“Ahhh…” Hime-chan exhaled.
As if she were about to follow it up with a muttered kicked the bucket, huh or something. Like the reaction you might have to learning that something you had absolutely no personal interest in but were aware was important had in fact disappeared a long time ago.
“…So it’s finally started.”
“Hime-chan.”
“No need for concern, Master.” She looked at me and smiled a melancholic, troubled smile. “Hime-chan may be a washout, but I’m still a student here. Something like this doesn’t shock me.”
“Right. Fine then.”
It wasn’t fine. It wasn’t fine at all. But it wasn’t my place to step in. It wasn’t my place. I couldn’t step in─to Hime-chan’s mind. All I had to do was ask the simple question, “What’re you thinking about right now?” and it would all be swept away, but I couldn’t ask it.
Because getting real with people, interacting without any nonsense or disingenuous kindness, meant hurting each other. I didn’t want to hurt Hime-chan with a clumsy intrusion─and most of all I didn’t want to get hurt myself.
Any more than I already had been. In this kind of circumstance.
There was a loud clang behind me.
It was the sound of Aikawa shutting the door.
“This is an unfortunate turn of events─don’cha think?”
“It sure is…” I replied. As a means of distracting myself from my thoughts. “I can’t believe the Director’s been…murdered. This means that all the danger we faced to get here was─”
“That’s not what I’m getting at. Forget about that. It just means we need to choose a different approach. And there’s a more than limitless supply of possible means for achieving our goal. Dammit─I thought it was too easy getting here. So that’s how it is. I guess the order for this must’ve come from somewhere.”
“What do you mean?”
“Iitan. What’s on my mind right now─is the fact that this is a locked-room murder.”
“Haah?” I accidentally let slip a moronic ejaculation.
But she was right. I mean, definitely, the door was controlled by a biometric handprint, and when we forced it open, there was a dismembered corpse and a head hanging from the ceiling─yeah. The door didn’t appear to have an auto-locking function, so the term “locked-room murder” did seem applicable. But what did that even matter? The problem was that, with Director Noa Origami murdered, we couldn’t negotiate with her, we couldn’t do anything at all to oppose her─
“This is no time to be discussing something as inconsequential as a locked room, is it? Are you feeling rattled because someone you knew’s been killed? Shake it off, Aikawa, it’s not like you─”
“Don’t call me by my last name. Only my ‘enemies’ do that,” Aikawa glared at me. “I’m cool as a cucumber. Listen, Iitan. The fact that I usually call locked rooms inconsequential or whatever isn’t just a personal prejudice, okay? They’re meaningless, so I just laugh at ’em, that’s all. Take that incident on Wet Crow’s Feather Island back in April. What possible meaning could that locked room have had? That was just a case of ‘I wanted it to be a locked room so I turned it into a locked room,’ right? What I’m after now isn’t the necessity for it, it’s the meaning behind it. Putting yourself above suspicion by drawing attention to the fact that you couldn’t have done it is certainly a clever ploy, but no matter what you do or how you do it, an absence of proof doesn’t constitute proof of your absence. That kind of trick really is meaningless. In the end─you’ll get caught in your own web.”
Totally. But.
“But this time it’s incredibly meaningful,” Aikawa went on. “It’s got all the meaning in the world. Listen up, how did we get into this room?”
“You broke the lock─”
“Yup. Clearly an act of ‘trespassing’… The act of a suspicious ‘trespasser,’ attempting to escape from this academy. And in the room, a butchered corpse. There’s an obvious suspect in that situation, wouldn’t you say?”
“Ah.”
That’s what she meant by meaningful…
In other words, whoever created this situation─had succeeded in framing us for the crime. By concocting a locked-room set up. She was right. Under the circumstances, what other suspect could there possibly be?
“Jun, this means…”
“We’ve been fucked, is what it means.”
And yet Aikawa didn’t seem at all humiliated by this. In fact, she seemed impressed by the person who had arranged it. “Seriously, what a laugh,” she said with a cynical sneer.
No…hang on a sec. It was just as bad as Aikawa said, or, even worse. A sense of impending crisis finally overrode my confusion. It was bad enough that Shiogi and her cohort were after us, but now we’d been made the prime suspects in the Director’s murder─
“What a way to go,” Aikawa muttered. She began picking up the scattered pieces of the dismembered Director. “These wounds are pretty ragged. A blade…or maybe a chainsaw? Yeah, that seems more likely. It’s a big job, dismembering a person like this.”
“You’re probably right, there are bits of flesh scattered everywhere,” chimed in Hime-chan. “Doesn’t it seem like she was hung from the ceiling and then chopped up with the chainsaw?”
They were both talking about it so blithely─but what a horrible conversation. A chainsaw? Taking something like that, to someone’s body…
“Could a fluorescent light like that hold a person’s weight?”
“Sure, if you distributed its properly…I think.”
“Dammit, you’ve really done it now, Noa.”
Aikawa spoke not to me nor to Hime-chan, but to the head of Noa Origami where it hung suspended in the center of the room. Naturally there was no reply, but Aikawa continued undaunted. With a smile that, from a certain angle─looked just a little bit sad.
“And you were this close to realizing your ‘vision,’ weren’cha… Things don’t always work out the way we hope. Which is what keeps things interesting, though I doubt you’d understand what I mean by that… There was something I wanted to say to you…but oh well. All is forgiven.”
Then Aikawa crouched for a second before leaping up and undoing Origami’s hair where it was fastened to the fluorescent light. The head thudded heavily to the ground, and Aikawa picked it up and put it with the rest of the body parts.
“Hm. Nothing seems to be missing…some of the joints, maybe. Well now…” And here she─Jun Aikawa─smiled the most, and I mean the most, wicked, vicious, horrible smile I had ever seen on her face. “Things just got fucking interesting.”