Chapter Text
The faculty observation room was on Deck 10, behind a door with no sign on it, and it had been fitted out in 2014 for a purpose the shipping company had never disclosed.
It had eleven monitors in a bank on the forward bulkhead, four workstations, a coffee machine that had been running since 0500, and a long table with five chairs at it, and at 09:40 on the third morning of the Deserted Island Special Examination it contained one examinations-office assessor, five homeroom teachers, and a student council president who was not supposed to be there and whom nobody had asked to leave.
"Feed twelve," said the assessor.
Feed twelve came up on the main screen.
Nobody said anything for approximately four seconds.
"That's a house," said Sakagami Kyougo.
"It's a structure," said the assessor.
"It's a house, Ishida-san, it has a roof and a floor and it's off the ground—"
"It has walls," said Hoshinomiya Chie, leaning forward with both elbows on the table and her chin in her hands and an expression of such uncomplicated delight that Chabashira Sae had moved her chair fourteen centimeters away from her at some point on the first day and had not moved it back. "Look at the walls! They've got shutters, Sakagami-sensei. Little woven shutters. That's adorable."
"Those aren't shutters," said Mashima Tomonari. "Those are louvers."
"What's the difference?"
"A shutter is for weather," said Mashima. "A louver is for airflow. Somebody in that class understood that a raised structure in a humid climate has a convection problem and solved it before it happened."
The main screen showed a clearing on a shoulder of high ground about six hundred meters up from the eastern shore, with a stream running past it and a fall of light coming through a break in the canopy, and in the middle of it stood a building.
It was eleven meters by six. It stood on eight posts about seventy centimeters clear of the ground. It had a raised split-timber floor, a frame lashed with cordage at every joint, a pitched roof shingled from the bottom up in overlapping broad leaf and thatch, three walls of woven panel with adjustable louvers, and one open side facing the stream. There was a ladder. There was a covered porch. There was, on the porch, a bench.
Off the eastern corner, a bamboo line ran down from a point upstream, elevated on forked stakes, into a stepped series of three sand-and-charcoal beds, and out of the last bed into a length of split trunk that had been hollowed and sealed, and from there into a pit.
The pit was two and a half meters across, lined with clay, and full of clear water.
"That," said Chabashira Sae, "is a swimming pool."
"It's a cistern," said the assessor.
"There is a girl in it," said Chabashira.
There was a girl in it. The girl was small, white-haired, and floating on her back with her eyes shut and her arms out, and a boy with red eyes was sitting on the edge with his feet in the water and a bamboo tube in his hand, and at some point in the last two minutes he had said something to her and she had, without opening her eyes, kicked water at him.
"It's a cistern," the assessor repeated, "which is also being used recreationally, which is not prohibited—"
"I didn't say it was prohibited," said Chabashira. "I said it was a swimming pool."
"Feed fourteen," said Mashima.
Feed fourteen was the kiln.
It was a pit, about a meter and a half deep, packed and sealed with turf, with a chimney arrangement made from a hollowed section of trunk, and there was smoke coming out of it in a thin white line, and beside it was a rack, and on the rack were forty-odd black billets of charcoal, and squatting beside the rack with a stick and an expression of religious ecstasy was a boy in a lab coat.
"He's still wearing the coat," said Hoshinomiya.
"He has worn the coat every day of this examination," said the assessor, in the voice of a man reading out a grievance. "It is not on the manifest. It was not purchased. It is a personal effect, and personal effects were not permitted ashore."
"Aizawa-sensei," said Mashima.
Aizawa was sitting at the end of the table with his arms folded and his chin down and his eyes shut.
"He wore it under the tracksuit," he said, without opening them. "Down the gangway, through the tender, onto the beach. He got past four staff, a metal detector and you, Ishida-san, and he did it by putting his arms through the sleeves and zipping the tracksuit over the top and walking normally."
"That's smuggling."
"That's tailoring," said Aizawa. "Take it up with him. He'll enjoy it more than you will."
"Feed nine," said the assessor tightly.
Feed nine was the cooking area.
It had not existed at 0800 on the previous morning. At 09:40 on day three it consisted of a low stone-and-clay hearth with three separate fire positions at different heights, a windbreak on the seaward side, a grid of green wood over the largest fire that was clearly meant to be replaced daily, a rack of split bamboo holding what appeared to be about eleven kinds of leaf and root, a hanging line of drying fish, and a boy.
The boy was small and brown-haired and he was moving between the three fires with the unhurried, unconscious economy of a person who had done this in a much worse kitchen for a much less grateful audience for most of his life, and he was talking, and the girl he was talking to had pink hair and two blunt horns and was holding a bowl.
"Who's that?" said Sakagami.
"Ikari," said Aizawa. "And Lucy."
"The quiet one is running their food?"
"He's the only one who can cook," said Aizawa. "He's been feeding twenty-five people for three days and I'd like it noted that the only class on this island that has not filed a single illness report is his."
Hoshinomiya Chie sat back in her chair.
"That's the part," she said.
"Hm?"
"That's the part nobody's saying." Hoshinomiya's face had lost some of the brightness. "Sakagami-sensei's had two retirements. Mashima-sensei's had one. I've had one, and she was dehydration, Aizawa-sensei, dehydration on day two, and my class bought sixty liters of water on the first morning." She tapped a nail on the table. "How is a class that has spent eleven points not sick?"
"Eleven," said Sakagami. "Eleven points."
"Eleven points," said the assessor. "One knife. That is the entire recorded expenditure of Class E over three days."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"Show me the water again," said Mashima.
The assessor brought up feed twelve and zoomed, and the bamboo line came into focus — the intake screened with woven fiber, the stepped filter beds, the sealed launder, and beside the launder a second and much stranger arrangement: a covered clay vessel on a low fire with a length of bamboo emerging from its top, angled down and running four meters through a shallow trench that had been dug into the wet ground at the stream margin, and terminating over a second, smaller vessel.
"What is that?"
"It's a still," said Aizawa.
"They're distilling?"
"They're distilling their drinking water and boiling the rest, and the bamboo run through the wet ground is the condenser, because wet ground is colder than air." Aizawa finally opened his eyes. "Ishigami explained it to Iwatani on the first evening for about nine minutes. It's on the audio if you want it. The short version is that filtration takes out the particulates, boiling takes out the biology, and the still gives him something he can use in the parts of his process where he needs water without anything in it at all."
"Parts of his process," said Sakagami.
"Mm."
"Aizawa-sensei," said the assessor, "what exactly is that class making?"
Shota Aizawa looked at the screen for a while.
"Soap," he said.
Three hundred meters below the observation room and eleven kilometers to the south-southeast, Senku Ishigami was having what he had described that morning, to a captive audience of four, as the single greatest week of his second life.
"Okay!" He came down the ladder off the porch with a wooden tray in both hands and set it on the bench with the care of a man handling ordnance. "Okay. Batch four. Everybody shut up. Pinkman!"
"Yo."
"QC."
Jesse Pinkman came over, wiping his hands on his tracksuit, and looked at the tray.
On it were eleven pale, slightly greasy rectangles.
He picked one up. He turned it over. He pressed a thumbnail into the corner and looked at the mark it left. He smelled it, made a face, smelled it again. Then he licked the very tip of his little finger, touched it to the surface, and touched the finger to his tongue.
"YO," he said, and spat, and spat again. "Yo. Nah. Nah, man, that's lye-heavy, that's — Ishigami, that burns, that's like — that's like puttin' a battery on your tongue."
"How heavy?"
"How'm I supposed to know how—"
"You knew it in a second, Pinkman, that's the whole reason you have the job. How heavy."
Jesse hesitated.
"...Ten, fifteen percent excess?" he said. "Somewhere in there. It ain't a disaster, it just ain't done. It's like — it's raw, yo, it's the same as pullin' somethin' before it's finished 'cause you're impatient. It needs to sit."
"Cure time."
"Yeah, man. Cure time." Jesse put the bar back on the tray. "Whatever this is, it ain't ready and you know it ain't ready, and you brought it to me anyway to see if I'd say it."
"Ten billion percent," said Senku, grinning.
"That's messed up, dude—"
"It's calibration. I know exactly what's in batch four. I over-limed it on purpose by fourteen percent and I wanted to find out whether you'd catch it by hand or whether you'd been guessing for three days." Senku picked up the tray. "You caught it by hand. Congratulations, you're the reason we're not going to poison Class B."
"YOU WERE GONNA POISON CLASS B?"
"I was going to irritate Class B," said Senku, "which is worse commercially and better ethically, and neither of which is happening now, because you tasted a soap and made a face. Batch four goes on the rack for four more days. Batch three's cured and Iwatani's already priced it."
"How much?" said Kurisu Makise, coming out of the shade with a bamboo section in one hand and a bundle of leaves in the other.
"Eleven S-points a bar."
"That's robbery."
"That's market clearing, Makise, there's a difference and the difference is that four hundred people haven't washed in three days." Senku set the tray on the rack. "How's the medical?"
"Zero," said Kurisu.
"Zero what?"
"Zero anything." She sat down on the bench, and she looked tired, and she looked pleased about it. "No fever, no diarrhea, no heat exhaustion, no infected cuts. Everybody's drinking three liters a day because Iwatani makes them sign for it, everybody's eating twice because Ikari won't let them past the fire otherwise, and Hyoudou has a blister that I've dressed twice and he keeps trying to show people."
"IT'S A BIG BLISTER," Issei shouted, from forty meters away, where he was carrying two timbers at once.
"IT'S A NORMAL BLISTER, HYOUDOU."
"IT'S THE BIGGEST BLISTER ANY MAN HAS EVER—"
"CHRISTINA!"
Okabe Rintaro came out of the treeline at a dead run with his coat streaming behind him and both hands full of charcoal and an expression of transcendent triumph.
"Rintaro, don't run with—"
"BEHOLD!" He skidded to a stop and held it up. "THE KILN HAS SPOKEN! Forty-one billets, hard, ringing, sonorous—"
"They're not supposed to be sonorous—"
"THEY RING, CHRISTINA. Strike one." He tossed her a billet. She caught it, tapped it against another, and it made a high clean note, and she stopped arguing immediately.
"...That's good charcoal."
"THAT IS EXCELLENT CHARCOAL, and it was produced by a pit kiln constructed by hand from turf by the FOUNDER of the FUTURE GADGET LABORATORY, and I would like the record to show—"
"Okabe."
"Yes?"
"You've been awake since four."
"The kiln does not sleep, Christina."
"The kiln is a hole in the ground," said Kurisu. "Sit down and eat something. Ikari made the fish thing again."
Okabe Rintaro looked at her.
Then, in front of four people and a hidden camera, the persona came off him entirely — the coat still on his shoulders, the charcoal still in his hands, but the voice ordinary and slightly hoarse and about eight years older than it should have been.
"It worked," he said. "Kurisu. It actually — I've never built anything that worked."
"You've built forty-one things that worked."
"I've built forty-one gadgets," said Okabe. "A microwave that sends messages back in time isn't a thing, it's a problem. This is a hole full of wood and it does exactly what it's supposed to do and nothing terrible happens afterward." He sat down on the bench, heavily. "I like it. I like it enormously and I don't know what to do with that."
Kurisu Makise did not say anything for a moment.
"Eat the fish," she said.
"...Yeah."
Fifty meters up the slope, Naofumi Iwatani was standing over a flat rock with the notebook open on it and a pencil in his hand and a queue.
"Next."
"Nyu," said Lucy, and put down a bundle.
"Timbers?"
"Eleven. Four to five meters. Two of them are bad." Lucy's voice was flat. "There's rot in the heart. I could feel it when I cut. Don't put them in anything anyone sleeps under."
Naofumi wrote it down. "Which two?"
"The ones I put on the left, away from the others, because I knew you'd ask."
"...Right." He looked up. "That's the fourth time you've pre-sorted before I asked."
"You always ask."
"Yeah, and everybody else always forgets." Naofumi wrote it. "Fifty-two timbers total. That's more than Ishigami asked for."
"Ishigami always asks for less than he wants," said Lucy, "so that he can be excited when he gets more, and then he gets to say the number out loud. It's an annoying habit and I've been cutting extra so he stops."
Naofumi Iwatani looked at the girl who had been raised in a laboratory and had killed a number of people that nobody in the class had asked her to specify, and made a note in the book, and said:
"Next."
"Fish," said Akame, and put down eleven fish.
"That's — Akame, that's four more than yesterday."
"There is a pool at the south end where the tide traps them. I have been going at the low water." She paused. "I ate three."
"You're supposed to eat three."
"I am aware. I am reporting it so that the count is honest." Akame's red eyes were absolutely level. "You will find that the eleven are the ones you can use and the three were the ones with the parasites. I checked the flesh."
"You — you can tell?"
"I have eaten a great many things I should not have," said Akame, "and the ones that were wrong announced themselves. It is not a skill I would recommend acquiring."
She walked off toward the cooking fire.
"Next," said Naofumi, weakly.
"Nipah~!" said Rika Furude, and put down a basket that was almost as big as she was.
"What is all this?"
"Warabi, mizuna, three kinds of mushroom that are safe and one kind that isn't which I brought so I could show everyone what it looks like, sansho leaf for the fish because it's boring otherwise, and eleven crabs which Ruby-chan caught by screaming and grabbing them, which is not the correct technique and worked perfectly." Rika beamed. "Also we found a hot spring."
Naofumi's pencil stopped.
"You found a what."
"It's very small," said Ruby Rose, appearing behind her with wet hair and a face of total joy. "It's, like, this big? It's basically a puddle. But it's hot, Naofumi, it comes out of the rocks hot, and Rika says if we dig it out and put stones round it—"
"Nobody is digging out a hot spring."
"You say that now—"
"I say that permanently, Rose, we are on a graded examination—"
"Iwatani-kun," said Rika, cheerfully, "the pollution rule is about what you leave. A hole is not refuse. We asked."
"We asked?"
"Ishigami-kun submitted a written query on the second morning and got a receipt," said Rika. "He submits four a day. The examinations office has stopped putting the time on them."
Naofumi Iwatani put his face in his hands.
"Next," he said.
"Structural report," said Seiya Ryuuguuin.
"Go."
"The house is sound. The eight posts are set six hundred millimeters into packed ground with stone footings and I have checked all eight this morning by hand. The lashings on the north-east corner have loosened by approximately four millimeters since yesterday and I have re-tensioned them. The roof has shed two panels of thatch in the overnight wind and I have replaced them. There is a section of the porch on the stream side where the decking has a two-millimeter deflection under load that I do not like and I intend to sister a second joist under it this afternoon."
"...Seiya, that's a two-millimeter—"
"I am not ready," said Seiya Ryuuguuin, "for the porch to fail."
"The porch is not going to fail—"
"It is not going to fail," said Seiya, "because I am not ready for it to. Those statements are causally linked and I would appreciate it if you stopped separating them." He walked away.
"Next," said Naofumi, and then, "Satou, why are you empty-handed."
"Because I've been scouting," said Kazuma Satou, injured. "That's my job. I have a detect enemy skill, Naofumi, it's canonically established—"
"What did you detect?"
"Class C's got two guys about eight hundred meters north-west and they've been there since yesterday afternoon and they're bad at it. Like, offensively bad. One of them's smoking." Kazuma folded his arms. "Also Class A's moved their camp inland because the beach position was flooding at high tide, which they should have thought about three days ago, and Class B is out of everything."
"Out of everything?"
"They bought comfort," said Kazuma. "Tents, cookware, sixty liters of water, a first aid kit, and — I counted — about ninety percent of the toilet paper on the manifest. And now they've got a hundred and forty S-points left and six people asking Ichinose whether they can buy more water and Ichinose keeps saying 'we'll figure something out' in a really nice voice while her hands do a thing."
"...What thing?"
"The thing," said Kazuma. "You know the thing. The thing where somebody's hands are being calm at you."
Naofumi Iwatani made a note in the book, and drew a line under it, and looked at it for a while.
"Right," he said. "That's the last one."
"What's the last one?"
"That's the last piece I needed." Naofumi closed the notebook. "Satou, go and find Ishigami and Lawliet and tell them Class B is dry, and tell Ishigami that batch three is going on sale this afternoon at eleven points a bar and that he is not to be in the room when I sell it, because he'll be excited and excitement costs money."
"Ooh," said Kazuma. "You're gonna fleece them."
"I'm going to sell clean water and soap to a class that spent its budget on toilet paper," said Naofumi Iwatani, "at a price they can afford, with a receipt, in front of a camera I know is there, and I'm going to do it politely, and every point they hand me is a class point at noon on day seven." He picked up the notebook. "And Satou — I'm not going to gouge them."
"You're not?"
"No."
"Why not? They're the enemy—"
"Because there are three hundred and ninety-eight kids on this island who have never done anything to me," said Naofumi, "and because I have spent two years being the guy that everybody assumed was a monster, and I'm not going to spend seven days proving them right for eleven points a bar." He walked away. "Eleven is fair. Eleven is what it costs. Tell Ishigami I said that too, and tell him if he argues I'll show him the notebook."
At 11:20, the sun came round over the shoulder of the ridge, and the camp — which had been a construction site since 0530 — did something that surprised the observation room considerably more than the house had.
It stopped.
"What are they doing," said Sakagami.
"They're resting," said Aizawa.
"It's eleven twenty in the morning—"
"They started at half past five. They've done six hours." Aizawa did not move. "Arc runs the rotation. There's a rest block from eleven to one every day because the sun's worst then and because Makise told him on day one that heat exhaustion doesn't announce itself. It's on the audio."
"Aizawa-sensei," said Mashima, slowly, "does your class have a schedule?"
"My class has a schedule, a rotation, a materials ledger, a medical authority, a food authority, and a written document signed by all twenty-six of them assigning responsibility for failure to a specific individual by name." Aizawa yawned. "They wrote it on the first morning in about eighty minutes. I wasn't in the clearing. I heard about it afterward from the audio like everybody else."
"You weren't in the—"
"They didn't ask me to be," said Aizawa. "That's the part you're all missing."
On the screen, twenty-six people came off the work and moved into the shade.
And what happened next took approximately ninety seconds and was subsequently, in the private opinion of Chabashira Sae, the single most educationally significant thing she witnessed in eleven years at the Advanced Nurturing High School, for reasons she was never able to articulate to anyone's satisfaction.
Rias Gremory came up the ladder onto the porch with a book in her hand.
She had been on her feet since six. She had walked to Class B's camp and back with Kurumu, which was eleven kilometers round trip, and she had been diplomatic at Ichinose Honami for forty minutes, and she had carried a load of thatch up a slope in a tracksuit in thirty-one degree heat, and she was — as she announced to the porch at large — finished.
"I'm finished," said Rias Gremory.
"You're not finished, Buchou, you're amazing—"
"I am finished, Issei, and I am going to lie down, and I am going to read my book, and nothing is going to move me."
"Right! Yes! Absolutely!" Issei Hyoudou was sitting on the deck with his back against the wall and his legs out in front of him, sunburned and filthy and radiantly happy. "There's — the bench is free, or there's the mat, or—"
Rias Gremory looked at him.
Then she stepped over his legs, turned around, and lay down on top of him.
Fully. Deliberately. Without haste. She lay lengthwise along him with her legs across his legs and her whole weight settled, and she folded her arms on his chest, and she shifted twice to get comfortable, and the practical consequence of the arrangement was that the entire upper portion of Hyoudou Issei's head was no longer visible to anybody on the porch.
She opened the book. She propped it, open, on the crown of his skull.
She began to read.
There was a silence.
"...Buchou," said a muffled voice, from somewhere underneath.
"Mm?"
"Buchou, I want you to know that I'm going to die here."
"That's fine."
"I'm going to die here and I'm at peace—"
"Don't move your head, Issei, you'll lose my page."
"YES MA'AM—"
"Well," said Kurumu Kurono, "if we're doing that."
And she crossed the porch to where Kazuma Satou was sitting with his back against a post, and Kazuma said, "No," and Kurumu said, "I've walked eleven kilometers," and Kazuma said, "No, hang on, listen—" and Kurumu Kurono lay down on top of him in exactly the same configuration, propped her own book on his head, and settled.
The sound Kazuma Satou made was not entirely human.
"Are you comfortable?" said Kurumu.
"I'm dead—"
"Good."
"I've died. I've actually died, this is a thing I've done before, so I'm speaking with authority—"
"Shush. Chapter eleven."
Jaune Arc came up the path from the stream carrying a coil of cordage over one shoulder and stopped at the bottom of the ladder and looked at the porch for about four seconds.
"Now I see," he said, "why Junko asked that question."
"Which question," said Junko Enoshima, who was lying on the bench with her arms behind her head and her eyes closed and a smile on her face like a cat in a sunbeam.
"On the boat. About — you know. Activities." Jaune shifted the rope. "I thought it was just about, like, getting a reaction. Learning about the other classes."
"It was."
"Yeah, but it wasn't just that, was it." Jaune gestured vaguely at the porch, at the two books propped on two skulls, at four people who had achieved a state that could not be undone. "You made everybody in the entire year think about it. For a week. And now everybody's on an island with no walls and no rules and no adults and—"
"Arc-kun," said Junko, without opening her eyes, "I'm going to give you a piece of advice for free, and I never do that."
"...Okay?"
"Don't finish that sentence out loud in front of a woman who's been carrying timber for three hours."
"I'm just glad that isn't—"
"Jaune."
Jaune Arc's entire body locked.
Esdeath came up the path behind him. Her tracksuit sleeves were pushed to the elbow, her hair was tied back and coming loose from it, and there was pale grey dust on her forearms from the clay pit, and she looked, for the first time since anyone in Class E had met her, tired.
"I have been walking for almost three hours," she said, "and I have just come back from bringing in more material for whatever that broccoli-haired boy is doing. I need a good place to relax." Her pale eyes went, briefly, to the porch, where a duchess and a succubus had achieved a configuration. "And clearly the devil and the succubus know what they are doing. So go and sit on one of the chairs and lie back. Now."
Jaune Arc made a sound.
"...Yes ma'am," he said.
He went up the ladder. He sat in the chair. He lay back. Esdeath followed him up, unhurried, and lay down on top of him in exactly the manner that had now been twice demonstrated, and she was six feet tall and she did not fold up small, and the practical outcome for Jaune Arc was total and immediate.
She did not bring a book. She put her arms down, and her cheek on her forearm, and she went, within about ninety seconds, completely and unmistakably to sleep.
"Oh," said Kurumu, quietly, looking over.
"Yeah," said Rias.
"She's asleep."
"I know."
"Senpai, she doesn't sleep. She's been up before all of us every single morning—"
"I know," said Rias Gremory, and turned a page.
"Rika?" said Ruby Rose, coming up the path. "Rika, why are your hands—"
"Nipah~," said Rika Furude, whose hands were over Ruby's eyes. "Don't look."
"Why can't I look?"
"Because everyone's resting."
"I can rest! I like resting! I'll go and—"
"Rose-chan," said Rika, steering her firmly by the shoulders toward the stream, "we're going to go and look at the crabs again."
"We looked at the crabs twice—"
"We're going to look at them a third time, and it's going to be wonderful, and if you're very good I'll let you catch one by screaming at it."
"...Okay, that's actually a good offer."
"I know. I've had a long time to work out what your offers are."
Inside the house, on the plank couch that Seiya had built on the second evening out of four split timbers and two bundles of thatch and an amount of engineering that everyone agreed was excessive, three people were not looking at the porch.
"They're doing it again," said Hachiman Hikigaya.
"Mm," said Lucy.
"All three of them. Simultaneously. In front of everybody."
"Mm."
"There is a documented camera eleven meters that way in the crook of that tree, and Shiro waved at it, and they're doing it anyway—"
"Hikigaya-kun," said Shinji Ikari, from the far end of the couch, where he was sitting with a bowl in his lap, shelling something.
"What."
"You've looked over four times."
"I have not—"
"Five times now."
Hachiman Hikigaya opened his mouth, and closed it.
"...It's aspirational looking," he said. "It's not envy. It's an academic interest in a life I will never have and have made my peace with not having."
"Nyu," said Lucy.
"Don't do that. You've been doing a voice for three days, don't switch back to the noise the second it gets emotional."
"...It's easier," said Lucy, in her own voice.
"Yeah," said Hachiman. "I know. That's why I said it."
There was a silence, and it was a comfortable one, and outside twenty-two other people were doing nothing at all in the shade, and the stream ran, and the smoke went up in a thin white line from a hole in the ground.
"Ikari," said Hachiman, after a while.
"Yes?"
"What are you making."
"Sansho and salt for the fish," said Shinji. "And I'm — sorry, this is stupid—"
"Say it."
"I've been drying the crab shells and grinding them, because Rika-san said her grandmother used to do it, and it makes a stock, and I think if I get enough of it I could do something on the seventh day." Shinji looked at the bowl. "For everyone. As a — like a thing. At the end."
Hachiman Hikigaya looked at the ceiling of a house that had been built out of an island by twenty-six people who had nowhere else to go.
"That's not stupid," he said.
"It's a bit stupid."
"It's slightly stupid," Hachiman allowed, "and if you tell anyone I said the first thing, I'll deny it and I'll be believed, because I have a reputation."
"You have a reputation," said Lucy, "as the person who talked Jabami out of a coin flip and gave four hundred thousand points to Iwatani."
"That was one time—"
"It's the only time anything's ever happened to you and you've been complaining about it for eleven days."
"...I liked you better when you said 'nyu.'"
"No you didn't," said Lucy.
"No," Hachiman admitted. "I didn't."
In the observation room, Sakagami Kyougo had stood up.
"That is inappropriate conduct—"
"In a public area," said Aizawa, without moving.
"YES—"
"There isn't one." Aizawa opened his eyes. "Section eleven, subsection four. Inappropriate physical conduct in public areas of school property. That island is a designated examination site. The camp is a structure erected by the class, on ground allocated to the class, with no faculty present and no other class within nine hundred meters." He looked at the screen, where three books were propped on three heads. "Also nothing inappropriate is happening. Six people are lying down. Two of them are reading. One of them is unconscious."
"They're lying down on each other—"
"Sakagami-sensei," said Hoshinomiya Chie, who had both hands over her mouth and was making a noise, "look at the general."
"I am looking at the—"
"No, look at her." Hoshinomiya pointed. "That is a woman who has slept about four hours a night since she got here, who scouted eleven kilometers this morning, who has not once — not once, I've watched all three days — let anybody stand behind her. And she just walked up onto a porch in front of twenty-five people and went to sleep on top of a boy with her back to the treeline."
The room was quiet.
"That's trust," said Mashima Tomonari.
"That's unconsciousness—"
"That's trust," Mashima repeated, "and I'd like somebody in this room to explain to me how a class that has existed for twenty-one days has produced it, when mine has had three months and Katsuragi and Sakayanagi still won't share a tent."
Nobody explained it.
"Aizawa-sensei," said Chabashira Sae.
"Mm."
"You're not surprised."
Shota Aizawa looked at eleven monitors showing sixty concealed cameras' worth of an island, and at a house with a porch on it, and at twenty-six kids in the shade at the hottest part of the day, and did not change expression at all.
"No," he said.
"Not by any of it? Not the house, not the still, not the—"
"I taught heroes for eleven years," said Aizawa. "Do you know what the actual job was? It wasn't teaching them to fight. Every one of them could fight when they walked in the door — that's why they got in." He folded his arms again. "The job was getting a room full of teenagers who had each spent their entire lives being the strange one to work out that the other strange ones were an asset instead of a threat. That took me, on average, about four months per class, and I lost two of them along the way."
He nodded at the screen.
"That lot did it in eleven days," he said, "because I told them the truth on the first morning and then got out of the way, and because every single one of them arrived already knowing what it costs to be alone." A shrug. "So no. I'm not surprised. I'm not even watching, really. I'm sitting here because if I leave, one of you will file something."
At 13:40 a delegation from Class B came up the eastern path and was met four hundred meters out by a boy in a hoodie and a girl with pale blue hair who had not been asleep for eleven minutes, and was escorted the rest of the way, and was not permitted past the bottom of the ladder.
"Ichinose-san," said Naofumi Iwatani.
"Iwatani-kun!" Ichinose Honami's smile was warm and open and about six percent thinner than it had been on the beach. Behind her stood Kanzaki Ryuuji and Shibata Souta, both of whom were staring past Naofumi at the house with expressions of undisguised betrayal. "Wow. Wow, this is — okay, I'm going to be honest, I practiced a whole thing on the way up here and I've forgotten it, because you have a house."
"We have a structure."
"It has shutters—"
"Louvers," said Seiya, from the porch.
"Sorry?"
"They're louvers. A shutter is for weather. A louver is for airflow." Seiya did not elaborate.
"...Right." Ichinose put her hands together. "Okay. I'm going to just say it, because dancing around it wastes your time and mine. Class B is low on water. Not out. Low. And I've got a hundred and thirty-eight S-points and a manifest price that will take about ninety of them, and if I spend ninety points on water then that's ninety class points my class doesn't get on the seventh day, and I've been walking for an hour trying to decide whether to do it anyway."
"And?"
"And then Beppu-kun said the freak class has a waterfall," said Ichinose, "and I said don't call them that, and then I came here, and it turns out you have a waterfall." She looked at the bamboo line and the filter beds and the pit. "Iwatani-kun. What would it cost me?"
Naofumi Iwatani opened the notebook.
"Four points per twenty liters," he said.
Ichinose blinked.
"...Four."
"Four."
"The manifest is twenty-two."
"The manifest is twenty-two because the manifest wants your points," said Naofumi. "Mine's four because four is what it costs me in labor and charcoal, plus a margin, and I worked it out on the second night." He turned the notebook around and showed her, and she looked at it, and her face did something. "You can inspect the filter. You can watch it come off the still. You can bring your own containers or buy ours at two points and I'd rather you brought your own, because carrying our containers back to your camp means somebody in your class walks eleven kilometers twice."
"You're — Iwatani-kun, you could charge me eighteen."
"Yes."
"I'd pay eighteen."
"I know you would," said Naofumi. "That's why I'm not charging it."
Kanzaki Ryuuji said, flatly, "What's the catch?"
And Naofumi Iwatani laughed.
It was a terrible sound. It came out of him like something breaking, and half of Class E turned around, because none of them had heard it before.
"Sorry," he said. "Sorry. That's — that's the first thing I said, on the first day, in that classroom, when they gave us a hundred thousand points. What's the catch." He wiped his face. "The catch, Kanzaki-kun, is that we're going to do this every day for four more days, and every time you come here you're going to see this camp, and on the seventh day you're going to go back to that beach and somebody's going to ask you how the class at the bottom of the school beat you, and you're going to have to say because they built a filter and we bought toilet paper."
"...That's it?"
"That's it. That's the whole catch. I'm selling you water at cost plus, and I'm humiliating you with it, and the reason it works is that it's not a trick." Naofumi turned the notebook around. "Sign here. And I want a receipt copy for the examinations office, because I file everything, and because I'd like it on the record that Class E did not extort a rival class when it had the opportunity."
Ichinose Honami signed.
Then she stood there for a second.
"Iwatani-kun," she said, "can I ask you something that isn't about water?"
"You can ask."
"On the first day, on the beach, when Ishigami-kun asked about the trees." Her open face was uncharacteristically still. "Everybody in my class laughed. And I laughed too, and then that night I lay in a tent I'd paid forty points for, and I thought about it, and I couldn't sleep." She looked up at the house. "How did he know to ask?"
"He didn't," said Naofumi.
"...What?"
"He didn't know. He asked." Naofumi closed the book. "That's the whole thing, Ichinose-san. He didn't have secret information. He just looked at a forest and a manual and thought nobody has checked whether these two things are allowed to touch, and then he put his hand up in front of four hundred and forty people and asked a question that made everybody think he was an idiot." He shrugged. "There's no trick. Everyone on that beach could have asked. He was the only one who was willing to look stupid in public."
Ichinose Honami went away down the eastern path with sixty liters of water and a receipt and something in her face that Kanzaki Ryuuji, walking behind her, decided not to ask about.
At 15:11 a girl with silver-grey hair and a limp came up the same path with a cane and a bodyguard and stopped in exactly the same place, and was met by a boy with red-gold eyes and a smile.
"Sakayanagi-san," said Karma Akabane.
"Akabane-kun. How nice."
"You've walked six kilometers on that leg."
"Seven and a half, in fact, and I intend to complain about it for weeks." Sakayanagi Arisu's pale eyes were bright and she was not looking at him at all; she was looking, past him, at everything. "I'm not here to buy anything."
"I know."
"I'm here to look."
"I know that too," said Karma. "You can look. Iwatani says anyone can look, on the grounds that looking doesn't help you, which I think is showing off, but he's earned it."
Sakayanagi Arisu looked for a long time.
"There's no leader," she said at last.
"Sorry?"
"I've been here four minutes and I have seen eleven people do eleven different things, and not one of them checked with anybody." The cane tapped the ground once. "In my class, if a person picks up a tool, they look at Katsuragi-kun or at me first. In Class C, they look at Ryuuen-kun. In Class B they look at Ichinose-san without knowing they're doing it. And here—" she gestured, "—a girl with horns just walked past carrying an armful of timber and put it on a pile, and nobody told her where the pile was."
"She knows where the pile is."
"Why does she know where the pile is, Akabane-kun?"
"Because it's been in the same place for three days," said Karma, "and because on the first morning a guy with green hair drew the whole camp in the dirt and twenty-six people looked at it."
Sakayanagi Arisu smiled, and it was not the smile she used at school.
"I came here to identify your leader," she said. "I was fairly certain I'd manage it by simple observation, because a leader on this island is a person with a card who must be somewhere three times a day, and behavior of that kind is very difficult to conceal from someone who is genuinely watching."
"And?"
"And in four days I have observed twenty-six people walk to occupied spots in twenty-six different combinations at times that do not divide by eight," said Sakayanagi, "and I have concluded that either your class has no leader, which is impossible, or somebody in there understood on day one that the way to hide a pattern is to generate a hundred of them." Her fingers moved on the cane. "It's the most elegant thing I've seen at this school and I want very badly to know whose idea it was."
Karma Akabane grinned.
"Guy in the back row," he said. "Dead eyes. Complains constantly. Thought of it in about forty seconds while trying to talk us out of the plan."
"...You're not lying."
"Nope."
"That's infuriating."
"Yeah," said Karma. "We all feel that way. He's unbearable about it, which is to say he pretends it never happened and gets upset if anyone brings it up, which is somehow worse."
At 17:30, eight hundred meters north-west, two Class C students who had been in position since the previous afternoon were approached by a small blue-haired girl with a float ring and a basket, who said "Nipah~! You've been here a long time! Would you like some water?" and offered them a bamboo tube, and both of them refused it, and one of them said something unpleasant, and Rika Furude smiled and said "That's alright! Ryuuen-kun told you not to take anything from us, didn't he? That's very sensible" and walked away, and the two Class C students spent the next hour arguing about whether they had just given something away.
They had.
At 19:00, Ryuuen Kakeru received a report and laughed for a long time and then stopped laughing.
At 20:00 all five classes stood roll call at the base camp under the floodlights, and Class E arrived as twenty-six people in clean tracksuits smelling faintly of woodsmoke and soap, and four hundred and fourteen other students noticed the second part.
"They're clean," said Sudo Ken, out loud.
"Shut up, Sudo—"
"No, but they're clean, Ike. Look at 'em. That guy's shaved."
"That's the detective, he doesn't shave, that's just his face—"
"Somebody in that class washed," said Sudo, in a voice of raw personal grievance, "and I've been in the same shorts since Tuesday."
At 20:40 Horikita Suzune walked eleven meters out of Class D's camp, stopped, and turned around.
"Ayanokouji-kun."
"Yes."
"Class E is going to win this examination."
"Probably."
"They're going to win it by a margin that makes the rest of us look like children." Her arms were folded and her voice was very controlled. "Class B has bought water from them. Bought it. Ichinose came back with sixty liters and a receipt."
"Yes."
"And you're not going to do anything about it."
"No."
"Why not?"
Ayanokouji Kiyotaka looked out at a dark island with five fires on it.
"Because we're not competing with Class E," he said. "We're competing with Class C for third and with Class A for second, and every point I spend trying to interfere with a class that spent eleven S-points in three days is a point I'm not spending on the classes I can actually beat." He turned. "And because I'd like to see it finished."
"...See what finished?"
"The house," said Ayanokouji Kiyotaka, and went to bed.
It was a good house.
It was well framed and well thatched and well sited, and it kept the rain off, and it kept the ground damp away from twenty-six sleeping bodies, and it had louvers that could be adjusted for the airflow, and it had cost the class nothing at all.
And it had, as Hachiman Hikigaya had pointed out on the second evening, in the flat voice of a man who had found the ugly thing, exactly one design flaw.
"There's no walls," he'd said.
"There are three walls—"
"There's no walls inside," said Hachiman. "It's one room. Twenty-six people in one room with no partitions and no doors and no soundproofing." He'd shrugged. "In the dorm we've all got a room with a door. On the boat we had cabins. Here we've got a shed."
"So?"
"So some of us are going to find out about the rest of us," Hachiman had said, and gone to sleep.
The first night it had been Shinji.
It started at about ten past two — a small, catching sound, barely audible over the stream, the kind of noise a person makes when they are trying not to make one and are asleep and therefore failing. Then it had gotten worse. Then there had been a word, and the word had been father, and Shinji Ikari had said it four times in a row in a voice that did not belong to a sixteen-year-old boy, and twenty-five people in a dark room had lain absolutely still and listened.
Kurisu Makise had gone over and woken him up, because Kurisu Makise had read the literature on it and knew that you were supposed to, and Shinji had apologized eleven times before he was fully conscious.
The second night it had been Lucy.
Lucy did not talk in her sleep. What Lucy did was worse, which was that at some point after midnight the air in the house had gotten heavy and there had been a sound like a knife being drawn through cloth, and a section of the wall panel eleven centimeters wide had opened by itself in a clean diagonal, and everybody in the building had woken up at once and nobody had moved.
And Hachiman Hikigaya had said, into the dark, in a completely ordinary voice, "Lucy. Wall."
And Lucy had woken up, and the pressure had gone, and she had said "...sorry" and Hachiman had said "it's a wall, we've got fifty-two spare timbers" and Seiya Ryuuguuin had said "I will repair it in the morning and it will be better than it was" and that had, somehow, been the end of it.
But the third night was Subaru, and Subaru was different, and everyone had known since the first night that Subaru was going to be different, because on the first night, at about half past three, he had woken up screaming with his hands over his own throat.
"Natsuki-kun," said Rika Furude.
He was sitting on the porch steps with his back against the post and his knees up, at 03:11 on the fourth morning, shaking.
He hadn't screamed this time. That was almost worse. He had come awake with his teeth locked and had gotten out of the building without waking anybody up — he thought — and had made it as far as the steps, and had been there for about twenty minutes.
"Rika-chan." His voice came out wrong. "Go back to bed."
"Nipah~. No."
"Seriously. It's — I'm fine, it's just a—"
"Natsuki-kun, you've said 'it's fine' four times in three days and every single time your hands have been doing that." Rika sat down beside him on the step. She was small and her feet did not reach the ground and she was wearing a tracksuit four sizes too large and she looked, in the dark, about eleven years old. "Also I wasn't asleep."
"You're always asleep. You sleep like a cat—"
"I haven't been asleep before four in the morning in eleven days," said Rika Furude, "and it's got nothing to do with you."
Subaru turned his head.
"...Rika?"
"Do you know what the worst part of getting out is?" she said, conversationally, looking at the stream. "Everybody thinks the worst part is being in it. It isn't. Being in it is terrible, but you're busy. There's a thing to do and a June to survive and a person to warn." She swung her feet. "The worst part is afterward. Because you get out, and you win, and everybody's alive, and then it's a Tuesday and you're at a school and nothing is trying to kill you, and your body doesn't believe it. It keeps checking. Every night at three in the morning it wakes you up and asks whether you've checked yet."
Natsuki Subaru did not say anything for a while.
"How long," he said.
"For me? Nipah. A long time." Rika smiled at the water. "I got my ending. I actually got it — the real one, the one where everyone lives, and I don't have to do it again. I have that. It's mine." Her feet stopped swinging. "And I still wake up at three."
"...Yeah."
"You didn't get one," said Rika.
Subaru's whole body went rigid.
"That's not—"
"You didn't get an ending, Natsuki-kun." Rika Furude's voice was very gentle and completely merciless. "I've watched you for twenty-one days. You laugh at everything and you say yes to everything and you're the first person to help anyone with anything, and when it's quiet your face does something that mine used to do in the mirror. That's not a person who finished. That's a person who stopped in the middle."
"Rika—"
"So did they take it away from you," she said, "or do you still have it?"
The stream ran. Something in the trees made a noise and stopped.
Natsuki Subaru put both hands over his face.
"You're not going to believe me," he said.
"I've believed six impossible things before breakfast, and one of them was me."
"Yeah, but—"
"Natsuki-kun." Rika turned and looked at him, and the ancient thing behind her eyes came all the way up to the front of them, and Subaru — who had been dead more times than the school's records field could display, who had seen a witch's hand come out of his own chest — actually flinched. "Say it. Whatever it is. Say the words. I promise you cannot say a sentence at three in the morning that I have not already lived through."
Subaru Natsuki opened his mouth.
He was still, at some level below thought, braced for it. He had been braced for it for two years. Every single time in his life that he had gotten within a hundred meters of these particular words, the world had come to a stop and something enormous and freezing had reached into him and taken his heart in a hand and squeezed, and there had been a scent like flowers, and a voice like love, and a darkness with a smile in it.
He said: "I have a power called Return by Death."
Nothing happened.
The stream ran. The stars did whatever stars do. His heart continued to beat in the ordinary manner of a heart.
"...I—"
"Keep going," said Rika.
"I have a power called Return by Death," said Natsuki Subaru, louder, and his voice cracked in the middle of it, "and when I die I go back to a save point and I have to do it again, and I've done it — Rika, I've done it so many times, and I couldn't tell anybody, I physically could not tell anybody, if I even got close to saying it she'd—"
He stopped.
He touched his own chest with one hand.
"She's not doing it," he said.
"Who's not?"
"The — she's not doing it. She always does it. Every time." He was staring at his own hand. "There's a — there's a woman. A witch. She's the reason I have it and she's the reason I could never say it, and every single time I tried, she'd stop my heart and hold it there until I stopped, and I've felt it hundreds of times, and I just said the words out loud on a porch and she didn't come."
"Nipah," said Rika Furude, softly.
"Why isn't she—"
"Because she's busy," said Rika.
Subaru's head came round so fast his neck cracked.
"...What?"
"You're not the only one who came here with something attached to him, Natsuki-kun." Rika Furude was looking out at the dark, and her small face was perfectly calm. "There are twenty-six of us in that building and at least eleven of us are carrying something that shouldn't work in a place like Japan, and it's all been sitting in the same six hundred meters for three weeks. Ishigami's soap and a devil's power of destruction and Iwatani-kun's shield and Sora-kun's world and my — " she paused, "— my whatever-she-is, and your witch."
"That doesn't—"
"It's very loud," said Rika. "That's all. It's very loud here, and there are things that notice loud."
"Rika, what are you talking about—"
"I'm talking about the fact that on the second night I heard a voice I have not heard in a very long time," said Rika Furude, "and she said auau, which is what she always says when she is embarrassed about something, and she said that she was sorry, and that she had been busy, and that there were two others."
"Two other what?"
"Two other women," said Rika, "who are not women."
The stream ran.
"One of them is very old and very cold and she thinks all of this is a story and she is enjoying it, and she is the one I would like everyone in that building to stay away from." Rika Furude's feet had stopped swinging entirely. "And one of them is very sad and very strong and she loves one specific person so much that it has warped everything around her for four hundred years, and she has apparently spent the last three weeks negotiating."
Subaru could not breathe.
"Negotiating what," he whispered.
"Nipah. Rika doesn't know." Rika smiled, and it was small and old and it did not reach her eyes at all. "But you just said the words out loud and your heart is still beating, so I think we can guess what she gave up, and I think we can guess that she did it because someone showed her that a person can hold a thing very tightly for four hundred years and still be wrong about how to hold it."
Natsuki Subaru put his face in his hands and made a sound.
"That's not — that's not fair," he said. "That's not — she can't just—"
"She can. She did. And now you can say it." Rika bumped her shoulder against his, once. "So say it again."
"...What?"
"Say it again," said Rika Furude. "To somebody who isn't me. Not tonight. Tonight you're going to sit here and shake and I'm going to sit here and let you. But sometime, Natsuki-kun, in the next seven days or the next seven months, you're going to be in a room with twenty-five people who have all been broken in a different place, and one of them is going to ask you what's wrong, and you are going to have the chance to answer." She stood up. "And you should know, before that happens, that I've heard every terrible sentence there is and I didn't move away from you on the step."
"Rika—"
"Aizawa-sensei told you it doesn't expire," said Rika Furude, from the top of the steps. "He was right. But he's very tired and he's only got three years, and I've got — nipah. I've got a while." She went through the door. "Come inside when the shaking stops. There's a wall panel that's a bit ragged and if you lie on that side you can see the stars."
Subaru Natsuki sat on the steps of a house on an island until the sky went grey.
At 03:40, four rows in, Hachiman Hikigaya, who had been awake for the entire conversation and had not moved a muscle, thought: that's the thing. That's the ugly thing. Somebody in this class can go back and none of us know what he's already seen us do — and filed it, and did not say it, and lay looking at a thatch roof until the light came.
At 04:10, on the far side of the room, Makise Kurisu woke up because Okabe Rintaro had said something in his sleep, and reached over and put her hand flat on his shoulder without opening her eyes, and he went quiet almost immediately, and she went back to sleep, and neither of them mentioned it in the morning, and neither of them had mentioned it any of the other eleven times.
Somewhere that was not a place, three of them were talking.
"You gave it up."
"I did."
"Ohhh, that's delicious. Four hundred years and you fold because a boy told a schoolteacher he had something he couldn't say. My dear, that's not love, that's housekeeping."
"Auau — don't be cruel to her—"
"I'm not being cruel, little horned thing, I'm being accurate, which is worse and much more fun."
"He said it out loud."
"Yes."
"Nothing happened."
"Yes."
"He said it out loud and nothing happened and he looked at his hand like it belonged to him."
"...And?"
"And that," said something that was very old and had a smile in its voice, "is the first genuinely new thing I have seen in a very long time, and I would like to see what he does with it, and so — for the moment, and only for the moment — I'll behave."
"Auau. That's the frightening one."
"That," said the sad one, "is the only offer any of us are going to get."
At 05:30 on the fourth morning, twenty-six people got up.
Shinji lit the fires. Akame went south to the tide pool. Lucy went into the trees. Issei carried. Seiya sistered a joist under a section of decking with a two-millimeter deflection that nobody else had ever noticed and would never notice. Ruby and Rika went for warabi. Naofumi opened the notebook. Esdeath went north at a pace that Kazuma had described on the second day as "unsportsmanlike." Senku lit the kiln, and Okabe watched it, and Kurisu tested the water, and Jesse tasted batch three and pronounced it good. Sora and Shiro sat by the cistern and played a game with pebbles that neither of them would explain. Karma went to have a conversation with two men in a bush. Yumeko sat on the porch with a deck of leaves she had cut into fifty-two rectangles and did not play a single hand, because she was thinking about a number, and it was making her ill, and she was enjoying it enormously. Rias and Kurumu walked eleven kilometers. Light and L sat on opposite ends of the bench for forty minutes in absolute silence, each writing in a different notebook, and at the end of it L said "Class C" and Light said "agreed" and neither of them said anything else. Jaune wrote the rotation on a plank with a piece of charcoal. Hachiman sat in the shade and found the ugly thing. Junko lay on her back in the leaf litter with her eyes closed and her mouth curved and did not say anything to anybody for four hours, which was, in her case, the single most alarming behavior available to her.
And Natsuki Subaru got up with everybody else, and carried water, and made a joke that was too loud, and at one point in the middle of the morning stopped dead in the middle of the path with a bamboo tube in each hand and said, out loud, to nobody, experimentally:
"Return by Death."
Nothing happened.
He laughed. It came out of him wrong and wet and he had to put the tubes down.
"Natsuki?" said Naofumi, from the rock.
"Nothing," said Subaru. "Nothing. I'm — I'm good, man. I'm really good."
"...Okay."
"Hey, Naofumi."
"What."
"You know how you said, on the first day, what do you want from us?" Subaru picked the tubes back up. "And Aizawa said twenty-six of you at the graduation gate?"
"I remember."
"Yeah." Subaru grinned at him — the awful grin, the raccoon eyes, the whole disaster. "I've decided I want that too. That's all. Just — thought I'd say it out loud, 'cause apparently I can do that now."
He went up the path whistling.
Naofumi Iwatani watched him go, and wrote water: 40L in the notebook, and did not write down the other thing, and thought about it for the rest of the day.
Ten decks up and eleven kilometers away, the assessor said, "Feed twelve again, please," and feed twelve came up, and the observation room looked at a house with smoke going up beside it and a cistern with two people sitting on the edge and a rack of soap curing in the shade and a boy in a lab coat screaming with joy about a hole in the ground.
"Three more days," said Sakagami Kyougo, heavily.
"Three more days," Mashima agreed.
"Aizawa-sensei," said the assessor, "for the record — do you intend to intervene at any point in the remainder of this examination?"
"No."
"None at all?"
"They've built a house, a water supply, a kitchen, an economy and a rota," said Shota Aizawa, standing up and stretching until something in his spine made a noise, "and last night one of them told another one something he hasn't been able to say to a living person in two years, and nobody woke up the rest of the room about it." He picked up his sleeping bag. "There's nothing for me to do down there, Ishida-san. That's the job. If I'm needed, I've failed."
He went to the door.
"Aizawa," said Chabashira Sae.
"Mm."
"That house is going to be on that island when the examination ends."
"Yes."
"The pollution clause—"
"Ishigami filed a written query on day two and got a stamped receipt," said Aizawa. "Native material, harvested on site, left standing. It's not refuse. It's a modification." He opened the door. "The Chairman can knock it down if he wants. He'll have to send somebody."
The door shut.
Hoshinomiya Chie put her chin back in her hands and looked at the screen, where a girl with pale blue hair was walking up a path with an armful of timber and a boy with blond hair was coming down it with a plank and a piece of charcoal, and they stopped, and said something to each other, and both of them laughed.
"Sae-chan," said Hoshinomiya.
"Don't."
"Sae-chan, they're happy."
"I know," said Chabashira Sae, and lit a cigarette she was not supposed to light, and did not look away from the screen.