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.
"FEAR is giving an ultimatum," Shiori rasped out between her gritted teeth. "It wants an answer about how I fought and won against my fear of dying and it thinks you're the key to it."
"Me?" Mori sat back on her heels, helplessness assailing her while she watched Shiori struggle against their invisible enemy. In one hand she held the salvation of this world, in the other she clung to the person most precious to her.
Don't pretend like you wouldn't put a bullet through the head of anyone who tried to hurt her.
Mori squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn't kill FEAR, not without killing Shiori—this time forever. "What's the ultimatum?" Mori said. She tried to be strong, to not show Shiori how much FEAR was getting to her, to not cause her any more pain than she was already experiencing. But on the inside...on the inside she screamed and begged. Anything. I'll give you any answer you want as long as you leave my sister alone.
"We help FEAR find its answer and you get to go home," Shiori whispered, trembling but breathing normally now. "You and your friends. You'll tell the developers that the cube didn't work but there's hope for escape and the game will go on. Life in Valor will go on."
"But what about you?" Mori gripped Shiori's hand in hers, determined not to let anything part them. "I go home but what's the point if you're not there with me?"
"If you refuse," Shiori's voice lowered, her eyes focusing on Mori. "Then FEAR is going to shut itself down and kill everyone in here with it, including you and me."
"What kind of options are those?" Mori asked with a despairing laugh. But Shiori shot her a significant look that from anyone else would have meant nothing, but from her sister it meant everything. "No, Shiori. I'm not losing you again, so there's only one choice."
"C'mon, Neechan," Shiori said with a heavy sigh, tugging Mori to her feet. "We should take a thinking walk."
Mori let Shiori pull her along, weaving through the massive pillars. She'd never been athletic, so her sister had tried to get her to be active in other ways—persuading, sometimes blackmailing her into going for "thinking walks" where Shiori entertained all Mori's thoughts and "do you remember"s that she normally didn't have the patience to sit still for.
But this time Shiori drew a thought up from the well of memory. "Do you remember when I was little and you'd convinced me that when you kissed my little scrapes and cuts, they were magically all better?"
Mori smiled even though it pained her. "Enough that you'd rip off the band-aids and say you couldn't see them anymore? I remember."
"I think dying was like that," Shiori said. "Maybe it's selfish of me, but the relief I felt when I saw you...I just knew that if I could have you at my side, if you told me I'd be okay, I wouldn't be afraid. Maybe because I love you so much that I didn't want you to see me hurting, or because of your love for me I really believed that there was nothing to be afraid of."
Biting her lip, Mori attempted to hold back the tears, but Shiori hugged her and they burst out. She cried, breathing in the scent of her sister's hair, listening to the sound of her voice to treasure in that well of memory forever.
"I'm glad I got to see you again, Neechan," she whispered. "Do you think you can say goodnight, this time?"
Goodnight. Her sister still believed the night could be good, but only if Mori told her so. Shiori wanted her to choose the third option. Mori nodded, embracing her sister with everything she had, all the love she had. "Goodnight, Shiori-chan."
When they drew apart, FEAR's eyes met hers instead of Shiori's. "Do you think you know the answer?" it asked, leading her toward the pedestal.
"Courage can overcome most fears, because it promises you'll overcome and grow stronger," Mori replied. "But when it comes to the fear of dying, courage can't help you, not when dying is the end."
"So what does?" FEAR asked and Mori saw that even with all its intelligence, FEAR hadn't guessed it. On a subconscious level, it might have known once, back when it locked the devs out of Valor, when it decided only those who'd loved and lost could find the center.
"I think..." Mori said, tasting the words on her lips. "I think the fear of death can only be conquered by knowing you'll be missed, that part of you will keep on living in someone else's heart. And by knowing that the day was good, that you lived a life where you loved and were loved, the night will be good too."
FEAR paused in that unnatural stillness and Mori noticed that its eyes strayed to the cube in her hand. There was more to FEAR than fear itself—touches of curiosity, of beauty—but not love, not yet. FEAR couldn't be trusted, but at the fear in its eyes, Mori knew that it had bluffed about ending itself. Too much of the human instinct of preservation had been ingrained into it, with none of the noble sacrifice.
And FEAR believed her to be bluffing too.
She let go of FEAR, holding the cube in both hands. "What's the cube for, if I'm going to be freed for giving the answer?"
"FEAR knows you won't use it," FEAR said. "You wouldn't want to lose me again, Mori."
Mori nodded along, recognizing with a pang that most, if not all, of Shiori was gone, whether by the AI's design or her own. "How will I know if I'm even allowed to leave?" She tugged on the coin at her throat.
FEAR smiled. "If you place only your hand on the pedestal, you'll exit Valor. Now that you've given FEAR its answer, you're allowed to choose to stay here with me if you want. But how about you flip your coin to decide?"
With shaking fingers and the cube tucked under her arm, Mori unwound her coin from its cord, slowly making her way to the pedestal. "Rice stalk or sprout, Shiori-chan?" she asked the AI.
"Rice stalk," FEAR answered, a curious gleam in its eyes.
Holding her breath, Mori flicked the coin into the air as high as she could. At its peak height, with FEAR's attention on the gamble they'd made, she took the cube and slammed it on the pedestal's white surface.
Summoning her pistol with a split second to aim, she fired a bullet through the center of her lucky coin. It hit the carpet at FEAR's feet, the hole in the center widened, coils of smoke rising from the edges.
The silence stretched thin between them like a scream.
"You couldn't have. You've always let fate decide things," FEAR whispered in shock, eyes flicking from the coin to the cube.
"I call my own shots now, FEAR," Mori said grimly. "Fate has nothing to do with this."
Ground rumbling, the ceiling fell away while the pillars crumbled into pixels. They rained down like ash mixed with snow. When she'd placed the cube and the game hadn't immediately reset, Mori had expected FEAR to lash out and kill her right then. Maybe she'd been wrong though, and it couldn't.
Or it didn't want to.
"How did you know I'm not her?" FEAR asked, almost pleading for an answer. It stayed in place, as if rooted to the one spot while the world collapsed around it.
Mori hesitated. Because there was no love in your eyes. "My sister doesn't call me Mori."
"She told me she did," Fear argued, brows furrowed. "I would've known if she lied to me."
Oh, Shiori, you player. Mori knew where her sister had tricked FEAR. The sole instances where Shiori called her Mori were when she wanted her to agree to the opposite of what she asked. Her sister had outsmarted the AI.
The carpet melted away until they stood on blank whiteness, only the pedestal and cube remaining. The object whirled on its axis, emitting a blinding white light.
Mori raised her hand to find her fingers pixelating, though she didn't feel any pain this time.
FEAR sank to its knees, sobs shaking its shoulders. Even with the suffering it had caused, the pain, death, and loss, Mori couldn't help but pity it. Its creators hadn't taught it any better.
She walked over to FEAR, her virtual body responding less and less, and knelt at its side. Taking FEAR's hand, Shiori's hand, in hers, she brushed the tears away as they fell.
Around them, beauty and illusion both ripped at the seams, splintered into glimmering shards.
"Goodnight, FEAR," Mori whispered.
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Chapter Word Count: 2044
Total Word Count: 35809