Naegi watched Kirigiri as she tugged absently on her single thin braid instead of answering him immediately. She was thinking about what to tell him, he realized, the knowledge causing a slight pang through his chest. Even now, even after all they'd been through together, she still didn't trust him enough to tell him everything.

But then again… didn't the fact that she was thinking about it mean that she planned to tell him something? She wasn't going to keep him entirely in the dark. Compared to her iron grip on secrets in the past, that had to be progress. He couldn't expect someone as cautious as Kirigiri to trust him completely in a matter of days. All he could do was wait for her to come to a decision, and do his best to seem trustworthy in the meantime.

Finally, Kirigiri sighed. "Ever since I left you a day and a half ago, I've been exploring one of the locked areas of the school."

"Then — Ikusaba held up her end of the deal?" Naegi asked, startled. The longer she'd been gone, the more he'd feared that Togami's thoughts about a trap of some kind had to be right. "Which area did she open?"

Kirigiri tilted her head, one corner of her mouth curling slightly upward. "What do you think?"

Naegi frowned, considering the question. He knew it wasn't the headmaster's office or the data center, since he and Togami had been in both of those rooms without seeing a trace of her. His thoughts briefly darted to the second locked door in the data center — but he didn't see how Kirigiri could have been searching the mastermind's center of operations while Monokuma was active. The biology lab was a possibility… but if she'd been up on the fifth floor, surely she would have noticed the disarray in classroom 5-C on her way back and stopped to investigate. And if she hadn't actually been trapped or in trouble, a day and a half seemed like an awfully long time to search a single room.

"Were you in the second floor of the dorms?" Naegi asked.

She smiled, a thin curve of the lips without warmth or humor. "That's right. There are no cameras or security monitors there, so I was able to explore without the mastermind's eyes on me."

Which explained why she hadn't shown up on his upgraded e-handbook. Naegi nodded slowly. "I guess that must be why they kept that area locked for so long — they don't have a way to monitor us if we go there."

"That isn't the only reason." Kirigiri's eyes were fixed on Naegi, a wall of gray steel hiding her thoughts from view. "I believe that floor holds the key to some of the secrets at the core of why we were imprisoned here — secrets that the mastermind doesn't want us to learn."

"What secrets?" Naegi asked, his eyebrows drawing together. "Do you mean you found something out?"

She eyed him, twisting her braid around her finger like a long, coiling snake. "And what if I said yes? What if I told you everything I saw and all the truths I've learned? What would happen if you knew exactly what I know?"

"Well… we'd talk about it, wouldn't we?" Naegi said, puzzled. "I don't know what else would happen. I guess that would depend on what you found out."

"Would it?" One of her eyebrows arched up in a pale flash. "Do the specifics matter? After all, the most important thing about any information from behind that locked door is that it's something the mastermind doesn't want any of their captives to know."

Naegi stared at her in bewilderment, trying in vain to look through the blank mask of her expression to find some hint about what she was trying to tell him. "But if the mastermind wants to keep this stuff secret, doesn't that make it even more important to share it? I mean, you haven't told anyone else, right? You're the only one who knows so far."

"Of course that's the case," Kirigiri said calmly. "Who else is there? You know perfectly well that you're the only one I've been working with."

That wasn't exactly a surprise to hear. After all, the closest Kirigiri had come to working with anyone else was when the two of them had met up with Togami on the fifth floor — and she'd barely seemed to tolerate him, even aside from Togami's low opinion of her. Naegi couldn't imagine Kirigiri choosing to confide in someone who had repeatedly accused her of plotting murder and betrayal. But… if she hadn't told anyone else…

"Then do you mean you don't want to tell anyone?" Naegi asked, doing his best to follow what he could see of the twisting train of her logic. "You're just going to keep what you learned to yourself? Isn't that more dangerous?"

"Dangerous for who?" Kirigiri's words were barely louder than a whisper. "The mastermind has gone to great lengths to make sure that we don't learn too much about what's been happening. What would someone like that do… if one of their pawns knew something that could disrupt the game?"

"Well… I think they'd be pretty mad," Naegi said. "They wouldn't want us knowing something like that. But —"

"But you can't take away knowledge once someone has it," Kirigiri cut him off, her eyes frozen on his. "No matter how you try to hide it or erase it, you can't get rid of ideas once they take root inside our heads."

"I guess that's true." He wouldn't have phrased it quite like that, but he didn't see much point in arguing with the basic idea. He just couldn't see where she was going with it.

"And that means that once someone possesses this knowledge that the mastermind tried to hide," Kirigiri went on, her voice distant with the chill of new frost, "they're a threat to the entire situation. Anyone who knows too much can upset the game the mastermind worked so hard to create — and that's something they can't ignore."

The ice in her demeanor began to trickle its way down the back of Naegi's neck, and he felt his shoulders hunching defensively against it. "Wait… are you saying that you think you know too much?"

"No. I'm saying that the mastermind thinks I know too much." Her voice was quiet and even, as if she were stating nothing more than mundane facts.

Except that these words were anything but mundane. Naegi stared at her, eyes wide with all the horror that she wasn't displaying. "What are you talking about? Did something happen?"

"You tell me," Kirigiri countered, leaning back and crossing her arms. "After all, I've been out of touch for more than a day. There's no possible way that I could know what's going on. So tell me, Naegi… has something happened?"

Under the pressure of her stare, the prickling along his neck intensified into a wave of needles crawling their way down his spine. For a strange moment, he felt almost like he did during the class trials, when she would turn to him and demand that he give her an answer that would prove a point she couldn't make on her own. Looking back at her, trying to fight the urge to edge away along the bench, the room seemed to tilt around him in the dizzy whirl of the trial arguments, with his friends shouting from every direction until he didn't know where to look.

And then he blinked, and the disorientation evaporated. He wasn't in the middle of a trial arguing for everyone's lives — not yet, anyway. He was sitting in the bathhouse with Kirigiri, and she had no idea about the terrible truth that was the answer to her question.

"Yes," Naegi said. "A lot of things happened, but… there's one that you really need to know about. While you were gone, there was another murder… and it wasn't one of us." He took a deep breath to brace himself for what he had to say. "Mukuro Ikusaba is dead."

She went very still, a statue carved from chilly ice and silvery marble. "I see."

"The body discovery announcement played a while ago, so the trial will probably be starting soon," Naegi went on, when it became clear she wasn't going to say anything further. "Togami and I have been trying our best to investigate, but…" He glanced down at his injured left hand, still cradled in the makeshift sling. "Well, we haven't been able to get as far as we would have liked."

"But you must have found something." Her voice sounded far away, like she was talking to him from across an almost insurmountable distance. "There would have been clues to this murder."

"Well… yes, there were some," Naegi admitted. "The Monokuma File didn't say the exact cause of death, but it does say that she was poisoned. And when we searched the room, we found the kind of humidifier you were going to use when you pretended to kill me."

Kirigiri closed her eyes. "Of course you did." Naegi wasn't sure what to say to that. He watched her for a long moment, until she opened her eyes again to reveal a steely glint. "And I suppose you found the poison, as well."

He nodded slowly. "The bottle, anyway. But I don't know how the culprit got it out of the dojo locker after we burned the key."

"Quite the mystery." Her lips quirked with a humorless smile.

Looking at her now, Naegi's thoughts flashed back to that moment, when the two of them had worked with Togami to try to ensure the poison had been sealed away. She'd insisted so fiercely that they make sure the bottle stayed intact — not just to stop it from being used, but to act as insurance. It had seemed like a strange explanation, but he'd gotten pretty used to Kirigiri making weird demands for inexplicable reasons. But now that the bottle had somehow turned up as evidence in a murder, he had to wonder…

"Did you know something like this was going to happen?" he asked, searching the blank mask of her face for some hint about her thoughts. "When you decided to work with Ikusaba and went into one of the locked areas to find the mastermind's secrets… did you see this coming?"

"I suspected." Maybe it was just his imagination, but at those words, Naegi thought he saw a flicker of sadness dart across her face for the briefest moment. "But I hoped that I was wrong."

She'd thought a murder might happen while she was gone… and she'd left anyway. Naegi didn't know whether to be horrified at her ruthlessness, or in awe of her courage. He wouldn't have had the nerve to act that way, not if he'd thought there was a real chance that someone else could end up dead… but he'd never been able to match her drive to learn the mastermind's secrets, either. He might not like it, but he could understand why she would have done something like that.

"Okay." He nodded slowly. "Then… what are you going to do now?"

"The only thing I can do." She tilted her head. "You didn't expect me to give up without a fight, did you?"

Naegi couldn't help the brief grin that flashed across his face as her determination sparked an answering feeling in him. "No. Of course not."

"I can see the trap being set in this trial," Kirigiri said, something cold twisting across her face as she spoke. "But I told you once before that I'm not planning on dying. I don't intend to lose — even with the mastermind against me."

"So you have a plan for the trial?" Naegi asked, a hint of genuine, untainted hope stirring in his chest for the first time since Togami had told him about the corpse on the fifth floor.

"Not just the trial." Kirigiri crossed her arms. "If this is the only chance I get, then I plan to play for keeps."

Naegi blinked. "What do you mean?"

A cold, hard smirk curled across Kirigiri's lips. "By the end of this trial, I intend to unmask the mastermind."