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After a few long breaths, and then a few more, and then some shorter, jagged ones, Chio sucked in one final batch of Gaarrr air particles and…stayed exactly where she was, glued to the edge of the welcome table.
The forest was the only way forward, she could see that.
But the fruit on the table was quite tasty, and the green watermelon substitute juice didn’t make her retch or vomit, and as soon as she left it behind it would probably vanish into ether just like the tunnel had.
Jun kut sei…
Seriously jun kut sei.
There was still a chance that none of this was real, that she was dreaming, that the cops were hovering over her unconscious body in the plaza toilets, trying to decide whether to either revive or cremate the evidence.
Or she really was dead and this functioned as some kind of…what? Afterlife? Next level up?
She picked up the final skewer of white fruit and rested it against her bottom lip. Didn’t eat it, just licked it a little.
No, this wasn’t death.
Every bone and synapses felt real. Taste and smell remained active. Time was passing just like materialists said it did. And the idea that all the above could be happening in some god-head’s brain…was utterly pointless…meaningless…not helpful in any tangible way.
Yes, tangibility.
She bit off the fruit and dropped the skewer. Then bent down and picked it up, put it carefully back on the table, just in case any Dreg City wardens were hiding in those weird, blue bushes nearby.
Okay, forest path. Rock sanctuary with scenic ponds. Settlement with other humans. Or humanoids. Ahh, whatever, as long as they weren’t neon green blobs or sleazy octopi.
Go, Chio. Move.
The words were firm enough, yet her legs didn’t budge.
How could they?
The foliage on the trees up ahead was turning a darker shade of blue and there was still fruit and a bizarrely-shaped glass of fake watermelon juice right next to her.
Why leave?
Why not wait until the red dot thing came back and said, ha, well done, it was all a sham but you saw through it. As a reward, let us discontinue this wacky simulation and check you into one of our better hotels?
She picked up more fruit, instinctively checking that there was no black stem line. Didn’t seem to be, though some of the seeds had clotted together and looked not that dissimilar to a stem line. But then, the red dot promised that it wasn’t poisonous, that doing such a thing would be cruel.
Promised?
Was that what it was?
Or just said?
She put the fruit back down and looked back at what had previously been the tunnel out of the base. The alleged base. Now it was nothing but faintly pink air. Which, along with the trees, was slowly turning darker.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Jun, you’ve gotta move, she told herself, leaning against the table and picking up the glass of alien watermelon juice. Can’t stay here all night. Gods knows what kind of creatures might crawl out of these creepy, blue bushes.
As soon she thought it, absolutely nothing happened. Which was eerie in itself. A minute ago, the wind had been blowing through and the leaves had been swaying from side to side, some of them even falling off, but now…nothing, no movement at all.
She grabbed a fresh ball of fruit and gripped it like a grenade. Stared at the bushes until they started moving again. Only they didn’t move so she was forced to keep looking at them, studying the dark patches between and beyond.
Seriously, where did the breeze go?
Was this some kind of sign?
Get moving or we’ll…do…something.
There was no response from the weather or the trees, but there was a shrill whistling noise coming from the area behind, the place she’d come out from. Taking a long, meditative breath that phased into a stern ‘jun kut sei’ at the end[a tactic Kenji has told her to utilise before fights], she turned slowly to face what she hoped was just the red dot floating back again to say sorry.
Of course, with her luck the way it had been the last hour or so, it wasn’t that.
Though it was red.
A kind of shifting spectrum of three different shades, pale, not so pale and blood simple, swirling around in a mist cycle that appeared to be heading right for her.
‘Err…is this…’ she started to say, holding up the fruit still glued to her hand.
The red mist clearly didn’t approve and, without warning, split into two cousin cycles on both sides.
‘Are you the red dot?’
No response, apart from a sharp increase in swirling.
‘Should I-…’
Chio vetoed the rest of the line and backed quickly away from the table as all three mini hurricanes swirled forward.
She wasn’t the most agile person on Triton, but the recent fights had given her just enough guile to avoid both the initial destruction of the table and the flying bits of wood that came after it.
The watermelon juice, however…
‘Jun…’ she muttered, wiping green residue off her chin.
Maybe on some level she’d wanted to be hit by it, so she could lick it off as she walked along the path later. And that was what she clearly had to do now that the table was gone, and the fruit had been sucked up into the spiralling abyss of those three little red holes.
‘Psychopaths,’ she whispered, watching them coalesce again into one swirling mass and then whistle off into nothingness.
If they’d heard her, they obviously didn’t care to do anything about it. Why would they? The table had been destroyed, the fruit had been sucked up. There were no more reasons for Chio to stay put anymore. Except for maybe the creeping dread of the forest path ahead, the eerie blue shadowiness…but, really, how bad could it be? And, according to the red dot, there was a sanctuary at the end of it, with a map to the first settlement, and why would it tell her all that if it knew something would kill her before then?
Unless it was a way to lull her into a false sense of utter dopiness?
Ah, could be.
But between that and those three red holes…
Jun. Just go. Sooner you get in there, sooner you can meet another human face. And then use them as a shield. If necessary. If they’re as jun as everything else in this place.
‘Gods, stop prophesising…and move.’
Zipping up her Leopo crash jacket an extra inch, then double checking the lack of head wound one final time, she grunted with approval and moved forward, taking one of the surviving skewers off the ground at the last second.
‘Okay, forward we go.’
Despite the dimming of the lights, the path was still pretty clear, and the blue foliage on either side relatively dense, so she kept to it as strictly as she could, with the skewer in her right hand trembling a little if she got too close to the burned-looking weeds and fallen leaves clustered at the side.
Luckily, there were no wild animal noises near or distant, no real sound at all except for the occasional rustle of twigs and canopy when a breeze swept through.
No predators, no thieves, she told herself as she looked back and saw that the table fragments had vanished and the path she had already travelled along was now about the width of paperclip.
As if the forest were closing in behind, getting ready to digest her.
No predators, no thieves, no living forest entities.
No predators, no thieves, no living-
A noise from up ahead, like a distorted mating call.
She stopped, gripping the skewer tight.
Was that a bird?
A humanoid scream?
She held her position, staring forward at the path ahead and the tree shapes on both sides, the oddly serene picture punctuated every few seconds with a pale blue twinkle from a falling leaf.
There were no more noises.
The forest had put a bag over something’s head.
And was now waiting for her to move forward again.
Into the jaws of…IT.
‘Jun kut sei,’ she muttered, keeping her hold on the skewer at dark alley setting, walking forward again. ‘Maybe I should’ve just gone with the cops.’
She thought it out, pictured herself exiting the bathroom with hands raised, then instantly getting shot back into it.
‘Okay, maybe not.’