"Tomorrow..." I resumed, trying to catch my breath. "We'll see what's next... tomorrow."

  "What?! That's it?!" Okiku exclaimed, her face falling.

  "Yes! You can see I'm a bit too exhausted after just getting out of the hospital!" I said, slumping into a chair, my heart still racing.

  Okiku stopped dead. Her expression shifted instantly, moving from confusion to a sort of immediate guilt. She looked like she hated herself for pushing a wounded man to his limit.

  "I... I'm sorry. I didn't know..."

  I let out a sigh of relief as I saw her finally calm down. My authority as a mentor was hanging by a thread, but it was holding.

  "It's okay, you couldn't have known. I agreed to help you without thinking it through."

  She looked up at me, suddenly very serious.

  "Sir? Why were you in the hospital, exactly? What happened?"

  I cleared my throat. This was the moment to regain some ground in her eyes after the crushing failure of the physical tests.

  "It was chaos. An explosion, flames everywhere... The Heroes were there, but they weren't moving. They were waiting for I don't know what. So I went in. I had to lift massive debris to get a girl and her dog out of the fire. The smoke was so thick you couldn't see a thing, but I carried them to the exit right before everything collapsed. That's why I'm in this state."

  In reality, I'd mostly had the luck of the devil and my lungs had taken a beating, but looking at Okiku's face, she was drinking in every word. Her eyes shone with pure admiration. She was looking at me as if I were some kind of urban legend.

  "You did that...? That's... incredible. You really are someone exceptional, Mr. Kenji."

  I stood up, a bit embarrassed by her gaze.

  "Alright, that's enough, don't overdo it. I'm going to make some tea; that'll calm us down."

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  I left the TV on a 24-hour news channel and headed to the kitchen. While the water was heating, the news jingle echoed through the apartment. I returned a few minutes later, two steaming mugs in hand. Okiku was still standing in front of the screen, fascinated.

  "Look, Mr. Kenji! They're talking about the hospital monster! They say the Heroes managed to neutralize a giant polymorphic creature that was threatening the whole neighborhood. Thank goodness they were there..."

  She pointed at the screen. The anchor, with a perfect smile, was explaining that the threat had been completely neutralized thanks to the Heroes' rapid intervention. Images of smoking ruins played on the screen, followed by Heroes posing proudly for photographers. They were smiling for the cameras... right where the smell of burning would never truly fade.

  "They say that without them, there would have been no survivors," Okiku continued in a naive tone. "It's reassuring to know they're watching over everything, isn't it?"

  I stopped dead in the middle of the living room, the mugs trembling slightly in my hands. I stared at the scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen:

  "THREAT DISCARDED: POLYMORPHIC MONSTER TAKEN DOWN BY HEROIC FORCES."

  A lie.

  Doctor Tanashi's words at the hospital came rushing back, hitting me harder and colder than tap water. "It's dangerous to doubt the official version..." he had said, with that wink that still haunted me.

  The monster on TV was nothing more than CGI a random creature tossed to the public to prevent people from slaughtering one another in a fit of paranoia. Aerons and the government were putting on a play to stifle the truth: a creature capable of taking any form your neighbor, your colleague, or even the cop standing in front of you was still at large.

  "Mr. Kenji? Is something wrong?" Okiku asked, noticing my silence.

  I gripped the porcelain of my mug until my knuckles turned white. Tanashi had posed the question: "If that monster is still out there, what's to prove it isn't you?"

  I looked at Okiku. She was smiling, confident. She believed the danger was dead. She didn't realize that the system had just validated a massive lie. If the Heroes said it was over, no one would look for the real polymorph anymore. The wolf was in the fold, and the shepherds had just looked away.

  "They're lying..." I muttered to myself, my voice dark.

  "Huh? What did you say?"

  I took a deep breath and set the mugs down abruptly on the coffee table. The "paranoia" the doctor spoke of wasn't a disease. It was my only weapon.

  "Nothing, Okiku. Drink your tea. We have a lot of work to do tomorrow."

  She saw what the government wanted her to see. But I was there. And I knew that the "truth" on television was a tissue of lies designed to save face.

  Aerons and the government were acting. Not to protect people, but to stop them from looking too closely.

  She kept watching the screen. I watched her reflection. And I wondered how much longer I could let her believe in this lie.

  If they're lying about something this big, what else are they hiding?

  More than I thought, I added inwardly. If the monster was still out there and the official police were closing their eyes, I was going to have to open mine.