"Huh, Brother Tang Ze is sick?"
"Yeah, his health hasn't been very good..."
"Poor health?" Mitsuhiko Tsuburaya repeated in confusion. "But I remember Brother Tang Ze being pretty amazing, though?"
As for physical fitness, while they had never seen Tang Ze compete with anyone head-on, they had witnessed him stepping in to help others.
A guy who could sprint a hundred meters, vault into a truck to stop it, and catch someone falling from a building with a three-step layup was hardly convincing when described as unhealthy.
"Uh, not physically. You may have heard that Tang Ze has had some, um, psychological issues..."
Facing the puzzled children, Ran Mouri kept a smile on her face and tried her best to make up a lie, while her toes were already curling hard against the floor.
She could not help recalling the scene Okita Soji had mentioned.
Tang Ze took leave every so often, so his former classmates had thought of him as a "frail, aloof handsome guy." Even after he had been kidnapped and transferred schools, nobody had questioned it. Some had even begun assuming he was no longer alive...
At that moment, she finally understood it deeply.
Other than claiming someone was physically unwell, it was really hard to make up a smooth, convincing lie...
"Oh, I do know about that. It was something related to his memory, right?"
"No, I asked Little Ai. Little Ai said he had some kind of brain lesion when he was little..."
"Stop guessing wildly." Ai Haibara, who had heard them loudly speculating about Tang Ze the moment she stepped out of the elevator, pulled up her coat hood and helplessly stopped their nonsense. "My brother has high-functioning autism. When he was your age, he couldn't even speak. He's recovered now, but he still