Togami wasn't sure what he'd expected Jill to tell him about the two years of his life she apparently remembered better than he did — but he hadn't been prepared for her response to line up so neatly with the clues about the outside world that had been scattered through the school. If he could believe what she was saying, then Hope's Peak would have closed about a year ago — just as the letter they'd found when the library first opened had suggested.

Could she have imagined the story so that it fit with what they'd already learned? No… Fukawa had been the one with them when they'd discovered that information, and so the memories should have been wiped from Jill's mind along with all other trace of her other self. However she'd come by these memories, they must have been made independently of the hints in this prison.

In that case… could it be true?

No, it was too early to judge that, not for certain. He narrowed his eyes at Jill, who apparently had already forgotten about her boast of talking all day. "Well? There has to be more to it than that!"

"Yeah, probably," Jill said, twirling her scissors absently again. "But like I said, it's not like I'm the one who lived through it — I only got the scraps that came up whenever Gloomy got a whiff of blood. And sure, for a while there it was happening pretty often — but for some reason no one ever wants to relax and chat with me when a room's got blood dripping from the walls!"

As repulsive as that mental image was, Togami refused to let his expression twist into a grimace. Not that hiding his disgust would make any difference to his dignity — as if he had any of that left after everything he'd done on the mastermind's godforsaken broadcast system — but at least it wouldn't encourage her to continue in that vein.

"Tell me about the scraps, then," he said, directing her towards a more useful topic than descriptions of gore. "What's your earliest memory of your time at Hope's Peak?"

He half expected her to launch into a disturbingly stalker-esque description of her first sight of him — but for once Jill actually took the question seriously, even going so far as to give it a few seconds of thought before answering. "Hate to break it to you, darling, but like a lot of first times it was pretty underwhelming. I woke up one morning all by my lonesome in a strange bed, no idea how I got there — pretty much par for the course!"

"And those were the dormitories?" he persisted, giving the extraneous details the lack of attention they deserved. "Meaning that you didn't know beforehand that you'd be attending a boarding school?"

"Not like Gloomy and I could really sit down for a nice friendly chat about her plans." Darkness rose behind Jill's eyes for a moment, shadowing her face — but then it vanished like she'd wiped it away, her smile springing back brighter than ever. "But it didn't exactly take Nancy Drew's talent to find the orientation papers on her desk and put the pieces together."

"Orientation… so they would have had a date on them?" Togami demanded, seizing on the important detail. "When was it?"

"I don't know, probably sometime in the spring." Jill shrugged. "Sorry, darling, but anniversaries aren't my style — hard to keep track of dates when you don't see two mornings in a row!"

"The year, then," Togami snapped impatiently. "Surely you must remember that much!"

"Sure — 2010," Jill said. "Don't exactly need a cheat sheet for that one."

"2010…" Togami repeated slowly, trying to sort through what that could mean. If he'd been asked to name the year, that was the same one he himself would have given. "And you said that was two years ago?"

"Something like that!" In spite of her cheerful agreement, Jill's intense stare never flickered away from his face. "The kick off for a year packed full of more high school shenanigans than a shoujo manga!"

A year that he didn't even remember… a year when anything could have happened. What would he have done, if he'd found himself attending Hope's Peak as planned instead of trapped in this awful game? How would he have acted? When he'd met all the students in his class for the first time… what would he have done?

His heart lurched, and for a moment his lungs couldn't remember how to breathe. He had to force them to expand once more, to draw in just enough air to ask the question screaming through his head. "Naegi — did I know Naegi?"

That wasn't what he wanted to ask, not really. Had he given Naegi a chance to prove how wonderful a person he was? Had he bothered to look deeper than the ordinary surface long enough to appreciate the extraordinary person hidden inside? But he didn't have the strength to ask those terrible questions aloud. That poor attempt was the closest he could get.

But Jill seemed to catch his meaning anyway. "Be pretty hard not to know him, with the way you two were joined at the hip! Not that I ever caught a glimpse of you two getting snuggly — but it's not like I need every little detail spelled out to get a read on that kind of situation!"

Relief slammed into him even more harshly than the fear had, and he had to close his eyes to bear the force of it. He'd still loved Naegi. Even if his mind had been twisted, even if he couldn't trust the thoughts in his own head, he could still be assured that much had remained true.

Or at least, he could if he took Jill at her word about the years that he'd supposedly forgotten.

Not that he thought she was lying — no, he was sure she thought she was telling the complete truth. But considering that she was also an insane serial killer, that didn't necessarily mean her "truth" mapped neatly onto reality. How far could he trust her word? He didn't know. He couldn't know, not as long as this was nothing more than a possibility. He needed some way to verify her words, to tell whether this was anything more than a string of coincidences — but how could he when he didn't have anything —

Anything —

Without any conscious choice to move, Togami's hand went to the pocket where he'd placed his e-handbook… and the precious photo of Naegi he'd placed inside. He'd assumed that the picture of a slightly younger Naegi and Maizono must have come from their time at the same middle school… but what if he'd misunderstood what he was seeing? What if it showed something else entirely?

"Describe the Hope's Peak uniforms," he demanded, not even daring to pull the handbook out from his pocket yet. Keep it hidden, keep it where she couldn't possibly catch a glimpse, and that should make it impossible for her answer to match the one in the picture. Impossible, unless…

"Brown, brown, and more brown!" Jill said at once, grimacing. "It was a painful sight for an artistic soul like myself! At least they made the tie red, but that wasn't enough to save those uniforms from being the least adorable way to wrap up all the cute boys and girls at that school!"

Brown with a red tie… Togami pulled the handbook from his pocket and flipped it open, revealing the photo tucked safely within its cover. "Do these outfits look familiar?"

Jill's eyes popped wide open. "Huh? Makyutie and the soda pop song princess? Where'd you get your hands on this, baby?"

Togami barely even registered that she'd asked him a question — his mind was still stuck on what she'd said a moment before. "Her name — tell me the pop singer's name."

"Sayaka Maizono," Jill replied. "And word on the street is that she's one of the kids who got the ax during round one of this game."

That knowledge would've been easy enough for Jill to pick up along the way — but even so, two girls had died before the first time Jill's personality had manifested during the game. Even if she'd assumed the girl in the picture had to be one of the students from the game, there was no way she could have known if it was Sayaka Maizono or Junko Enoshima…

Except that she had known. She hadn't even hesitated, like there was nothing wrong at all with her memory.

Like his memory was the one that was wrong.

"Why've you got a picture of little miss soda pop getting all clingy with your guy, anyway?" Jill asked. "Want me to get her out of the way?" She snapped her scissors shut for emphasis.

"No." Togami snatched the photo back out of her reach, closing the handbook protectively around it again. He didn't enjoy seeing Maizono in a picture with Naegi — but he also didn't trust Jill's scissors anywhere near it. "It's the only one I have of Naegi, and I doubt Monokuma would let me have another."

"Eh? Monokuma gave it to you?" Jill blinked. "What'd he do that for?"

"He —" Togami stopped short, the explanation of how he'd bargained for the photo freezing on his lips. If this really was a photo from the two years of memories he'd lost — the two years the mastermind had stolen from him — then why had he been allowed to have it?

If the mastermind had wanted to erase the previous two years, why were he and Jill being allowed to have this conversation uninterrupted?

Suddenly, the large, airy room of the garden seemed to loom too large around them, full of too many spots hidden by foliage. The humid air clung to his skin, sending tendrils of sweat slithering down the back of his neck like the physical manifestation of a shiver. Every rustle of leaves sent his nerves prickling, and with only one working ear he couldn't pinpoint the location of any of the unsettling sounds.

"We need to go," he said, trying to struggle to his feet. The effort sent his head spinning in a nauseating whirl, but he couldn't let that stop him. The garden was the worst possible place to have this conversation. "We need to get out of here now."

"If you insist, baby!" Jill caught him as he staggered upright, slinging one of his arms around her shoulders. "Most people keep the cuddling for the dessert course, but I don't mind making it the main entree!"

He ignored her chatter, concentrating instead on the herculean effort it took to place one heavy foot in front of the other, over and over. Had the door been so far away the first time he'd crossed the floor? It seemed to be miles away from the bench, an eternity of trembling steps punctuated with glances into the shadowed bushes.

Finally, they reached the door, and Jill apparently had the strength to haul it open without letting him drop to the ground. They stumbled out of the garden —

And came face to face with Kirigiri and Ogami as they crossed the hall returning from deeper into the fifth floor.


Schedule note: No new chapter next week, due to a family wedding! Next chapter will be posted August 26 - see you then!