On the northern shore of the uninhabited island, at the independent observers' camp. Ryuen Kakeru sat on a reef, the cold glow of his terminal screen reflected on his face. The sea breeze made his eyelashes tremble faintly, casting a small shadow. Before him lay two observation reports he had yet to submit. The first concerned the Shared Pool Allocation model for Group 12 in South Coast Area B; the second compared the timeliness of supply distribution among all the island's groups during the storm warning. Sakagami had tasked him with submitting two observation reports. He could have done just that—no one had asked him to make a comparative analysis, no one had asked him to mark the exact delay for each group's distribution, and no one had asked him to attach a scoring matrix for every group's emergency evacuation routes. But he had already made his twelfth spreadsheet and was working on the thirteenth. It wasn't to curry favor or make amends. It was an instinct he'd developed in the White Room: when you had no cards in your hand, memorize every card on the table first.
He replayed the communications logs from all six camps across the island during the storm, recording the start and end times of every signal outage and the delay between each supply order and its response. Some of the data had been uploaded automatically by real-time monitoring points. Other details he'd recorded himself, frame by frame, through a telescope from the lighthouse observation deck. One group in Class C had overestimated its actual consumption by thirty-four percent in its freshwater crisis project, far exceeding the school's twenty-percent limit. They hadn't reinforced their still before the storm hit, and mud had clogged the filter cartridges. Two members argued in the rain for fifteen minutes before dividing up the work again. He included the record in the final section of his Shared Pool analysis model. His comment consisted of a single line: "During the low-pressure system, supply distributions without stated allocation reasons were delayed four times longer on average than those of Group 12. The largest source of error in every case points to the same group's failure to activate its Shared Pool weighting."
After writing the final sentence, he stopped and looked up at the black sea below the lighthouse. A few minutes earlier, Ishizaki had been crouched beside the Weather Station, watching a bird's nest blown from its tree by the storm. He'd used a small shovel he carried to lift the nest back into the branches of a shrub, then tucked some dead leaves inside. Ryuen had seen it through his telescope. His fingers had stopped over his log without him realizing it. He returned to the first observation report and added a note at the end of the appendix: "The behavior of certain subjects has an unquantifiable residual value. Recommend excluding it from this round of scoring and leaving it for further observation."
He hadn't written Ishizaki's name or mentioned the nest. But the note's reference number happened to be on the same line as the data on how long Ishizaki had spent sampling water beside the Water Intake the previous night.
His terminal vibrated. A system notification appeared: "Independent Task, Part Two: Submit two observation reports. Deadline: June 7, 00:00. Forty minutes until the deadline." There was also a private message from Sakagami, more direct than the system notification: "I've received the first draft of your literature review. There are two typos. In Part Three, you gave this year as the year of the Shared Pool clause. You can submit the final draft by June 9 after correcting it. It won't count as late." There was also a voice-message notification from Ishizaki, sent just after the storm had passed, when communications had yet to fully recover. The message had been cut into fragments and pieced back together, leaving only scattered words: "sports drink," "half a bottle left," "put it beside the still." He pressed play and listened to the whole fragmented message. He didn't reply.
He turned off his terminal, packed the tablet and telescope into his waterproof bag, and stood up from the reef. The lighthouse beam swept across behind him, casting his shadow long across the jagged rocks. Ishizaki had said he wouldn't climb over the wall again, but when he'd used his shovel to lift the bird's nest beside the Water Intake that afternoon, Ryuen had felt that he was the one still trying to climb over the wall. Ishizaki had made it across. He was still wandering outside it. He slung the waterproof bag over his shoulder and walked back along the gravel path from the northern shore to the lighthouse. The shrubs lining the path had mostly been bent over by the storm, and the roots of several old trees lay exposed above the soil, but the lighthouse's foundation stood firm. As he reached the foot of the lighthouse, he suddenly remembered the last time Sakagami had attended a Disciplinary Committee meeting before retiring. After the meeting, Sakagami had stopped him in the hallway and told him to open the minutes on the Old System. At the time, Ryuen had thought the old man was using some ancient grievance to lecture him. Now, standing alone beneath the lighthouse, he finally understood: Sakagami had never meant to lecture him. He had simply left a key at a crossroads Ryuen was bound to pass, waiting for him to come far enough before turning back to pick it up. Shared Pool Allocation. The third section of Ryuen Kakeru's literature review was precisely about reinterpreting that frozen clause.
At exactly midnight, he submitted both observation reports. He didn't go to sleep right away. He opened his chat with Sakagami and typed: "I've corrected the typo in Part Three of the literature review. I found a possible trigger for the clause on exemption from collaborative scoring in the Old System's frozen provisions in the storm data. If possible, I'd like to submit an independent argument before the first phase ends." He pressed send, then turned off his terminal and lay on his camp bed with his hands behind his head, watching the lighthouse beam divide the Tin Roof into alternating bands of light and shadow. A few minutes later, his phone screen lit up with a reply from Sakagami. No pleasantries, no praise, just the familiar tone: "Fixing the typo is enough. Handle the argument yourself. Don't show it to me—submit it directly through the school's system. You have five days." He set the phone beside his pillow and didn't reply. He simply turned the screen face down and closed his eyes. The lighthouse's white beam continued to sweep over the Tin Roof every ten seconds, at the same interval as the camp of Group 12 on the southern shore.
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