"Is there a detective on the plane?"

…I didn't hear that right, I thought.

You don't often get that question on a passenger plane cruising at roughly ten thousand meters, after all. I must have misheard or misinterpreted somehow. Maybe it was the altitude?

"Nah, probably not."

I nixed my own idea and calmed down a little, then looked around and saw that a flustered cabin attendant was marching this way.

"Is there a detective on the plane?" Apparently, I wasn't imagining things. Geez, not again.

For as long as I can remember, I've had an incredible knack for running into trouble. I guess you could say I was born for it.

When I walk down major streets, I get stuck in the middle of flash mobs. When I take back alleys, I stumble onto transactions involving a suspicious white powder. I've run into the same cops at so many murder scenes that we know each other by sight, and I'm always a suspect. Today, as it happens, I was flying overseas with a really big attaché case, and I didn't have a clue what was in it.

And I was only in my second year of middle school. Maybe one day I'd be a spy or in the military.

As if. I wanna work a desk job for the government and actually go home at closing time. Don't expect any heroism from me, all right?

And so:

"Of course there isn't."

What was going on here anyway? Ordinarily, you'd expect them to ask for a doctor or nurse.

We've all heard the line before, on TV or in comics: Is there a doctor in the house? Right now, though, what they were asking for way up here in the sky was—a detective? That made no sense.

Exactly what kind of situation would require a detective on an airplane in flight? Nope, no way. I refused to get dragged into even more trouble I didn't need.

Ignoring the incoming cabin attendant, I shut my eyes tight. Right after that, it happened.

"Yes, I'm a detective."

The voice carried so well that my eyes opened on their own, just in time to see a girl about my age raise her hand from the seat on my right.

Her bobbed hair was pale silver, and her enchanting blue eyes pulled you in. Her dress was a flattering color, apparently modeled on some country's military uniform, and the glimpses of skin I caught beneath it were as clear as snow.

She was so beautiful she could have been an angel incarnate. If you looked up beauty in the dictionary, her name was bound to be there. If you ran a search of her name online, you can bet the related images would have been photos of flowers and birds and the moon.

Which was why all my interest just then was focused on learning what her name actually was.

Detective? Whatever, I don't care. Who is this girl? That's I want to know.

"What's your name?"

So the next thing I knew, I'd asked her aloud.

…But even now, four years later, I still don't know what her name was. At least, not her real one. All she told me was her alias: "Siesta."

She was a real detective who fought "the enemies of the world."

After that, I became her assistant, and we set off on a journey together. "Ready?" she'd say. "While they're filling you full of lead, I'll go take

down the enemy leader."

"Hey, ace detective," I'd say, "you wanna make a plan that gets both of us out alive?"

"Don't worry—I'll erase your computer's search history."

"…Hold it. You looked at my history? You looked at my search history?!" Eventually, we were close enough that we could banter easily. We spent

three full years on a kaleidoscopic adventure—

—and then death tore us apart.

It's been a year since then, so four years total.

I'm the one who got to live. My name is Kimihiko Kimizuka, and at eighteen, I'm currently in my last year of high school. And my life is now completely, utterly normal. Tepid and routine.

Am I okay with that, you ask?

Sure. It's not like I'm causing trouble for anybody. I mean, it's true, isn't it?

The detective is already dead.