Ogami's words turned the air in Togami's lungs to ice, freezing his chest from the inside out. He'd known how to use the cold once, before he'd ended up at Hope's Peak. He'd known how to take these shards of ice and turn them to a shield that could protect his soul. But the killing game had torn that knowledge from him… and the cold burned through him.

"So that's what happened." Kirigiri's voice seemed to come from far away, even though she was less than halfway across the room from him. She looked abruptly down at the table in front of her, breaking her locked stare with Ogami. "Yes… I suppose you would have had the opportunity to put the idea in his head."

The opportunity… when she'd been alone with Naegi. The ice trickled down Togami's spine and coiled into his stomach as he tried to remember just how many times he'd left Naegi confused and vulnerable in Ogami's care. With the slow weight of a shifting glacier, he looked across the room at Ogami…

And she flinched away. No physical attack could break her guard, but now, faced with this, she couldn't meet his eyes.

"I didn't intend for him to take my explanation that way," she said, voice dull and flat. "I had no idea he'd consider it."

"I'm sure you didn't," Kirigiri said, before Togami could find the words to respond. "Naegi has proven himself to be… surprisingly difficult to predict accurately." She closed her eyes, and for a moment Togami almost had the impression that she'd been overwhelmed by exhaustion.

But then he blinked, and all trace of it was gone. She shrugged, looking as though she were afflicted with nothing worse than boredom. "It hardly matters how that happened at this point."

She might have said more, but the rushing white noise of those words crackled through Togami's mind until he couldn't hear anything else. It didn't matter? She was going to say that, after every word Naegi had ever pleaded in her defense? Togami could still see Naegi's face twisted with misery when he'd thought Kirigiri might be the burned corpse on the fifth floor — and even after he should have known the truth, he'd spent the last precious hours of his life fighting to clear her name. Kirigiri had been one of the beloved friends Naegi had wanted to protect — and now that he was gone, she was saying that it didn't matter?

"You're not even trying to hide it anymore." The snarled words tore themselves from his throat without a conscious decision to say them. He could see Kirigiri turning towards him, eyebrows drawing together like she actually had the nerve to be confused, and any thought he might have harbored about biting back the words was lost beneath the ice freezing through him. "You don't care about him — you never did. You never once did anything but manipulate him into getting hurt for you. He called you his friend, and you used that until he thought he had no choice but to —"

He would have gone on, but something tight and painful seized the back of his throat when he tried to form the words. Even with cold reality staring him in the face, with too many pieces of evidence to ignore — his body rebelled against saying the words himself. He'd thought nothing could be more painful than living in a world where Naegi had been unjustly executed… but the thought that Naegi had been tricked into signing his own death warrant brought new shades of misery into the nightmare.

Because surely, surely there had to have been a trick. Even with Ogami's suggestion poisoning his mind, Naegi couldn't really have chosen to throw his vote away. If he'd believed the other votes would end up as a tie between Kirigiri and Togami, then voting for himself should have meant guaranteeing the blackened's victory, since the mastermind hadn't revealed their tie-breaking rule yet. Making a decision would have been terribly hard… but even so, Naegi couldn't have decided to condemn them all to death rather than face it. Togami knew there had to be another piece to this, if only he could figure out what.

"I'm not going to argue with you," Kirigiri said, razor-edged words slicing through the whirlwind of his thoughts. "There's no point… not when you're right. I never took Naegi's claims of friendship as seriously as he did, and I didn't answer him with sincerity."

"I don't need you to tell me that," Togami snapped. "I've known it all along whether you admitted it or not."

"True enough. But even taking that into account… this wasn't the outcome I wanted." Kirigiri's hand curled into a fist, stark black against the light tabletop. "It wasn't what I expected."

"Really? You think you can do a couple sidesteps to dance around the issue?" Silver flashed around the room from the scissors Jill spun in both hands. "Then maybe you need some hands-on instruction about getting to the point!" The scissors froze in unison, at just the right angle to send light gleaming down the edges of the blades.

But of course Kirigiri didn't bother to acknowledge Jill's theatrics, looking straight ahead like she wanted them to think that she didn't even see the enraged serial killer glaring at her. "No… I'm not avoiding anything. I just don't think I'm ready to say it yet… not here."

Togami knew what she was getting at. After weeks of dodging the mastermind's cameras, it was obvious that she wanted them all to follow her into the bathhouse locker room so that she could talk freely without being overheard. Taking that kind of precaution had seemed so reasonable when they'd been trying to work together to escape… but it hadn't been, had it? Being careful hadn't done a thing to protect Naegi — all it had done was give each of the girls here the chance to hurt him one on one. What was the point of caution if the situation still ended up like this?

"No. You don't get to play those games anymore." Togami glared at her, settling firmly back against the door. "No more excuses about how we can't let the mastermind hear us — not when we know for sure that they'll side with you if push comes to shove. You can say the truth where they can hear it, or not at all."

He expected her to clam up, to roll her eyes and refuse to talk if she couldn't do it on her own terms — but she shrugged. "All right, if you're so sure you want to know. It's exactly as I told Naegi — I intended to use the trial to reveal the mastermind's true identity."

Togami froze, clenching his jaw until the tension spasmed up through his temples. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Jill and Ogami turning to sneak worried glances up at the security cameras trained silently on the scene — but he refused. He'd challenged Kirigiri to speak her mind without regard to any observers. If he flinched away now that she'd done as he demanded, it would be as good as saying she'd won.

Instead, he forced himself to raise his chin and do his best to match Kirigiri glare for glare. "Quite an impressive goal — if you're telling the truth, that is."

She didn't answer, ignored the baited remark as if it were too obvious to acknowledge. Togami narrowed his eyes. "All right, then, if you expect me to believe you, then let's hear it — who is the real mastermind you thought you were going to unmask?"

Kirigiri flinched.

It was quick, over before Togami could fully recognize the reaction — but no matter how fast she repaired her emotionless mask, she couldn't erase the fact that it had slipped. And while he couldn't rule out the possibility she was faking, it would be tricky to change her expression so quickly with so little warning. The ability to hide her emotions didn't necessarily mean she was also a good actress, after all. So whatever had broken through her defenses for that brief instant, it had almost certainly been genuine.

He just couldn't be sure what it was.

Togami tried to sort through the possibilities in his head, spinning through options in an instant of whirling gears — but he found his own mind rebelling against the attempt. Every time he tried to focus on an idea, it snarled together with a dozen other thoughts in an impenetrable mess. Logic had always been his most reliable tool, one that he reached for as easily as breathing — but now, it seemed that even his brain had turned against him.

Something in his head was actively opposing him, preventing him from following the question to whatever conclusion was waiting at the end of this train of thought. He ground his teeth together until needle-sharp frustration jabbed through his temples, physical pain underscoring his sudden inability to think logically. It was almost like something in his own head was actively opposing him, keeping the knowledge he wanted just out of his own reach.

"So you mean you got Makyutie to jump through all those hoops for you without even naming names?" Jill put one hand on her hip, tapping her scissors against her upper thigh. "Gotta say, I'm not buying this repeat performance — you must've been way more convincing on opening night if you got him to believe you!"

Believed her… the words almost didn't make sense when Togami tried to translate them into meaning. She was a liar, a manipulator, a traitor who'd hidden every important part of her true identity… and yet… Naegi had believed her.

It seemed so obvious now that someone else had said it. Naegi called Kirigiri his friend… he cared about her… he trusted her. Of course he would have taken her at her word if she said she had a way to reveal the mastermind, even without a shred of proof to back up her claim. He'd wanted nothing more than to find a way to end this killing game without losing any more of his friends. Wasn't that the excuse he'd offered for every one of the times he'd risked his life? If he'd thought there was a chance that Kirigiri could stop the mastermind once and for all… what would he have done?

Togami could feel the world shifting into focus around him, all knife-sharp edges and searing colors. He didn't want to see this world, didn't want the knowledge it held, but he'd moved beyond the point when that was possible. He could see too easily how the pieces fit together around this new revelation, and it didn't matter that he no longer wanted the answers to his questions. He could see the truth all too clearly.

If Naegi had really believed Kirigiri's claim that she could reveal the mastermind, then he would have seen the other students' attempts to identify the culprit as a distraction from their real goal. With that in mind, it would have been more important to make sure the trial gave Kirigiri the opportunity she needed… and of course she couldn't reveal the mastermind if she were dead. The moment she got a majority of the votes, the mastermind could have put a stop to her plan permanently. And so the only way to make sure that didn't happen, to give the plan the best possible chance at successfully saving everyone — it would have been to make sure the votes didn't name her as the culprit.

Naegi wouldn't have considered deliberately voting incorrectly to ruin the trial or to hide the real killer's guilt… but faced with a chance to take down the mastermind, he might have. And with Ogami's story about her own past votes ringing in his ears, he would have had an obvious way to do it. He would have expected the result to be a tie between Kirigiri and Togami, giving them one more chance to take aim at the mastermind.

Except that it hadn't turned out that way. Togami's eyes snapped shut, squeezing tightly together until pain stabbed between his eyebrows, but even that couldn't hold back the onslaught of knowledge.

Naegi had voted for himself… but he'd only meant to tie the vote. Everyone had known that his injuries made it impossible for him to be guilty, so he wouldn't have been expecting to see his own face shown as the result of the votes. Not when choosing the wrong culprit meant that they'd all die.

But choosing the right culprit would have let them live.

Togami bit down on his lip to hold back the useless protests running through his head as Ogami's words about the final moments after the vote whispered through his mind once more. Naegi had admitted he was the culprit. It hadn't been true, it couldn't have been true — but he'd admitted it anyway. Togami hadn't been able to believe it at first, because why would Naegi tell such a suicidal lie? The boy Togami loved wouldn't have given up on fighting like that. He wouldn't just throw his life away.

But he would sacrifice himself to save the rest of them.

The bitter tang of blood soaked through his mouth, but he could barely feel the pain of his teeth digging into his lip. Such a small pain couldn't reach him any longer. Words flew through the air around him, but he couldn't bring himself to make sense of them. What was the point? If he was right, if the nightmare his logic had shown him was the truth… then what was the point of anything?

Naegi hadn't been a passive victim in his own death. Everything he'd done had been to oppose the mastermind, to try to escape this terrible game… and it had left him with only one choice. They had all left him with only one choice.

Naegi had died to protect them.


Schedule note: For now I'm going to keep trying the new writing schedule of posting longer chapters every other week. I'm still undecided if it's permanent or not, though. If anyone has feedback on the chapter length, please let me know! Next chapter should be posted December 10. See you then!