▼ 2:06 pm
Area 3, Inner Ring
THE four of us arrive in front of the surveillance room. As I’m about to open the door, I hear Tachibana talking inside.
“—op it. He’s not like that…!”
I can’t hear her too well through the door, but she seems to be conversing with someone. She speaks again before I can figure out who it’s to.
“—on’t believe that…—ho in the world? Why…—” She sounds miserable.
I swallow my hesitation and open the door. Tachibana screams the second it opens. “W-Wait!”
“What?” We instinctively stop just outside the door.
Tachibana is the only person in the room. Her face stiffens when she sees us. “C-Captain…and everyone else…!”
“Who were you talking to, Tachibana?”
“T-To…” Tachibana pauses for a moment before finishing with “Someone…on the radio.”
“The radio?”
“Yes. It momentarily connected with someone on the surface… But died right after. I instinctively cried out for them to wait when it cut off…,” she explains in a paper-thin voice.
Is she telling the truth? I doubt her but avoid prying too deeply. I don’t want to increase the amount of distrust circling within our group.
I cut straight to the point before anyone else can question her. “Hey, Tachibana, I just want to check with you to be sure… You didn’t happen to bring the supply of AD with you here, did you?”
“What? I haven’t taken a step from this room since you brought me here… Did something happen?”
“Yeah. Someone seems to have made off with the AD we left in the infirmary.”
“Oh no…!”
“So I wanted to check the surveillance camera footage to see if it caught anything.”
Tachibana shakes her head. “…I’m sorry, Captain, but there are no working cameras near the infirmary.”
“None at all?”
“There are two cameras working in Area 1’s inner ring, one operational in Area 3’s outer ring, and two running in Area 6’s inner ring. That’s it.”
“Two are still working in Area 6’s inner ring?! Is there any footage of Yuuri?!”
“Unfortunately no, not any footage of Yuuri on her own…”
“No, they should’ve caught her near Area 6!”
“Why do you think that?”
Ukita answers Tachibana’s question before me. “You see, he’s been claiming that he saw Yuuri’s dead body in Area 6’s emergency staircase. Though this supposed corpse he saw was nowhere to be found when we looked.”
“Are you positive about this?” Tachibana sends me a questioning look.
I give a firm nod and argue, “We can prove if what I saw was real or not by checking the surveillance camera footage. It should’ve been taken about thirty minutes ago now. Try replaying the footage around then.”
“V-Very well. There happens to be footage of the emergency staircase.” Tachibana replays the footage taken by the camera in that area.
Area 6’s emergency staircase displays on the monitor. Everyone turns their full attention on that screen. After a while, there’s movement on-screen. It caught me staggering into the stairwell.
“It happened right after this! I saw Yuuri’s body right there!” I lean in close to the screen. “…What the?!”
The me on-screen stumbles right out of the stairwell. The time displayed is 1:40:19 pm. The time coincides perfectly.
“I didn’t find a body…?!” I utter in disbelief.
“…Captain Kasasagi,” a deep voice snarls behind me. “Care to explain yourself?”
I whip around to find Ukita glaring daggers at me. I wince. “E-Explain what?”
“Not only did you not discover a body, but you passed through the area without stopping. Why did you lie, hmm?” I have no answer for him, so he chomps down like a dog with a bone. “There’s one more thing that doesn’t add up—the time stamp.”
“What about it?”
“It’s marked ‘1:40 pm’. That appears to be the time you left the stairwell, but…you didn’t show up in the factory until 1:50 pm.”
I’m blindsided by his remark. I’d just assumed I lost track of time from the shock of finding her body, but what if that’s not the case?
“It doesn’t take ten minutes to walk from the inner ring to the factory. Where and what were you doing for those ten unaccounted minutes, I wonder?”
I fumble over a reply to his tenacious questioning. “W-Well…I was shaken up after finding her body—”
“But you didn’t find anything. There’s not even a body shown on camera!”
“You’re wrong! I know I saw it!”
I still have the vivid memory of finding her body. But I have no way of defending myself against Ukita’s accusations when my subjective opinion has been blown to pieces by the objective data left by the camera footage.
Ukita hits me with another round of questions as if he’s an interrogator closing in on the truth. “Why don’t you just acknowledge it already, Captain Kasasagi? Acknowledge you lied.”
“How is it a lie?!”
“How is it not? You used the discovery of a nonexistent corpse as an excuse for why you were late in arriving at the factory. And then you used that time to secretly go and swipe the AD supply for yourself. Didn’t you?”
The others all gasp at his suggestion.
I impatiently argue back. “D-Don’t be ridiculous! I’d never do something like that!”
“Then what were you doing for those ten minutes, hmm? When every second is more precious than the last for us.”
I can only respond with silence, because I don’t know the answer to that myself.
Moribe stares into my eyes and asks, “…What’s wrong, Captain? Why aren’t you saying anything? You didn’t actually trick us, did you?”
“I-I did not! I honestly don’t know what happened!” I shout.
“I see. So you don’t believe yourself now?” Ukita sneers. “Are you going to blame this one on your amnesia too? Might as well write off every mistake you’ve made that way. But if you do, it’s the same as admitting there’s no credibility to anything you have ever done or said.”
“H-How?”
“Isn’t that obvious? How do you expect us to believe the words of a madman who hallucinates about nonexistent corpses? Couldn’t you have just forgotten where you stashed our AD?”
“H-How could I forget something like that?! I’m sane!”
“Then that would make you a liar. There was no corpse, and as such, you were probably the one who stole the AD.”
“Grrr…!” I realize all too late that he’s cornered me. Whether the others choose to believe I’m sane or not, I’ll still lose all credibility.