It's not even summer yet, but the cicadas are already singing their lives away. Literally. I've always thought cicadas are cool insects. They show up in the summer. They sing. And they die.

They are singing their dirge for Jin now.

The teachers have announced the news of his death in the morning ceremony, when we sing the national anthem and put up the Japanese flag. Today the flag goes up only halfway for mourning purposes.

Our senpai, the upperclassmen, don't seem very bothered by Jin's death. I don't blame them; they never knew him. They never knew the sunshine-y bundle of joy who was always obliging, always eager to please, always excitedly showing off his muscles to anyone who would look. They are more worried about how it happened. How did some strange intruder get into our school and start stabbing innocent students? Our security is supposed to be top-notch. Small academy in the mountains, not completely secluded from civilization but with only the tiniest little village as our neighbor. Anyone who enters is always thoroughly checked; no one wants anyone outside the school to really know what we're doing. As far as the outside world is concerned, we're a very elite, very hard-to-get-in academy that basically guarantees all our graduates a successful future in the job industry. They think it's because the teachers make us study hard; they don't know it's because we hack into people's minds and can steal lots of info for blackmail and other purposes. I know that it was what I thought, my friends thought, my parents thought, before I actually got in the school.

That was why my parents were so proud when they heard I passed the entrance exam, I think. They're the sweetest, best parents anyone could ask for and if I were born to any other set of parents I'm pretty sure I would just slap them and run off looking for my current ones, but like most Japanese parents they value studies and grades above all. It can be frustrating. It can also be convenient in my case because as long as they think I'm studying hard they don't ask as many questions about what I actually do. None of us tells our parents the real situation at school; it's like an unspoken agreement. It's kind of surprising, come to think of it, that out of all the generations of our alumni no one has told at least someone, no matter a relative or a friend, or even written about it online.

Perhaps someone had before, but no one believed them. I know my parents wouldn't have believed me if I had told them.

They aren't allowed to visit campus anyway, none of our parents are. Jin's aren't either. The school has to send his body home instead of let the parents come to us. I know this is to keep what we do strictly a secret, but I still wish it were done differently. I want to meet Jin's parents, want to hug them, to talk to them, to listen to them tell me all about that time their sweet little boy had stayed up all night to draw a gigantic though ugly birthday card for his mom (I'm making this up off the top of my head of course, but this sounds like something a young Jin would do), and I would tell them all about that time I started crying after class because my weapon-conjuring abilities are crap and their sweet little boy had walked by and tripped over his big feet deliberately just to show me that I'm not the only lame one and put a smile on my face (this, now, isn't made up. It really happened).

Or maybe Jin's parents wouldn't have time to talk to me. But I don't even need to talk talk to them really.

I just want to be there for them when they see their handsome youngest son, slightly show-off but utterly kind to the core, peacefully lying there in his casket.

-

The one good thing that happens today is that Katsuki has woken up. As had Miss Furukawa, but as you can guess as much as I like and respect Miss Furukawa the joy of seeing Katsuki okay and in one piece is pretty much insurmountable.

We have been sitting by his bed most of the afternoon. All classes are cancelled for these two days; the school probably needs to sort out security problems, and obviously we students aren't in the mind to take classes anyway. The infirmary is grim, a bit melancholy, a bit too echo-y for my liking. Miss Matsuda, the school nurse, disregards our questions entirely and instead focuses on playing some pretty ridiculous-sounding zen music that zooms in and out and is too sharp and too contrasted and it makes my ears and head hurt. Mr. Yamada and Mr. Kojima both come by once or twice, to check on us, I think.

By late afternoon everyone's getting tired of the hard wooden chairs the infirmary has to offer. But the tedious wait is worth it when Katsuki slowly opens his thin eyes, and before he can muster any words Hiroki is all over him like an excited puppy licking his owner. Hiroki has a very clingy way of showing affection but this is one of the times when it's adorable.

After Hiroki cries all his tears (as does Natsumi and Ririka who both gets emotional), we all talk. It's hard. It's especially hard when we have to tell Katsuki about Jin.

Katsuki blames himself, of course he blames himself. He's supposed to be spotter, he shouldn't have let anyone harm Jin. He also shouldn't have gotten knocked out and made it inevitable that Shun had to unhook himself to get us out of this mess. We do our best to assure him it's not his fault. A spotter is in charge of keeping track of the life signs on the monitor, not of fighting off big men-in-black with knives, we tell him. But I know he isn't convinced.

I know, because I feel guilty too. Survivor's guilt, Izumi had said when I told her. According to her, I feel bad because Jin had died (most likely from having the mattress that is closest to the door, while the rest of us were deeper inside the room and harder to get to without circumnavigating the beds), and I had lived. But that's not it. It's all my fault because out of all days of days I just had to pick this one to get an expulsion warning and go get extra training at night and if I hadn't been so useless and stupid and just found my weapon earlier none of this would be a problem, we wouldn't have gone training yesterday night, the intruder wouldn't run into any of us, Jin would be safely in his room eating chips. He wouldn't be dead.

All my fault.

Izumi has acted like my personal chain to reality all day. I'm glad to have her. It's really kind of nice, to have a best friend who's so levelheaded and reasonable and understanding. The relationship between us has always been simple: I blab, and she comforts. She doesn't just say oh my poor dear it will be okay honey, not that kind of comfort. She gives good advice and approaches everything from such a logical way and backs it up with all sorts of evidence that I eventually give up and realize I really don't have anything to worry or be sad about and brighten up again. I'm an illogical spaz whose thoughts are always all over the place and can get super caught up in the moment, and Izumi is my lifeline.

After night falls, she sees that I'm still restless, and suggests that we go see Shun, just the two of us.

There's a reason we're not rounding up everyone to go together. Shun is placed, according to Mrs. Sato, in a room on the third floor of the main research building. It's the floor with the best machines-all the good ones are in the main research building-so it makes sense to have him there.

But no one likes going to that floor. It's mostly deserted, for one thing, just a lot of whirring machines and lights that aren't always on. For another, the poor comatose teacher is there. Like okay, yeah, just a comatose teacher, only this and nothing more. But he's been lying there for god knows how many years and could well be dead just that we don't know it and the thought of this somehow horrifies me.

It horrifies everyone else too, so it's why Izumi doesn't think asking everyone else to come would be a good idea, and I agree. It's been a tough day for the others; they don't need anymore emotional trauma.

Besides, annoying Anna is our roommate and she's busy studying (really, studying at a time like this), and we know that if we ask others to come along she's probably going to side-eye us really hard and lecture us on how staying in never hurt a soul and if we had been studying in the library like she had been last night nothing would have happened.

Like I didn't know that. Like I didn't wish with every bit of my soul that we had done just that.

We meander through the mostly deserted schoolyard (it's always like this in the night, people are too busy studying to walk around or anything) and head towards the main research building, which unfortunately is at the other corner of the school. I grab at Izumi's shirt, because it is dark and I don't like dark. Izumi walks steadily, undisturbed. Not trying to act brave, but because she really honestly doesn't mind. She's probably the bravest girl I know. If I ever kill someone, she's the one I'll trust to help hide the body.

Izumi leads me up the stairs toward the third floor. Most of our school buildings, like a lot of the ones in the rest of Japan, are open-ish, step out of the classroom and you're greeted with fresh air and a corridor with half a roof and maybe a large stone sink where the mops are hung. But the main research building is all indoors. There is air conditioning, yes, however the whole place smells musty and the carpet is old and the lights blink a lot, like in one of those eerie first-person shooter video games where the zombies wander out behind corners.

And the third floor is the eeriest of them all. There's a large fridge by the staircase, holding specimens of God knows what. And wires creep all along the floor by the walls, wires that I can't even begin to guess the function of.

I grab at Izumi like I were facing a zombie horde and she were my gun. She smiles nonchalantly at me, but then freezes.

I freeze too. Because we hear screaming. Blood-curdling, almost animalistic screaming.

My first instinct is to run. And I run. I'm half way down second floor when I finally regain my senses enough to recognize the screamer.

I'll know that voice anywhere. After all I've been listening to it for like ten years.

Shun.

I run back up the stairs. Izumi, forever the brave one, is already investigating the source of the sound. We hurry towards it briskly, passing the room of the comatose teacher. We can see him through the windows, just lying there, wires and tubes running all over his lifeless body, the beeps of the monitor stable and rhythmic, spelling futility and loss.

We don't have time to be scared of him. Shun is in the next room, and I rush forward and peer through the windows.

He is tied down to the machine, with ropes. And I can't see his face clearly because they've gagged him too, probably to stop him from accidentally biting his tongue off or something. But he's still screaming. To me it's like the sound of heartbreak.

"We need to get a teacher," Izumi declares, forever the voice of reason. "Someone needs to stay here with him, you go and I stay or I stay and you go?"

Personally I would think Izumi could probably get a teacher faster than I can, because while she's not the fastest runner out there she's certainly calmer and would know exactly where to go while I would just run around in circles and cluck like a chicken, but damn I'm not staying here with screaming Shun and feel my heart break itself into a million little pieces and then a billion and then a trillion and then a zillion and I'm not even sure if this is the right number order but I'm Japanese and our number systems are different so I have a legit excuse to not know.

"I'll go," I say, and dart away before Izumi can reply. But I get lucky, because I have barely gone down one floor before running smack into Mrs. Sato. She smiles comfortingly at me, like she doesn't hear the ruckus that is going on up there.

"Don't you hear the ruckus that is going on up there?" I demand. Of course, it sounds much more forceful put down in black and white, in reality I'm sobbing and gasping and hiccuping all at the same time and it takes a lot of effort to get all the words out.

Mrs. Sato pats my head sadly, which is kind of weird because I'm taller than she is. "He's been like that all day. It's always like this, soul reattachment, I'm afraid. Back when the boy unhooked himself, he had to force himself to jump back into real consciousness, even though his mind is in the virtual world. This tears the soul apart. Reattaching it, my dear, that's a painful process, according to the research people had done. Very, very painful, and no guarantee that it would work. It is why we have to tie him up-if he struggles too hard and accidentally unattaches from the machine, the result would be disastrous. Coma-san up there, he went through something similar, though his circumstance was entirely different. His was an unfortunate incidence of being unhooked too late-"

I don't want to listen to Mrs. Sato talk about the teacher's unfortunate experiences especially if she keeps referring to him as coma-san like coma were his fucking name. I just don't want Shun to suffer so hard. I cut in.

"And isn't there anything we can do to stop that?"

Mrs. Sato shakes her head sorrowfully. "No, I'm afraid. Once attached to the machine, he can no longer hear or see us."

"Then unhook him," I say.

"No, no, no, dear, don't you see? The machine is all that is keeping his soul together right now. If we unhook him now, I'm afraid-either death or never waking up." Mrs. Sato sighs and looks down at the giant files she is carrying. The wrinkles around her eyes are deep and troubling and I almost feel bad for her. Working in such a gloomy building can't be very exciting.

"I'm sorry, dear," she says, sensing the defeat in my stance. "But this is the boy's fight now. If he is strong, he will make it out whole. And he is strong, yes?"

I nod hard, biting my lip to stop the sudden tears from falling. Of course he is strong, you don't even know-

"See, that's the answer I want to hear. Now go back to your dorm, my dear, have a good rest."

Mrs. Sato ruffles my hair and with a brief smile heads downstairs. I find myself wondering if she has children.

Shun is coughing now, horrible, lung-wracking coughs. I fight my tears as I walk back to collect Izumi, but they still fall. Izumi doesn't ask questions; she only holds me and steers me towards the exit. She smells like her closet does, kind of woody and grassy and herby and nice.

It's why she's my best friend.