The door led straight to the staircase. Apparently, in the dim light, no one had been able to tell a handle-less door from a bolted-down window earlier.
Utami reached for one of her pockets, but Lucky quickly found that the [黃龍] digital lock was still open. Swinging the door, he paused. "So where do we think the others are going to be?"
"At the other side of [Door 1]." Utami stepped past the threshold into the lit room.
Pear rested a finger against her cheek. "Do you think it led to another stairwell?"
Five, the farthest back, put his hands in his jean pockets. "There's no way to know. I don't exactly have my phone or any of their numbers." He smirked. "Well, their ten-digit numbers."
Unfortunately, Utami didn't have a supernatural connection to her brother, either. "Well, [Door 1] was on the third floor, right? So that's probably our best bet."
"But we're on the same floor now, aren't we?" Pear brought up.
Lucky nodded. "They're obviously not right here, though..."
"And they may have run off to try a new key or keycard somewhere." Five pushed his glasses up. "Our best bet is probably to split up."
Pear responded with an exasperated sigh. "But then we won't know where anyone is!"
"Then we just agree to meet back here after a while," Utami said. "Ten minutes?"
Lucky wrung his hands. "But what if we don't find them by then?"
"Then we start all over again." Utami looked at the stairs. "I'm going to look around for this [蟠龍 keycard]'s match."
The others nodded in approval and stated a few of their destinations. Pear would see if she could get around to the normal stairwell and the rest of the third floor. Lucky would check the basement, and Five would start on the second floor.
Utami's best bet for the [蟠龍] lock would be the office-like doors on the first and second floors. The first floor was locked in this stairwell—but by what? She'd never gotten a good look at it.
She hurried down the stairs to investigate. No card reader was mounted on the side, but she didn't see a keyhole, either.
"What's supposed to unlock it, then? Or is it ever supposed to unlock?"
Experimentally, she pressed on the handle and was completely unprepared when it fell away from her hands.
"Gah!" She tumbled forward, not quite managing to catch herself before she fell onto the carpet of the next room. "Ow..."
She pulled herself to her feet, rubbing a faintly scraped patch above her knee.
"What the heck? They did say this had been locked, right?" With a frown, she let the door creak closed behind her.
Ahead was a cramped hallway, its walls a spotted but sterile shade of white. She couldn't make out any doors, so the only option was forging ahead and following the corner. Finally it ran into a one-panel metal door spreading from side to side.
"This thing'd better open."
Utami seized the handle and turned. It turned with her.
"Whew."
She stepped through before straightening her wrist and jamming her foot in the doorway. She wasn't willing to take off and leave one of her clean, white sandals in the crack, so she glanced around to see if anything within reach would do. She soon found the little box affixed to the right side of the door. One of the keycard scanners, its light green.
"Hmm... Well..." She looked between the scanner and her foot a few times before letting the door close. It shut with a final-sounding thud.
"Oh, boy." She reached for the handle and pulled—
It opened just as easily as it had from the inside.
With a sigh of relief, she let it fall closed again. "Well, isn't that nice of The Malefactor. Although with a name like that, pretty much anything normal would seem nice of him."
She cast one more glance at the keycard—its label was [虯龍]. A... bug dragon?
"Hey! Cera!"
Utami recognized the voice before she turned to see one of the others jogging towards her.
"Solo!" She glanced around him, but the others weren't with him. "Are you holding up all right?"
"Hm." He nodded, coming to a panting stop a few feet ahead of her.
"I guess you got through [Door 1]? Is that where the [虯龍]—" she traced the kanji in the air—"keycard was?"
He nodded again. "You found the lock here, then?"
"Yeah." Utami motioned to the door behind her and glanced at the open area ahead. A bathroom on either side—the brick walls curled to prevent the need for doors—and a blocked-off area opposite a plain door. "Where's everyone else?"
"Don't know." Solo cast a look over his shoulder. "Bathrooms must be in the same place on every floor. I stopped at the one just outside the door and told them I'd catch up. I guess they're out looking for you all."
"Well, they must have come this far." She swung the door open and peered down the hallway, although with the turn she couldn't see the stairwell door. "You'd think we would have run into them on the stairs, though... Did you guys finish a while ago, then?"
Solo scratched the triangle of fuzz on his chin. "Not 'a while,' but... Five to ten minutes, probably?" Looking ready to make a joke, he lifted his left but but sighed.
I looked past the stump. "No watch, right?"
He nodded, lowering his arm.
Letting out a breath, Utami shut the door behind her. "I guess we just missed them. My group is meeting back up in ten minutes. I'm trying to find where this keycard goes in the meantime." She dug the [蟠龍 keycard] out of her pocket and showed it to Solo. "Look familiar?"
He scanned the word before giving a single nod. "Coiled Dragon. I'm sure I saw it on one of the doors... Around the desks in the atrium, right?"
"Sounds good. How do we get there from here?"
Solo nodded before heading towards the other door. "Let's see if I can work us around."
He led her up the stairs at a rather slow pace, but he insisted he was fine. After a little bit of going up and down and getting through another thick door, they finally made it to one of the outside stairwells and climbed down to the first floor. Solo led her to the single door at the end of the row of desks.
"Let's see..." Utami wiped a little dust off the nameplate over the card scanner.
蟠龍
"That's the one, right?" Solo was leaning, the small of his back pressed against the counter behind them.
"It had better be." Utami lined up her keycard and slid it through its slot. The red light on the scanner blinked off, the green above it turning on in its stead.
"We're in." She seized the doorknob and twisted it. For once, the wooden door didn't creak as it opened. The room beyond was dark, but a little feeling around found a set of light switches just beside the door frame.
"Let there be light," Utami said as she flicked them on. A few round overhead bulbs came to life as well as a large lamp with a dull, square lampshade.
Solo stepped inside behind her. "I'm gonna say office."
Utami nodded as she scanned the room—she could only come to the same conclusion. To the right was a dark wooden desk covered with papers, paperweights, file folders, paper clips, pens, and other clutter. Behind it was a worn but nice leather chair, pushed back against a blinded window to the atrium area. Several less comfortable-looking chairs were spread in a choppy arc not far from the front of the desk. Various certificates and other framed things hung on every wall, all of them straight. Two other doors were present: a wooden one on the far wall with a little glass window, and a metal one on the right.
Utami stepped up to the metal door immediately, her throat tightening. [3] stretched across the length of the metal, a bit of the red splatter reaching the off-white walls.
"[Door 3], huh? About a third of what I wanted, but better than nothing." Solo slipped past her to examine the RED. It said [VACANT], just like any other new one they'd found.
"Yeah... We probably won't be able to find [Door 9] until we've cleared all of the other [numbered doors]." Utami sighed, fiddling with one of her braids.
Solo's brow furrowed. "You think so, huh? I hope we have time for that..."
"Wouldn't be much of a 'game' otherwise." Utami crossed her arms, frowning at the painted number for a while longer before turning to the other closed door. It had a curved handle rather than a knob, and a keyhole took up the front of the handle joint.
"Doesn't feel like much of a game to me." Solo tugged his left sleeve up a little. "What kind of ship is this Malefactor running?"
"Ship? They're not even pretending it's a ship this time," Utami said as she jiggled the handle. Locked. She had to glance behind her to see the look Solo was giving her. "As far as what they want... It's probably an experiment. It fails every ethics board and whatever variables they care about aren't too isolated, but I don't know what else would call for an elaborate setup like this."
"An experiment, huh...?" Solo ran his hand through his hair. "Makes as much sense as anything."
Utami nodded but didn't give any other response. There wasn't much more she wanted to say, after all. For a science major, she'd had more than enough experiments...
Instead of pursuing the subject, she got on her tiptoes to check the little window on the locked door. A few good thumps of the heel of her palm only made the glass vibrate.
"We're probably not breaking this."
Solo peered around her. "Might not do any good, anyway. It'd be awful hard to reach around and actually turn the knob from the inside. I don't think I could do it, and I've got the longest arms." He paused.
Utami didn't feel up to commenting that only one of his arms was still long, so she focused on the window instead. The lights were on in the room beyond, and straight ahead she could see the shine of metal—stark in comparison to the blinding red up next to it. A few steps back, and she could see it more clearly. It was definitely a [numbered door]...
"Wait... What?"
Solo stepped a little closer at her cry of confusion. "What is it? Another door?" He squinted at the little window and frowned. "Huh..."
"Well, that's... new," Utami managed as she put her weight on her heels again.
Her Nonary Game certainly hadn't a [Door 0].
"Do you... still think we'll have to go through all of the numbers?" Solo started, his breathing faint. "Because that's impossible."
Impossible?
Utami looked back at the elongated, red [0] on the door, a savage slash cutting from the upper right to the lower left. A digital root of zero... He was right. Even if something added to a multiple of ten, the first digit would be the root, not zero. Unless they could produce a few [0] bracelets, there was no way to get the right root for that door. But that didn't seem right.
"Then why is it here...?"
Why would The Malefactor go to the trouble of setting up a [numbered door] that couldn't be opened? It didn't add up. This [Door 0] couldn't be exactly what it seemed.
Utami gripped the handle again, although it still didn't budge for her. The keyhole, though... It was a little larger than a normal one, and the shape... She felt she had seen it before...
"Solo? Do you recognize the keyhole?"
He frowned and stooped over to check. "That's kind of a weird thing to recognize, you know?" He wiped some sweat off his forehead. "I only remember keys from the rooms, though. As far as the dragons... Didn't Pear have the Hidden Treasure Dragon key?"
"The... The what?" Before she had time to deduce which key he meant, Solo took a paper and pen from the table clutter. He had to commission a few paperweights to keep the sheet from sliding while he wrote down [伏藏龍].
Utami nodded. "The three-symbol one... I guess we'll just have to ask Pear—Oh!" She jerked, her hands flying to her sides. "Pear! I have to meet up with Pear and the rest of them—how long has it been?"
She checked her wrist, but she seriously doubted it was 3:00. "Shoot. Come on, let's go back to the front of [Room 8]. Or..." Frowning, she looked over Solo. "You can stay here and rest if you want. You didn't agree to meet with them, after all. And... it's the back of [Room 6], too..."
Solo shut his eyes for a moment before stepping over and pulling out the leather office chair. "All right. Send one of the guys to bring me some w—beer or something if you find any."
"I don't think we're going to find beer in a school environment... But I'll have Give run you some juice or coffee if we're so lucky."
"Thanks, Cera." Solo leaned in the chair, his neck bent back a little awkwardly without a sufficient headrest to support it. He closed his eyes as Utami hurried out.
Thankfully she had memorized the convoluted path back to the [虯龍] door. The last stairwell door opened with a creak as she hurried inside. No other footsteps clanged above or below.
"I'm definitely late. Crap."
She pelted up as quickly as she could without risking a loss of footing and crashed through the door on the third floor.
"I'm here! Everything's okay! I'm okay! I just got carried away..."
Utami came to a panting stop a while before she could run straight into Lucky and Five. She swung her head around a bit before swallowing.
"Where... Where's Pear?"
Lucky gripped his hands. "I was hoping you'd know..."
Frowning, Utami looked to Five, but he just shook his head. "How late am I?"
"It's not like any of us have clocks on us." Five sighed, shuffling a hand through his brown curls. "But I think it's been fifteen to twenty minutes..."
"What could be taking her so long?" Utami looked over her shoulder. "Was she scouring the sandbox again or what?"
Lucky let out a breath and adjusted his gloves. "We should probably look for her... What do you think?"
"Sure, sounds good to me," Five said. "I can go grab the rest of the guys from the break room and rally them."
"It's been a while," Lucky mumbled. "I guess I could check the basement again..."
Utami nodded. "That won't take long. I'll tag along with you, Lucky."
"Okay, sure."
Their paths decided, the three of them entered the stairwell and split on the second floor, with Utami and Lucky continuing to descend.
"So where was everyone else?" Utami panted.
"They had split up, too, but Five found Zirconium on the second floor just outside of here. Right now they're all supposed to be in the room with the foosball table and stuff. Well, Solo was supposed to catch up." Some of the redness in his face from the exercise faded. "You don't think... I-I mean, his wound was pretty bad..."
Utami shook her head and grinned. "I ran into him, actually. He's cooling down in an office I unlocked, across from the number [3] door."
"Oh." Flushing again, Lucky let out a weak laugh. "Okay. Just me being paranoid, I guess..."
He trailed off as he came to the first-floor landing.
"Lucky? Something wrong?"
He turned to her, stopping. "Did Solo come through here...?"
"No, he never got the chance. Why?"
Lucky's back stiffened as he seized the back of his arm. "I... smell blood. Don't you?"
Blood...? Utami had been panting too hard to worry about smelling anything, but she struggled to catch her breath. Lucky's hands were shaking by the time she finally pulled a reasonable amount of air through her nostrils.
"I... Yeah, a little bit." She sucked in a breath and let it out. It may not have been anything serious. There were two other females here, after all... It was probably...
"C-come on." Her voice was blunt as she swept past Lucky, her grip on the handrail tight. As she descended, the scent grew stronger—Falcon...?—and she had more and more trouble catching her breath. She could hear Lucky's footfalls not far behind her until she rounded the half landing to face the last section of the stairs. Then it all seemed to fade away.
Pear lay at the bottom of the stairs, a puddle of blood around her head and neck that soaked into her shirt and crept over the thinner sections of her spread-out ponytail. Her back was arched a bit, just from the angle between the stairs and the ground, and her legs were twisted uncomfortably, splayed out so they just reached the fourth step. Her arms had fallen at her sides, the fingers bent awkwardly and failing to conceal the [bracelet] that had fallen just beyond them. Her eyes were closed, her face turned sideways and chin tucked in at far too severe an angle for a living person.
But she... wasn't a living person...
Utami hardly noticed her balance shifting until she was already collapsing backwards. She hit something softer than the wall, but it hardly mattered.
Pear was dead... Lying in a puddle of her own blood...
No, not Pear. Momo. She was a real person, not just an experimental subject... And she was... She was...
Only after a few minutes did the numbness of Utami's ears fade enough for her to realize she was screaming. Managing to cut off with a series of coughs and splutters, she gasped for breath, feeling the tears on either side of her face. Lucky was apparently helping to hold her up, his jaw locked in breathless silence.
"Utami... Utami."
She heard her name, but it didn't make sense. Lucky didn't know her name. It made no sense. None of it... Any of it... Momo knew her name... But that didn't make sense, either...
Something shifted, Lucky's support behind her disappearing as she tilted forward into someone's chest. The fabric was rough, and the smell... wasn't blood...
"I... chi..." Her throat was too raw for her to finish her brother's name as she wrapped her arms around him. Her tears soaked into his shirt, but that didn't keep more from coming.
Zirconium didn't say anything. Some other words were being thrown around by other people, but none of them were coherent. She heard Pear's name a few times. She couldn't figure out the rest, or how long it took before she was ready to stand on her own feet. She still clung to her brother's arm like she was twelve again.
"...so the only ones with an alibi are Zirconium and Hex?" Five was saying.
"U-unless they were both in on it!" German yelled, pointing at Zirconium and the woman a step behind him.
Zirconium looked up at him, a strange look on his face. "Why?"
"You—" German struggled for a minute, his hands behind him death-gripping the safety rail—"Y-you're b-both The Malefactor!"
" 'The' usually means one," Five said slowly.
"It's all a r-ruse! E-everything's a ruse! Y-you... Y-You're all...!"
Hex walked right up to German and drove her knee into his stomach. He doubled over, his panicked wheezing giving way to reflexive coughing.
"Calm the hell down." She backed up, straightening her hair sticks. "Shouting accusations without solid evidence is going to get us nowhere."
"Besides, we don't even know that she didn't just trip and fall." Solo swallowed. "Those are pretty high heels for running around on the stairs, aren't they?"
Hex shook her head once. "Not possible. Look at her hands."
Although Utami hadn't been the one prompted, she turned her gaze back to Pear's corpse. Her hands were limp at her sides.
"Ah!" Lucky shouted, nearly falling backwards. "She didn't catch herself!"
Five adjusted his glasses. "How do you know that? Her hands look pretty messed up to me. She could have just moved her arms afterwards."
Utami was shaking her head before she even realized she had a point to bring up.
"Cera?" her brother prompted.
"Her neck..." She put her hands to her own neck, as if thinking about Pear's death too hard would snap her own. "She broke her neck when she fell... She wouldn't have been able to move her arms."
"So someone moved them for her?" Solo hooked his thumb under his belt. "Or she was moved entirely?"
"Did she even fall?" Hex rubbed her chin. "We need to do a more thorough analysis of the body. She could have just been beaten to death. I'm sure I can figure out some basics about the weapon if that's the case."
"That's great and all, but—" Five was cut off by a chiming sound.
Ding dong ding dong... Ding dong ding dong... Ding dong ding dong... Ding dong ding dong.
Utami blankly counted the bells as they came. Six.
Five looked like he had eaten something bitter. "...That. We're on a schedule here. We don't have time for a full investigation of death here, all right? I..." He looked down. "I know it's screwed up, okay? But we can't all die, right? We don't want to, I mean?"
Zirconium squeezed Utami's hand. "No."
"We need to get to the [numbered doors], then," Hex said, backing up. "As long as we preserve the scene, there shouldn't be a problem. We have two doors, right, Solo?"
"Unexplored? Yeah. [3] and [5]. Of course, [Door 5] is..." He stared at the basement landing beyond Pear's body.
"I guess we'll have to take some extra precautions if we're going that way," Hex said with a nod.
"Are you kidding?!" German staggered back. "Who would go down th-there with...?!"
"I'm sure [Door 5] has something important behind it..." Lucky gripped his hands. "I could make my way down there..."
Five nodded. "Utami? How are you doing?"
"Huh?" She looked up at him. "How do you think I'm doing...?" She took in a few shallow breaths that she tried to make deeper. "I... I want to go through a door."
Some part of her wanted to contribute to the game... but mostly she wanted—needed—a task. Some way to get by with the bloody smell of Pear's dead body scorched into her nostrils.
Zirconium squeezed her hand again, looking her in the eye. "Which?"
Utami said...