At five thirty in the morning, the sky was still dark. Dust and the smell of old paper filled the Old School Building's hallways. Half the fluorescent lights in the ceiling were dead, and the other half seemed superfluous in the morning glow. As Kanzaki Toru passed the third floor with the fire inspection clipboard he'd picked up from the Equipment Room, his footsteps were the only sound in the entire building.
He stopped outside the archive room on the west side of the third floor. The door shared an exterior wall with the adjacent storage room, and the pipes Ishizaki had stepped on while scaling the wall ran just outside its window. He took out the old key from Shiina Hiyori and tried it in the lock. On the third key, it opened. A stronger smell of aged paper than the hallway's rolled out, mixed with a faint trace of camphor and mildew. He didn't turn on the lights, but swept his flashlight over row after row of iron-gray filing cabinets.
The three students Ryuen had dealt with last term—two expelled after being framed with false testimony, and one placed on long-term sick leave. When their names had appeared in Horikita's compressed files, they had been no more than words. But their original records should still be here, along with a copy that had never been submitted to the Disciplinary Committee. This was probably what Ryuen had sent Ishizaki to find. Ryuen hadn't dared come in person or follow the proper procedure to request the records from the Disciplinary Committee. He'd only dared send Ishizaki to scale the wall—which meant this place really did hold something that could threaten him.
At the bottom of the last row of filing cabinets, he found the folder. It had a light brown kraft-paper cover with no title, only a handwritten number and a string of dates in pencil. He opened it.
Inside were five pages of handwritten interview records. Their edges had yellowed and frayed, but the writing was clear. The name of the Disciplinary Committee member in charge was signed in the upper-right corner, next to the Student Council's official seal. The records described the mediation of an interclass dispute from last term. The student being questioned was Tanaka, a boy from Class D accused of stealing personal points from a classmate. The mediator was Ryuen Kakeru.
Kanzaki Toru read through the records word by word. Tanaka's testimony contradicted itself. On the first page, he said, "I didn't steal it." On the second, he changed his story: "I only borrowed it." On the third, after Ryuen pressed him, it became, "I took it, but I didn't mean to." From the third interview onward, Tanaka's handwriting grew noticeably messier, with many signs of repeated corrections. The final page held just one shaky line: "I admit it. Please don't tell my parents."
He went on to open the attachments on the following pages. Beside a hand-drawn classroom seating chart, Ryuen had marked several arrows in red pen, all pointing to another name: "Sato." Attached to the interview records was a separate student statement, given by Ishizaki. In it, Ishizaki claimed he had seen Tanaka rummaging through Sato's bag during free time in gym class. The signature had been altered, and the dates contradicted each other.
The moment he compared these pages with the electronic Disciplinary Committee records for last term that he'd found on Horikita's end, he understood what mattered. Tanaka's handwriting turned strange from the third page onward, and the date of Ishizaki's signature as a witness had been changed twice—yet all of that had been smoothed over in the final ruling. The version Ryuen submitted was clean: "The facts are clear, and the evidence is conclusive." But these original interview records, hidden deep in the filing cabinet, clearly showed the pressure Tanaka had been under when he was forced to confess. The mediation process Ryuen had led was itself a process of coercion. And at the end of Ishizaki's witness statement, in the remarks column, a line of tiny pencil writing read: "Ishizaki Daichi privately admitted afterward that he hadn't witnessed what happened."
He flipped back to the first page and reread it, confirming the role Ishizaki had played. In the dispute Ryuen had personally settled, only two students had been targeted from beginning to end: the "victim" whose belongings had been stolen, and the "witness" who had appeared out of nowhere. Both were named Ishizaki. The student named Sato was another opponent of Ryuen's in Class C, and the incident had completely stripped him of his class representative authority.
He took out his phone and photographed every page of the file. As he took the fifth picture, a faint sound suddenly came from the end of the hallway. It wasn't a mouse or a window blown open by the wind. It was the deliberate, soft scuff of a shoe against the old wooden floor. He switched off his flashlight and leaned behind a filing cabinet, holding his breath. The footsteps drew closer. The person wore soft-soled indoor shoes, was light on their feet, and moved with a steady, unhurried rhythm. It wasn't Ishizaki or Ryuen, nor did it have the heavy, flat-footed clomping typical of the athletes who frequented the halls.
Someone else had come to the Old School Building at this hour—and they knew the archive room's lock had been opened. Kanzaki Toru closed the folder and soundlessly slipped into the deepest corner between two rows of filing cabinets. The footsteps lingered just outside the archive room, then vanished.
The other person hadn't come in. They'd only confirmed that the door had been opened.
He counted to one hundred and twenty in the dark. Once he was sure the hallway was completely silent, he stood up and returned the records to their place. When he left the Old School Building, the morning sun had just cleared the school's outer wall. Students out for an early run kicked up a soft rustling sound as they trotted along the edge of the track. Standing in the shadow of the Old School Building's back entrance, he took another look at the door handle. A faint trace of fabric remained on the curved top of the metal handle. He hadn't left it there when he pushed the door open with his fingertips, which meant someone really had stopped outside after he entered the archive room.
His terminal vibrated. An encrypted message from Karuizawa Kei:
"Last night, someone reported to the Student Council that your interclass group report contained classified files that had been frozen. The trail points to the Old School Building."
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