Chapter 83

The sewer shootout leaves Loid with a bullet in his arm and Yuri disarmed. Squaring off hand to hand, Loid is troubled by his own hesitation, while Yuri, seeing Twilight's abilities up close for the first time, reasons that the spy's choice to copy his appearance means Twilight either knows him personally or has been observing him. The brawl itself is lopsided: Loid floors Yuri repeatedly, warns him to leave if he values his life, and snaps his jaw with a belt strike, yet the young officer keeps getting up. Astonished, Loid wonders if being raised by Yor forged that stubbornness. A pipe blow to the head finally leaves Yuri bloodied and collapsing, but as Loid readies the final strike he hears him murmur an apology to his sister. Loid tosses the weapon aside and walks deeper into the tunnels wearing a grim expression.

At the Shellbury Hotel, Fiona and the WISE Agent adapt to Wheeler's no-show. Using gear Loid supplied, the Agent dresses as Gascoigne, the SSS officer assigned to receive the defector, and strolls the streets as live bait. Wheeler, already wary after his signal went unanswered, watches from a high floor, spots "Gascoigne," and concludes WISE beat the SSS to Shellbury, though he judges the man genuine and merely tailed. He follows his target with caution. When walking the streets flushes nobody out, the Agent has a colleague stage a car crash into a pole, expecting hidden watchers to betray themselves by looking away too quickly; to his shock, no one does.

Fiona alone catches the tell: a man in sunglasses whose gaze slides from the accident to a window across the street, tracking his mark through the reflection. Lighter lenses than a careful operative would choose let her read the eye movement, and she knows Wheeler has had no time to buy darker ones. Made, Wheeler bolts, and with Red 4's help Fiona runs him down and boxes him in.

Loid defeats Yuri in a brutal sewer fight but cannot bring himself to kill him, sparing the unconscious officer after hearing him apologize to Yor. Yuri's deduction that Twilight may be someone close to him plants a dangerous seed for later chapters.

Fiona identifies Wheeler on the streets of Shellbury through a reflection-tracking giveaway that survived a staged accident, and together with Red 4 she corners the fugitive.

Loid's belt strike to the jaw repeats a move Sylvia used in Chapter 63, and this is the first chapter since his childhood in which he lets out an audible scream. The scarred officer from Chapter 82 is named here as Gascoigne. The panel of Loid walking away from Yuri also inverts the series' usual staging by drawing Twilight's true face in the foreground with the disguise behind it, the reverse of chapters like Chapter 1 and Chapter 21.