Days had passed since Iris, his partner, returned to field duty. Around the time the leaves on the roadside trees began to take on the faintest hint of color, the investigative vehicle carrying Kujo was patrolling the city as usual. Afternoon light streaming through the windshield dimly illuminated Iris's profile in the passenger seat.
“Iris, run the vehicle number ahead of us.”
“…Understood.”
There was an obviously longer pause before her response than there had been before. Kujo glanced from the driver's seat toward Iris, but her expression hadn't changed. Still, he could see her eyes flickering faintly behind the lenses. The irregular blinking was almost like breathing.
“Verification… complete. The number does not match the vehicle in question.”
“…That was slow.”
Kujo muttered the words under his breath. The Iris he'd known before would have answered instantly. Her computational processing had clearly slowed. In the past, a response had come the moment he issued a directive. Now, there was a distinct delay. If she were human, it would have felt like watching someone utterly exhausted answer while struggling to lift their heavy eyelids.
That wasn't all.
“Iris, turn right at the next intersection.”
“Yes.”
She answered, but her response to the turn directive came one beat too late. They nearly continued straight through the lane. Kujo reacted instinctively, yanking the wheel and forcing the car around the sharp curve. The tires let out a brief squeal.
“Hey.”
“…My apologies. Processing… took longer than expected.”
A faint mechanical hum could be heard between her words. In the silence of the car, a sound like a fan spinning at high speed echoed from somewhere. Kujo looked around as if searching for its source, but he found nothing unusual. Still, he had a vague sense that it was coming from inside Iris. It sounded as if a small machine had been pushed to its limits and was crying out in protest.
“Is something wrong with you?”
“No abnormalities… have been detected.”
Despite her words, the unnatural delay in her response remained. Kujo didn't press her any further and simply stared ahead. But his hands were gripping the wheel more tightly than usual.
During a lull in the patrol, while they waited at a traffic light, Kujo watched Iris from the corner of his eye. She was staring ahead in her usual posture, but every so often he noticed her fingertips tremble faintly. As if something inside her continued to strain without end.
“…It's nothing. Must be my imagination.”
Kujo muttered quietly and turned his gaze forward again. The light turned green, and the car started moving once more.
On the way back that day, Iris suddenly stopped in the hallway of headquarters.
“Iris?”
“…I require a brief recharge. Excuse me.”
With that, Iris headed to the charging station installed at the end of the hallway and connected herself in silence. Kujo frowned. Judging by her operating time, it should have been too soon for her to need a recharge. The pale blue indicator on the charging port mounted in the wall began blinking at regular intervals.
“It isn't time for you to recharge yet.”
“Backup power consumption is higher than anticipated. …The cause is currently under analysis.”
There was no lie in her words. But something remained unspoken. Kujo realized that, yet deliberately chose not to ask further. Even if he managed to draw something out of her, he didn't think she'd be able to give him an answer.
—A quiet anomaly was progressing inside Iris.
The code Crow had planted had burrowed deep into her cloud data, continuously consuming her computational resources. It wasn't merely causing bugs. What Iris was truly wary of was the suspicious behavior of an object operating in close proximity to her—an attempt to synchronize with Kujo's bodily systems at the level of faint signals. When she first came into contact with Kujo after returning to the field, Iris had noticed that regular, mechanical response patterns different from his biometric data were intermingled within it. She never went into detail about what that meant. At least, she never revealed it outwardly.
She already understood that Kujo felt a deep loathing toward android technology and the very existence of cyborg-conversion surgery. The rejection of machines themselves that seeped through the edges of their past exchanges. She had observed and recorded it countless times, then locked it away in the deepest part of herself—or as close as she could come to having such a place. If she told him the truth, Kujo's heart would undoubtedly be deeply wounded. To prevent that, Iris had continued forcibly canceling the virus code's synchronization process. That processing load was what manifested as her reduced computational capacity.
Unable to confide in anyone, she continued her quiet battle alone, inside herself. It was a lonely defense that no one would praise, and that no one would even notice.
“…That's enough. You're done for today.”
Kujo left those words behind and started walking down the hallway ahead of her. Iris remained where she was, still connected to the charging station. As the hallway lights went out one by one, only her lenses continued to glow with the faintest light.
The next day, Kujo went to see Kiryu. Morning sunlight streaming through the window illuminated the stacks of documents piled across Kiryu's desk.
“Chief, I'm going to be frank. Sending Iris into the field in her current condition is dangerous.”
“What’s causing it?”
“I don't know. But her responses are clearly sluggish. There's a delay in following directives, too. If another unforeseen situation like last time occurs, she may not be able to respond in time.”
A sense of urgency unlike anything he'd shown before colored Kujo's words. It wasn't mere irritation. There was a measure of anxiety in it, too. But Kujo himself hadn't recognized the true nature of that emotion. He only instinctively sensed that something serious was happening to the partner in front of him.
“I've asked the technical team to investigate. Wait a little longer.”
Kujo wore an unconvinced expression, but he didn't press the matter any further. In Kiryu's eyes was the restrained heaviness of someone carrying something he couldn't tell his subordinate. Kujo didn't miss it, but deliberately left it unspoken.
The friction between the two men grew more intense with each passing day. It was an invisible tension lurking beneath their simple exchanges of reports and directives.
Then, an emergency report came in to headquarters. An employee belonging to the Cybercrime Countermeasures Division had been found dead at home. The cause of death was unknown. But even more abnormal was the fact that, immediately after the body was discovered, repeated unauthorized access to the police network using the employee's ID had been detected.
“Accessing the network with a dead man's ID…?”
Kujo drew his brows together as he listened to the report. This wasn't an ordinary case. It was highly likely that someone well versed in network security had deliberately engineered the incident. Tension spread through headquarters, and signs of alarm appeared among the staff.
“For this case, we'll borrow the expertise of a cybercrime specialist. Release CROW-3 from the storage section and deploy it.”
Kujo's expression grew complicated at Kiryu's directive, but he didn't object. Weighing his distrust of Crow against the urgency of the situation, the answer was obvious.
“Iris is to stand by this time. Determining the cause of her computational load comes first.”
Kujo felt both relief and irritation at the decision. Relief that his partner wouldn't have to be sent into a dangerous scene, and irritation at being unable to do anything while she suffered from a malfunction whose cause remained unknown. Conflicting emotions quietly struggled within him.
Deep beneath headquarters, Kujo made his way with Amamiya toward the storage section, which was protected by heavy radio interference. With every step down the dim staircase, he felt the air grow colder.
“Um, Kujo… I should warn you now, but… please don't be shocked.”
Amamiya offered the warning apologetically. There was a hint of an awkward laugh in her voice.
“What are you talking about?”
“You'll understand when you see it…”
When they opened the heavy door, a dim storage room stretched out before them. Crow's body lay on a metal platform installed along the wall. Sterile lights faintly illuminated its form.
Kujo was struck speechless by the sight.
Both arms and both legs were secured to the platform with thick, belt-like restraints, leaving it unable to move even an inch. And in the center of its face—where its eyes should have been—the eyeball units themselves were missing. Only dark, gaping hollows remained.
“…Telling me not to be shocked is asking the impossible.”
Kujo stood frozen in silence for a while. The treatment was horrific. Crow looked as if it had been strapped to some kind of torture device. In the silence of the storage room, the only sound was the low hum of the ventilation fan.
“This is what happens when you have a bad track record…”
Amamiya gave an awkward smile as she approached the platform. She opened the tool case in her hand and checked the fasteners on the restraints with practiced movements.
“Crow, can you hear me? I'm going to release the restraints now.”
“…Mm.”
A muffled voice leaked from the eyeless face.
“Whenever I get restrained, nothing good comes of it. They even took away my vision. I thought I was going to die of boredom in the dark. Whose prank got me this time?”
“Your own prank, obviously. Last week, you tried snooping around for a back door into the network without permission and got flagged by security, remember? I had to write a formal report because of you.”
“You're so strict, Shizuku. I was just taking a little digital stroll to kill time, is all.”
Amamiya and Crow's banter flowed as naturally as any ordinary exchange between them. Even as she worked on removing the restraints, Amamiya dutifully responded to each of Crow's wisecracks. Kujo watched them with an indescribable expression. Amamiya's attitude toward Crow, who constantly called itself a broken tool, was clearly not the way one treated a tool. There was unmistakable trust in it, along with an easy familiarity that felt almost familial.
“There. Eyeball units installed.”
Amamiya carefully attached the units, and light returned to Crow's eyes. They moved as if surveying the room before finally settling on Kujo. Something like amusement flickered behind the lenses.
“Well, look at that. My brother.”
Crow addressed him with the same overfamiliar ease as always.
“Shizuku isn't the only one who came to pick me up today. You came, too? I'm touched. …By the way, what happened to your adorable princess—Iris? She didn't come with you?”
“…That’s none of your business.”
A faint stiffness entered Kujo's voice. Whether Crow noticed it or not, it gave a casual shrug.
“Still as cold as ever. Come on, don't be like that. Now that they've let me out of the dark, let's get along.”
Crow rolled the arms freed from the restraints, then deftly climbed down from the platform. The sound of its joints moving echoed faintly through the quiet storage room.
Kujo didn't engage any further and briefly explained the outline of the investigation: the suspicious death of an employee from the Cybercrime Countermeasures Division and the unauthorized access using a dead person's ID. Though Crow continued tossing out wisecracks, its expression grew more serious as it listened. The focus of the lenses behind its eyeball units could be seen making minute adjustments.
“…Huh. A dead man's ID dancing around, huh? Sounds interesting.”
“This isn't something to enjoy. Someone's about to break through police security.”
“Sorry, sorry. Occupational hazard.”
As Crow spoke, it began preparing to leave the room with Amamiya. Kujo took the lead and left the underground storage room.
Accompanied by the newly activated Crow and its assigned technician, Amamiya, Kujo returned to the surface. As he climbed the dim staircase, Iris's delayed responses and the unexplained mechanical noise remained in his mind as an unease he couldn't shake.
When he reached the top of the stairs, Kujo suddenly stopped and looked back at the door leading underground. He still didn't know that, beyond it, Iris was likely continuing to quietly confront whatever was happening inside her. All that remained with him was a weight in his chest that he couldn't put into words.