Naegi stared at Jill in shock, unable to process the contrast between the brightly-colored garden and the dark pressure emanating from the girl in the middle of it. Jill's dark uniform had been shredded, sleeves sliced past the elbows and skirt torn into fluttering strips reaching so high up her thighs that Naegi would have turned pink – if it hadn't been for the blood oozing down her limbs. The same blood glinted wetly from the tips of her scissors, and the sight of one fat drop of it falling to splatter on the ground broke Naegi out of his daze.
"Jill – what happened?" he called, taking a stumbling step forward. "Are you okay?"
At the sound of his voice, she whipped around, scissors whirling to point blade-first in his direction. Naegi stopped short, not quite daring to go any closer to the armed genocider.
"Am I okay?" Jill repeated, her voice far too bright and cheerful for a girl covered in blood. "You want to know if I'm okay? Man, you ask the most ridiculous questions, Makyutie – don't I look like I'm okay?"
"Well – no, not really," Naegi said slowly. "You're – kind of bloody?"
"Oh, this stuff?" Jill raised an arm to inspect it, like she hadn't even realized the blood was there. She ran a finger from the opposite hand across her arm with an almost puzzled air, before looking back up at him with a wide grin. "Don't worry about that – it's nothing to do with you!"
That wasn't reassuring at all – not when a sudden, awful thought crossed Naegi's mind. The blood on Jill's arms and legs – the tears in her clothing, far too extensive to have been done by accident – the scissors in her hands, with blood on the blades proclaiming that they'd been used –
Jill had even said it herself yesterday, during the trial – there was only one person she wanted to kill.
Nausea surged through Naegi's body, sending the world spinning around him. His knees shook, going weak and watery, and if he hadn't caught himself on the edge of the doorframe, he would have lost the ability to stand upright. He could hardly see the garden any longer as the colors bled sickeningly into one another. The only thing burned still and unmoving into his vision was the dark red of fresh blood on Jill's hands, and the sight of it froze his breath in his throat.
And through the spinning world, he heard Kirigiri ask a question, her voice sounding like it came from very far away even though he knew she stood directly beside him. "That's your own blood, isn't it?"
Jill's wild laughter rang through the air as Naegi's vision began to clear again. "Mine? Is it mine? Well, it came gushing right on out of this body, so it looks like it's gotta be, right? There's not anyone else's it can be – not anymore!"
So it was Jill's blood after all, and not – not anyone else's. An intense relief rushed through Naegi at the confirmation, so powerful that his hand shook where he clutched the doorframe. The blood on the scissors didn't belong to Togami – wherever he was, however angry he might still be at Naegi, he was alive. That awful fight wouldn't be the last time that Naegi ever saw him.
And hard on the heels of that thought, guilt twisted through him. How could that have been his first thoughts, when Jill had just said that she'd been injured? How could he have found anything good about the knowledge that one of his friends had been bleeding? That her blood was still wet on her scissors –
On her own scissors. Naegi forced his vision to snap back into focus at the thought, clenching his fists until his nails bit painfully into his palms, and he gave Jill a much closer look.
Now that he was paying attention, he could see that the blood trickling down her arms and legs hadn't been splattered on her. Dozens of thin lines had been sliced into her skin, growing messier and deeper as they crawled down her thighs and up her arms. And the angles – Naegi might not have Kirigiri's talent for examining bodies and understanding wounds, but even he could tell that Jill's cuts were at the exact angle that would happen if she'd been the one to perform them.
"Jill…" Naegi said, slow horror creeping through him as he put the pieces together. "Jill… did you do that to yourself?"
Her answering grin twisted across her face, unsteady and off-kilter. "Didn't hear anyone else offering."
"But – why would you do something like that?" Naegi demanded. "You weren't trying to – to –"
"None of those cuts could possibly be fatal," Kirigiri cut him off, crossing her arms. "However, even the shallowest is deep enough to scar."
"Always on the ball, aren't you?" The look Jill shot in Kirigiri's direction wasn't entirely a positive one, despite her complimentary words.
"What are you talking about?" Naegi asked, looking from one girl to the other.
"They aren't just cuts," Kirigiri explained, not taking her eyes off Jill even as she addressed him. "They're tally marks."
"What?" Naegi's gaze ran over all the marks on Jill's arms and legs, dozens of them stretching out in row after row.
"It's a common trick for serial killers," Kirigiri said. "They like to keep track of their victims. Scarring her own body was risky, but no more so than the ones who keep a collection of mementos from the ones they've murdered."
"But Jill hasn't killed anyone," Naegi protested, before rethinking that phrase. "Well – not lately."
"Sure – not since yesterday!" Jill said. "That's ages, right? What's one night, when you really get down to it, huh? I mean, sometimes I'd fall asleep one night and wake up to find that days and days had just slipped away without me!"
Naegi frowned. "Are you talking about Hagakure?"
"That loser? Please! I'd have to take marks away from my tally if I wanted to include him," Jill sneered.
"But who else –" And then another option occurred to Naegi. "Wait. Are you talking about Fukawa?"
"Give the boy a prize!" Jill twirled a pair of her scissors in his direction.
"But – that was the mastermind," Naegi said. "You didn't do anything to her. You weren't even there!"
"Oh, no?" And suddenly, Jill bounded across the room to loom over Naegi, glaring right down into his eyes. "Tell me, then, if you're so smart – where was I? You think I wasn't there? You think I didn't get tossed into a mental hospital and electrocuted? Well, who the fuck was it then?"
Naegi leaned back against the wall, glad he had the support against his back. The genocider's eyes flashed red mere inches from his face, and he was alarmingly aware of the scissors spinning in each of her hands.
"It was Fukawa, wasn't it?" he said, figuring that his best option was to answer her question as honestly as he could.
A pair of scissors smashed into the doorframe, less than an inch from his ear. "And what," Jill went on, her voice low and dangerous, "have I told you about Gloomy?"
Naegi cast his mind frantically back through everything that Jill and Fukawa had ever said about their relationship to one another. They switched places – they were opposite personalities – they only shared emotions, not memories –
They shared emotions.
Naegi stared into Jill's wild red eyes, understanding finally clicking into place for him. "You feel what she feels," he said, voice trembling as the full horror of it sank in. "Which means – you felt her dying. The fear, the pain, the loneliness – whatever was going through her head, you would have felt all of it."
"Oh, I like a guy who's sharp," Jill said, tongue curling out in front of Naegi's face. "Lucky for you you're not quite sharp enough for my tastes. Yeah, you bet I felt the whole death and dying sob fest Gloomy had going on – but more than that, you know what else I felt? You know what was going through her head?"
Jill leaned in close, hissing the words into Naegi's ear. "How much she hated me."
