Unprovable… the word rolled through the trial room like a death knell spreading through a silent church. Naegi could see the moment it hit each of his friends — the realization that the mastermind had just called them liars.
But they weren't lying. They knew it, Naegi knew it, and most importantly, Junko knew it. Everything his friends had said was the exact truth about the circumstances surrounding Ikusaba's death.
"It doesn't matter if they can't prove it. It's still true." Naegi gave the words all the force he could muster, willing them to reach across to the control room where Junko sat.
He wasn't sure he'd managed it — but apparently she'd been listening for something of the sort. She leaned backward again to look out the doorway as soon as he spoke. "You seem pretty sure about that! But you know, it's kinda hard to say for sure without a doctor's note. Did our resident meat shield get some medical credentials when I wasn't looking?"
Voices sounded from the speakers again as his friends tried to resume their arguments, but Junko's eyes pinned Naegi in place so powerfully that even his attention couldn't move away from her.
"It would be awfully hard to tell how bad an injury was without seeing it in person." Junko shook her head, letting out a theatrical sigh. "And if I couldn't tell, I just don't see how anyone else could, either!"
Anyone else…? Naegi blinked for a moment before he understood her train of thought. The rest of the world — that was what she meant. The trials had always been about showmanship, meant to broadcast despair to the people watching outside. And after Kyoko's challenge over the previous verdict, this trial came down to public opinion more than any of the past ones.
It didn't matter if Junko knew the truth. As long as the rest of the world couldn't be sure who was lying, the truth didn't count. The only way his friends could win their argument would be with real proof that even Junko couldn't refute.
And the voices from the trial room began to seep their way back into his consciousness, Naegi realized that he wasn't the only one who'd worked it out.
"Nothing we can say will prove anything," Kyoko said, her fingers tapping against her elbow in a single tiny blur. "Every suggestion so far would eventually come down to one of us pitting our word against the mastermind's. As long as we don't have evidence to back up our claims, we can't progress."
"Then what exactly are you proposing?" Byakuya snapped back, a glint of his old edge returning as his patience clearly frayed. "If what we've said so far is useless, what line of attack do you see that wouldn't amount to hearsay?"
Kyoko quirked an eyebrow upward at his tone — and that expression jolted Naegi back to another Hope's Peak, one that didn't exist any longer. For a moment, he could see her sitting in the back of a classroom, trading thorny barbs with Byakuya on topics so complex Naegi couldn't begin to understand. If he wanted to follow along, he had to watch their expressions, the glares and smirks, scowls and grins — and he'd noticed that Kyoko always raised her eyebrow just so when she knew Byakuya had realized she was right.
Byakuya caught the lift of her eyebrow and retaliated with a swift roll of his eyes — a look more often accompanied by his confident assertion that the current situation was no more than a temporary setback leading to his ultimate triumph in their ongoing line of friendly challenges. The whole exchange felt so familiar it approached the mundane… and the sheer ordinariness of it ached at the center of his chest.
They'd acted out the same pattern from their old lives… but did Kyoko and Byakuya even recognize what was happening between them with their memories gone? Or was Naegi the only one left who could see the meaning in such an insignificant gesture?
Or maybe there wasn't any meaning left to find. If neither of his friends remembered the reasons that had once lain behind their gestures, then maybe it wasn't the same at all. Maybe he'd grown so desperate to connect the people on the screens to the friends he remembered that he'd started imagining parallels where nothing existed. Maybe… maybe everything he'd seen was only there in his head.
No. No, that couldn't be right. Naegi stared up at the trial room monitors, looking from Kyoko to Byakuya, Jill to Sakura, and back around again. Those were his friends standing there, no matter what they remembered. As long as he could hold on to that knowledge, he could still believe that everything could somehow turn out all right.
And when Kyoko's lips twisted upward in a smile more for herself than any observers, Naegi knew he'd been right to believe in her.
"We need proof that supports our claims about the situation — tangible proof. We need a method of determining who was capable of doing what during the murder." Kyoko looked across the circle — no, not just across the circle. She looked at the place where Naegi would have been standing if he'd been present, meeting his portrait's gaze in lieu of his own. "And there's only one viable source of that proof."
Naegi frowned. What was she talking about? Could they have uncovered some useful clues during the hours he'd been unconscious? It didn't seem like it, because the other three looked just as confused as —
Byakuya's eyes shot wide, what little color had remained to him draining from his face.
"Togami? Are you all right?" Sakura leaned over her podium, anxious concern lining her forehead. "Are your injuries worsening again? Do you need rest?"
Jill rolled her eyes. "Not like it matters — pretty sure we won't get to stop this ride for a nap break! Good thing that's not the problem." She spun to glare at Kyoko, braids flying out behind her. "Haven't you done enough to my White Knight? Are you aiming for the trauma overload high score?"
Byakuya should have responded to that. He should have sneered at the insult, should have retorted with enough venom to make the genocider cackle with delight.
He shouldn't have stood frozen and pale, as if her words had never even reached him.
"I'm not the one who caused this particular trauma," Kyoko said, though her eyes stayed on Byakuya rather than Jill.
Jill huffed out a sigh, punctuated by the clatter of her snapping scissors. "Yeah, for once you didn't cause it, maybe. But I'd bet my last bloodstain that you saw this coming back when we couldn't find him in the Bio Lab!"
The Bio Lab? What did that have to do with anything? Even if they'd gotten through the locked door, it wasn't like there was much to find. As far as Naegi could remember, it was nothing but storage up there, the temperature-controlled room preserving a stockpile of supplies the headmaster had squirreled away for the day when they might finally leave their shelter.
"I suspected, certainly." Kyoko's steely mask shuttered down across her face, and Naegi couldn't quite work out what she was trying to hide behind it. "The only reason for the mastermind to confiscate anything would be if we could use it to our advantage."
"Wait." Sakura looked from Kyoko to Jill, eyebrows knit together as she tried to keep up. "Wait… if you're talking about the Bio Lab… about what wasn't in the Bio Lab… then…"
"She means his body." Byakuya had shut his eyes against the trial, and tension quivered from his jaw down to his throat and shoulders in a long line of visible pain. "The only chance we have to prove what he could or couldn't have done… would be if we could show the injuries on Naegi's body."
Ice gripped Naegi's heart as he struggled to understand the words. It didn't make sense — how much had Junko forced him to sleep through?
"But… would such proof really exist?" Sakura asked, her voice uncharacteristically hesitant. "That is… after we last saw him…"
"Yeah, odds are there's not much to see after a building fell on him," Jill agreed, one hand on her hip. "Almost like it'd be an awful idea and a complete waste of time!"
"Not necessarily."
If Naegi had learned anything about Kyoko in their years of friendship, it was that her calm tone was meant to mask the fact that she wasn't feeling calm in the slightest. He couldn't read past it, couldn't hear what she'd hidden if she didn't want him to know… but he knew something was very wrong.
"In fact," Kyoko continued, "I think it's far more likely that there is something important for us to learn from seeing Naegi. After all, he was the only executed student that the mastermind has dealt with so personally. There must be some reason for that — something that makes Naegi different from the others."
A bright giggle burbled out of the control room, twisting Naegi's stomach into knots. He wished she would keep that door closed… but then again, that was probably the exact reason why she didn't.
"Uh oh — sounds to me like you've all forgotten that sequence-breaking is a big no-no!" Monokuma sang out. "We talked about this waaaaaay back when the first trial ended, remember? I promised to take care of all the clean up after every round of the game, so that you could focus on new ideas instead of getting bogged down in the past! If I brought a messy dead body to your nice clean trial room, that would mean breaking my word!"
"Oh?" Kyoko's eyebrow arched high at that. "So you're saying that you always keep your word once you give it? No matter what?"
"Sure! What kind of headmaster would go back on a promise to one of his beloved students?"
"I see." Kyoko nodded once. "In that case, I have a promise that I would like to redeem." She reached down to pull out an e-handbook — but instead of opening it for use, she flipped to the back of the case. Reaching inside, she pulled out a slip of paper that Naegi recognized.
Kyoko held up the last of the three trip tickets that Monokuma had given him.
