At first, Mori believed FEAR had led her back to the garden, but when the cottage door swung open, it revealed an empty throne room. Crimson rugs carpeted the floor like a sea of blood, golden corinthian pillars dwarfing her. Placed at the end of the room, where Mori would expect to find a seat of power, a white pedestal soaked in the sunlight filtering through a glass concave in the scrolled stone of the ceiling. The rest of the hall lay in shadow.
The moment she stepped into the room, the doors slammed shut behind her, stats reappearing. Only hers though, the rest of her party members' info missing as if it'd never existed.
FEAR watched her with those too intelligent eyes, making Perera's once soft and pretty features shrewd and hostile.
"What do you want, FEAR?" Mori asked. The silence rubbed wrong here, but her voice didn't sound much better—shaky and weak, an echo that faded and was forgotten.
"Answers," the AI replied. "And you two will give them to me." It gestured to a pillar.
Shiori stepped out from behind the structure, her hands tucked into the pockets of her favorite burgundy hoodie. She wore a matching pair of leggings underneath.
Mori's breath snagged in her lungs, a painful aching tug as if a scab had ripped off. "What answers?" she demanded, but when she turned, Perera was gone.
Her sister sat down on the carpet, legs crossed and back straight, a familiarly Shiori-like gesture. She stared at her sneakers as if Mori weren't there.
FEAR lies. This isn't real.
But still Mori's heart longed for her to wrap her arms around Shiori. "Are you mad at me?" she whispered to her younger sister.
"No, I'm scared for you," Shiori answered, tugging at her shoelace. She glanced up and another stab of pain broke open Mori's wound. If Shiori wasn't real, then FEAR had pulled out all the stops to convince her she was.
Pain, fear, traces of anger. Mori expected all that to be within FEAR's power to reproduce. But in Shiori's expression, the face Mori knew how to read better than her own, she found an emotion more authentic than she believed FEAR to be capable of.
"Why?" Mori sat down a few feet away.
"Because the night is not good here," Shiori said softly. "I don't want this to happen to you too. I don't want my fate to be yours."
Mori wished she could grip something, anchor herself to reality somehow, but she had nothing. She didn't even know whose side Shiori played for. "So you don't want me to stay here then? You want me to able to leave Valor?" she prodded.
Shiori shut her eyes, breathing labored, veins popping out in her hands and temples. "Stop," she growled, but Mori felt it wasn't directed at her. "I'm trying."
The air settled into that wrong stillness again as Shiori relaxed, sweat shining on her forehead. "There are three kinds of people to FEAR. Those who are afraid of dying, those who are not, and those who were but somehow managed to overcome it. It's most interested in the last category."
Mori's thoughts flashed back to her conversation with Skye, where she'd touched the tip of the iceberg but hadn't been able to infer anything further. She stared at the cube in her hands, at the mist wafting from it. "Shiori, how much of you is still you?"
"Most of me...I think." Shiori choked, hand clawing at her chest as she gasped for air.
Throwing caution to the wind, Mori crawled across the carpet and grabbed her sister's hand. A sudden weight hit her shoulders, pressing her closer to the floor.
YOU ARE READING
Facing Fear | ✓ ONC 2023 Honorable Mention
Science Fiction| 𝟏𝟐𝐱 𝐅𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐝 | An ex-gamer enters a virtual reality ruled by a rebel AI in order to rescue her younger sister and shut down the death game. * * * Eight years ago, Mor...
