Naegi couldn't quite comprehend the enormity of the conclusion he'd reached, not with the pain throbbing through his skull. His thoughts were all in a jumble, a box of puzzle pieces shaken apart every time he tried to make a connection that could help him understand. Because he needed to understand, needed to make sense of how his best friend could do such a thing to him. It couldn't be true, he didn't want to believe it… except that he knew that it was right.
Kirigiri had lied to him. She'd lied, right to his face, when she'd been telling him about her meeting with Mukuro Ikusaba. She hadn't see the girl's tattoo, she couldn't have, not when she'd been wrong about where it had been placed. She'd been wrong, clearly and provably wrong — except that she'd never been wrong like this, not in all the years he'd known her, not about specific facts that she'd uncovered. She couldn't be wrong like that… and so it had to be a lie.
But why lie about something so small? It didn't matter where the tattoo was, surely it didn't, not enough to deceive him. She hadn't even had to mention it if she hadn't wanted him to know. He wouldn't have questioned her, not seriously, not expecting an answer — she never told him more than she had to, he'd learned that first thing. He had to keep up if he wanted to work with her because Kirigiri would never ever wait.
No… that wasn't it, was it? She would wait when she had to, when she knew there was no other option… but she expected him to keep up when she knew that he could. And she'd taught him this, showed him how to think, how to work out answers to impossible questions. He wasn't as good as her, no one else could be… but she must have expected him to be better than this. She'd told him a direct lie, an obvious lie, when she could have avoided it… and she'd made sure he had the means to spot it.
So she hadn't seen the tattoo, was that it? Had she meant to draw attention to the contradiction so that he would realize the girl she'd met was an impostor? But no, no, the pieces still didn't fit, because if she hadn't met the real Ikusaba then she couldn't have known where the tattoo was supposed to be in the first place.
The real Ikusaba…
Pain howled through his head once more, every neuron screaming in protest. Tears burned at his eyes, but he was powerless to wipe them away. Why did everything hurt, why couldn't he think straight, why was his own mind turning against him now? He wanted to stop thinking, to flinch away from the cause of his agony, but against his will his mind hurtled onward into the darkness of uncertainty.
The real Ikusaba lay dead on the floor upstairs, part of the game from the beginning. She'd been here in the school all along, one of the mastermind's agents… here in the school with her tattoo plain for anyone to see. With her nails too long for gloves, her allies would have been unable to miss its location. Even if one of them wanted to pose as Ikusaba… they shouldn't have gotten the tattoo's location wrong.
Only someone who had never met Mukuro Ikusaba could have made that mistake.
Never met her.
Kirigiri had never met her.
Dizziness flooded through Naegi's head, his vision narrowing to a black-edged tunnel. He could see through it to the end, the final destination, the one thing that he didn't want to know. He would have stopped himself if he could, would have halted the knife-edged thoughts before they could go too far… but he didn't have the strength to prevent the plunge forward.
Kirigiri had never met Mukuro Ikusaba. That was the hole in her story, the flaw in her plan, the reason none of the puzzle pieces she'd given him could fit together to form the picture he'd been trying so hard to make. Kirigiri had never met Ikusaba… and everything she'd told him otherwise had been a lie.
Everything had been a lie. Images flickered before his eyes like a reel of film spinning out of control, visions of all the things that had happened after Kirigiri's deception. Her long disappearance, his fear for her safety, the terrible uncertainty when he hadn't known who the corpse upstairs really was.
The corpse. Mukuro Ikusaba.
Kirigiri's story about meeting her had been a lie… but Ikusaba's death was real. He'd seen the body, seen the mangled mess that had once been his friend, and there was no question about that. Ikusaba was dead… just days after Kirigiri had lied about meeting her. Was that a coincidence? Truth and lie tangled together in his head, bleeding into one another until he couldn't be sure of anything. Had one event caused the other? Which had come first? He didn't know, he didn't know —
No. No, he knew, he did, he had to. No matter what kind of tangles Kirigiri had put in his head, he knew she had to have her reasons for it. The mastermind wanted to trap her during the trial, she'd told him so, and confusion snarling through his memories wasn't her fault. It was the mastermind, always the mastermind at the root of everything, her and no one else.
No matter how the mastermind had manipulated Kirigiri, she hadn't done anything wrong. He had to keep that thought in his head, no matter how the rest of his mind might twist out of his control. The mastermind was trying to trap Kirigiri, to use her own fake murder plan to frame her, but none of it was real. It couldn't be, he knew it couldn't be, because he'd watched as Kirigiri and Togami locked up the poison, watched as they burned the key —
The key…
They'd burned the locker key…
Alarm bells screamed through his head, piercing through the aching bones of his skull. He was missing something, he could feel the void in his head, empty and gaping wide, waiting to be filled with the right answer to a question he didn't even know.
They'd burned the locker key… but there had been another keyhole, hidden away, where a master key could still have opened the door.
The door.
The locked door.
A key that could open locked doors.
Ikusaba had offered to open locked doors for Kirigiri… except that no, no, she hadn't done anything of the sort. It had been a lie, all of it was a lie, none of the mastermind's agents had agreed to open locked doors —
But one of the doors had opened anyway. Kirigiri might have lied about meeting Ikusaba, but she really had managed to enter the second floor dorms. He'd looked at his map, over and over he'd kept checking it, and she hadn't appeared anywhere. She hadn't been in the hidden room behind the boys' bathroom, so she must have been in one of the other places with no cameras.
Behind a locked door.
But she couldn't have gotten through the door on her own, not without breaking a rule. The door to the rest of the dorms had been locked, he knew it had, and Kirigiri hadn't had a key.
A key.
A key for a locked door.
Naegi? What are you doing?
He heard her voice in his ears again, Kirigiri's voice, startling him out of the dark thoughts he'd had just before the trial. He'd been alone in Togami's room, unable to investigate, believing she was still missing and possibly in terrible trouble… and he'd heard her voice. He'd turned, turned to see her, and she'd been there in Togami's room with him, standing right in front of the door…
The locked door.
He'd locked that door. Ogami had worried about leaving him all alone, and so when she left, he'd locked the door behind her. He'd had Togami's key with him, it had been in his pocket safe and sound… so how could Kirigiri have been standing there?
He already knew the answer, sitting in his head like an anchor dragging him down into the darkness.
She'd had a key. Somehow Kirigiri had a master key.
