Something like a scream rises up from the pit of Chiyoko's belly and she has to swallow hard enough to hurt to chase it back down again. She doesn't know what to do -- keeping an eye on Hiroshi and Osaka was supposed to stop all this happening, neither of them had been acting weird or irrational -- but there's Haruhi, poor Haruhi, deader than dead again, and all Chiyoko can do is stand and stare and feel sick to her stomach again.

"... was she... was she alive?" she manages to ask, thickly. "When they burned her?"