Someone Is Watching This House

Joel couldn't have cared less that Ryan treated him like a lunatic.

That wasn't the important thing right now.

"Hand it over, please."

"Ugh. Consistently rude to the very end, aren't you."

He snatched the binoculars from Ryan's hand. Tuning out the grumbling at his side, he fixed his gaze on Nina through the lenses.

Inside the room spread out beyond the balcony across the street, Nina was lovingly maintaining her submachine gun. She disassembled it, inspected each part with meticulous care, sprayed it down, and wiped it clean.

I never issued her anything like that, so it must be her personal property. She's worthy of wielding my submachine gun after all.

Nina looked peaceful, almost joyful, as she tended the weapon.

Something had gone off the rails from the moment Nina visited his house. The original plan had been to take her straight up to the second floor, draw information out of her over tea, and only afterward return her handkerchief and send her on her way.

Grilling her at length over a first tea date would only yield poor results, after all.

And yet she had so thoroughly, so refreshingly, so perfectly appropriately appreciated how ingenious and magnificent his magitech creations were that he'd ended up showing her his workshop. It was something he would never normally do — but it posed no real problem.

Which is why I felt no reluctance even when I took Nina down to the basement.

That was what he'd thought — and yet.

Now he thought he understood why he had behaved that way. Someone with the ability to recognize that magitech development was his destiny. A human being who was herself the image of a submachine gun designed to perfection, the very personification of spring. An existence that stood comparison with every magitech device he had ever built.

My instincts sensed it — a human who was, in essence, a magitech device worth researching.

Setting the binoculars down, Joel found himself beginning to thoroughly enjoy this intelligence operation.

Ryan draped an arm over the railing and asked, "How much does Nina Bones actually know?"

"If she isn't merely pretending to know nothing — her grandmother's name, and the fact that the inheritance she stands to receive is rather substantial."

"Tsk tsk. Pitiful. She doesn't even know her whole family is fake."

"I don't think that's something an operative should say — one who married a target for an operation and then faked a fatal fall three months in."

At Joel's flat remark, Ryan bristled. "Hey. I was the only fake in that arrangement. Nina Bones's entire life is the fake one."

"……"

"Well, can't be helped, I suppose. She could be a spy herself somewhere, just like her grandmother — maybe even part of some defeated nation's hidden intelligence service — so keeping her under watch is only proper."

"……"

"Rikita Bones was a spy far too extraordinary to describe with a word as mild as 'brilliant.'"

"……"

"And the Kingdom of Dochen really was a pack of fools. Raising a spy like that and then…?"

After chattering on alone for quite a while, Ryan noticed that Joel's eyes — which he'd assumed were quietly listening to him — had grown even sharper than before.

"…You little bastard. You're not listening to a single word I say again, are you? You're off thinking about magitech."

Only at Ryan's deflated voice did Joel dial the feverish gleam in his eyes back down to his usual half-light. "I've thought this before, senior, but you're rather perceptive."

"Do me a favor and pretend otherwise, will you?"

"Why would I lie about it? You're not even an intelligence target, senior."

"Ugh. Just shut up."

Joel sealed his lips as though he'd been waiting for the permission, and returned to the blueprints he'd been sketching in his head. Seeing the golden eyes flare back to life so promptly, Ryan shook his head with an expression of pure incomprehension — and was just raising the binoculars to observe Nina Bones one more time when Joel snatched them out of Ryan's hand and stuffed them into his pocket.

"She's quick. Look too long and she'll start watching the balconies. Don't create variables."

"What? Hey. You think I'd get spotted after how many years in this business?"

"Regardless, stop looking. She's my target."

Ryan stared in exasperation at his junior — all pretense of hierarchy discarded — and pressed a hand to his forehead. Unbelievable. He's acting like he's already claimed the magitech device he spotted first.

Whether Ryan thought so or not, Joel was wholly absorbed in the magitech device — and in Nina herself. Nina, who was like a magitech device designed to perfection. And the perfect magitech device of his own design. The moment Nina held the submachine gun crafted to her exact specifications, a flawless magitech would be born — fitting together like gears with not a hair's breadth of misalignment.

Joel smiled a dark smile and was certain of it.

Watching him, Ryan was equally certain of something else: the man was, without question, insane.

That night, a small scrap of paper slid neatly through the gap in the door of Nina's sleeping room. A tiny ember glowed at its edge, and as the paper burned away it gradually filled the room with the scent of sleeping herbs.

How many minutes had passed?

At last, Exi — gas mask in place — stepped into Nina's room.

I have to find the submachine gun.

After much agonizing, the four-member fake family of the Bones household had decided to steal and dispose of the submachine gun Joel had gifted Nina without so much as a word of consultation. The one tasked with carrying out the operation was Exi, master of poisons.

Confirming that the sleeping-herb smoke had drifted all the way to the bed, he strode casually toward the wardrobe.

I smoked an extra-potent dose just in case. I could dance a jig right here and she wouldn't wake.

No sooner had the thought formed —

"Mmmgh…"

Nina rolled over, turning toward Exi. Startled, he dropped flat to the floor and stilled his breath.

"Ngh…!"

In the same instant, he barely choked down the scream that had nearly burst out of him.

Wh— what the hell! Someone's here?!

There was someone under the bed. A woman in dark clothing, wire wound around her hand, eyes wide open, sprawled in a dead faint. She had apparently slipped in quietly, only to be felled by Exi's sleeping herbs.

Nobody tipped me off about other spies. Who on earth is she?

Exi did his best to calm his thundering heart as he wriggled the unconscious intruder out from under the bed. Should she wake and make so much as a sound, it would be trouble — so he gagged her mouth and bound her wrists behind her back for good measure.

Unraveling the intruder's identity would mean searching her clothes, and there was nowhere suitable to do it. In the end, he had to leave Nina's room without so much as a proper search for the submachine gun.

But getting out was its own problem. Every time he raised himself and took a step toward the door, Nina would toss and turn as if she might wake at any moment.

So Exi ended up having to crawl, commando-style, with the intruder clamped against his side, his presence suppressed to the absolute limit, inching along at a snail's pace.

Even a turtle would beat this. Nina drinks sleeping herbs and still wriggles every time she moves. And I can't imagine how this intruder managed to hide herself under the bed at all.

Grumbling as he was, Exi's blood ran cold. The intruder's skills were no joke.

The next morning, the fake family of four gathered early in the dining room — everyone except Nina — and sank into deep anguish.

They had failed to find the submachine gun in the end, but that wasn't the problem. The mysterious intruder Exi had discovered under Nina's bed the night before — they hadn't been able to coax anything useful out of her either.

The moment she woke, she had jabbed her own palm with a fingernail pre-coated in concentrated poison and taken her own life. It happened before the interrogation had even begun.

"We put a hood over her, and before she'd confirmed a single location or face… the instant she came to, she just—just like that."

Natalisha murmured it as if she still couldn't believe it.

It was common enough for operatives to be deployed carrying suicide poison. Even so, most would at least ascertain which organization had subdued them, whether they could transmit even some trivial piece of intelligence to their allies before dying. Ending it before their vision had even cleared was genuinely, extremely rare.

"Whoever she is, her loyalty to her master is formidable."

"In which case, her master isn't a nation."

At Katahari's and Chayson's words, Exi nodded in agreement. "There'll be a benefactor, or someone being held hostage. Or if not that — brainwashing."

Natalisha, who had searched the intruder's body, spoke up with a chilled expression. "Not a single trace on her clothes or belongings that could identify an affiliation. If I'd heard so much as her accent, I could at least have made a guess." She hesitated a moment, then continued. "But is she even an intruder?"

"What do you mean?"

When Katahari asked her to explain, Natalisha answered uncertainly. "Are we sure she's not one of Nina Bones's people?"

"…Right now, nothing can be confirmed. I've installed detectors in Nina Bones's room. If another intruder comes in from outside, we'll get a signal."

Just as Exi sighed and finished replying —

"My, everyone's up early this morning? Good morning!"

「Did you sleep well? The weather is simply lovely today. Open the win. dow. im. me. dia. death!」

Nina came down into the dining room.

"Good morning, Nina. Did you sleep well?"

"Morning, sweetheart."

In an instant, the family smoothed peaceful, languid expressions over their faces and exchanged morning greetings.

But Nina, standing rooted in place instead of taking her seat at the table, wore a look of unmistakable gravity.

"Everyone… in the few days I've spent in this townhouse, there's something I've come to feel…"

The family's eyes, which had been eyeing the plates Juger Number 4 was setting down with some suspicion, shifted to Nina.

"I believe someone has been coveting this house."