreaking. What criminal enterprise required someone who could break all of those codes?
A hacking group, or a white-collar crime ring? A company recruiting dirty employees to decrypt patents and proprietary information? Maybe even someone going after bank encryptions, user data on a massive scale. Or worse, an anarchist group trying to break into government systems.
As soon as he knew what this was, he’d take it to the right person—the PSB, the FBI, the MPD’s cybercrimes unit. But he didn’t have all the facts yet. And he didn’t want to waste anyone’s time.
Only the first code had used the app portal. All the other codes he’d tracked down on foot, most of them hidden in plain sight: graffiti spraypainted on a subway tunnel, some letters scratched into the stall of a train station bathroom under a flickering fluorescent bulb. But this last code felt different.
He’d had to break onto the roof of a building scheduled for demolition to get it. (And seven-year-old body versus warped security door, that had been a fun ten minutes.) Plus, it was more complex than the others—an arrangement of chess pieces that, when taken to endgame, revealed a latitude and longitude along the river.
Shinichi had ridden his skateboard as far as he could. But he hadn’t realized until he got here exactly how deep the blinking map dot was in the abandoned dockyards. The whole place was deserted. All he could hear was the creak of old metal shingles and the crunch of his own footsteps, and the harsh croaks of the crows perched on the old telephone wires. He was pretty sure he’d seen that crumbling smokestack on the news, the last time the Organized Crime division made a major drug bust. Shinichi ducked into a narrow alley and inched past a sagging sheet of rusty tin, really glad all of a sudden that Rei had insisted he get his tetanus booster.
Was all of this really just hiding another puzzle? And what clue would it make sense to leave all the way out here?
When he first started chasing down the clues, Shinichi had a sense others were competing too. He found scuff marks and footprints around the subway graffiti, signs that someone had taken a pencil rubbing of the puzzle on the bathroom wall. But for the last few clues, he’d been all alone. No one else was following the White Rabbit anymore.
Rei and Akai had both asked him to loop them in if things started to get dangerous. And he would. As soon as he knew what this was. But he wasn’t going to take them away from their important jobs just to follow a lead that might turn out to be nothing. Shinichi had everything under control.
Besides, he was just going to sneak in, poke around, snap a few pictures, and get out. How dangerous could that possibly be?
His phone rang in his hand. Shinichi cursed, looking at the caller ID. How did Rei always know when he was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be?
“Hey.” Rei didn’t say his name—he never started a phone call that way, just in case—but Shinichi could hear the smile in his voice, the growl of the Mazda’s engine and the rush of traffic in the background. Rei sounded like he was smiling a lot when he called Shinichi, though Shinichi hadn’t totally figured out why. “I just got off shift—want me to pick you up on the way to the restaurant?”
Shinichi winced. The restaurant. He’d forgotten they were supposed to have family dinner out every other weekend from now on, since Rei’d heard through the neighborhood grapevine that they were getting a reputation as antisocial shut-ins.
“I’m…actually not at the house right now,” Shinichi hedged, hopping over a knot of barbed wire and crossing his fingers Rei wouldn’t think to check his phone’s GPS.
Rei’s voice had turned exasperated. Shinichi got that a lot, too. “You’d better not stand me up again. I will not be known as the couple that does family restaurant dates.”
“I’m definitely on my way,” Shinichi promised, jogging toward the docks and in the complete opposite direction of the restaurant.
Rei clicked his tongue. “That’s what you said last week. Then you ditched us at that Indian restaurant, and a very mediocre date with Akai became the double date from hell when we were cornered by your teacher and that flop-headed detective she’s seeing. With whom I’ve now technically shared an indirect kiss, by the way, since he wouldn’t stop badgering me until I tried his wine. Akai nearly suffocated inhaling his saag paneer so we could get out of there.”
Shinichi snorted but managed to turn it into a cough. “Twenty minutes. I swear.”
It’d be thirty at best, but he couldn’t turn back now. He’d just do this fast and then beg forgiveness—Rei wasn’t immune to Conan’s big blue eyes yet. Still, Rei was pretty sharp—it was never a bad idea to distract him when Shinichi was trying to get away with something.
“Besides,” he added, fake casual, “I thought you and Akai were kind of getting along lately.”
“It’s impossible to get along with that…” Rei cut himself off—some variety of asshole that he couldn’t bring himself to say to a seven-year-old.
“Right,” Shinichi muttered, ducking a ragged tarp. “Guess I just imagined that night we were watching a movie and you fell asleep on his shoulder…”
“That was entirely due to blood loss!”
His phone buzzed again, distracting him from the rest of Rei’s excuses. Someone was texting him too.
Hey, kid. What kind of pepper did he want?
Shinichi frowned, typing fast. No pepper. Peppercorn. Apparently Akai had blocked out Rei’s ten-minute rant the last time he brought home pre-ground pepper that, as Rei put it, a discount pizza joint in a dying strip mall would be embarrassed to serve.
Right. Thanks.
“Shinichi? You still there?”
“What? Uh, sorry—I’m here, just…” Just helping Akai avoid getting brained by a pepper shaker didn’t seem like the right excuse. “Nothing. What were you saying?”
He could just picture Rei shaking his head, that kids and their cellphones look he’d borrowed straight from a parenting magazine. “I said, are we still on for Christmas shopping tomorrow?”
Shinichi shook his head. “Shouldn’t you get a present for your own husband?”
Rei snorted. “If I get him something, it’s going to come with a body bag.”
“I don’t think they sell those at the mall,” Shinichi deadpanned. But he was sort of smiling as he zigzagged across the old train tracks, a strange warm feeling in his chest.
Shinichi couldn’t remember ever going family Christmas shopping before. It was still weird to think Rei even wanted to do those kinds of things with him. And it was definitely cheesy. But he didn’t really mind the idea of spending an hour wandering the open-air walking mall, watching Rei identify and then systematically shove to the back of the rack every shirt that would pop with jade green eyes. And Rei always let him get one of the massive java chip Frappuccinos, which seemed like a milkshake but was secretly harboring about as much caffeine as a double shot.
Besides, he was trying to say no to stuff less. Since Akai kept giving him those looks whenever he turned Rei down.
“Sure. Count me in,” Shinichi said. Then his phone was buzzing against his head—another text.
What do you think he wants for Christmas?
Shinichi smirked, texting back. Come to the mall with us tomorrow and find out.
There. Now it was really a family shopping trip.
Shinichi flicked away from the messages screen to pull up the map again. The coordinates were dead ahead of him. Whatever this clue was leading to, it had to be in the hulking warehouse he could see right up against the water, the broken windows staring at him like blacked-out eyes. The sun was setting fast.
Shinichi threw a glance at his watch.
“I gotta go. Order without me. Thirty minutes, I promise!”
“You said twen—”
He ended the call and slid the phone back into his pocket.
Now that he was close, Shinichi approached the warehouse slowly, his senses on high alert. This place had definitely seen better days. The gray river lapped at the crumbling concrete foundation, and grime and moss crawled over the pylons and up the walls, festering in the cracks between the bricks. Shinichi knelt in the pockmarked road, tracing a line of black rubber. A totally abandoned dockyard—and one building with fresh tire tracks. He was in the right place.
The door to the loading dock hung partway open, creaking on rusty hinges. Shinichi scrambled up the old broken steps and pressed his back to the wall, listening hard. Just the wind whistling through the cracked glass. The warehouse was stripped bare—there was nothing inside but some old crates and decaying machine parts. And a small metal lockbox, dead center of the floor. Shinichi had a feeling that was for him.
For one second, he considered turning back. Something about this place put his teeth on edge. Until now, the White Rabbit case had been like a chess game, trading moves with an unseen opponent, every riddle luring him deeper and deeper into the board. But he couldn’t understand this move.
He fidgeted with his phone. He could retreat to the road, call Rei and Akai for backup. But he was so close. What if he backed off now, and he lost this lead forever?
Silently, Shinichi pulled his hood up and slipped through the door. As he moved toward the center of the warehouse, he felt his phone buzz in his pocket. Rei again—a text this time. He brought a grocery bag into the restaurant! Where are you?
Almost there, Shinichi texted back. But the wheel just spun, the little icon blinking in the corner. No service. Because he was inside the building? Or too close to the water?
Distracted, he bent to pry open the box. Shinichi’s mouth went dry. A stack of ten thousand dollars cash, as promised. And on the underside of the lid, two words written in sharp red chalk.
WELCOME, ALICE
Suddenly, Shinichi knew exactly what this was. But it was far too late.
A dark figure lurched out from behind the broken machines. Shinichi caught a flash of bloodshot eyes and a vicious, meaty hand grabbing for him—then he was running, tripping over old gears scattered on the floor, sprinting as fast as he could for the door. Heavy footsteps thundered toward him before a second person leapt the crates and seized the back of his jacket, jerking him back so hard all the buttons popped open. Shinichi wrenched his arms out of the sleeves and threw himself under the skeleton of an ancient conveyor belt. He came up coughing and covered in dust and grime, his arms red and raw from scraping the concrete.
They didn’t want one more code solved. They wanted the codebreaker. And he’d walked right into an ambush.
“Cut him off!”
Shinichi cursed at his cell phone screen. Still no signal. It wasn’t the building. It was a cell phone jammer. Hopefully one of the cheap ones, with about a thirty-foot range.
Akai’s number was at the top, hidden under the A. Desperately, Shinichi typed out a message. Then he wrenched back and flung his cell phone out the broken window—just before the meaty hand closed around his wrist, yanking him up off the ground.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
Shinichi kicked as hard as he could. But his legs were too short to reach the man’s groin, and his shoulder was on fire, all his weight dangling from that unforgiving grip. He stared up into a leering face, feeling all the little bones in his wrist crushing in.
Behind him, a woman’s voice shouted, “Don’t hurt him. He’s just a kid!”
Then a stun gun jabbed into his ribs, electricity crackling, and everything went black.
His last thought was, Rei was going to be pissed.