EDITOR IN CHIEF, FULL SPEED AHEAD!

“No good,” said Haruhi flatly, thrusting the manuscript back.

“It’s not good enough?” whined Asahina. “But I thought about it really hard…”

“Yeah, no way. Not even close. It’s got no punch.” Haruhi leaned back in the chair at her brigade chief’s desk and grabbed the red pen she’d stuck behind her ear. “Just for starters, this introduction is such a cliché. ‘Once upon a time’? It’s got no freshness to it at all. It needs a twist. The intro has to be super catchy, got it? First impressions are critical.”

“But,” said Asahina tremulously, “that’s how fairy tales are supposed to start…”

“That thinking is obsolete!” Haruhi’s rejection was haughty and total. “You need to transform your approach. If you think you might have heard something before, then do the opposite. That’s the way to bring something new to life.”

I got the feeling that the reason it felt like we were leaving the original point of all this activity far behind was thanks to the system Haruhi had just described. It certainly wasn’t like the threatening feint of a pitcher who’s trying to hold a fast runner at first base, but just doing the opposite wasn’t going to work either.

“Anyway, this is no good.” Haruhi deliberately wrote “rewrite” with her red pen on the copy-paper manuscript, then tossed it into a cardboard box beside the desk. In the box (which formerly had contained oranges) was a mountain of papers she’d decided was bound for the incinerator. “Write something new.”

“Ugh…”

Shoulders slumping, Asahina made her way back to her own seat. She looked truly pathetic. I felt violently sympathetic to her as she picked up a pencil, then held her head in her hands.

I cast my gaze over to a corner of the table from which emanated nothing at all, and there was that most important fixture for the clubroom: Nagato, who was not reading.

“…”

She stared at the display of the laptop computer in front of her, stock-still, typing something on the keyboard every few seconds, whereupon she would turn inanimate yet again.

Nagato was using the laptop we’d won in our battle against the computer club. Similar machines were in front of both Koizumi and myself, their CPU cooling fans spinning away despite the CPUs themselves not really having anything to think about. Koizumi’s fingers typed away deftly, the sound of each keystroke grating on my nerves. How nice for him, that he’d decided what he was going to write about.

Asahina, the only one of us to express a prejudice against using machines, was writing by hand on a sheet of copy paper, but she’d stopped, as though synchronized with me.

Of course I’d stopped. How was I supposed to type with nothing to write?

“That goes for everybody else too!” Haruhi alone was strangely energetic. “If you don’t hurry to hand in those manuscripts and get the editing done, you won’t make it in time for publication. Time to shift into high gear! Just think a little harder and you’ll be able to write something. It’s not like we’re writing epics or aiming for literary prizes here.”

---

---

As usual, Haruhi’s cheerful face bloomed with that strange energy of hers. Like she was about to devour an insect.

“Kyon, I don’t see your hands moving. Sitting there staring at the screen isn’t going to get a sentence written. Just write the thing, then print it out and let me take a look at it. If it’s good, it passes, and if it’s not, then it won’t.”

My sympathy for Asahina turned into pity for myself. Why did I have to do this, anyway? And it wasn’t just me—shouldn’t the moaning Asahina beside me and the beatifically smiling Koizumi across from me be raising some kind of flag of mutiny?

All that said, the brigade chief known as Haruhi Suzumiya specialized in not listening to anything anybody said. Still, why had she decided on this particular role, of all things?

My gaze moved from Haruhi, who sat there just itching for people to toss their manuscripts into the cardboard box, to the armband wrapped around her arm.

Normally it read “Brigade Chief,” though in the past it had also been “Detective” and “Ultra Director.” But now a new title was scribbled on the cloth in large Magic-Markered letters.

It was: “Editor in Chief.”

This all started a few days earlier.

It was a day in the third term of school as the footsteps of the approaching New Year were starting to become audible. It happened during an otherwise peaceful lunch hour—a bit more warning would’ve been nice.

“Summons.”

It was Yuki Nagato who spoke. For some reason she was accompanied by the ever-composed Itsuki Koizumi. The two of them coming by my classroom together didn’t give me so much as a single micron of anything like a good feeling, and although I’d been the one who’d interrupted the business of stirring up my lunch to come into the hallway, I wanted nothing more than to get back to my own desk.

“What do you mean, ‘summons’?”

I could only think of my current situation. Taniguchi had been on his way back from buying some pastries and a melon drink when he’d called out, “Hey, Kyon, your cohorts are here,” which was why I’d gotten up and was now standing where I was. The particular pairing that confronted me was wholly unlikely, but as far as a suitable partner for Nagato to pair up with went, I couldn’t think of a single person I’d approve of.

After looking for about three seconds at the alien girl who stood there after delivering her mysterious “summons,” I gave up and regarded Koizumi’s handsome face.

“So are you going to explain?”

“Of course, that is why I have come,” said Koizumi, craning his neck to look inside Class 5’s classroom. “Do you think Suzumiya will be out for a while?”

She’d taken off right after fourth period ended. I figured she was munching away on her lunch in the cafeteria right about now, I said.

“Excellent. This is something I’d rather she not hear.”

I got the feeling it was going to be something I’d rather not hear too.

“Actually—” Koizumi lowered his voice.

It seemed like he was enjoying this, I told him.

“Well, whether or not one finds this enjoyable depends on the person.”

“Just tell me what it is already.”

“We’ve received a message from the student council president. We’re to appear in the student council room today after school. In short, it is a summons.”

Ah hah.

I suddenly understood.

“So it’s finally come, eh?”

An order to appear in front of the student council president—I wasn’t so naive that I couldn’t imagine why such a thing would happen. I was too good of a person to ignore the many misdeeds perpetrated by the SOS Brigade both in and out of the school this past year. Had it been the time we’d scammed computers from the computer club? No, wait, we’d settled that in trial by video-game combat the previous autumn. I’d heard that the president of the computer club had withdrawn his complaint with the student council after the loss.

Was it because we’d gone too far when we filmed our movie? That had been a while ago by now, and student council elections had been after the school festival. Had the current council suddenly remembered the business left to them by the previous administration? Or had the physical descriptions of the brigade members that had surely circulated among the neighborhood shrines and temples finally made it to North High? We’d visited a few too many places during our first shrine visit of the New Year, after all.

“Guess there’s nothing we can do about it,” I said, shrugging and looking back at my unoccupied desk next to the window. “I bet Haruhi’ll be thrilled to go mano a mano with the president. Depending on their attitudes, this could turn violent. I’m counting on you for mediation, Koizumi.”

“You misunderstand.” Koizumi pleasantly refuted me. “It is not Suzumiya who is being summoned.”

So, what, it was me? C’mon, that didn’t make any sense. It would be the height of injustice if I had to bear the full brunt of the backlash just because Haruhi was as defiant and stubborn as a mule. I knew the student council members were basically the school administration’s puppets, but if they were that cowardly, I’d be pretty disappointed.

“No, it is not you,” said Koizumi, even more pleasantly, like he was happy about something. “It is Nagato alone who has been summoned.”

What? That made even less sense. She was great as a target for lecturing, since she’d certainly sit there and silently listen to whatever you said, but I didn’t think it’d be very satisfying for the lecturer, since she’d just as certainly stick to her “no comment” policy.

“Nagato?! The student council president wants to see Nagato?”

“Your subject and object are both correct. Yes, the president has indicated Nagato.”

As for Nagato herself, she simply stood there, as though she had no thoughts of herself at all. She accepted the wave of surprise that emanated from my eyes, her hair fluttering minutely.

“What do you mean? What business does the student council have with Nagato? Don’t tell me they want to make her secretary.”

I wanted him to just spit it out already. Was his infuriatingly roundabout manner carved into his DNA?

“My apologies. I’ll explain it as understandably as I can. The reason Nagato has been summoned is simple: they want to discuss the literature club’s activities, particularly in regards to its ongoing existence.”

“The literature club? What does—”

What does that have to do with anything? I was about to say—but choked back the words.

“…”

Nagato, still unmoving, looked down the hall.

Her pale, once-bespectacled face looked just as it had back then. I would never forget how she looked when Haruhi had burst into her clubroom, dragging me along, and Nagato had looked slowly, expressionlessly up at us.

“I see. The literature club, eh? So that’s how it is.”

The SOS Brigade’s long occupation of the literature club’s room for its headquarters was the very embodiment of the present progressive tense. Nagato was the only proper member of the literature club, whereas we were freeloaders at best, and possibly illegal occupants. Haruhi surely felt we’d long since asserted exclusive rights over the space, but the student council was undoubtedly insisting upon a different standard.

Koizumi must have read my facial expression. “They want to talk to the club president about exactly that, face-to-face, after school. The notice came to me first. I passed it on to Nagato.”

Why’d it go to him? I wanted to know.

“Perhaps because they knew it would be ignored if they gave it directly to her.”

Maybe that was so, but Koizumi and I were just about equivalent in our total lack of association with the literature club, I pointed out.

“That is true, but things aren’t necessarily so simple. That may make things even worse. Since we’re occupying the literature club’s space without doing anything even remotely related to literature, you wouldn’t have to be the student council to find that questionable. Honestly, given how infamous we are, I’m surprised they’ve overlooked it for as long as they have.”

Koizumi’s sensible position was accompanied by a smile that made me wonder which side he was on, anyway.

Put that way, I myself might’ve wanted to quibble with our arrangement, had I been on the council. But still—why now? The student council had thus far ignored the SOS Brigade like a lazy landlord neglecting to fix a leaky roof, I pointed out.

“They have indeed. However, the current council president may not be so easy to deal with.”

Koizumi smiled, showing his white teeth, then looked at Nagato out of the corner of his eye.

Nagato, naturally, had no reaction, but she shifted her gaze from the end of the hallway down to my feet. It sort of seemed like she was apologizing for causing the trouble.

I, of course, did not feel like she was causing the trouble at all. Obviously. I knew only a single entity who inconvenienced the very air she moved through. The inconvenience’s name was—

I exhaled and spoke the name.

“It’s Haruhi’s fault—like always.”

It had been, ever since she’d announced that the space would henceforth be her clubroom.

“I’d ask you to keep this a secret from Suzumiya,” said Koizumi. “I fear she would only complicate things. So after school, please make your way to the student council room without her seeing you.”

Yeah, sure, I started to say, then stopped short at a strange detail.

“Wait just a minute. Why am I going? I’m not the kind of Johnny-come-lately who just wanders into a situation uninvited.”

Of course, if Nagato asked me to go, I’d accompany her without a second thought, but Koizumi had no business asking me. Plus, if Nagato went alone, she’d be that much more likely to just scare the crap out of them, I figured.

“The council is well-informed. That’s why I was appointed as messenger. I would be quite happy to act entirely as Nagato’s representative, but should things go poorly, there could be problems later, and being her agent is not part of my job description. I suppose I can put it simply by saying: you are Suzumiya’s representative.”

“Why not just send Haruhi herself?”

“Are you being serious?” Koizumi exaggeratedly widened his eyes.

I answered his clumsy acting with a snort. If he wanted to know whether I understood the situation or not—yeah, I understood it. If we tossed a bomb like Haruhi in front of the student council, we’d be lucky if all we got was an explosion. Given the concern she’d shown for Nagato during the winter trip, if she found out Nagato had been called before the council, we’d only get as far as “Nagato’s gotten a message from the student council…” before Haruhi would leap straight to breaking down the council room’s door—or she might cut right to the chase and assault the staff room or the principal’s office. Which might make her feel better, but I’d be the one to suffer afterward. Unlike Koizumi, I had no desire to transfer schools without any good reason.

“Well, then, I’ll leave the matter in your hands.” Koizumi smiled as though he’d known from the start what my answer would be. “I’ll inform the student council president. We’ll meet in the council room after school.”

Koizumi’s stride was light and long-legged as he walked away from classroom 5. When Haruhi wasn’t around, he really did have quite an attitude. I watched Nagato follow behind him, feeling somehow that the end of our first year really was upon us.

At any rate, maybe Koizumi and Nagato were perfectly comfortable being the faces of the SOS Brigade. We were all cooperating, but the number of secrets we were keeping from Haruhi was increasing by the month…

Maybe I was being pointlessly sentimental.

Thanks to my sentimentality, I didn’t get to ask Koizumi why he was going about normally as the student council’s carrier pigeon.

Incidentally, the ever-perceptive Haruhi immediately picked up on my suspicious behavior—though she didn’t realize it—during the break following fifth period.

A sharp object poked me in the back, and I turned around.

“What’s got you so restless?” Haruhi demanded, twirling a mechanical pencil in her fingertips. “It’s like someone’s called you out or something.”

I’d prepared a 100 percent unfalsifiable contingency plan for just such an occasion.

“Yeah, Okabe wanted me to see him. He went out of his way to call me over during the lunch break,” I answered casually. “I guess there’s some kind of problem with my grades. Depending on the final exam results, they might even be notifying my parents. He said that I have to change my ways now if I want to go on to college.”

Of course, it didn’t make sense to change my ways, given that nothing needed changing—not that I would’ve been able to anyway—but what I was saying wasn’t complete nonsense. For one thing, Taniguchi’d gotten a similar earful, though not in so many words, and the conclusion I’d drawn after comparing notes with him was that our homeroom teacher was proportionally compassionate enough to be worried about his students’ educational futures.

Of course, since I was pretty close to Taniguchi’s level myself, we each had a sense that if one of us was slacking off, the other could afford to do so as well, which tended to dilute the feeling of tension. It was enough to make me think that Kunikida—who was careful to get decent grades—was the weird one.

“Huh?” Haruhi held her chin in her hands, elbows resting on her desk. “Were your grades that bad? I thought you were more serious about listening in class than I was,” she said, gazing out the window. The speed of the passing clouds told of the wind’s strength.

I would’ve appreciated not being lumped in with her brain. My own head didn’t have anything to do with space-time distortions, data explosions, or monochrome parallel dimensions. Compared with Haruhi’s unprecedented conceptions, it was a cute little miniature dachshund.

“Listening without comprehension is a waste of time,” I said, without any particular conviction.

“Oh yeah?” Her eyes still fixed on the scenery outside the window, she spoke as though addressing the silent glass. “Should I help you out with studying, then? I don’t mind—we’d just be going over the class material again. And I can definitely explain language arts better than they do in class.

“The teachers suck, after all,” Haruhi murmured quietly to herself. She glanced at me, but then looked immediately away.

As I was trying to figure out how to answer—

“I mean, Mikuru’s been freaking out too, right? This school’s just a prefectural public school, but this time of year they get all weird and start acting like a prep school. It’s really hard on the juniors. They’ve got all those special classes and mock exams and everything, and it turns their big class trip into a total mess. If that’s what they’re gonna do, they should move the class trip to freshman year. And the school festival should be in the spring, not fall, am I right?”

Despite her rapid-fire delivery, her eyes remained fixed on the drifting clouds. As she seemed to be waiting for a reply, I gave her one.

“Yeah, I guess,” I agreed, looking at the clouds myself. “I just want to make it through the school year.” Then, on the chance I got held back a year, I played up to Haruhi’s ego and added, “Heya, Suzumiya-senpai.”

“Kyon, you dork. Just go buy me some rolls. I’ll pay you later.”

I resented the prospect of such mundane conversations making their way into the clubroom. There wasn’t anything wrong with getting Haruhi to make a test preparation guide in order to avoid that, right? Wait—it’d be good to have Nagato on the production staff too. I bet we could sell them for five hundred yen a pop, make a little money on the side. I figured I could cut Taniguchi a break and give him a bad-influence discount of 30 percent or so.

“No way,” said Haruhi, immediately nixing the profitable-sounding idea. “That wouldn’t really help your academic ability at all. It would just be a temporary fix. If a slightly different question showed up on a test, you’d have no idea what to do. If you don’t build up your knowledge properly, you’ll fall for all their sneaky tricks. But don’t worry. If you’ll just apply yourself, I can get you to Kunikida’s level in six months, easy.”

---

---

I didn’t really want her to get too enthusiastic about it. Despite my efforts not to, I found myself imagining the scene—sweating nervously as Haruhi thwacked me on the head with a yellow megaphone, happily yelling at me, “No! Why can’t you understand something so simple? What are you, an idiot?”

“I’ll just ask you about the places I don’t know,” I said, “and all you have to do is explain those. I’ll handle the rest myself somehow.”

“If you can handle it yourself, why haven’t you done that already?”

She certainly knew how to figure out the most annoying thing to say. She was dead right, I told her.

“Why’re you being so stubborn?” Haruhi faced me, her lips tight with frustration, then leaned suddenly forward. “I won’t allow the kind of scandal that would come from a member of the SOS Brigade failing out of school. That’d give the student council all the ammunition they’d need to come down on us. I need you to be just a tiny bit motivated so they don’t get that opening. Got it?”

Haruhi’s words were delivered with her brow furrowed in irritation, her mouth curving into a keen smile, glaring at me until my face showed acceptance of her demands.

Classes were over for the day.

I took my leave from Haruhi by pretending that I was headed for the staff room, then proceeded to the student council room. It was right next door to the staff room, so there was no need to take a detour, and soon I’d arrived at my destination.

Truth be told, now that I was here, I was feeling pretty nervous.

I didn’t remember the student council president’s face at all, even though I would’ve seen it during the council elections that came right after the school festival. I remembered hearing the candidates’ speeches in the auditorium, but as a completely unaffiliated voter, I just picked the most mundane-sounding name on the ballot and immediately forgot it. What kind of person had it been? Whoever it was had to be at least a junior, since to be called “president” I figured you’d have to be an upperclassman of some kind. And surely it had to be someone with more dignity than the computer club president.

As I stood there hesitating in front of the door—

“Heya, Kyon! Whatcha doin’?”

A familiar long-haired figure popped out of the staff room. It was Asahina’s classmate and an honorary adviser to the SOS Brigade, a junior girl who I knew by now was no ordinary individual.

No matter who you were, you had to tip your hat to her.

“ ’Sup,” I said.

“Ha ha ha—’sup!” she replied to my jock-ish greeting.

Tsuruya raised both hands and smiled brilliantly, then looked at the door in front of which I stood.

“What’s this? Got business with the student council?”

I was here to find out exactly what that business was, I explained. I’d never have business with them myself.

“Whaa?”

Tsuruya strode toward me vigorously—it was hard to say whether she or Haruhi was better at that—and despite my flinching away, put her mouth in close proximity to my ear.

“Hmm? Are you by some chance a student council spy?” she asked, in a quiet (by Tsuruya standards) voice.

I detected a hint of seriousness in Tsuruya’s close-range smile. It was an expression I wasn’t used to, given her standard of constant optimistic mirth. For some reason I felt compelled to explain myself.

“Um, well…”

What do you want me to say, Tsuruya? I pointed out that if I were a spy under orders from someone, I wouldn’t be going to all this trouble at the moment.

“I guess that’s true.” Tsuruya stuck out her tongue. “Sorry for doubting ya! I just kinda overheard something, y’know? Know anything about the rumor that the student council’s been overrun with people making secret deals behind the scenes? I hear it even goes back to the last election for council president. Not sure I buy it, though.”

That was the first I’d heard of it. It was hard to imagine that kind of intrigue happening at our shabby little public school, so it was probably nothing more than a rumor. Although it did seem like the kind of academic drama that Haruhi would’ve loved.

“Tsuruya—what kind of person is the student council president?” I went ahead and asked her. It seemed like she might know more about the subject than I did.

I hoped she’d tell me something about his personality or something, but—

“I don’t really know him very well. He’s in a different class and all. He’s sorta stuck up but also handsome, and pretty smart, from what I hear. If he were a character in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, he’d be Sima Yi, that cunning army general. He’s constantly working for more student independence, I hear, since the last student council was out of touch—total pie-in-the-sky.”

It was troubling that despite the reference to a famous historical figure, I couldn’t easily imagine his personality—and the comparison to airborne pie was suspicious, as well.

“Uh, by the way—why were you in the staff room?”

“Hmm? Oh, it’s my turn to deliver the weekly reports, so I came by to do that,” she said easily, slapping my back and purposefully raising her voice. “Anyway, Kyon, good luck! If you’re gonna wrestle with the student council, I’ve got your back! I’m an ally to all in Haru-nyan’s club!”

It was certainly reassuring. However, I didn’t want things to go that far. There was no telling what methods the ecstatic Haruhi would employ upon the appearance of a truly worthy adversary. It exhausted my mental capacity just thinking about it. And as things stood, I already had enough to worry about.

Tsuruya waved her hand in a good-bye gesture, and having said everything she wanted to say, strode off briskly.

As usual, she’d gotten to the heart of the matter without my saying anything. In that sense, her cognitive abilities rivaled even Haruhi’s. She was probably the only person at North High who could demonstrate power equivalent to Haruhi’s in a matchup. The difference between her and our pain-in-the-neck brigade chief was that Tsuruya hadn’t left her common sense behind.

Given the thin construction of the wall and door, though, it was a safe bet that her last words had been audible on the inside. There was something Haruhi-like hidden within her, in the end.

Oh, well—it was time to gird my loins and do this.

I gave the door a polite knock to avoid offending whoever was inside.

“Enter,” came a sudden voice from within the room.

It was surprising to hear somebody actually commanding me to “enter,” especially in a voice so deep and severe you’d expect to hear it overdubbing some famous veteran actor in a foreign movie.

I slid the door open and entered the student council room for the first time in my life.

While it boasted a slightly larger size than the literature club’s room, it wasn’t that much different than any other room in the old building. In fact, without a triangular plaque reading COUNCIL PRESIDENT on one of the desks, it felt a little drab compared with our room. It was really nothing more than a meeting room.

Koizumi, having arrived before I did, greeted me. “I’m glad you made it.”

Standing next to Koizumi, evidently also having waited for me, was Nagato.

“…”

Nagato cast her clever gaze toward the window, in front of which stood the president.

He was… how to put it?

It was obvious enough that he was a tall male student. For whatever reason, he was looking out the window, his hands clasped behind him, not so much as moving a muscle. His form was indistinct, backlit as it was by the afternoon sun that streamed through the south-facing window.

There was another person, sitting at one corner of the room’s long table. It was a female student, face downturned over an opened notebook, mechanical pencil in hand, poised for recording the proceedings. Apparently she was the secretary.

The president did not move. I had no idea what was so fascinating about the scenery visible from the window—all you could see from there were the tennis courts and the totally abandoned swimming pool—but the meaningful silence dragged on.

“Mr. President,” Koizumi finally said after an appropriate interval, his voice brimming with fresh solicitousness. “All the individuals you asked to come have arrived. Feel free to proceed with your business.”

The president slowly turned, at which point I finally beheld his face. He was a second-year student, and he wore a slim-framed pair of glasses. He was a pretty handsome guy, but not like Koizumi’s dime-store-teen-idol good looks. There was a callous look in his eye, like a young and upwardly mobile professional whose every thought was turned toward improving his own position. I reflexively anticipated that I would not get along with him very well.

His face expressionless—but not like Nagato’s—he spoke. “I believe you have already heard this, Koizumi, but I’ll state it again. The reason all of you are here is quite simple. The student council is giving the literature club its final notice.”

Final notice? Had we ever been given a notice at all? If we had, I couldn’t imagine Nagato had meekly complied with their summons, which was what had allowed us to continue using the clubroom as our base of operations.

“…”

Unconcerned with Nagato’s lack of response, the president coldly continued.

“Currently you are the literature club in name only. Is this correct?”

I guess holing up in the clubroom and reading books wasn’t good enough.

“…”

Nagato said nothing.

“You are no longer a functioning student organization.”

“…”

Nagato silently regarded the president.

“I’ll be clear. The findings of our inquiry are this: we of the student council do not currently see any purpose in the existence of the literature club.”

“…”

Nagato was very still.

“Thus, I am informing you of the immediate and indefinite suspension of the literature club. You will promptly vacate your clubroom.”

“…”

Nagato remained silent, as though she didn’t care one way or another. But I knew better.

“Miss… Nagato, was it?” The president calmly returned Nagato’s tangible gaze. “There are non–club members in your room, and you’ve allowed them to stay there. And I wonder what you’ve done with the budget provided to the literature club this year. Would you suggest that your film counts as a literary activity? According to my investigation, that film was produced by and credited to the SOS Brigade, an unauthorized organization, and the literature club’s name appears nowhere on it. And the film itself was made without the permission of the school festival’s organization committee.”

It was painful to hear. Perhaps because Koizumi and Nagato never had any intention of stopping Haruhi, the responsibility of restraining her tyranny fell solely to me. And there was Asahina to think about as well—forced to play the powerless heroine.

“…”

Nagato’s profile did not suggest any assertiveness on her part, though that was just an amateur’s observation.

Perhaps taking her silence as a sign of acquiescence, the president maintained his pompous demeanor.

“The literature club’s activities will be temporarily suspended, and you will remain prohibited from entering the clubroom until such time as new members can be recruited next year. Are there any complaints? Feel free to voice them. We will listen, if nothing else.”

“…”

Nagato didn’t move a muscle, but Haruhi, Asahina, or Koizumi would’ve understood what was going on. And if that crowd could understand, then it would be obvious to me. That much I could gather.

“…”

Nagato, sunken into silence.

“…”

Nagato, quietly furious.

“Hmph. You have no objections, then?” The president curled the corner of his lips unpleasantly. “The literature club has but one member—you, Miss Nagato. You are effectively the club president. If you’ll consent, in order to preserve the clubroom, we can immediately begin the removal of all foreign objects from it. Such objects will either be disposed of or stored by us. Any personal items must be immediately removed—”

“Now wait just a second.” I interrupted the president’s monologue before Nagato’s silent rage reached critical levels. “You can’t just suddenly say stuff like that. It’s not fair to ignore us for so long, then drop this on us out of nowhere.”

“Oh, is that so?” The president regarded me with a cold glare, snickering. “I’ve had a look at the Student Organization Establishment Form you submitted. It’s like a bad joke. If we approved every organization whose goals were so absurd, there would be no end to it.”

The sneering, haughty upperclassman pushed his glasses up in an exaggeratedly dramatic fashion.

“You should learn better rhetoric. In fact, you should probably devote yourself more to academics in general. I can’t imagine your grades are so good that you can afford to be wasting so much time after school playing around with this ridiculous ‘club.’ ”

So that was it. The president’s real goal all along had been to destroy the SOS Brigade. All this nonsense about the literature club was just a pretense. At least Ultra Director Haruhi had managed to come up with some kind of an excuse to put Nagato in her movie’s script—this guy wasn’t even bothering.

“And don’t tell me you’ll just join the literature club,” said the president, heading off an option that hadn’t even occurred to me yet. “Consider this: even if you all had been good-faith members of the literature club, you have not done a single thing that can be remotely recognized as literary activity. Just what have you been doing, I wonder?”

The president’s glasses glittered pointlessly. What was that, some kind of special effect?

“And yet we have been tolerant. The ‘SOS Brigade,’ as you call it, was established without permission and has simply acted as it pleased. Detonating fireworks on the school roof, threatening faculty, wandering around the campus in lascivious clothing, cooking stew in a building with a no-open-flames policy—these would be unacceptable for any club. Just who do you think you are, exactly?”

I could see that everything he was saying was totally accurate. That was all on us. We should’ve at least asked about these things first. I seriously doubted we would’ve been given permission, but we sure weren’t going to just roll over and do what they wanted now.

“This is dirty pool,” I said, inheriting Nagato’s fury. “If that’s your problem, you should’ve just gone straight to Haruhi. What’s the point of bringing in Nagato and threatening to dissolve the lit club?”

The president had anticipated this tack. “It should be obvious, shouldn’t it?” He was totally unperturbed, folding his arms and speaking as though he was an elite executive who’d just finished reading a proposal written by an inept subordinate. “The SOS Brigade does not exist as a student organization. Am I mistaken?”

Had it really come to this?

No matter how hard the student council or its president tried, they could not dissolve the SOS Brigade—because administratively speaking, no such brigade existed in the school. Trying to make something that didn’t exist disappear was like multiplying by zero; the answer was still always zero. Even if it didn’t go badly and wind up being analogous to multiplying a negative by a negative, you never knew what was going to happen if you poked Haruhi Suzumiya wrong. She might go flying off in any direction. Her behavior was totally unpredictable, like a hooked ball heading for a 7-10 split that jumps into a different lane for a 10-pin strike.

If you tried to throw the straight-on fastball at a girl like that, she’d just smash a line drive foul into your dugout—basically, it was pointless, or so the student council must have concluded when they’d decided to lay their indirect siege.

Which they did by attacking the third-floor clubroom of the literature club, which the SOS Brigade was illegally occupying.

If the literature club could be summoned and brought to task, then the SOS Brigade’s residence would automatically disappear. The only reason we were allowed to use the clubroom was because the sole real literature club member had said, “It’s fine,” and Nagato was probably the only person who would’ve said so when asked if her clubroom could be borrowed.

If the literature club was dissolved, Nagato would cease to be a member, and her days of quietly reading in the room would be over, and the five of us would no longer have anywhere to go after school.

It was a magnificent tactic. I was impressed. The worst part was no matter what we did, Nagato became both victim and coconspirator.

I knew how weak our position was, which gave me no way to formulate a counterargument. Haruhi would’ve done it anyway, and all I could do was wonder if the president knew that, but in any case it made summoning Nagato the obvious course of action.

Nagato, meanwhile, seemed to be reaching her limit.

“…”

The silent pressure emanating from the petite, school-uniformed figure was tangibly filling the room. I wondered what would happen if we just let her go. I doubted the world would be rewritten, but I could imagine the student council president with his memory erased, being controlled like a puppet. Or perhaps she’d do what she did after the Asakura debacle, using data manipulation to transform both the president and the clubroom into something completely different. When Yuki Nagato went on a rampage, there was no telling what could happen. I was inescapably reminded of last fall’s contest against the computer club.

The president took a step back and posed in front of the setting sun. Just as I was nervously thinking about telling him just how much trouble he’d gotten himself into—

“…”

Silent as ever, the invisible feeling of menace disappeared.

“Hmm?”

The aura I (thought I had) detected from Nagato had vanished, as though it had never been there. I couldn’t help but glance at Nagato, whose unblinking gaze had shifted from the president to a different individual.

I followed her eyes.

The presumably second-year girl whose pencil had been moving as she’d taken notes during the meeting slowly looked up from her writing.

“… Huh?” I said stupidly.

I immediately wondered why she was here, then realized I couldn’t remember her name. It had been last summer. A strange incident that happened a bit after Tanabata. I’d never forget what I’d seen, but in the end it hadn’t really mattered…

“Is something the matter?” the president asked haughtily. “Ah, I haven’t introduced you. This is the student council’s top officer, and she’s taking notes for me today—”

The girl’s hair shifted slightly as she bowed.

“—Miss Emiri Kimidori.”

The massive cave cricket came thundering back into my mind.

“Kimidori?”

This girl who’d gotten involved in a truly ridiculous chain of events that had started with the SOS Brigade website, then moved on into investigating the disappearance of the computer club president, and finally ended up in a different dimension, was now seated in a corner of the student council room, looking at us as though she didn’t recognize us at all.

---

---

Kimidori smiled pleasantly, shifting her gaze from me to Nagato. I got the feeling that her eyes narrowed just a bit—and that she and Nagato had exchanged some kind of sign. I even thought I noticed Nagato give a tiny, reluctant nod.

What was this? Had some kind of telepathic signal passed between the two of them?

The more I thought about it, the stranger that incident seemed. Kimidori had claimed to be the computer club president’s girlfriend, but then the president himself had told us he didn’t even have a girlfriend. So as to the question of what reasoning had led Kimidori to turn to the SOS Brigade for counseling, I’d just assumed it had been Nagato’s doing. But now bumping into her again and seeing her exchange looks with Nagato—I couldn’t imagine it was a coincidence.

I was as terrified as a young Slavic soldier hearing the sounds of a squadron of Luftwaffe dive-bombers.

Wham—!

From behind me echoed a sudden noise, like a balloon bursting. My heart attempted to leap free of the confines of my rib cage and leave me behind—

“Hey!”

There was no mistaking the hundred-decibel voice that sounded its war cry through the now-open door of the student council room. The voice continued at its eardrum-rattling volume.

“What does this pathetic excuse for a student council think it’s doing, locking up my three faithful servants in a room like this? I figured you’d get around to doing something sooner or later, but if it was going to be this interesting, you should’ve just come straight to me! And what’s this? Don’t tell me you’re giving Yuki a hard time. Kyon would be one thing, but there’s no way you’re getting away with hurting Yuki! I’ll beat the stuffing out of you and toss you right out the window!”

Yes, indeed, there was but one individual who could come breaking in there like a mother cat whose kittens have been threatened.

I didn’t have to turn around to know who it was, but I wanted to see the look on her face. Yup, it was her, looking even livelier than usual, elation practically radiating off her at having found something so interesting.

“You can’t keep me out of this, you know. I’m the supreme leader of the SOS Brigade!” Haruhi boasted. A moment later, her eyes alighted upon the level’s final boss. Her pupils, shining with the force of whole galactic clusters, took in the shape of the lanky, bespectacled boy. “So you’re the student council president? Very well, I accept your challenge. It’s president vs. brigade chief, so the fight money’s even. No objections, right?”

Then she turned to me, as though to take me to task for harboring such pointless questions as how she’d even found out we were here. “And you, Kyon! Don’t tell me you’re just going to shut up and let this happen. Don’t hold back just because it’s the student council president. If we all jump him at once, then tie him up, the rest will be cake. I’ll put him in a joint lock, so just get some rope ready!”

Her eyes blazed, brimming with lava that threatened to form a caldera right on the spot.

“…”

In contrast to that, like a front-line commander, Nagato was silently ignoring the sudden and unasked-for reinforcements, still not moving as she observed Kimidori with her dormant-volcano eyes.

Instead of jumping the student council president or scampering off in search of some rope, I simply watched the expression of the person who was facing the brunt of this intruder’s threat.

It was strange. The president’s brow creased as he directed an accusatory glance at the person standing next to me—Koizumi. For some reason I thought I noticed him shake his head slightly. With a pained smile on Koizumi’s face, it seemed the two of them had shared some kind of silent communication, and I suddenly wished I’d never noticed anything at all.

“What are you trying to pull, anyway? If you’re going to call out somebody, call me! Trying to cut the brigade chief out of all this, are you? Some student council you are!”

“Suzumiya, please calm down.” Koizumi casually put his hand on Haruhi’s shoulder. “Let us at least hear the council out. We’re still in the middle of the conversation.”

He—suspiciously—made eye contact with me. Was I supposed to know what the hell to do?

The only thing I knew was that our brigade chief had come to her underlings’ rescue in their time of need.

“Fine, then it’s come to all-out war! I’ll warn you that we’re happy to take on any challenge, any time, any place. Every single member of the SOS Brigade is a valiant warrior, who knows neither fear nor mercy, and you shall receive none till you either weep or kneel!”

I got the feeling that the situation was only going to escalate.

And it was already bad enough, with Tsuruya offering her support in advance, Nagato right on the verge of exploding, and the unexpected and sudden return of Kimidori.

Plus, Koizumi and the student council president were part of the picture too, somehow.

“Kyon, what’re you doing? We’re up against the student council president! It’s the most obvious enemy we’ve ever had! If we’re not going to do battle here, where would we fight? At least give him a harsher look!”

Student council vs. SOS Brigade, huh?

Someone, somewhere, had triggered the switch for this event—a switch I wished they’d ignored. I really hoped it hadn’t been me.

I wondered what was going to happen next as I regarded Haruhi, who was infuriated but also somehow delighted. Whatever it was, the certainty that it wouldn’t be good news swirled within my chest.

“Oh brother,” I muttered under my breath. I’d like to think it was an understandable reaction.

And in fact, the situation turned into the exact opposite of good news.

Haruhi underwent a class switch from “brigade chief” to “editor in chief,” ordering us Brigade members to become authors and write pseudonovels, a task so random and unprecedented it was like a Stinger anti-aircraft missile trying to target a Jupiter Ghost Gundam.

Haruhi was like a short-fused street fighter who’d picked up a letter of challenge meant for somebody else and had come to the fighting arena anyway. “Come on, mister evil student council president! Are you up for a no-holds-barred, no-referee, no-rules, winner-takes-all fight?” she shouted in a high-handed voice, her finger pointed accusatorially at the president, whose back was to the window.

The president didn’t even try to hide his irritated expression. “Miss Suzumiya. I don’t know what sort of techniques you’re accustomed to using in your fights, but I’m not in the habit of walking into a ring my enemy’s prepared for me. The ‘rules’ you’ve proposed are the epitome of barbarism. It is unbecoming. Know this: the student council cannot allow fights on the school grounds, no matter the reason.”

Haruhi’s gaze never left the president’s face. “So what challenge would you have us face? Mah-jongg? You can even bring a pinch hitter to stand in for you; I don’t care. Or maybe you’d prefer a computer game? I’ve got just the game.”

“There will be no mah-jongg and no video games.” The president deliberately removed his glasses, polishing them with a handkerchief before putting them back on. “There will be no challenges at all. I have no time to play along with your games.”

Haruhi began to boldly stride forth, but I held her back with a hand on her shoulder. “Hold on, Haruhi. Who told you we were in here?” I asked.

Haruhi glared at me belligerently. “I heard from Mikuru. She said she’d heard it from Tsuruya. As soon as I’d heard that the student council president had called you guys in, I came right over—Yuki and Koizumi were missing from the clubroom too, after all. I knew right away that the student council was finally making its move. They knew they’d lose if they went up against me, so they attacked our weak spot. Just the kind of cheap move I’d expect from a petty villain.”

The president didn’t move, even when called a “petty villain.” The second-year student seemed more bored than anything else as he looked at Haruhi, then finally voiced another complaint to Koizumi.

“Mr. Koizumi. Perhaps you should explain—explain why it was that I summoned Miss Nagato.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” said Koizumi calmly, his smile chagrined. He did so love explaining things.

“I don’t need any explanations,” said Haruhi, cutting him right off. “You’re just trumping up charges to destroy the literature club, since if Yuki’s not a club member anymore, then we won’t be able to use the room. You probably figured since she’s such a nice, quiet girl you’d be able to just talk circles around her, but I won’t have it. If you’ve got a problem with the SOS Brigade, don’t bother with this sneaky crap—just say it to our faces!”

As she went on, Haruhi’s own words incited her to greater enthusiasm. She went into kicking stance, as though she was preparing for a throw down. And you had to hand it to her—her intuition was excellent. Just as I was thinking that Koizumi would be disappointed at not getting to explain anything—

“Thank you for saving me the time of explaining. That is indeed the situation,” said Koizumi, his facade of serenity unperturbed. “However, we are still in the midst of negotiations. I expect the president has not finished speaking. In any case, forcing an officially sanctioned club like the literature club to suspend its activities immediately, with no grace period, cannot be possible. I don’t believe the student council has the authority to do that. Does it, Mr. President?”

So he had gotten to make his explanation. Just as I was thinking this third-rate melodrama couldn’t get any worse, the president put on his best honor-student-in-a-cheap-melodrama face.

“Naturally, we of the student council do not wish to cause unnecessary conflict. If the literature club were to conduct standard literary activities, we would have no complaints at all. What we find problematic is the fact that there have been no such activities.”

“Does that mean we have an alternative to immediate suspension?” asked Koizumi immediately.

“It is not an alternative; it is a requirement,” said the president huffily. “You must immediately engage in at least one activity befitting the literature club. If you do, we’ll lift the indefinite suspension and approve continued use of the clubroom.”

Haruhi lowered her raised foot, though her voice and demeanor remained confrontational. “So you can see reason, then. Will you approve the SOS Brigade as well? And not just as an informal association—as a true student organization. If you did that, we’d be entitled to our share of an operating budget.”

I recalled that being written in the student handbook. But the student council president was not so foolish as to let a random “Brigade” that wasn’t even an informal association jump two levels overnight. “I know of no such brigade. And I can’t possibly allow said brigade to be recognized as a club, nor portion it any of the school’s meager budget.”

The president folded his arms slowly, unconcerned as he returned Haruhi’s angry glare. There wasn’t so much as a single drop of sweat on him, so he clearly wasn’t bluffing. Where had he found such confidence?

“I’d prefer to hear as little talk about ‘brigades’ as possible. We are discussing the literature club. Whatever unauthorized group you choose to form on your own is none of my concern. The only reason it reached my ears in the first place was because of the disruption in the literature club’s operation. I’d like never to be troubled by it again.”

He should’ve just left us alone then, given that no matter how sneaky and circumspect his methods, it would be only a matter of time before Haruhi came barging into the student council room. She’d do it before the day was out, and she’d be dragging me along by my necktie behind her.

“As for the literature club, obviously not just any activity will do. Using the room for a reading group or for writing book reports on library books—such things belong in elementary school. I will not approve them.”

“So what’re you telling us to do?” Haruhi cocked her head slightly, her eyes still blazing. “Kyon, what does a literature club even do besides reading? Do you know?”

“Beats me” was my honest answer. She’d be better off asking Nagato.

“There is but one requirement,” said the president, ignoring our conversation. “Creating a publication. Past generations of the literature club have all managed to create at least one publication a year, even during times of low membership. We have the records. It is the most visible activity you can do. The literature club is, quite literally, about the art of literature. Simple reading is not enough.”

Which meant that all this time, Nagato hadn’t been acting like a proper club member. Our little Nagato had only ever read books.

I couldn’t help but shake my head. I didn’t want to think about her troubled, bespectacled face as she sat in front of an obsolete PC. Seeing it in my dreams was enough.

“Any objections?”

The president seemed to have misread my expression. In any case, he looked like he had objections aplenty.

“Bear in mind that this is the most minimal possible concession. By all rights, we should’ve given you notice at the school festival. I’d like you to feel a bit of gratitude at my having waited this long. Of course, anybody else would’ve left you alone indefinitely.”

Nagato aside, I wished he would’ve left Haruhi out of it, I told him.

“That would not have done. I won election to the student council on my promises for school reform. As you know, the previous council was a council in name only, and there was little allowance made for student independence. It simply followed the plans handed down by the school administration. It was an insubstantial organization that did only as it was told.” The president casually tossed off this heated rhetoric. “I aimed to free the council from that position. If the students wished it, the cafeteria menu should be expanded and enriched, the most trivial matters remaining up for discussion—I planned to negotiate with the school to make that a reality.”

I was grateful for this work on the student body’s behalf, but if that were true, why wouldn’t he hear a single student’s desire to have “brigade” added to the official organization list, along with “association” and “club,” I asked him.

---

---

“My slogan is ‘Serious reform.’ If I were to publicly acknowledge such a frivolous organization, it would destroy my reputation. I cannot allow it,” said the president, refusing my request. “Your deadline is in one week. One week from today you must present two hundred copies of a literature club newsletter. If you do not, the club will be suspended and the room vacated. I will hear no objections on this matter.”

A newsletter? I wondered if that was anything like an anthology.

“Fine,” Haruhi agreed. It wasn’t her line, though—Nagato should’ve been the one to say so.

Nagato, of course, was silent, and she seemed unlikely to say anything, so I supposed it was all right for Haruhi to speak in her place, but something about the particular nature of Nagato’s silence at the moment made me think it was different from her usual taciturnity.

“…”

All the while, Nagato faced Kimidori, neither of them looking away from the other. Nagato was expressionless, while Kimidori had a thin smile.

I wasn’t sure why, but maybe it was fortunate that Haruhi didn’t seem to notice Kimidori, the SOS Brigade’s very first client. Apparently Haruhi was too busy glaring at the president to pay any attention to the secretary. Or maybe she just didn’t remember the face. She hadn’t seen that cave cricket, after all.

“A newsletter, eh?” said Haruhi with an expression like a mathematician who had just proven a theorem. “Is that like a zine? With stories, essays, columns, poems—stuff like that, right?”

“The contents are none of my concern,” said the president. “You are free to use the printing room and may write whatever you wish. However, there is another condition. The completed newsletter will be set out on a table in the main hallway, and that is all. You may not hand it out or solicit readers. Bunny girls are out. If you cannot give away all two hundred from that table within three days, there will be a penalty.”

“What kind of penalty?” asked Haruhi, her eyes shining. She did so love her punishment games.

“We will let you know when the time comes,” said the president, annoyed. “But be prepared. There are a number of ways to use volunteer work. I will say it again—this is a concession.”

The president seemed to be worried about unilaterally bringing about the tragic end of a clan. You didn’t have to know the history of the Ako domain to guess that much—especially not when your opponent was Haruhi. And I doubted Haruhi would be satisfied with just the head of the president. If things went badly, the school itself would be scattered to the wind.

I will leave it for future generations to decide whether the student council truly gave in or not, but in any case this “club newsletter” business was certainly their way of evading the issue.

And while Koizumi might have worked for the Agency, he was no literary agent, which meant the literature club would have to step up. And as an activity of the literature club, the newsletter had to have literary merit of some kind, but what did that even mean? Who was going to write it, and what would he or she write? And why was Haruhi looking so bizarrely delighted?

“Well, isn’t this interesting!” She grinned like a child who’d discovered a new game. “Call it a bulletin, a newsletter, or a zine—if you say we’ve gotta make it, then we’re gonna make it. This is for Yuki, after all. Can’t have the Lit Club disappearing. That clubroom is mine, and I hate it when people take my stuff.”

Haruhi’s hand reached for the nape of Nagato’s neck—not mine, for once.

“Well, since it’s decided, we’ve gotta have a meeting. Yuki, we’ll put your name in the masthead as publisher. I’ll do everything else, of course, so don’t worry about that. First we’ve got to go learn how to make a newsletter!”

Haruhi grabbed the back of Nagato’s collar.

“…”

Nagato was pulled wordlessly along, and easily too, as though she were a balloon. Haruhi opened the door with a clunk, then dashed out through it like a bullet from a rifle.

I looked over my shoulder and saw Nagato’s feet disappear through the doorway, and then she was gone, dragged out by Haruhi, who’d barged into the room like a strong wind but left like a typhoon gaining strength.

“Such an obnoxious girl,” observed the president accurately, shaking his head, then looking down at the table beside him. “Miss Kimidori, we’re finished here. You may leave.”

“Yes, Mr. President.” Kimidori nodded politely, closing her notebook and standing. She put the notebook back on its shelf, nodding briefly at the president before walking out of the room.

She gave me a brief bow as she passed by, walking through the door that Haruhi had opened without meeting my eyes. Her hair fluttered a bit as she went, a pleasant scent wafting behind her. I found myself a bit dizzy.

As I was pondering the nature of Nagato and Kimidori’s relationship, the president snorted and spoke.

“Koizumi, close the door.”

His tone was very different from a moment ago, and I turned my gaze back toward him.

The president watched Koizumi close and lock the door, then roughly sat down on a nearby folding chair and put his feet up on the desk.

What the hell?

But it was too early for me to be surprised, because the president then furrowed his brow as he rummaged in his uniform’s pocket for something. By the time I realized that he’d produced a lighter and cigarette, he already had the cigarette between his lips, a curl of smoke beginning to rise from it.

It certainly didn’t seem like the kind of thing the student council president should be doing. Just as I was beginning to feel like I’d discovered a firefighter committing arson—

“That’ll about do it, right, Koizumi?” said the president, cigarette in mouth as he removed his glasses, put them in his pocket, and took out a portable ashtray. “The plan changed a little, but I pretty much did what you wanted—but damn, keeping up that stupid act was a pain in the ass. You gotta put yourself in my place. Talking in that serious freakin’ voice all the time really takes it outta me.”

The president’s cool demeanor had completely changed as he exhaled smoke and tapped the cigarette’s ash into the ashtray.

“Student council president, my ass. I never wanted the job! Pain in the neck, if you ask me. And then I gotta deal with that flighty broad. Ridiculous damn work.”

In only a moment, the president had turned sulky and peevish. He put the stinky, smoking cigarette out on the edge of the ashtray, then got out another one and turned his attention to me. “You want one?”

“I’ll pass.” I shook my head, then looked over at the serenely smiling Koizumi standing next to me. “So the president’s one of your guys?”

I’d sort of figured as much. They’d exchanged suspicious eye contact, plus if you’d really wanted to contact the literature club, you’d skip Koizumi and just go straight for Nagato. I didn’t even have to think about it hard—there was no reason for the student council to go to the trouble of calling me in either.

Koizumi returned my look, making a show of smiling as he answered.

“I suppose you could say that, but he is not an associate in the same way that Mr. Arakawa or Miss Mori are. He is not directly connected with the Agency.” Koizumi glanced at the president, the smoke from his second cigarette now rising to the ceiling. “He is our confederate within the school, cooperating with us in exchange for certain considerations. If Mori, Arakawa, and I are the inner circle, you could consider him the outer circle.”

I didn’t care who was in what circle—how did a guy like this get to be student council president, I wanted to know.

“You could say it was the result of an extreme effort on my part, considering his lack of motivation. I had to make him a candidate, position him to gain the favor of the constituency over the previous council’s recommended nominee, and constantly maneuver to win the majority in the election for president. It took quite a bit of work, all told.”

I was bored already.

“The amount of money it required to win the presidency was probably about as much as it would take a minor political party to run for office in the lower Diet house.”

Now it had gone beyond boring and was actively sapping my will to live.

“Going by what Koizumi here said,” said the president, ill-temperedly exhaling smoke, “I had to become president before that stupid girl Suzumiya—or whatever her name is—got the idea in her head to try it herself. I wound up getting tapped thanks to my ‘presidential face.’ Friggin’ ridiculous. I even had to wear these fake glasses.”

The conversation had long since turned tiresome.

“Upon fully considering what Suzumiya’s image of a student council president would be, the closest match of that image in this school was him. In this case, his disposition was irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was his looks.”

And he’d made the mistake of falling for Koizumi’s spiel.

He was tall, handsome, and bespectacled—a pointlessly haughty upperclassman. His role was to play a Haruhi-esque villain who would abuse student council power to deal with a small-time humanities club.

---

---

He was every inch the quick and easy villain that Haruhi would’ve wanted him to be.

But the fact that Koizumi had needed to go to such lengths in order to create the antagonist that was Haruhi’s fondest wish meant that she wasn’t truly omnipotent. If she was indeed all-knowing and all-powerful, it would’ve been the simplest thing in the world, wouldn’t it? I asked Koizumi whether all his effort didn’t mean exactly that.

“Ah, but the result of our labor was the creation of exactly the student council president that Haruhi wanted, which means that her wish did in fact become reality, does it not? Practically speaking, it does.”

He was talking circles around me again. Only Tsuruya was better at it than he was.

The president irritably crushed out his cigarette. “Anyway, Koizumi. Next year you be the president. If what you want is to avoid Suzumiya running for the job, then just do it yourself.”

“I wonder about that. I’m fairly busy myself, and lately I feel as though Suzumiya wouldn’t make a bad president herself.”

The hell she wouldn’t. If Haruhi set out to conquer the school, there was no telling what would happen. I had a feeling that it would wind up being a huge pain for the rest of the brigade too. She might decide to give the entire student body the SOS Brigade treatment. Knowing her, she’d probably decide that, since she was president, the rest of the students were now her subordinates. The whole school would turn into an alternate dimension.

Still, so long as the election was carried out correctly, I couldn’t imagine that Haruhi would actually win. I still believed in the average North High student’s sense of common decency. So long as Koizumi didn’t pull some kind of stunt, no election could possibly result in Haruhi winning high office.

I sighed. “So basically, Koizumi, this is another one of your games, is what you’re telling me. You’ve just invented this ‘student council plotting to destroy the literature club’ scenario to give Haruhi something to do.”

“It was no more than the seed, though.” Koizumi exhaled a sigh into the drifting smoke. “There are a number of outcomes that are now possible. All will be well if we finish our publication by the deadline, but if we cannot finish, or if we fail to meet the requirements…” He shrugged lightly. “If that time comes, we’ll just think of a different game to play. I’ll be counting on your brain for that too.”

I was happy enough to participate as an observer, but I sure wasn’t interested in trying to think of new challenges that I myself would have to face. What could I possibly have to gain from that? I wanted to know.

“As far as my being the student council president goes,” said the punk prez, “it definitely has its perks. First of all, it makes my school record look great. Of all the reasons Koizumi used to try to talk me into it, that was the biggest one. You said you’d get me through the college entrance exams, right? You better not have forgotten about that.”

“Of course not. I remember. We’re making the arrangements, naturally.”

The president eyed Koizumi suspiciously, as though he were interrogating a suspect. He then sniffed. “You’d better be. Doing this ridiculous job has been a pain in the ass, but I’ve learned some things in the last few months. The student council really has been totally useless so far. It might as well not exist. Which means I can mess around with it as much as I want.”

The president then smiled for the very first time. There was a certain degree of malice in it, but it was more a human expression than it was a calculating one.

“ ‘Uphold student independence’ really is a great slogan. Depending on the interpretation, it can mean anything. That budget is especially interesting, let me tell you. I’ll bet there are some delicious details in there.”

Some president we had. He was definitely up to Haruhi’s expectations of villainy.

“We’ll permit a modest abuse of authority,” said Koizumi, miffed. “But please do not get carried away. There is a limit to how much support we can provide.”

“Oh, I know. I won’t pull anything that’d get the teachers’ attention—I’d lose my hold on the sympathies of the council. I’ve already swept away the remaining members of the student council. There’s no one left to oppose me.”

I was starting to like this president guy. He was obviously up to no good, but for some reason he was strangely compelling. It was a little strange to be feeling as though following him would be all right, but…

Suddenly alarm bells went off as Tsuruya’s face appeared in my mind. I remembered what she’d told me when I’d encountered her in the hallway. Her keen, almost extrasensory perception had told her that the student council and its president had a hidden agenda. The student council’s spy—that wasn’t me, Tsuruya; it was Koizumi. He was more than a spy, though; he was a puppet master.

I didn’t particularly care if the president used his powers to his own advantage, but if Haruhi realized it, she might press for an immediate recall and recommend Tsuruya as his replacement. I could imagine Tsuruya laughing heartily and charging straight in, right along with her. Koizumi and I would automatically wind up being on Haruhi’s side too, and the president would be overthrown.

I wish you luck in your future secret maneuverings, Mr. President. Just keep them where we can’t see them.

He probably didn’t need me to tell him that, though. And while his role would probably bring him into occasional conflict with Haruhi, I just wanted him to choose his battles carefully.

I walked out of the student council room side-by-side with Koizumi, then remembered there was something I needed to ask him.

“So I understand that the president is under your supervision. But what about the secretary? Is Kimidori one of your confederates too?”

“She is not,” said Koizumi, like it was nothing. “Kimidori took the secretary post rather unexpectedly. The truth is that when I thought to check, she was already there, which is why I hadn’t noticed until that point—even though I feel that in the early days of the current student council administration, we’d appointed a different student to that position. But when I checked later, all the records said she was there from the start. Even my memory. Nobody, not even the president, has any doubts about it. If it is a case of falsification, it’s an extraordinary example of such.”

If it were so extraordinary, I asked, why didn’t he sound a little more surprised?

“If I were surprised to such an extent, if anything more unexpected were to happen, I might very well go into cardiac arrest.” Koizumi turned his head to regard the windows as we walked leisurely down the hall. “Emiri Kimidori is one of Nagato’s comrades. That much is unmistakable.”

I’d figured as much. Her coming to us with the cave-cricket trouble had been too perfect of a coincidence. If it had been just that, I might’ve believed that Nagato had set up the whole thing herself, but given the current situation, our previous encounter could hardly have been an accident. What worried me was not knowing how closely Nagato and Kimidori were tied.

“There was the trouble with Ryoko Asakura, yes. But I don’t think we need to worry too much on that count. It seems that Kimidori and Nagato are comparatively closely related. At the very least, they do not oppose each other.”

How did he know that? They didn’t look like they got along very well. Although they didn’t look like they got along especially poorly either, I admitted.

“We in the Agency would like to test our intelligence-gathering capabilities. We contacted some—not many but a few—TFEIs like Nagato, in an effort to convey our intentions. While they were by no means cooperative, we can make some deductions based on the fragmentary conversations. It seems that a different faction within the Data Overmind sent Kimidori than the one Nagato is associated with. But we know that, unlike Ryoko Asakura, they are not hostile.”

I wasn’t sure what to think of the things I heard Koizumi saying so casually, but it wasn’t anything new, so neither of us was particularly worried.

Still, I’d known there were different kinds of aliens, but to think that Kimidori was one of them… Given the way she’d calmed down the furious Nagato in the student council room, perhaps her faction was a peaceful one, I said.

“Quite possibly. We have concluded that there is no need to be excessively conscious of her movements. In my opinion, Kimidori’s role is to observe Nagato. I don’t know how long it’s been the case, but that seems to be the job she’s currently settled into.”

Koizumi’s voice sounded like he was in the middle of climbing a mountain during a long hike, so I didn’t press him on the matter. As far as Nagato went, I had quite a few memories of her myself, many of which I preferred not to share. Even if he was a member of the SOS Brigade, Koizumi wasn’t someone I wanted to explain these things to over and over again. I’d play them back in my head as many times as I wanted to, though.

I fell vaguely into silence as we walked quickly to the clubroom, Koizumi likewise keeping his mouth shut.

When you get a rapid input of strange information, it seems like the last things you hear are the most memorable.

Which is why I hadn’t forgotten.

I hadn’t forgotten that Haruhi, having snatched Nagato and flown out of the student council room, was in there.

I was just kind of spaced out, thinking about everything—about the outlaw student council president and about Kimidori.

“You’re late, Kyon! You too, Koizumi! What were you doing? We’re running on a deadline here! If we don’t hurry, we’re gonna be in trouble!”

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen her so happy. This is how Haruhi always looks when she’s gotten her eyes fixed on a goal.

“We’ve been going crazy searching for the old newsletters the literature club put out. I asked Yuki where they were, but she said she didn’t know.”

Nagato was plopped down at her usual corner of the table, staring at the screen of the laptop the computer club had left us.

“Um…” Asahina stood there, fidgeting uncomfortably in her maid outfit. “Are we making a book? Do we have to? What are we going to write, I wonder…?”

I hadn’t forgotten about this either. Haruhi had swallowed the president’s story about the literature club’s job of printing a whole newsletter. It was for Nagato’s sake. Nagato was the sole member of the literature club, and in reality she had another face as a member of an unauthorized student organization that occupied the literature club’s room. Said unauthorized organization’s chief had agreed to create a publication, which by the principle of commutative responsibility now fell upon my head, and for a publication to exist in the first place, someone would have to write something, and that “someone” would have to be me and the other club members.

“All right, pick one.”

Four folded scraps of paper lay in the open palm of Haruhi’s hand—the same kind of lots used to determine classroom seating assignments. Doubting what these scraps could possibly decide, I picked one up. Haruhi immediately grinned.

Koizumi amusedly did likewise, as did Asahina, who blinked rapidly. Haruhi gave the last scrap to Nagato.

“You will write what is written on the paper. That will go into our club newsletter. Now that it’s decided, hurry and sit down! You’ve got to get to writing!”

An unpleasant premonition ran though my body as I opened the piece of folded notebook paper. Haruhi’s writing leaped up at me like a freshly landed fish.

“A love story.” I read the contents aloud and immediately bemoaned my fate. A love story? Me? That was what I had to write? I asked.

“Yup.” Haruhi grinned like a cunning tactician who took advantage of every weakness. “The lottery decided it fair and square. I shall brook no complaints. So, what’re you doing, Kyon? Get your butt in front of the computer!”

I looked and saw several laptops set up on the table. It was nice that she hadn’t had trouble getting everything set up, but how the hell was I supposed to write a story just because she told me to?

The paper in my hand felt like a grenade whose pin had been pulled out.

“What’d you get, Koizumi?” I asked, hoping that he’d be willing to switch with me, thereby securing my salvation, but—

“It says… ‘Mystery,’ ” said Koizumi with a pleasant smile, not looking particularly troubled at all. Asahina, however, was upset, as usual.

“I got ‘Fairy Tale.’ A fairy tale is for children, right? A story that’s good for, um, putting children to bed? Is that right?”

I didn’t have an answer for her. But anyway—a mystery and a fairy tale, eh? Between those and a love story, which one was the best?

I looked to Nagato. She’d quietly opened her scrap of paper, and upon noticing my gaze, showed me Haruhi’s handwriting with a flick of her wrist. The writing read: “Fantasy Horror.”

I didn’t really understand the difference between fantasy horror and mystery.

“I’m just relieved I didn’t get ‘love story.’ I feel as though such a thing would’ve been impossible for me to write,” said Koizumi, as though he were trying to deliberately get on my nerves. He was obviously calm. I wanted to know the secret behind his relaxed attitude, I said.

“It’s quite simple. In my case, I can simply treat the mystery games from last summer and this last winter as real events and create a novelization of them. They are originally scenarios I created, after all.”

Koizumi coolly headed for the table and began setting up his computer, looking totally unconcerned. Nagato returned her gaze to the liquid crystal display in front of her, unmoving. She might have been considering what “fantasy horror” meant, or thinking about Kimidori.

There was no further explanation. Asahina’s eyes practically projected question marks around the room as she flailed around, at a loss. I was no different. Wait—let’s think about this. There were four scraps of paper. The SOS Brigade has five members.

“Haruhi,” I said to the brigade chief, who was grinning like a temple guardian on laughing gas. “What are you going to write?”

“Oh, I’ll write something,” she said as she sat at her desk and picked up the armband that had been left there. “But I have a more important job. Listen—there’s a lot of work that goes into making a book. You need a person to direct it all. And that’s what I’m gonna do for you.”

She quickly slipped on the armband, puffing out her chest and speaking grandly.

“Starting today and for the rest of the week, I will no longer be the brigade chief. Since this is the literature club, there’s a different title that’s much more appropriate.”

The brilliantly shining armband said all that was necessary.

Thus it was that Haruhi appointed herself as editor in chief, boldly declaring her intentions as she utterly ignored Asahina’s and my bewilderment.

“Come now, everybody! Get moving! There’s no use complaining about details—just write! Something good, of course.”

Haruhi reclined arrogantly in her brigade chief’s chair and regarded us pitiful brigade members.

“And of course, if I don’t think it’s good, then it’s out.”

And so—

In the week that followed, we were stationed in the literature club’s room, toiling away at this suddenly literature-club-like activity.

It was Asahina who ran bravely at the fore. It was fortunate that fairy tales seemed to suit her, but if writing one was a simple matter of sitting down and cranking it out on command, then anybody could be a fairy-tale author.

Nevertheless, Asahina was persistent. She checked out a pile of books from the school library and read through them with utmost seriousness, occasionally flagging sections with Post-it notes, scribbling furiously with her pencil.

Meanwhile there was Haruhi, whose main job seemed to be either grinning maniacally as she gazed at the many fanzines she’d borrowed from the manga club for the purpose of study material, or aimlessly browsing the Net on her desk’s computer.

Asahina steadily submitted manuscripts, and Haruhi steadily rejected them.

“Hmm.” Haruhi managed a plausible sound of ambivalence as she finished reading the exhausted Asahina’s latest effort. “It’s getting better, but it still needs more impact. Oh, I’ve got it, Mikuru! You need to add some illustrations. Make it like a picture book. It’ll draw people in more quickly, and give it more flavor than just plain old words.”

“P-pictures?”

Asahina looked ready to cry at this latest and totally unreasonable demand. But rejecting the orders of the editor in chief was no easy task, so Asahina resigned herself to adding illustrations.

The always serious girl attended a lecture on sketching given by the art club, learned four-panel comic creation from the manga club, and worked so hard that it made me want to tell her there was no need to go to such lengths—and with no time left over for her to brew good tea, I was left to idly, silently sip mediocre tea brewed by either myself or Koizumi.

And I had to write a love story, of all things? No way. If it’d been a feline observation diary, I would’ve had material aplenty, but…

The only one of us making easy progress on his composition was Koizumi; even Nagato only occasionally hit a key. When it had come to a video-game contest, her fingers had flown over the keyboard with unbelievable speed, but evidently she didn’t have the knack for putting the information in her head into words. I was starting to wonder if that was part of why she tended to be so silent, but I couldn’t help but be interested in the “fantasy horror” story she was writing, so I snuck a glance at the display of her laptop.

“…”

Nagato quickly rotated the laptop sideways, hiding the display from me. She looked up at me.

“C’mon,” I said. “Let me have a bit of a look.”

“No,” replied Nagato flatly. No matter how I tried to sneak a look, her timing in moving the display away from me was perfect. I was starting to get more and more interested, and eventually tried sneaking up and looking over her shoulder, but besting Nagato’s reflexes was impossible.

“…”

Finally she repelled me with a sharp sidelong glare. I returned to my own seat to confront the blank white screen of my empty word-processor document.

Thus had the past few days in the clubroom unfolded.

Things had begun to reach a bit of a stalemate, so while it might be technically a false start, let’s go for a change of pace and have a look at Asahina’s fairy tale.

Asahina’s manuscript had been rejected over and over by the editor in chief, who’d eventually ordered her to add illustrations, and Asahina had continued to agonize over the piece, killing herself over every word selection. I’d finally come to her aid, and the work had eventually been completed once the editor in chief added her own revisions.

Anyway, feel free to have a look.

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… How shall I put it—it was very Asahina-like, an allegorical tale that was a jumble of fairy tales and war stories. More than anything else, the sense of desperation in it was very clear. It was surely adequate. As to which parts were the results of Haruhi’s meddling, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

Now, then, enough about Asahina’s worries—my real problem was that I still hadn’t touched my own assignment. Just asking me to write a story of any kind was unreasonable enough; making it a love story went right past “unreasonable” into the universe of totally foreign experiences. What could I possibly do?

On the other hand, Haruhi was engaging in surprisingly editor-like activities.

Haruhi asserted that the number of pages the four of us had produced was insufficient, and moreover lacked variety, and she resorted to recruiting outside writers.

Her first victims were Taniguchi and Kunikida, then Tsuruya and the computer club president, all of whom were given deadlines that Haruhi had determined.

By Haruhi logic they were auxiliary brigade members, despite their being totally unrelated to the literature club.

But I had no time to be sympathetic to their plight—quite the contrary, I would’ve been much happier if my own writing responsibility had just disappeared. Although I doubted Haruhi would tolerate such literary laziness.

The deadline set for us by the evil student council president drew nearer. One morning while waiting for the morning homeroom period to start, my ears were assaulted by the sound of Taniguchi’s bitter grumbling (“Why the hell do I have to write ‘a fascinating slice-of-life essay’ in the first place?”) and Kunikida’s easygoing reply (“C’mon, that’s not as bad as the ‘twelve-subject study-guide column’ I’ve got to write”).

Haruhi had gotten to school later than me that day. She thrust a sheet of copier paper at me without so much as a “good morning.”

“What’s this?”

“The manuscript Yuki turned in before she went home yesterday.” Haruhi made a face as though she’d swallowed a filling while brushing her teeth. “I gave it a good read after I got home. It’s kind of a weird story. It’s got a fantasy feel to it, and I guess you could call it horror. I’m not sure what to make of it. Length-wise, it’s barely a short story. Here, read it.”

I was interested in reading anything Nagato wrote, whether or not Haruhi ordered me to.

I took the paper from Haruhi, and my eyes began following the text printed upon it.

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“Bwuh…?” I got that far before looking up.

I was greeted by the familiar sight of my fellow students filing into the classroom before the morning homeroom period started. If this had been a usual morning, Haruhi would’ve been sitting behind me either gazing out the window or poking me in the back with a mechanical pencil, but this morning she was craning her neck to peer over my shoulder, her eyes following the letters of the manuscript I held in my hands, her expression at once thoughtful and troubled.

To be fair, my own expression wasn’t all that different from hers.

Both of our expressions were thanks to what was written there. It was a little heavy to be reading first thing in the morning.

It was true that the paper Nagato had drawn said, “Fantasy horror.”

I moved my eyes from Nagato’s writing and regarded Haruhi’s profile.

“Hey, Haruhi, I’m not exactly an expert on either fantasy or horror, but is this what fantasy horror looks like these days?”

“Beats me.” Haruhi put her hand to her chin, cocking her head just like an editor agonizing over how to judge a piece of work in front of her. “I guess there’s some fantasy there, but there’s definitely no horror. But… hmm. It does seem very Yuki-like. Maybe Yuki finds this kind of thing scary.”

Anything that would scare Nagato surely would utterly terrify me. I didn’t want to ever experience anything like that—not even in a story.

“Hey, by the way,” I said, looking at Haruhi’s confused face as a new thought occurred to me. “If you didn’t know what ‘fantasy horror’ was, why did you write it down on one of the lots? You’ve got to think before you pick genres like that.”

“I did think! A little.” Haruhi took the manuscript sheet out of my hands. “I added fantasy to it because I thought horror by itself wouldn’t be much fun. The genres I wrote down were the result of serious deliberation. Mystery, fairy tale, love story—once you’ve done those, you’ve gotta go with horror.”

She’d skipped science fiction entirely. And anyway, I seriously doubted she’d spent more than three seconds picking out those genres. I bet she’d just written them down in whatever random order they’d occurred to her, I said.

Haruhi smiled slightly. “I just wanted to mismatch the writing projects as much as I could. Yuki’d probably be great at science fiction, but that wouldn’t be any fun, would it?”

I twitched involuntarily, but an invisible hand calmed my hammering chest. Whether or not it would actually be “fiction,” it would be the easiest thing in the world for Nagato to write something about space. I mean, she was a space alien. For a moment I wondered if Haruhi had realized that, but then I remembered—even Haruhi could see that Nagato’s bookshelves overflowed with SF, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to assume that science fiction was a specialty of hers.

No, wait a sec. If that were true, then there’d be a similar setup for the mystery genre, I said.

“That’s right. I really hoped either you or Mikuru would do the mystery. I wanted to see what kind of crazy thing you’d come up with. But with science fiction, you can pretty much get away with any kind of absurdity—so while it pained me to do it, I had to cross it off the list.”

I wanted to tell her that was just her prejudice talking, but no amount of complaining about the lottery was going to reset time. The order with which I’d been burdened—writing a love story—wasn’t going to be rescinded, and I didn’t feel much more capable of writing mystery, fairy tale, or fantasy horror stories—not that I’m saying I preferred the love story, mind you. But at least with science fiction, I could’ve used some of my experiences as a foundation. Although I probably had no business informing editor in chief Haruhi about my true-life experiences.

Haruhi flipped through Nagato’s fantasy horror short story. “At least Koizumi got the mystery. If we don’t get at least one readable story, we won’t be able to put out a newsletter. If all we do is show off how eccentric we are, the readers will head for the hills.”

She was already thinking about turning the literature club newsletter into a periodical. This was supposed to be an emergency measure to stop the student council president’s evil plot. That was probably something I had to remind her about. The SOS Brigade was not part and parcel with the literature club; it was just a parasite, I told her.

“I know that much. I can’t think of a single thing I need you to tell me about the school. I am the brigade chief, and you are just a member.” Haruhi glanced at me. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter. There’s more to Yuki’s story. Read the second page.”

I dropped my gaze to the sheet of copier paper that remained in my hand and began reading the printed characters there, which were so neat I wondered if they were Nagato’s handwriting.

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Thus concluded the second page.

“Hrrmmm…”

I cocked my head and read it over and over. It wasn’t really horror, and it was hard to call it fantasy horror—it was difficult, even, to call it a story. If it were anything, it was sort of memoir-ish. Or it was a simple reflection, or it was just words she’d randomly strung together.

Nagato’s story, eh…?

As I was reading it, I thought of something else. Something that happened during December of last year, something I’ll never forget, no matter how long I should live. That other Nagato, there in the literature club room—could she have been writing a story? All alone on that ancient computer?

I don’t know how Haruhi interpreted my silence and my thoughtful face, but she snatched the paper out of my hands.

“Then there’s the last page, the third one. The more you read it, the less sense it makes. I’d like to hear your thoughts.”

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“… Hmm. This is a tough one.”

I laid the third page on my desk and empathized with Haruhi.

Good old Nagato had written something totally incomprehensible. She seemed to have completely ignored the fantasy-horror topic, and this was hardly a story—it was more of a poem, I said.

“It doesn’t seem like just any old poem, though.” Haruhi collected the three pages and put them into her bag. “Hey, Kyon. I don’t think Yuki just wrote this without thinking about it. I think she’s really revealing something about herself here. Don’t you think all that stuff about the ghost and the coffin is a metaphor for something?”

“How the hell should I know?” I said, but the truth was that I felt like on some level I could understand it. I didn’t see how the “I” in the story could be anyone besides Nagato. As for the other characters—the ghost girl, the man, and the sheet girl—I had the sense that the ghost girl and the sheet girl were the same person, and that (I was just guessing here, but…) the man was Koizumi-ish and the girl was Asahina. In any case, she’d probably used the people around her as models for the characters. Haruhi and I hadn’t shown up, but I wasn’t so worried about it that I wished I’d been included.

“Anyway, does it matter?” I looked out the window and down at the tennis courts. “Nagato wrote the story she wanted to write. Trying to read an author’s mind through her work is a pain. That kind of question belongs on modern-literature tests.”

“I guess.” Haruhi also looked out the window. She seemed to be looking up at the clouds, as though willing them to bring unseasonal snow. Eventually she turned back to me and smiled like a blooming spring flower. “We’ll call this okay, then. Yuki’s done. There’s no telling how it’d turn out if I made her rewrite it. Koizumi seems to be making steady progress, and Mikuru’s getting close to finishing her illustrations.” Her smile shifted from brigade chief to editor in chief. “So, what about you? I haven’t even gotten so much as a prologue from you. When will it be done?”

I had been wrong to hope she had forgotten about it.

“Let me just say,” began Haruhi with an unpleasant grin, “that I want a proper story from you. And if it’s not a love story, it’s getting spiked. Spiked! Not a horror story, or a mystery, or a fairy tale. And don’t try to weasel out of it either, because it won’t work.”

I looked around the classroom for some sort of salvation.

The truth was that I hadn’t written so much as a single word. Of course I hadn’t. Why the hell did I have to write a love story, anyway? The question was racing through my body faster than an immune system overreacting to the influenza virus. I’d thought about trying to summon reinforcements in the form of Taniguchi and Kunikida (who themselves had also failed to write anything), but my two supposed friends had been looking over at me for some time, whispering to each other and avoiding my gaze, and just when I was about to cross myself, Catholic-style, in preparation for being crushed along with my friends by Haruhi’s assault, the school bell finally rang.

I was thus able to avoid confronting the advancing burden, but that didn’t mean I had escaped—I had merely bought myself some time.

But seriously, Haruhi—a love story?

I pretended to take the first-period class seriously, sinking deeply into thought, like a ship plunging to the bottom of the Challenger Deep.

So what was I going to write?

After school, I went to the clubroom to escape Haruhi’s manuscript demands.

“What about writing something based on your personal experience?” said Koizumi, his fingers moving swiftly over the keyboard of his laptop. “In other words, why not just get involved in a romance? Then you can simply write what happens and claim it’s fiction. I recommend using first-person perspective. In such a case, it wouldn’t be hard to transform your normal thoughts into prose.”

“Is that your idea of sarcasm?” I shot back, before returning myself to the pressing job of staring at my own laptop’s screen saver.

The clubroom had temporarily become a safe place, since Haruhi was away from her desk.

Even now she was running all over the place as part of her campaign of total war against the student council; she was so cunning that I wanted to add “demon” to the part of her armband that read “editor in chief.”

Her first targets had been her nearby classmates, Taniguchi and Kunikida. No sooner had homeroom period ended than Haruhi had quickly seized the escaping Taniguchi, and with a brief exchange (“I’m going home.” “I won’t let you.”), the battle was joined. Kunikida didn’t even bother trying to escape, and soon she’d forced them into seats and put sheaves of loose-leaf paper in front of them.

“You’re not leaving until you’re done writing.”

Her face was strangely happy, perhaps from the pleasure of having discovered a new outlet for her sadism.

Taniguchi continued to grumble, while Kunikida simply shook his head softly and picked up a pencil. He didn’t seem to be too put out, but Taniguchi complained bitterly about the imposition, as though he’d realized that even minor involvement with Haruhi’s machinations might cause him to someday miss the bus to paradise. I could understand where he was coming from. Unless they wrote the interesting essays that Haruhi demanded, they couldn’t even dream of escape.

“What the hell is ‘an interesting slice-of-life essay’ supposed to be, anyway?” said Taniguchi. “Kyon, listen—slices of your life are way more interesting, anyway. You should be writing this.”

No thanks. I had my own literary problems.

“Suzumiya, isn’t twelve columns a bit too much?” said Kunikida, relaxed. “Surely five would be more reasonable. I’m pretty good at English, math, classics, chemistry, and physics, but I’m crap at Japanese history and civics.”

If he had that many specialties, then his manuscript was the only one I was looking forward to reading. Twelve subject-specific study columns. If they were actually useful, there’d be nothing I’d want to read more.

“I’m going to come back in an hour to check on you,” said Haruhi to the pair, who were the only ones remaining in the classroom. “If you’re not here then… you know what’ll happen, right?”

After dropping that threat, she left the classroom. Our editor in chief was a busy woman.

Nevertheless, I should add that there were people who readily accepted Haruhi’s writing assignments.

One of them, it goes without saying, was Tsuruya. The upperclassman, possibly the only person as formidable as Haruhi, when abstractly asked, “So, will you write something? Anything is fine!” ended up readily giving her assent.

“Sure, when’s the deadline? I’ll definitely have it for you! Ha ha, this’ll be fun!” she answered with a smile. I wondered what she would possibly write.

There was one other—and this was not a single person, but a group. The computer club. Now that their attempt to cheat us with their rigged video game had passed and the clubs were friendly enough that Nagato would occasionally visit them, the computer club had become like a second branch of the SOS Brigade, so our brigade chief had no trouble securing a promise from them to write a “Game-Busting Primer! Reviews of all the latest games!” or something or other. Apparently the whole club, from the president on down, was pretty into the idea. Incidentally, I’d never played a proper computer game, so I had absolutely no interest in this.

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And even so, Haruhi’s work was not done. Having decided to make the newsletter’s cover into something worthwhile, she hoofed it over to the art club to ask who their best artist was, then strong-armed a piece out of that person—then, having decided that a newsletter filled with nothing but text wouldn’t be interesting enough, went over to the manga club and ordered some illustrations. It seemed pretty presumptuous of her, but sadly I didn’t want to be any more empathetic with the inconveniences of the others than I already was, so I left Taniguchi and Kunikida in the classroom and made my way back to the clubroom.

Haruhi was not there. She was running all over the school on the aforementioned errands, and while that should’ve made it easy for me to relax, the act of staring at a screen saver was far from being relaxing.

“Hmm. Mmm…”

Asahina was sitting at the table, wearing (for once) her school uniform, as well as a dire expression.

At this point, she hadn’t yet completed her picture-bookish illustrations, so all I could see was her leaning her head over the table as she frantically moved her pencil over the paper. I had no choice but to make my own tea.

Next to her, Nagato was maintaining her usual appearance. She was like a posed doll, sitting there with a hardback book open in front of her, giving off the sense of having completed her task.

“…”

Perhaps having decided that, having turned in three short stories, her duty was finished, Nagato had returned to her usual self. The invisible aura that had emanated from her during the meeting with the student council was like a lie.

Speaking of lies, I can honestly confess that I’d be lying if I claimed not to have been worried about Nagato. There were a million questions I wanted to ask her—what had she been feeling that had led her to write such strange stories? Did she think nothing of showing them to Haruhi? What did they mean, anyway? Would she mind writing some annotations? But I couldn’t very well ask these questions in front of Asahina and Koizumi.

I’d just have to seize the opportunity the next time we were alone.

I took my eyes off of the book-reading literature club member, who’d returned to her normal expressionless mode. There were two computers running on the table; Nagato’s machine had been set aside and closed as tightly as its master’s lips.

I wanted to do the same thing, if I could. The guilt of wasting the planet’s precious and limited resources assaulted me, and I wanted to turn the laptop’s switch to the “off” position immediately. Leaving it on would only waste more energy, and while I was turning things off, I wanted to turn off my own brain as well and go into a deep sleep.

As such thoughts ran through my head, I sighed. Koizumi spoke up.

“You need not overthink things so much. Just write things how they are.”

Easy for him to say, since he could just write stuff that was already in his head. I had to think of everything from scratch. Maybe he should just tell me his own romantic experiences, I said. I’d write him a lovely tale with him as the protagonist.

“I’ll pass on that, thanks.” Koizumi paused his touch-typing and regarded me with an inquisitive smile. Then, in a small voice: “You really have nothing? Have you never been captive to feelings of love, or even gone out with a girl? If nothing like that has happened this first year at this school—or nothing you can write about, I suppose I should say—what about before that? In middle school?”

I looked up at the ceiling and pondered my own memories. Koizumi’s voice got even quieter.

“Do you remember what I told you at the baseball game?”

He was always talking about all kinds of stuff, I said, so I couldn’t be bothered to remember every detail of every line he’d spoken.

“I should think you’d remember me telling you that you were batting fourth in the order because Haruhi wished it so.”

I suspiciously looked at Koizumi’s gentle smile. This again, eh?

“Yes, this again. It is no coincidence that you were the one to draw ‘love story.’ ”

I’d been plenty suspicious about the randomness of lotteries for a while now. I knew full well that you didn’t have to be a master of sleight-of-hand to make them turn out the way you wanted.

I glanced at Nagato, who did not particularly seem to be eavesdropping. Asahina had her hands full with her new best friends, Mssrs. Pencil and Eraser.

“In other words, Suzumiya wants to know about your past romantic history. That’s why you got the love story genre. The fact that the assignment wasn’t a ‘memoir of your romantic experience’ is proof that Suzumiya herself is a bit hesitant.”

I didn’t think there was a hesitant thing about her, I said. She always came barging straight in to whatever she did, without any restraint or even so much as a “Hi, how are you.”

Koizumi smiled thinly. “I am speaking of her heart. Despite her exterior, Suzumiya is well aware of where that fine line is drawn. It may be an unconscious sense, which would make it all the more impressive for its keenness. In reality, she has never once done anything that would trample on any one of our hearts. Certainly not to me, anyway. On the other hand, I’ve only briefly been allowed to enter Suzumiya’s psyche.”

Come to think of it, I’d only been there twice myself. “I’m still convinced she’s a girl without any sense of restraint, though,” I finally managed to reply. “Otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to do stuff like kicking the student council door open or hijacking the literature club. Or making me write crap like this, to be honest.”

“And so what if she is? It’s fun in its own way, is it not? The few students of an underdog club, going up against the might of the student council…” Koizumi’s pleasant gaze grew unpleasantly distant for a moment, but he soon regained his smile. “To be honest, I dreamed of having a school life like this. More and more, I acknowledge Suzumiya as a god, and I feel I want to worship her—because she’s made my dream come true.”

More like he was acting in his own play, I said. Dream come true, my ass—he was pulling the strings from behind the scenes. I’d acknowledge his effort, but that was all.

“Ah, but I would never try to manipulate which assignment you drew. Let’s get back to the real subject. To put it simply, Suzumiya wants you to write something about your views on love. And incidentally, I may as well say that I do as well.” Koizumi’s voice got a bit louder. “From what I’ve heard, there was a girl you got along quite well with in middle school. What about writing something about that episode?”

How many times did I have to say it? That wasn’t that kind of story.

I furrowed my brow and massaged my temples, sneaking a look at the faces of the other two occupants of the room.

Asahina was focusing solely on the completion of her illustrated fairy tale, and it didn’t seem like a word of our conversation had reached her ears.

As for Nagato—

She, too, seemed to be wholly concentrating on reading her book, but while I had no way of knowing how sensitive her ears were, I had my doubts as to whether it was possible to speak so quietly that she couldn’t hear.

Anyway, why was I assaulted by this guilty feeling? Why had Kunikida, Nakagawa, and the rest of my middle school classmates all come to this mistaken conclusion? It was a mystery.

“I have no intention of writing that story,” I said flatly. Particularly not for the satisfaction of anyone’s curiosity, and definitely not for this smiley-eyed jerk, and—hey, what was up with that “yes, yes, I know” look in his eye? He had it all wrong, I told him. It’s not because it was some memory from my past that I didn’t want to think about. The whole story really just didn’t matter.

“We shall leave it at that, then,” said Koizumi irritatingly, then he moved on immediately to a new suggestion. “In which case, you’ll need to quickly think of a different memory that you can write about. Surely you must have one. A date you went on with someone, or a time when someone admitted they had a crush on you.”

Like hell I did.

My mouth was half opened in the process of telling him so when I stopped. Koizumi noticed and smiled widely. “Ah, so you do! See, there you are. Both Suzumiya and I look forward to hearing the story. Please do write it.”

I wanted to know who’d made him the assistant editor. Didn’t he need to get back to his novelization of the disappearance of Shamisen? I’d decide what to write on my own, thanks very much, I told him.

“Of course, you will be the one to decide. I’m simply an observer, or an adviser at best. Though at the moment I feel more like Suzumiya’s proxy.”

Koizumi shrugged, ending his conversation with me and turning his attention back to his computer.

I started to think.

Sorry, Koizumi—you’ve gotten the wrong idea again. In his imagination there might be a vision of me in a typical middle school boy-girl relationship, but although I’m not proud of it, no one has ever confessed feelings for me, nor have I to anyone else. My first crush was my older cousin, but she eloped with some worthless guy. I guess it was a little traumatic, but that was a long time ago.

No, indeed—there had been no love confessions, and definitely no dates.

I chuckled as a scene appeared on the insides of my eyelids.

It had been about a year earlier. The middle school graduation ceremony was over, and the scene was from the period just before I’d come to this school. I hadn’t had the slightest inkling that my high school life was going to turn out the way it had, and I was just enjoying my last lazy spring break of middle school.

The tiny episode that had lodged in the cracks of my brain had begun when my little sister had brought the telephone receiver up to my room.

I stared at the ceiling, then sniffed and touched my finger to the laptop’s trackpad.

The screen saver disappeared, replaced by the blank white of the text editor.

I sensed Koizumi grinning irritatingly next to me as I experimentally hit a key.

I was just warming up. If it got boring in the middle, I could easily just delete the whole thing.

Imagining I was panning for gold hidden in the cracks of my memory, I transmitted the sentences down to my fingers that I’d composed in my brain, and I started writing the opening.

It went something like this.

“It was the last bit of the final spring break of middle school, just before I would enter high school…”

---

---

… Having gotten this far, I took my hands off the keyboard, leaned back in the folding chair, and stretched.

I really wasn’t used to doing this kind of thing, so my shoulders were unavoidably tight. As I rolled my head around to loosen my neck—

“You seem to be moving right along,” said Koizumi, looking both pleased and interested. “Keep it up until the end, if you please. I truly look forward to reading whatever you write.”

Too bad for you, Koizumi. I was willing to bet on it. This wasn’t something that would be fun to read, I told him. It was pretty far off the mark from a love story.

“Even so,” said Koizumi as he poked at the liquid-crystal display of his own laptop, “I’m intrigued by whatever you write, because writing always reveals at least a little bit about the writer. You can always hear the voice of the author speaking out between the lines. I’m interested in your writing, more than I am in Nagato’s or Asahina’s.”

There wasn’t any need for him to be interested, I told him. Since when had he taken on any job besides being an expert on Haruhi psychology? Wasn’t performing psychoanalysis on me outside of his job description?

“Considering that Suzumiya’s mental state is affected by yours, I don’t think you can assert that unconditionally, no.”

Did his impudence know no bounds?

I ended my exchange with Koizumi and looked over the room. Haruhi had yet to return, and Asahina was still drawing her pictures.

“Mmmm… hmm…” The cute upperclassman was bent over the drawing paper, a look of extreme concentration on her face as she childishly gripped a pencil, first drawing a line, then thinking for a moment, then rubbing the line out with a rubber eraser, finally hmm-ing again before hunching over the paper and continuing her work. Although I’ve already introduced you to the final product, at the time Asahina was still working on it. Given the results, her effort certainly paid off—and it turned out to be a very Asahina-like story too.

At this point, the only one of us who had finished her story was Nagato, who sat at her designated corner of the table, silently reading. Having completed her triad of untitled short stories, the sole literature club member sat and quietly read her book, ignoring Asahina and me, as well as Haruhi’s delighted running around, as though we were none of her concern.

For my part, I wanted to ask for some author’s notes regarding Untitled 1, 2, and 3, but I decided it would be better not to, and in any case, my main worry at that moment was the “love story” I’d been assigned. I should’ve been writing my brains out, but I couldn’t stand the idea of turning something in only to have Haruhi say, “It’s boring. Rejected.”

How’d I let myself get cornered into caring so much about something I couldn’t do anything about?

Just as I was letting it really get me riled up, that pleasant smile came at me again from the side.

“But that’s not really so, is it?” said Koizumi, as though refuting my internal monologue. His fingers never left the keyboard as he continued touch-typing. “If you write something about a past experience, something from before you met Suzumiya and me, I’m sure she’d be very interested to read it.”

I was impressed at his ability to talk and type at the same time—but his assurances didn’t make me feel any better, I told him.

“For example,” said Koizumi, vaguely amused, “haven’t you ever wondered about my past? What I did before I transferred to this school? What I thought of as I passed my days? Have you never wanted a glimpse of that?”

Well, now… that all depends. If it were a piece of nonfiction that depicted the daily life of an esper, then my elementary-school self would be jumping for joy to read it. Even now my intellectual curiosity was piqued by the organization known as “The Agency.”

“If you knew the truth, you’d only be disappointed. There aren’t any particularly interesting episodes. As you yourself are aware, I am an esper whose potency is limited to a very specific time and place,” said Koizumi. “However, it is true that my days do differ from the days of ordinary people. I do occasionally consider writing an autobiography, once things have calmed down. If I finish it, I’ll have to put your name in the dedication.”

“Don’t bother.”

“Oh? I would certainly want to give you a complimentary copy.”

I reached out for my tea, not answering. The teacup was empty. Since Asahina was still working, I would have to get another cup on my own, which I stood to do.

Bang. The room’s door slammed open, and in charged an energetic girl.

“Hey, everybody! Making good progress?”

Haruhi was so lively that it seemed a bit odd as she strode straight to the brigade chief’s seat, sat down, put on the desk the sheaf of papers she had been holding, and turned her eerily bright gaze to me.

“Oh hey, Kyon—if you’re making tea, get some for me too. Mikuru’s busy and I’d feel bad interrupting her.”

There was no point in childishly quibbling with her over something so trivial. I expressed my irritation with an audible sigh, then filled the teapot with hot water, poured tea into my cup as well as Haruhi’s, and became a temporary waiter as I brought it to her.

Haruhi cheerfully took the cup and sipped from it. “What’s this? It’s just hot leaf juice. Change the tea leaves, will ya?”

“You do it. I’m busy.”

It was the truth—I was busy, so even if the brigade chief had been thankful for the tea, a bit of mutinous behavior would be forgiven. She couldn’t very well claim that tea-brewing was more important than working on the newsletter.

Haruhi grinned. “Oh, so you are working. Finally! I’m impressed. You better make the deadline. We’re gonna have to start doing the layouts soon.”

I sipped the tea I’d brewed and speculated on the cause of Haruhi’s high spirits. It likely had something to do with the sheaf of A4 papers that she’d tossed onto her desk.

“Oh, this?” The ever-perceptive Haruhi noticed what I was looking at. “They’re finished manuscripts. Ones I commissioned. Everybody did a pretty good job. Taniguchi insisted he couldn’t write anything, so I gave him an extension until tomorrow. Kunikida was about half done. They’re taking it seriously, so they’ll be done tomorrow.”

Humming a tune to herself, Haruhi flipped through the manuscripts page-by-page as though checking them over. “Here are the illustrations I got from the manga club, and here’s the art club’s rough illustration for the cover. This is the piece from the computer club. These’ll buy us a few pages, at least. I’ve got no idea about what they wrote, but who cares? I’m sure their enthusiasm comes through, and people who know about video games will get something out of it.”

Ah, so that’s how it was. In essence, it seemed Haruhi had found happiness in the process of pushing the publication forward. Making something out of nothing as we gradually progressed toward completion—hell, even I thought it was pretty fun. It was sort of like gradually building a plastic model out of tiny parts or moving toward the final boss in an RPG. It was enjoyable, so long as you weren’t one of the model pieces or NPCs.

“What’re you mumbling about?” Haruhi polished off her tea briskly, grinning at me as she shook the emptied cup around. “You better hurry up and get back to your seat. C’mon, write! The computer club’s not even in the brigade, and look what they did! If you slack off, we’ll get a reputation for being slackers. We’re the ones who originally accepted this challenge, after all.”

Having a worthy organizational rival seemed to energize Haruhi. It was enough to make me want to tell her the truth about the student council president, just to irritate her. The original trumped-up charge had been against Nagato as a member of the literature club, and Haruhi had simply decided to barge in and take over leadership—even going so far as to wear an editor-in-chief armband.

I glared over at Koizumi, wondering how many plans he’d dreamed of to stave off her boredom. The island mystery had definitely been the first, and the nonsense on the snowy mountain had been number two. No, wait—what about the thing with Kimidori and the cave cricket? Oh, right, that had been Nagato’s doing.

I was reflecting on such nonsense when a knock suddenly sounded at the door.

“Excuse me.” The door opened before anyone had time to answer it, and a tall, thin figure entered the room.

Tinkk!

I was probably the only one who heard the sound, like a piano wire being snipped by wire cutters.

It was like the sub-boss of a shooter had appeared: there he was, the student council president.

The president’s glasses reflected meaninglessly, indicating he was in serious business mode. He swept his gaze slowly over the room.

“This is quite a nice room. I’m even more convinced it’s wasted on the likes of you.”

“What’re you doing here? You’re interrupting our work—just get lost.” Haruhi flipped into irritated mode faster than a superhero changing costume. She crossed her arms, looking even haughtier than the president, not even bothering to stand up.

The president calmly endured her murderous gaze. “Think of it as enemy reconnaissance. I have no intention of being your constant foe or an obstacle you must overcome. I came only to check up on you, as is my responsibility. Think of it as a checkup to make sure you’re being serious. From what I can tell, you’re certainly flailing around quite a bit. That’s all well and good, but movement does not necessarily translate into results. Let us say that you must continue devoting yourself to the task.”

It wasn’t like we needed him to come and tell us that—but before I could respond, the brigade chief (or should I say the editor in chief) beat me to it.

“Shut up.”

Zing. It was as though I could hear the sound of Haruhi’s eyes turning into daggers.

“If you came just to needle us, you’re out of luck. I’m not going to fall for such a clumsy jab.”

“And I’ve no such free time.” The president snapped his fingers pretentiously. I practically expected him to call out, “Garçon,” but the slick head of the student council was not calling for a waiter. “Kimidori, if you please.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

Kimidori, holding a stack of booklets in her arms, quietly approached Haruhi.

Nagato returned her eyes to the open hardcover book in front of her, unmoving.

“…”

Kimidori smiled, giving no indication that she’d noticed Nagato. “Here you are. Reference materials.” She presented the stack of musty old booklets to Haruhi.

“What’re these?”

Haruhi didn’t bother to hide the look of irritation on her face, her eyebrows going up as she accepted the stack like it was a cursed item of some kind.

The president adjusted his glasses sarcastically. “They’re newsletters produced by previous incarnations of the literature club. Feel free to refer to them. Given your tendency toward fanciful theories, there is a distinct possibility that you’re misunderstanding what constitutes ‘literature.’ No need to thank me. If you feel any obligation, direct it to Miss Kimidori. It was she who took the trouble to find them in the archive room.”

“Huh. Thanks. Not that I’m really pleased.”

Haruhi made a face like a feudal lord who’d received tribute in salt despite not particularly having a salt shortage. She dropped the booklets unceremoniously on the desk, then, as though realizing who this messenger’s face reminded her of—

“Hey, you… so you got on the student council, did you?”

“Yes, starting this year,” replied Kimidori politely, bowing and returning quietly to the president’s side.

“Did you work things out with your boyfriend?” Haruhi asked as though she didn’t really care.

“I really appreciated your help,” said Kimidori, her placid smile unwavering. “But we’ve broken up. When I think about it now, it is as though we were never really going out together. It’s a distant memory.”

It was a roundabout answer, but I felt like I knew the reason. I bet the computer club prez would agree with me. He’d have no memory of any dating at all. He’d just been punished for daring to look at the SOS Brigade’s website. I felt a little bad for him.

“…”

Nagato turned a page of her book.

At this point it felt like Nagato and Kimidori were engaged in a fierce battle to see who could ignore the other more. But since Nagato acted like this pretty much no matter who was around, the battle was probably all in my head. I felt like I was wearing glasses with weird-colored lenses.

---

---

“Huh, is that so?” Haruhi curled the corners of her lips strangely. “Well, you’re still young. Things happen.”

In point of fact, Haruhi was even younger, but I had no intention of taking such a cheap shot. Ignorance was the key here. And in any case, Kimidori’s actual age was probably the same as Nagato’s. Her seniority was doubtful. I bet she’d just happened to be enrolled as a junior.

Not that I could very well say anything about that. Going by Nagato’s reaction, Kimidori was not an enemy. I glanced casually over at Asahina out of the corner of my eye. At the very least, she knew that Nagato was an alien. Her shock when she was first dragged to the clubroom was proof enough of that. So my concern that she might also know the truth about Kimidori was entirely founded.

Still—

“Hmm. Oh, ah—mmm.”

Thanks to the intensity of her picture-drawing efforts, the lovely upperclassman seemed not to have noticed the two intruders in the room. I wasn’t sure whether to applaud her intense concentration or worry about how close she was getting to that klutzy-girl stereotype. If the latter were true, it was the result of Haruhi’s training of her.

As I stood there dumbly, Haruhi and the president continued their verbal combat.

“It seems you’re doing a fiction anthology,” said the president nihilistically. “But are any of you even capable of writing a proper story?”

“I’ll say it again: sucks to be you,” Haruhi shot back. “I’m not the least bit worried.”

Her face brimmed with confidence; I wanted to know what wormhole that confidence had sprung from.

She continued. “We don’t need anyone to teach us. Writing a story is easy. Even this idiot Kyon can do it. Most people know how to read and write, don’t they? If you can write letters, then you can write sentences, and all you have to do is connect those sentences. It’s not like you need special training to learn how to write. We’re high school students. We don’t have to practice writing stories! We can just write them.”

The president pushed up his glasses. “I can’t help but be impressed by your optimistic outlook. It is, however, infantile.”

I totally agreed, but I wished he would refrain from provoking Haruhi any further. Even if her ire were directed solely at the president, all of us in the room would have to endure her burning aura.

As expected, the angle between Haruhi’s eyebrows and eyes became sharply acute. “You think you’re a real big shot, huh? Well, even if you are, I hate big shots! And I hate small-fry people who think they’re big shots even more!”

She certainly wasn’t under-equipped for a war of words. I wondered for how long they’d keep up this performance. After all, the president did outrank Haruhi. It might have been just another act, but the ability to stay cool in the face of Haruhi’s blazing anger was impressive. The president was pulling it off, as was Kimidori.

“Hmph. I am not particularly important. You judge people by their rank, do you? If I have anything to boast of, it is having gained my position through a legitimate public election. And how is it you’ve come to sit in your seat there? What was it again? ‘Brigade chief’?”

I had to admit that Koizumi’s choice of personnel was impressive. The president had real guts. There probably wasn’t a single other student in the whole school who could face down Haruhi with such vicious sarcasm.

But Haruhi was a force to be reckoned with herself. I knew that all too well.

“There’s no point in trying to provoke me,” said the leader of this unauthorized student organization. “The student council may want to destroy the SOS Brigade along with the literature club, but it won’t work.”

Haruhi glanced at me briefly. What the hell was she looking at?

Her flashing eyes turned quickly and sharply back to the president.

“I am absolutely not moving from this spot. Want to know why?”

“I’d love to,” said the president.

If Haruhi’s words had been microwave radiation, then the volume she spoke at would’ve been more potent than any microwave oven.

“Because this is the SOS Brigade’s room, and I am the chief of that brigade!”

Having said what he’d come to say and let Haruhi speak her piece, the president and his attendant left.

“Argh, so irritating! What did that idiot president come here to do, anyway?” Haruhi grumbled, her lip curled in a sneer as she flipped through the old literature club booklets that Kimidori had left.

Haruhi’s war cry had finally gotten Asahina to realize that guests had entered the clubroom, but by the time she had, in a panic, started to make tea for them, it was too late—but thanks to her haste, I was able to finally enjoy her delicious tea and apply myself to my own writing… Well, no, not that last part.

Somehow, now that the mood had been wrecked, my motivation was gone. The fact that my theme had been chosen by lottery didn’t help; neither did the fact that I was trying to write an episode out of my past.

But that wasn’t going to be good enough. Thanks to the president’s visit, Haruhi’s zeal had been enflamed, and it seemed ready to blacken the ceiling with its intensity.

“Listen up, everyone.” Haruhi pursed her lips before opening her mouth to speak. “It’s come to this. We’re going to make this newsletter if it kills us, and it’s going to be great. We’re not going to have a single copy left over, and we’re gonna take down the president. Got that?”

The newsletter wasn’t going to be sold; it was going to be given away, and furthermore I had no interest in dying for this particular cause—but I had a feeling that if I missed the deadline, whatever punishment Haruhi dreamed up would make me wish I were dead. I knew that it was all part of his act, but did that president really have to go this far? Ditto, Koizumi—this was no time for his self-satisfied smile.

“For my part,” whispered Koizumi, right on cue, “I am extremely satisfied. So long as Suzumiya’s attention is turned toward ordinary activities, I can stay away from Closed Space.”

That might be good for him. But what about me? I really didn’t want to get tangled up in intrigues with the student council. I understood that the president was just playing a part, but Haruhi didn’t know that, and there was no telling what she’d resort to. If our newsletter didn’t live up to the president’s standards, I knew for a fact Haruhi wouldn’t just turn over the clubroom to him. I definitely didn’t want to wind up on the receiving end of a siege, being starved out of our castle, I told Koizumi.

He chuckled. “You’re overthinking things. What we need to focus on now is finishing the publication. The rest will fall into place. If it doesn’t”—a cunning expression flashed across his smiling face—“we’ll simply put a different scenario into play. Starvation tactics, eh? That might do nicely.”

Tsuruya had compared the student council president to the general Sima Yi; I wondered whom she’d compare Koizumi to. Maybe the warlord Kanbei Kuroda?

I was starting to feel like the lord of Takamatsu Castle after its water supply had been cut off, and I prayed that Koizumi didn’t indulge his taste for school intrigues too much.

It turned out that I wasn’t able to finish my manuscript that day. After being interrupted by the president, I didn’t write another word.

Fortunately, once Haruhi finished checking the pieces that had been finished, she rushed out of the room. Had she hit upon another outside source for material, or had she just gone off to deliver more “motivation”?

She returned just as the chime signaling the end of the school day rang; at the same moment, Nagato closed her book. Koizumi had made steady progress, and Asahina had put forth admirable effort. I grabbed my bag and stood.

Surprisingly, Haruhi didn’t suggest I take the laptop home and continue working on it. She might have merely forgotten to be angry, but in any case, I was grateful for it.

We all left school together, and as the chilly wind came down from the mountain, it nonetheless felt like a breath of spring air, and as I made my way home, I wondered idly what would happen if a new student appeared, wanting to join the literature club. Would they be automatically drafted into the SOS Brigade?

I continued my autobiographical story the next day, after classes were over.

Let’s see, how far had I gotten? Ah, that’s right—we’d just bought the movie tickets.

We’ll pick up from there.

---

---

“Whew.”

I wrote that much, then my fingers stopped.

Only Koizumi and Nagato were in the clubroom with me. Haruhi was running around like usual, and Asahina had gone to the art club for the final check on her illustrations.

I had scrolled through the entirety of the text I’d written when I saw Koizumi’s face seep into the corner of my vision.

“Did you write through to the end? Already?”

“Hard to say…,” I answered, but truth be told I felt like I could end it here. When I thought about it, what was the point in being so diligent about it? For the literature club’s sake, and by extension for Nagato’s sake—to that extent, I could see being enthusiastic, but really this was to help the SOS Brigade stay in the room and to keep Haruhi from getting bored. Koizumi was pulling the strings behind the scenes, and the president was just a guy abusing his power as Koizumi’s puppet. When you got right down to it, this was one big roundabout scam.

Still, I felt like I wanted to avoid the second-stage confrontation with the student council that Koizumi was anticipating so much. Nagato was at the center of this, after all. I wanted her to be able to enjoy as peaceful a school life as possible. I wanted to believe I wasn’t the only one whose heart was put at ease by seeing Nagato quietly reading her book in the corner.

“I guess this’ll do.” I gave Koizumi a nod. “I want to get your opinion before I show it to Haruhi. Read it, willya?”

“I’ll be more than happy to.”

I glanced at Koizumi’s deeply interested face, then manipulated the trackpad.

The laptops in the room were networked to the desktop machine, which acted as a server. With a little bit of clicking, the printer in the corner started up and began to spit out printed pages.

Some minutes later.

Koizumi, having finished reading, smiled and offered the following comment: “I thought I was the one doing a mystery.”

So he’d noticed, eh?

“What’re you talking about?” I feigned ignorance. “I didn’t try to write a mystery.”

Koizumi’s smile widened. “And there’s another problem. Where’s the love story in this?”

In that case, what did he think I’d written, I asked him.

“This is just bragging. ‘I went on a date with a cute girl.’ That’s all.”

That’s what you’d normally think, yes. However, Koizumi had noticed something else, I was pretty sure. Where were his suspicions roused, I wondered?

“From the very beginning. It’s rather obvious. It would be harder not to notice it.”

Koizumi put the manuscript’s pages in order, then took out a ballpoint pen and wrote marks on a few of the sheets. They were asterisks—the very asterisks you may have noticed in the manuscript yourself. He wrote those.

“You’re a very considerate writer. You included a series of clues, after all. Even the most oblivious reader would have an inkling by the fourth asterisk.”

I clucked my tongue, still pretending to not know what he was talking about, and glanced sideways. Seeing Nagato’s unmoving figure there made me feel at ease. The sight of her did me good, but Koizumi’s words were trying to corner me.

“But as it is, there’s no punch line, no climax. Why not add a line or two? Just to show all your cards, so to speak. I doubt it would take much time.”

Maybe I did need to add something.

I wasn’t thrilled about following any advice from Koizumi, but I got the feeling that he was worth listening to this one time. Psychoanalyzing Haruhi was his specialty, after all.

But, wait a second—why should I have to worry about Haruhi’s reaction? She was the one who’d gone and suggested a “love story,” but I was the one who had to actually write the thing—the same was true for Asahina and Nagato. If we were assigning fault, it belonged with the person who’d forcibly occupied the editor in chief’s seat: Haruhi.

As I stared at the liquid crystal display, Koizumi chuckled. “I doubt you have anything to worry about. If your story’s meaning is something I recognize, then I very much doubt that Suzumiya will fail to do likewise. Now, before you get cross-examined… Ah, whoops—”

Koizumi reached into his blazer’s pocket. There was a faint buzzing sound.

“If you’ll excuse me.” He pulled out his cell phone and took a look at the screen. “I seem to have some minor business to attend to. I’ll be out for just a moment. No, don’t worry—I just have to make a short report. It’s not one of those cases.”

With those words, Koizumi stepped out of the room, smiling all the while. I wondered if he was going to meet up with some girl on the sly. The guy was so sneaky, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out he was somehow managing to live a normal life with none of us the wiser.

Which left only Nagato in the room, still absorbed in her book.

She did not look up. I thought about saying something, but I was still thinking about my own problem—whether or not to add those last couple of superfluous lines.

There in the silence, I closed the file that contained my pseudo-story, and I opened up a new text file. The monitor was filled with a blank white document.

Might as well write something. Like Koizumi said, just a couple of lines to end it.

My fingers clicked on the keys. The addition was short enough not to need any revision, so I just printed it out on the spot.

As I stared at the single page that emerged from the printer, I started to want to just trash the entire story. It was no good. Even given how long ago it had happened, it was too embarrassing.

I folded up that last page and slipped it into the pocket of my blazer.

Then, that moment—

“Taniguchi’s run off somewhere again. I gotta get him to write something tomorrow, even if I have to tie him to the chair. Kyon, that goes for you too. If you don’t finish soon, your editor in chief’s gonna be mad!”

Haruhi had entered the room.

And her eyes alighted upon my manuscript, which Koizumi had left on the table.

My pleas for her to stop were in vain, as Haruhi swiftly snatched up the printout. She sat at her desk and began a leisurely read.

I was split between indignation and resignation as I watched the all-powerful editor in chief’s face.

Haruhi had been grinning at first, but somewhere in the middle, her grin faded into expressionlessness. When she finished reading the last page, her expression changed again.

How strange. It was a rare thing to see Haruhi so stunned.

“This is the end?”

I nodded quietly. Nagato said nothing and continued reading the page to which her book was opened. Asahina was still out. Koizumi had left on some pretense. There was no one here who could give Haruhi any unnecessary information.

And then—

Haruhi set my manuscript on the desk, then faced me again.

And then she smirked. Just like Koizumi.

“Where’s the punch line?”

“What punch line?” I decided to play dumb.

Haruhi smiled beatifically; it was unsettling. “Surely you wouldn’t just end it there. What happened to this Miyokichi girl?”

“I guess she went on to live happily ever after, somewhere.”

“Yeah, right. C’mon, you know, don’t you?”

Haruhi’s hands were on the desk, but then she jumped clear over it, right at me. Before I could react, she grabbed my tie. Her ridiculous power was making it hard to breathe.

“If you want me to let you go, you better start talking. And it better be the truth.”

“What do you mean, the truth? It’s a story! It’s fiction! The ‘I’ in the story isn’t me; it’s the first-person narrator of the story! Same for Miyokichi!”

Haruhi’s smile got closer and closer as her strength constricted my throat. This was bad—I could really suffocate.

“Sure, keep lying,” she said sweetly. “I never for a second believed you could write a totally made-up story. At the very least, you’d have to write something that you’d heard from somebody you knew. No, my intuition tells me that no matter how you read this, it’s a true story. And it’s your true story.” Haruhi’s eyes shone crazily. “Who’s Miyokichi? What kind of relationship did she have with you?”

My tie constricted my throat more and more, and I finally confessed the truth.

“She sometimes comes over to my house for dinner, then goes home.”

“That’s all? Are you sure you’re not leaving anything out?”

Reflexively, I touched the pocket of my blazer. That was enough for Haruhi.

“Ah-ha! That’s where you’ve been hiding the rest of the manuscript, eh? Give it here.”

She was way too perceptive for her own good. I couldn’t help but be impressed. But before I could say so, Haruhi had resorted to force.

Haruhi thrust her right leg between my thighs and performed a perfect inside-leg trip, sumo-style. Where’d she learn that?

“Whoa,” I yelled.

With Haruhi leaning on me, I fell to the floor. She straddled me like I was a horse, trying to reach into my blazer to get into the inside pocket. I tried to resist.

“Hey, knock it off!”

I looked desperately to Nagato, but when her subtle, near-expressionless gaze met mine, she too seemed to be unsure what to do.

Somewhere along the line, she had opened up her own laptop.

When had that been? She’d been able to hack into and rewrite the computer club’s game program, so peeking into the contents of my laptop would be child’s play for her. Had she seen it?

“…”

Nagato watched Haruhi and me wrestle on the ground, giving assistance to neither of us.

And then—

“I’m back—Wha?!”

Enter Asahina. She sure did have an incredible sense of timing. Stunned, she looked at me on the ground, with Haruhi on top of me and evidently in the midst of some kind of sexual harassment. Who knew what was going through her head?

“I-I’m sorry! I didn’t see a thing, honest! Really!” she shouted, running away, having gotten the entirely wrong idea.

“…”

Nagato silently regarded us.

---

---

“So, you’re not going to do as your editor in chief says? C’mon, hand it over!” Haruhi smiled wildly.

I held up my hands to defend myself as Haruhi manhandled me, a plea going out from my heart.

Help me, Koizumi. You’re my only hope. Get back here, now!

The single sheet of paper folded up inside my blazer read as follows:

---

---

Now then, the epilogue.

The newsletter was finished on time. It was printed on sheets of copier paper, stapled into booklets with a giant business-grade stapler, and the content—minus any personal bias I may have here—was pretty solid.

One particularly excellent section was the adventure story that Tsuruya wrote. The crazy piece—“Tough Luck! The Tragedy of Boy N”—had every single person who read it rolling on the floor in laughter. I myself had tears rolling down my face. It had been a long time since I was so surprised to read something so entertaining. The only one who kept a straight face while reading it was Nagato, but Tsuruya’s lively slapstick comedy was so hilarious that I can easily imagine Nagato having a private chuckle, once she was alone in her own room.

I’d suspected before, but the notion came to me anew: was Tsuruya actually a genius?

As far as the other SOS Brigade affiliates went, Taniguchi wrote an impressively boring slice-of-life essay, and Kunikida produced study columns filled with trivia. Between that and the rest of the material Haruhi’d been dashing around the school to collect (including things like the four-panel comic that someone in the manga club drew for us), the final product was almost too thick for a literature club newsletter. It took quite a bit of effort to staple each individual issue together, and the two hundred issues we printed flew away without us having to run around at all. I guessed that all the running around Haruhi had done had worked as accidental advertising for the project.

As for Haruhi, she wrote material too, just as she’d promised. In addition to a haughty “Letter from the Editor,” she wrote a short essay.

“Save the World by Overloading it with Fun, I: A Memo on the Path to the Future” was the title, and her thesis was filled with charts and symbols that, according to Haruhi, were the result of her thoughts on how to ensure the brigade continued indefinitely into the future. As for me, I found it totally incomprehensible. But there was still an order to the chaos, I felt, like Haruhi’s mind had somehow overflowed directly onto the page.

But when Asahina read it, she was so stunned she looked as though she might fall over.

“That’s… I can’t… so this is how…”

Her shock was so total that I was afraid her pupils were going to fall right out of her widely opened eyes, but when I asked her why she was so surprised—

“I can’t tell you; the details are classified.”

—she said.

“These are the fundamentals of time-plane theory. In my time… um… this is the first thing people like me learn. But who originated it, and when, has always been a mystery… and now, to find out that it was Suzumiya all along…”

She was then rendered speechless. I, likewise, was speechless, as the following notion appeared in my mind:

Haruhi would surely keep at least one copy of the newsletter to bring home with her. It was entirely possible that the bespectacled little boy would have a chance to see it. Haruhi was his tutor, after all. While Asahina and I had ensured a variety of conditions for the boy’s future, there were surely more to come. Was Haruhi the ultimate trigger? Even if she wasn’t, there seemed to be many composite elements in play. The number of questions I had for Asahina the Elder increased by one.

Having fully distributed the newsletter the same day it was completed, Haruhi made a point of going to the student council room to inform them. That she was practically radiating pride from her body goes without saying.

The president didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow at Haruhi’s victorious entry. His glasses shone as he spoke. “A promise is a promise. We’ll approve the continued existence of the literature club. However, concerning this ‘SOS Brigade’ of yours, it is none of our concern. Do not forget that there is quite some time left in my term,” he said in a transparent ploy to get one last parting shot in, before turning his back on us.

Haruhi took it as an admission of defeat, and she returned to the clubroom in high spirits, dancing a victory dance with Asahina as Nagato looked on indifferently. So it goes.

In any case, that was the end of that particular madness. All that was left was to wait for spring.

At this rate, so long as nothing happened, we would each of us move on to the next grade. If I had to guess at the next likely point where Haruhi would get up to something, it would be spring break.

Strangely, the year had felt both long and short. It’s a secret, but I’m putting a circle on a day in April this year. It’s the same day as last year’s school entrance ceremony.

Even if everybody forgot, even if Haruhi herself forgot, it’s the anniversary of a day I’ll always remember.

I’m confident that so long as I live, I’ll never forget the day I met Haruhi.

So long as I don’t lose my memory, that is.