Daylight in Sector 7 didn't look like daylight anywhere else I'd been. The sky stayed the color of old bruises, somewhere between grey and violet, and the light it gave off didn't cast shadows so much as smear them, long and soft-edged, in every direction at once.
Doesn't matter what it looks like. What matters is we can see each other now. That's the only upgrade I actually need from this place.
We split into pairs to search — not the split Fluff had forced on us the night before, but a smaller one, deliberate, agreed on out loud before anyone moved. Ha-eun and Areum took the east side of the ruined cathedral grounds. I took the west, with Jung-ho and Sang-min trailing a few paces behind, close enough to stay in sight, far enough that I could watch both of them without turning my head too obviously.
This is what it's come to. Watching the people I'm supposed to be protecting like they're the threat, because one of them might actually be
"You still think it's her," Jung-ho said, low, once Ha-eun and Areum were out of earshot. "Don't you."
"I think the torn cuff doesn't prove anything either way," I said. "That's different from thinking it's her."
"It's not, though. Not really." He kicked a loose stone, watched it skitter off into the weeds. "You keep saying it like you're being fair. But you haven't looked at anyone else the way you looked at her sleeve."
*He's not wrong. I hate that he's not wrong.*
"Fine," I said. "Let's fix that. Where were you standing when I came back through the gap?"
Jung-ho blinked, caught off guard by the directness. "Same spot I always was. By the pew, near Sang-min."
"Sang-min. Confirm that."
Sang-min flinched like I'd raised a hand to him instead of a question. "I — yeah. He was there. I mean, mostly there."
Mostly.
"Mostly?" I asked.
"I wasn't watching him every second," Sang-min said, voice climbing thin and fast. "I was scared, okay? Something had just grabbed Jung-ho, I didn't know if it was going to come through that gap after the rest of us, I wasn't exactly keeping a perfect log of everyone's position—"
"Nobody's blaming you for being scared," I said, though even as I said it, I watched the way his hands had started shaking again, the way his eyes wouldn't quite hold mine, and some old, ugly part of my brain — the part that had spent three years surviving a game that punished trust — started running the numbers anyway.
He's the one who suggested we all stay awake together. He's the one who's been the most afraid, the loudest about safety, since the moment we landed. Fear's a good disguise. Woojin used a different mask, but it was still a mask.
I didn't like the thought. I kept having it anyway.
We searched in silence after that, picking through the weeds and broken statuary, finding nothing but more ruin — collapsed archways, a dry fountain choked with the same pale, wrong-grown plants, no sign of whoever had grabbed Jung-ho beyond a single scuffed footprint in the dust that could have belonged to any of us.
It was Sang-min who found the blade.
He called out before he'd fully processed what he was looking at, voice cracking with something that sounded, in the moment, disturbingly close to guilt. "Ryo — over here — there's—"
I got there fast, blade already up, and found him crouched beside a low wall, staring down at a short knife half-buried in loose dirt. Dark stains along the edge. Fresh enough that they hadn't dried all the way to black.
That's it. That's the weapon. Someone hid it here, close to where we've been sleeping, close enough to grab in a hurry.
"You just happened to find it," Jung-ho said, arriving a beat behind me, and his voice had gone flat and cold in a way I hadn't heard from him before. "Right where you were digging around."
"I wasn't *digging around*, I saw something metal catching the light—"
"Convenient," Jung-ho said, echoing, without seeming to realize it, exactly what he'd accused Ha-eun of the night before.
Here we go again. Same pattern, new name attached to it.
"Jung-ho," I said, sharp enough to cut through whatever was building behind his eyes. "Back up."
He didn't. "He's the one who wanted us all awake together. He's the one crying about being scared every five minutes. And now he 'just happens' to find the exact knife that grabbed me last night, buried right where he was supposedly searching alone for two full minutes while you were somewhere else."
Two minutes. I lost track of him for two minutes while I was checking the fountain. I didn't even notice.
Sang-min's face had gone white. "I didn't — I swear, I found it, I wasn't the one who—"
"Sure," Jung-ho said, and something ugly had crept into his voice now, something that reminded me, uncomfortably, of the crowd outside Woojin's alcove the night everything fell apart — that same hunger for a name, any name, to finally hang the fear on. "Sure you didn't. Just like you weren't out here alone for two minutes. Just like you weren't the loudest voice telling us all to trust each other."
"That's not evidence," I said. "That's a story you're telling yourself because it's easier than not having an answer."
"And what, *yours* isn't?" Jung-ho rounded on me. "You've had it out for Ha-eun since the torn sleeve. Now suddenly you're defending him. Make up your mind, Ryo — or is it just whoever's standing closest to you gets the benefit of the doubt today?"
He's scared. That's all this is. He's scared, and scared people need somewhere to point the fear so it stops living inside their own chest
I understood it. Understanding it didn't make it less dangerous.
"Put the blade down," I told Sang-min, keeping my voice level, and he did, hands shaking so badly he nearly dropped it instead of setting it down. "Jung-ho. Look at his hands."
"What about them?"
"They're shaking. Whoever did this to you last night grabbed your collar with hands strong enough to yank you off balance in a second. Look at him. Really look."
Jung-ho did, reluctantly, and I watched something in his expression falter — not fully convinced, but no longer certain either, the anger losing its footing without quite knowing where to land instead.
"That doesn't prove anything," he muttered, but quieter now.
"No," I agreed. "It doesn't. Neither does the knife, on its own. Someone could've planted it exactly where they knew he'd search, hoping we'd do exactly what you almost did just now."
If that's true, it worked almost perfectly. It got Jung-ho ready to turn on him in under a minute. That's not luck. That's design.
Ha-eun and Areum arrived at a run, drawn by the raised voices, and I watched Ha-eun take in the scene in a single sweep — the knife in the dirt, Sang-min's white face, Jung-ho's clenched jaw — and her expression cooled into the same calculating stillness she'd worn the first moment I met her.
"What happened?" she asked.
"Sang-min found the knife," I said. "Jung-ho decided that meant Sang-min used it."
"I didn't decide anything," Jung-ho snapped. "I said it looked bad. It does look bad."
"Everything looks bad," Areum said quietly. "That's the point, isn't it. Whoever's doing this wants it to look bad. All of it. All of us."
She's the only one who's said the actual truth of it out loud. Everything here is built to make us doubt each other. The knife. The sleeve. The two minutes nobody was watching anybody closely enough. It's not evidence. It's bait.
"We're not doing this," I said, and this time I let the words carry the same flat certainty I'd used on Woojin, the same tone that had once made eighty-two frightened people go quiet and listen. "We're not turning on each other over a knife in the dirt and a torn sleeve and two minutes nobody can account for. That's exactly what got someone killed in Ha-eun's old group before the split. Forty people, and nobody ever found who was doing it, because everyone was too busy accusing whoever was standing closest."
Nobody argued. Nobody had anything better to offer.
Sang-min, still shaking, finally spoke, voice small. "Thank you," he said, not looking at me, looking at the dirt instead. "For not — for stopping that."
Don't thank me yet. I almost didn't. For about ten seconds back there, I was running the same math Jung-ho was, just quieter about it. That's the part that scares me. Not that one of us might be lying. That any of us, given enough fear, might convince ourselves an innocent person deserves what's coming to them.
I picked the knife up carefully, wrapping it in a strip of torn cloth before pocketing it. "This stays with me," I said. "Nobody touches it alone. Whatever prints or marks are on it, we figure that out together, in daylight, where everyone can see."
Ha-eun studied me for a long moment, something unreadable behind her eyes. "You're better at this than you think," she said finally. "Holding people together when they want an easy answer instead of a true one."
I don't feel better at it. I feel like I'm one bad night away from becoming exactly what I just talked everyone out of being.
"We're not done," I said instead, looking past her toward the far edge of the ruined grounds, toward a section of the wall we hadn't searched yet, half-collapsed and swallowed in shadow even in what passed for daylight here. "Whoever planted that knife wanted us fighting each other instead of looking for them. So let's stop giving them what they want."
[SYSTEM: Sector 7 — Day 1, continued. Instigator Event: ONGOING.]
[Note: False evidence detected. Suspect pool: unchanged.]
The system's words settled over me like cold water, confirming what I'd already guessed — that the knife had never been a clue at all, just a lever, placed exactly where it would do the most damage to the five of us without ever having to lift a finger itself.
Smart. Patient. And still out there, watching us prove it right.
We moved toward the shadowed wall together, all five of us this time, nobody willing anymore to be the one left standing alone.