Her Chessboard

Kushida Kikyo stood outside the Student Council Office and took a deep breath.

She wore a simple white school uniform, with a pair of slender legs showing beneath her short skirt. Her short hair was pinned behind her ear with a pink hair clip, revealing the clean line of her neck. She held a thick stack of documents against her chest, with a small paper bag on top. Inside were freshly baked homemade cookies, their delicate piped icing visible through the gap in the bag. Students passing through the corridor greeted her, and she smiled back at each of them, her voice soft and clear, carrying a hint of lazy afternoon sunshine.

She pushed open the door. Chabashira-sensei and the second-year Disciplinary Committee Chairman were at the table, making their final check of an interclass group score sheet. They both looked up at the sound of the door. Chabashira glanced at her and nodded. The chairman was the sort of second-year boy who wore square-framed glasses and never smiled. His expression didn't change when he saw Kushida, but his gaze lingered briefly on the documents in her hands.

"Sorry to bother you. These are the supplementary materials for Class D's interclass groups. Some teams hadn't managed to submit all their research appendices earlier, so I offered to deliver them together." She placed the documents on the table with a light, practiced motion, then set the cookies beside them. "We made these in home economics class, and there were some left over. Please have one, if you'd like." A thin layer of matcha icing covered the cookies, its soft green hue glowing beneath the fluorescent lights.

The chairman hesitated, then reached for one. The cookie was crisp, cracking softly as he bit into it. "Thanks for the effort. You even came all this way over something so trivial."

"It's no trouble. The class representative should take care of things like this, and I was passing by anyway." She tilted her head and smiled, her tone friendly but still maintaining a hint of distance. On her way from the Student Council Office to the copy room at the end of the corridor, she kept that smile carefully measured. Without hurry, she checked several notes on the interclass group score sheet, confirmed that none of the original drafts of the materials Ryuen had added had been left on Chabashira's desk, and only then went into the archive room.

The archive room was quiet, filled only with the hum of the air conditioner and the faint electrical buzz of the fluorescent lights. She walked between rows of filing cabinets, her fingers gliding lightly over the spines of folders in various colors. She found Ryuen's section and pulled out the gray folder labeled "Supplementary Interclass Coordination Records." Opening it, she saw that the pages of additional materials Ryuen had submitted last week were still in their original place, but there was a faint crease in one of the page numbers—someone had looked through it before her. Her gaze rested on the crease for about 0.3 seconds, then she calmly closed the folder.

The Student Council Clerk she'd asked to keep watch for her knocked and poked halfway into the room, lowering their voice. "That person you asked me to look out for seems to have come to the archive room yesterday to look for old materials, too. Not from the public catalog."

"Was there a record of the checkout?"

"No. He went through a non-public application channel. With the final review of the interclass scores coming up, if you want to find out exactly what he looked at—"

"No rush." Kushida lightly ran a finger along a folder's spine, and the dust motes drifted in the light before dispersing. "We still have the final review hearing, don't we? I can ask certain questions there. Confronting him in person would be in keeping with school procedure."

The clerk nodded and left. The door closed again, and white light from the fluorescent bulbs filled the room evenly. Kushida wasn't in a hurry. On her first day at school, she'd been the first to approach Karuizawa. During the first week of classes, she'd run errands for the Disciplinary Committee, delivering replacement student IDs. On the day of swimming class, she'd smiled at the camera without a hint of guardedness. All of it had cemented her image as someone who "offered to help," not an ambitious schemer. Ryuen used student records as weapons, but she didn't need to look through anyone's records. She was the record herself.

Ryuen wanted to be king, but he was a male class representative. No matter how strong he was, he was still only the most brazen piece on the board. He wasn't the one moving the pieces. She was. She didn't need a crown or to sit at the back of the classroom issuing commands. All she had to do was smile, bring cookies, and show up at the right office at the right time. No one would suspect a girl who volunteered to submit materials for the whole class, baked matcha cookies for the teacher, and told everyone in the hallway, "It's all right. I'll take care of it."

She gently smoothed the crease on the gray folder and put everything back exactly as she'd found it. She'd accomplished what she came to the archive room for: confirming that Ryuen's supplementary materials hadn't been replaced. Ryuen was still on the board, and making sure a piece remained in the right place was far more important than taking an opponent's pawn herself. The final review was only the first step. The real show would begin in that moment after the review, when everyone thought the dust had settled. That was when she would turn over her true trump card.

She left the archive room, closing the door so quietly it made no sound. At the far end of the corridor, several people had gathered around Ishizaki, asking him something. He had his back to her and didn't see her, his shoulders slightly tense. She didn't give it another glance and went down the side stairs. The rooftop garden at Keyaki Mall was one of her usual haunts. She had just sat down on a bench when two classmates, walking arm in arm, came over to talk.

"Kikyo, want to go to karaoke together this weekend? The place you mentioned last time still has rooms available."

"Sure, but I need to finish up a little work for the Student Council first. You can book a room, and I'll meet you later." She took the fruit candy one of them offered and popped it into her mouth, smiling as she slowly crunched it. Her expression was bright and cheerful, her tone warm and considerate.

After they left, Kushida sat alone on the bench for a long time. The rooftop garden breeze carried the yeast smell of a bakery in the distance, making the sunscreen netting slacken and tighten as it tapped softly against the metal frame. She poured a cup of black tea from her thermos and drank it slowly. As she drank, she wasn't smiling. She simply gazed at the strip of gray-blue sky above the tall wall beyond the glass curtain wall. In her mind, she arranged the timeline for what came next: Ryuen's plan, Kanzaki and Horikita's alliance, Karuizawa's recent unusual behavior, the direction Sakura's camera was focusing—all the fragments swiftly fell into place, forming a clear path.

She still had a small, unclaimed favor from Sakagami-sensei, the teacher who had left a record for Class D. And at the final review of the interclass scores, when everyone's attention was fixed on the direct clash between Ryuen and Kanzaki, she would raise the most damaging question—not against Ryuen, nor against Kanzaki, but against the third-party witness she had already, without anyone noticing, taken into her grasp. It wouldn't be a killing blow, just a gentle nudge at exactly the right moment.

As her tea ran low, she smiled again. Facing her blurred reflection in the glass curtain wall, she tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and stood up. She let every emotion sink to the bottom of the cup, along with the crushed remains of the fruit candy. Then she took the bag of cookies she hadn't finished handing out and headed lightly toward the Academic Building.

Meanwhile, Kanzaki Toru had received the final comparison of the old files and Disciplinary Committee records from Horikita. There wasn't much—only three pages. As Horikita pushed the documents toward him, she tapped the paper twice with her finger. "In the fifth page of the original conversation record, the only annotation signature without any signs of alteration is identified as 'assistant present'—Kushida Kikyo."

Just as he was about to speak, a light flashed from the rooftop across from them. It wasn't a security camera or a streetlamp. It was a signal from the long-lens equipment Sakura had just set up: one short, two long, one short. The camera's LED indicator pattern. The rooftop was silent beneath the clouds; only the light flashed and went out, carving a string of silent Morse code into his eyes. Someone had just taken their position on the opposite rooftop, ready to capture the next figure to enter the frame.