The dorm room smelled of cheap detergent and the faint metallic tang of instant coffee left in a mug. A single lamp on Tina’s desk threw a soft pool of light; the rest of the room was humming in shadow. A stack of textbooks, a stray sock, and a battered teapot crowded the small table where Natalie, Kazou, and Hannah sat. Tina, at her desk, watched them as if waiting for something to snap.

  Then she spoke, voice thin and brittle.

  “Did you kill Anna?” Her pupils shrank; her stare was a blade, right at Kazou.“Are you that serial killer on the news?”

  For a heartbeat, the world froze. The question fell like a stone into a silent pond. Hannah’s small face went blank. Natalie’s mouth opened; her eyes went wide and glassy.

  Kazou’s reaction was softer than the accusation required, an instinctive, stunned recoil.

  “No,” he said, the word steady, small. “I didn’t. I would never—”

  Tina’s laugh broke him off. It was raw, too loud in the quiet room, half-hysterical and half-pleading. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes and then streamed down her face. She pushed herself out of the chair as if the motion could launch her into some other shape.

  “You don’t understand!” Tina shouted, stepping forward. “They set this up—was it you, Natalie?! Did you come here to frame Casimir!? Did you come here so Kuroda would go and… and kill Anna? And after that, Casimir? Then another student? Me? Marcin?! Perhaps Anna's professor?!”

  Natalie’s voice came out in a ragged, hurt sob.

  “No—God, no, Tina. You’re wrong. It’s not like that. Dr. Kuroda is—he’s innocent. The cops are—” Her words cracked. She looked like she might crumble.

  And then the laughter turned into a sound closer to screaming. Tina laughed as if laughter could undo fear, and then, abruptly, collapsed into something harsher. She lurched across the room and caught Natalie’s face with an open hand—a clean, precise slap that landed with a sharp clap.

  The three of them, Kazou, Natalie, and Hannah, flinched.

  "GO AWAY FROM THIS HANNAH!" Tina yelled.

  Hannah’s breath hitched; she scrambled back from the table and scrambled toward the bathroom without thinking, slamming the door and locking it with a trembling little hand. The room held only two heartbeats and a clock now.

  Kazou rose smoothly, immediately, a silent, solid presence between Tina and Natalie.

  “Stop,” he said, voice low but iron-true. Not a shout, no theatrics, only a command. “Stop this.”

  Tina had to be told twice before her arms loosened. The hysteria fed itself; her shoulders heaved, and tears came harder. She looked at Kazou like a trapped animal. He met her eyes without flinching, and there was something in his look that steadied her; not pity, not quite forgiveness, but a plain, unblinking humanity. She sagged, exhausted.

  Natalie sagged too, rubbing her cheek where the hand had stung. She took a slow, shuddering breath and said, very small:

  “I’m sorry you think that of me. But this is not a set up. I didn’t lead anyone to anything.”

  Tina’s eyes were wet and furious, then shifting into frightened. She rocked on her heels. Her voice worked itself into a different shape—less wild, rawer.

  “We have to know.” She said it like an accusation, like a prayer. “We have to know who did this. If it wasn't Kuroda...”

  Kazou exhaled. He sat back down, drew an exhausted breath, and the room listened. He looked at Tina, softly, not accusing, and then at Natalie. The weight of the guilt and sorrow in his face was stronger than ever before.

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  “Brace yourself,” Natalie said quietly, as if she were delivering a verdict she’d been forced to bear.

  Kazou’s voice came after a moment’s pause, flat yet carrying an empathetic humanity.

  “Casimir killed Anna.”

  Tina’s hand flew to her mouth as though the sentence itself had punched her. She made a small, animal sound, half sob, half a sob that had torn itself out of a throat too tight for it. Her knees gave; she sank onto her chair. The room pressed in.

  For a few breaths, only the air conditioning hummed, only the city breathed outside the window.

  “No.” She whispered it at first—no, no, a prayer.

  Then the sob that followed seemed to make something in her shatter into a thousand small, sharp pieces. She covered her face; her shoulders trembled like someone trying to hold back a flood with cupped hands.

  Natalie moved to her instantly, arms folding around Tina as if a living brace.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, though she had no culpability to apologize for.

  She stayed there, holding Tina, letting the two of them grieve the way people do when the world suddenly proves itself monstrous and small.

  Kazou had his hands clenched on the edge of the table; you could see the tendons in his wrists. He watched Tina, the mirror of her shock in his features, and then he looked up at Natalie.

  “He’s not done,” he said, quiet but certain. The Guilt in his voice was a familiar weather: bleak, inevitable. “If Casimir is allowed to continue—if no one stops him—there will be more. Anna’s not the end. He will move on.”

  Tina’s breath came in ragged little pulls; she looked up at Kazou with eyes wet and wide.

  “What do we do? What can we even do!?”

  Kazou’s expression narrowed until his face looked carved out of the night. Something like surrender disappeared, and something else, sharper, harder, came forward.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said. The words were small, private. Not an order. A vow. “Tomorrow. Casimir will be at the philosophy event. He’ll be speaking for Anna. He’ll be on the stage, in the lights, before everyone. I will stop him before he reaches the mic.”

  Tina’s reply fell out of her like a confession.

  “How could beauty be so ugly?” she whispered—astonished, sorrowful. It was neither accusation nor lament; it was the only question the world had left her.

  How could that kind, beautiful boy be so evil?

  Kazou looked at the little circle of them, Tina hunched and shaking, Natalie thin with exhausted defense, Hannah hidden in the bathroom, the muffled sound of her crying. In that look, you could read everything that had shoved him to this precipice: the dead, the scared, the way old sins had reared like sea creatures.

  “You can’t become what you fight,” Natalie said suddenly, eyes on Kazou, voice like a blade softened by pleading, serious. "If you kill him… If you kill Casimir, then what are you? The hero? The villain? We don’t want that.”

  Kazou closed his eyes for a second and felt everything he’d promised slip under the weight of himself. His lines of conscience and duty fought against a darker, simpler calculation—end it now, this will save others. The choice tasted metallic on his tongue.

  He opened his eyes. They were steady again, at least, for a heartbeat.

  “I know,” he said. “I know what that would mean. I’m terrified of what I might become. But I’m more terrified of doing nothing.”

  “Then promise me this, you're not the one who's going to shoot Casimir. We’ll find a way that doesn’t make you the demon we swore we’d stop."

  For a moment, Kazou’s shoulders loosened. He almost smiled, an involuntary, broken thing, at her attempt to wield reason like a lifeline.

  Tina wiped her face on the back of her hand and laughed once, low and stunned.

  “We’re all so… small,” she said, voice raw. “We make plans like we matter. In Anna's project, I helped her with... Life didn't matter...Nihilism...”

  Kazou met her gaze.

  “We matter to each other.” It was the only truth he could offer that didn’t sound like a lie.

  They sat there until Hannah emerged, pale and knotted but quieter. She clung to Tina’s leg like a lifeline, and Tina folded her in without thinking.

  Plans hovered like moths around a candle: who to call, what to say, who might help keep the event from becoming a stage for worse things. Anxiety braided itself with a strange, brittle hope: if they could stop the next act, if they could get Casimir off that stage, maybe someone could live who otherwise would not.

  When the conversation finally wound down, it was not clean. No one left transformed. They left with ragged edges and the worn weight of people who had been thrown against the same rock and come away bloodied but still breathing.

  Before they moved to bed—Tina to curl under a heap of blankets, Natalie to stare at the ceiling, Kazou to sit alone by the window—Kazou stood, framed by the pale city light spilling over the radiator.

  “Tomorrow, Professor Ivanova is likely his next target since she knows Anna best and will eventually prove to the police that Anna's death wasn't a suicide, nor done by me,” he said, voice a promise, voice a threat.“I’ll be there. I will save her.”

  Natalie nodded once, slowly.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  Outside, the campus clock chimed the late hour.