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It was astonishing, almost devastating, how quickly Sara had learned to fear everything around her. She’d never really been a relaxed person by any means- there’d always been a test to worry about, a bit of unfinished homework plaguing her mind, a time she’d fucked up at kendo practice that made her wince every time she thought of it.
She’d never needed to fear every corner she turned, never glanced around for hidden traps tucked into every corner. She still hadn’t quite gotten used to the drowning melody of blood rushing in her ears and her heart pounding at her ribcage in response to every unfamiliar noise.
It was so cruel to break her in such an insidious way, to root so deeply in her brain and latch on to everything she could possibly hold dear. There was nothing she’d once loved that hadn’t been wrested from her hands and shattered into a million irreparable pieces.
In a way, she was thankful for the dark, twisting hallway stretching ahead of her. There was nothing deceptive about it, no pleasant and peaceful facades concealing unspeakable horrors underneath.
“Hurry up, Miss Sara.” Sou spoke up from behind her, voice mild but venomous. “We don’t have all day.”
“You’re welcome to go on ahead of me, Sou,” Sara muttered, casting a careful scan along the wall. “Nobody’s stopping you.”
“I think it’s for the best that I stick around. Can’t have you wandering into uncharted territory all on your own. After all, where would poor Miss Sara be without her loyal allies?”
Sara pressed her lips together. “How thoughtful.”
There was no witty response.
Sara sighed contently, hoping that Sou could pick up on her dwindling patience, and gave the wall one last cursory glance. The two of them had reached a dead end hallway after what felt like ages of creeping down a labyrinth of twisting corridors and misleading corners. There were no more maps, no more complex control rooms designed for the floormasters to hold every function of the facility at their fingertips.
There’d been no floormaster at all, in fact, just the decaying hum of a few flickering overhead lights. There was no new life within the halls, just a crumbling reminder of every loss that had bolstered the four of them into their miserable victory seats.
None of them should be displeased with the surroundings- after all, they’d grown far too accustomed to decrepit death.
“Dead end?” Sou asked, audibly speaking through his scarf. “Good time to turn back, then, don’t you think?”
“Oh, come on,” Sara snapped back, reaching to run her fingers across the peeling wallpaper. It had unmistakably yellowed with age, sporting a dull floral pattern that had faded in great patches. “You’re not an idiot. They wouldn’t stick us in this place and fill it with only dead ends, there has to be something here.”
“It’s probably a psychological manipulation technique. Drop us in a giant maze, keep heightening our fear without any payoff. I wouldn’t put it past them, especially considering how quiet things have been so far.”
“...Too quiet, though, wouldn’t you say?”
“That’s probably the point,” Sou responded dismissively. “No floormaster to sow conflict, no traps to spring on us, nothing to pit us against each other. Except ourselves, of course.”
Sara turned back to face him and found a pair of piercing green eyes staring back at her with nothing but indiscernible intent behind them. She remained still for a few seconds, refusing to break the gaze in any capacity. After a tense few moments, Sou blinked and shrugged his shoulders noncommittally.
“Just a suggestion, of course.”
“Of course,” Sara muttered.
“Now, are you going to be done soon? There are only so many seams in the wallpaper you can explore before giving up, Miss Sara.”
“Give me a few more minutes. It seems like we have plenty of time to waste anyway, what’s the rush?”
Sou grumbled something incomprehensible behind her, sounding as though he’d buried himself even deeper in his scarf.
“Wait… hold on a second. I think there’s something here.” Sara peered closer at the wallpaper in front of her, at the newly-discovered crack in the wall that was just a little too linear to be there by mistake. “Come here, help me push at the wall.”
Sou gave a disgruntled sigh, but nevertheless approached the wall and pushed against it as hard as he could. Granted, it wasn’t very hard at all, but the redness of his strained face made it very clear he was doing his best. Sara cursed herself for not insisting that Keiji (or even Gin, honestly) come along with her, but she was the only person she could leave alone with Sou in good conscience.
Resigned, she gritted her teeth, shut her eyes, and jammed her shoulder into the wall. With a satisfying thud, the heavy panel came loose and swung inward, toward the room just beyond the wall.
“See,” Sara started triumphantly, “we wouldn’t have found this if I hadn’t…” the words were quick to die in her mouth.
Sprawling out before them was a lush garden dappled with streams of sunlight spilling across the foliage. It was contained within a relatively small room, but the plants had been given free reign to press against the ceiling and set snaking vines loose across the walls. They’d created a virtual tapestry of uninhibited wildlife, clambering and snaking and patterning the entire room.
And sitting in the center, ringed by waterfalls of golden rays, was a spiral of vines accented with lush pink blossoms and a peppering of smaller white flowers.
Beside her, Sara heard Sou’s breath catch in his throat.
The plant was unmistakable.
“Sou… it’s not- I don’t think you should-” Sara managed, but he was already stumbling forward into the room.
Sara paused at the room’s threshold, glancing briefly back toward the long, flickering hallway from which they’d come. It was impossible to ignore the room, with its warm glow of supposedly-natural sunlight illuminating every inch of the area. And even if she ran, what kind of person would that make her out to be?
What kind of person had she become, someone who’d murder a child for the greater good and not even be able to look the resulting damage in the eye?
Sara swallowed, a desperate attempt to loosen the tightness in her chest, and took a step onto the soft soil carpeting the room before her.
Sou was standing in the shade of one of the plant’s leaves, hand reaching out delicately so that it was just barely hovering above a smaller stem protruding from the plant. Sara’s stomach lurched at the sight of his face- completely devoid of anger, eyes wide with a deep and devastated vulnerability that she’d only seen when he was driven to tears, begging for her vote to end his life.
Anger would have been a far more preferable sight.
Desperate to look anywhere else, Sara fixed her gaze on the stretch of skylights above her head. They clearly hadn’t been washed for quite awhile, as a film of dust had gathered on them, but perhaps that was the intention- whether or not the sky beyond them was real, it was impossible to tell.
How lovely it would be, to be so close to the surface they’d been endlessly climbing toward. Then again, the floormasters were too clever to leave nothing but a pane of glass between four desperate people and the freedom they’d murdered to reach.
There was also, of course, the possibility that it really was as simple as that. But as worn down as they all were, they’d never buy into such a simple solution and they’d be killed by their own paranoia. Perhaps it would be a fitting end.
Slowly, Sara glanced back at the mass of flowers towering over her, fluttering so gently in the midst of a breeze whose source she couldn’t pinpoint. They’d flourished since she’d last seen them, tucked away in the safety of a room where nobody could ever hurt them again. Bundled in a glass casket and a verdant garden, so beautifully safe but so carefully contained. Never meant to be ogled.
“What?” Sou’s voice was clear amidst the near-silent ambience of the garden, cracked and bitter as it was. “I guess this is satisfying for you, isn’t it?”
“It’s- it’s not,” was all Sara could get out. “I’m- I can leave if you want.”
“Of fucking course you’d say that,” he snapped back, still turned to face the plant. Never once taking his eyes off of all that remained of the little girl he’d fought so hard to protect. “What are you trying to accomplish at this point? Whispering and stuttering and acting so weak and kind and respectful? Oh, you’ll step out of the room so I can have a nice moment of peace with the child you fucking murdered? ”
Sara took a step back, the words ricocheting through her brain with enough force to fracture her skull. “Sou, I’m sorry, I’m-”
“I know you’re sorry! You could tell me a thousand goddamn times that you’re sorry, and not a single one would matter, because at the end of the day, her blood is on your hands! I don’t know how to get it through your head that your little smiles and apologies and speeches won’t make you a good person. It’s too fucking late for that.”
Sara was silent for a few seconds, as the boiling heat of Sou’s words dissipated through the air. His shoulders were visibly tensed, posture terrifyingly rigid.
“I never wanted to be the one to make these decisions, you know,” she began, loathing every word as it came out of her mouth.
As soon as she spoke, Sou whirled around to face her, eyes seething with the fury she knew so well. His scarf was wrapped over his mouth and nose, his beanie jammed over his hair, and no part of his face was visible except for those bitter, wrathful eyes.
“Oh, I’m so sorry that every single person in this group has adored you without you ever needing to prove yourself to them,” Sou snarled. “I’m sorry they’ve handed you your 15.5% survival percentage wrapped up in a little golden box. I’m sorry every single one of these fucking idiots will do anything you say without question because you’re their trustworthy leader. And yet not a single one of them forced you to vote for Kanna.”
“I was trying to do what was best for the group! We know you have coding experience, you came so close to getting all of us out alive! I was trying to save as many people as possible, because every single person in this game has looked at me and trusted me to get them out alive!”
“And who are you to decide what the lives of all of these people are worth? Who’s to say Kanna didn’t deserve to live more than all of us? She was fourteen fucking years old.”
“And Gin is twelve! He’s a kid, too, a kid who’s had to endure just as much shit as all of us at a much younger fucking age. I could have let him vote for whoever he wanted to and put the burden of killing someone in his hands, but I didn’t. Because I’m trying to get everyone out alive, and I don’t get to abandon everyone on a fucking whim.”
“I bet you wouldn’t say that if Joe was still alive, would you?”
Sara fell silent immediately, her heart rate speeding up and pounding viciously in her ears. She could hear nothing except the rush of her own blood and the sensation of her stomach dropping. Across from her, horror painted Sou’s face as the gravity of his own words struck him forcibly.
“Joe…?”
“It was a slip of the tongue,” Sou said carefully. “There wasn’t ever anybody named Joe. I… I just messed up.”
Images flashed through Sara’s mind like a hellish gallery of saccharine nostalgia, vague glimpses of a laughing teenage boy with a wild mane of brown hair and a glittering array of golden jewelry. Brief pangs of a warm, unencumbered joy that made her chest ache as soon as they left. A hollowness so painful that she felt as though she’d rather crack all of her ribs and let her chest pour out onto the floor if only to make the feeling go away.
A smile, caught in a tangled cobweb of blood and glinting metal pipes.
And a screen taunting her and flashing bright, crimson light bright enough to overwhelm her brain and drain it of any thoughts she could ever have again.
“I’m a murderer, huh?” Sara said slowly. “I’m the murderer here?”
All of the scathing remarks that had come hurling from Sou’s mouth had been suddenly muffled.
“Who are you to call me a murderer when you were the one who convinced everyone to vote for Kai? The one who placed the fucking sacrifice card for Joe to find, the card that got him killed?”
Sou still refused to speak, face sapped of the little color that remained. Regardless, his expression was stony and his jaw was set.
“You like to think of yourself as a martyr, don’t you? The brave man who put his life on the line to save a little girl and tragically failed. How terrible it is for you that everything in your life seems to go wrong. You know, Kanna wouldn’t have died if you hadn’t put her life on the line in the first place.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, Sara’s heart dropped. They were far too cruel, far too vicious, far too terrible for anyone to say. But they’d been spoken, and there was something so satisfying about the way Sou’s eyes widened with a terror she’d never seen him wear before.
“Isn’t it so awful that you brought a little girl to your side just so you could manipulate her? I’m sure all of the circumstances in your sad little life forced you to take advantage of a fourteen-year-old who had just lost her sister. Of course, you had no other choice. I’m sure that insisting she was weak and demanding she be voted for up until the second you realized she didn't have the sacrifice card was such a carefully outlined plan. I’m sorry that you suddenly decided she wasn’t worth manipulating anymore after you took advantage of her in her most vulnerable state.” Everything was coming rapidfire out of Sara’s mouth, toward the man who seemed so small in front of her. “And even now, you’re going against her last wishes and trying to get all of us killed because you’re so fucking absorbed with yourself and your desperation to be the victim. Joe was such a better fucking person than you will ever be.”
There was no sound except for the lonesome whistle of a breeze through the garden. It occurred to Sara that Sou was still standing beneath the shade of Kanna’s flowers.
“I hope you haven’t forgotten that Joe was only seventeen. The blood of a child is on your hands, too.”
Finally, Sara fell silent, heaving for breath. Her shoulders slumped, blood running cool through her veins once more. Shame was quick to course through her chest, a thousand admonishments for the cruelty of befouling a little girl’s grave in such a way. It was never something Kanna would have wanted.
Sou was unnervingly still in front of her, shrouded in the shadow of his dead sister with his blazing gaze fixed steadily on the ground in front of him.
The sight of his face conjured up so much bitter conflict- fury and grief and a sour pity all vying for victory in Sara’s brain. He’d killed her best friend, he’d sworn to kill her, he was the embodiment of all good things gone devastatingly wrong… yet there was such a deep misery in his eyes that Sara couldn’t convince himself he was acting on his own free will. Here was a man puppeteered by the phantoms of his youth, who would die a death that was virtually inevitable from every direction.
How could she not pity him?
Sara took a hesitant step forward, garnering no reaction from the man in front of her. “Sou, I’m sorry.” She wasn’t, really, not when the images of Joe’s lifeless corpse had scorched themselves into her brain as painfully as when she’d first seen them, but what else could she say? “We’ve both- we’ve both gotten fucked over by this game. We aren’t ourselves. We’ve both done so many awful things to each other and to everyone else, but it’s not too late to try to make amends and get everyone out ali-”
She was abruptly cut off as Sou shoved her backwards and she immediately lost her balance. Before she could formulate a single thought, he’d lunged at her again with his full body weight, bringing her to the ground with him on top of her. She coughed heavily as the impact expelled the air from her lungs, writhing to get him off of her as she gasped for breath- and then she felt the delicately sharp edge of a blade pressed to her throat.
Sara went rigid, still heaving for breaths her lungs refused to take in, and slowly latched her gaze onto Sou’s. Any anger in his eyes that she’d seen before was trifling compared to the vicious, all-consuming rage that had unrecognizably twisted his features. His upper lip was tightly curled, his eyes bloodshot, sweat dripping from his bony cheeks.
Sara swallowed, loathing how sharply the knife pressed into her throat after any motion. Somehow, he’d gotten his hands on Kai’s knife. She could overpower him so easily, likely with only a quick flick of the wrist, but the blade was already threatening to draw blood and there was so much ferocity in his eyes-
“Don’t move,” Sou hissed through his teeth, panting for breath. “I’ll cut you if you make even one motion, stay fucking still.”
“Sou,” Sara breathed, trying to speak as quietly as possible, “put the knife down. Please. Just put it down.”
His face twisted for a second, expression unreadable, and he seemed to waver briefly. The pressure eased temporarily, his limbs slackened, and Sara tensed her muscles to move, and then in just as quick of an instant the scowl returned to his face and the knife pressed even harder into her neck.
“You’re still a child murderer. You’ve still taken so many innocent people and toyed with them just so you can have a laugh out of it. I don’t care if you say you’re trying to help us all get out, we both know you’re winning this game. Maybe you’ll drag it on a little longer, maybe you’ll worsen the suspense for the rest of us, but every single thing that’s happened in this game has been designed to be on your side.”
“Like you getting my best friend killed?” Sara rasped. All she could see was an endless smile stretching Joe’s lips, his face so cold and sallow with death, giving everything left in his dying body so Sara would have one final good memory of him. Her stomach turned with nausea when Sou’s face shifted back into focus.
“You’re the one who singled me out as an enemy from the start,” she continued, painstakingly aware of how close the knife was to her throat. “You’re right, you know? I wouldn’t be anywhere without my allies. But I don’t see how it’s my fault that you refused to be one of them and suffered for it.”
The pressure on the knife increased; she could feel blood beginning to bead.
“As if you haven’t fucked over your allies just as much as the rest of us!”
“You think I haven’t been trying,” Sara protested in such a sad, strangled little voice, “to get everyone out alive? Do you think I’m controlling what the floormasters are doing? This game is designed to kill everyone off so only one person makes it out. How the hell can you blame me for these sick, sadistic people doing their jobs too well?”
Sou spluttered for a second, the anger still lingering in his eyes, and leaned closer. “Because you’re enjoying it. I can see it in your eyes, you’re loving every single second of this shit. You chose to kill a little girl instead of an adult man because you wanted to.”
“Says the person who laughed aloud after condemning Kai to die,” Sara spat back. “You’re fucking cruel, and nothing I’ve done will stop you from being that way.”
When Sou paused for the second time, Sara didn’t hesitate. Swinging upward, she bucked her head into his and their skulls clashed together with a jarring impact. He cried out in pain and she took the opportunity to fully shove him off of her and make a grab for the knife in his hand. Sou clung to it tightly, knuckles whitening against the handle, but Sara’s years of kendo training ultimately prevailed and the knife came free with another choked gasp from Sou.
The force of the knife being wrested from Sou’s hand knocked him back onto the dirt, and Sara jammed her knee into his chest, pinning him to the ground with her full weight. He could do nothing but splutter, face already flooded with a sickly pallor. He was so weak, so small and terrible and cruel, the person who’d laughed as her best friend was sentenced to an execution that he never would have come close to deserving, and Sara raised her arm to bring the knife down into his chest.
And then the pathetic man trapped beneath her knee coughed out a laugh.
Sara’s arm went limp.
“Well done, Miss Sara,” he muttered through a mirthless chuckle. “The group’s peaceful victim of a leader strikes again.”
Sou coughed again, then spread his arms wide as though he was trying to make a snow angel. “Well? Don’t let me stop you. Haven’t I been your biggest target this entire game? I just tried to kill you, after all, but I knew you’d have a trick up your sleeve. You always do.” His lips stretched into something just barely resembling a smile. “Get me out of the way once and for all.”
A tremor snaked through Sara’s arm. Slowly, shamefully, she began to lower the knife to the ground.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Did I ruin the thrill of the kill? I was supposed to be begging for my life, wasn’t I? No, no, by all means, keep going. Plunge the knife into my heart, I know you’ve been aching to do it from the second you first saw me.”
Sara was wordless, too much adrenaline pumping through her veins for anything to make sense. The flowers in whose shade she’d been about to draw blood seemed to have keeled over far more than when they’d first entered the room.
She swallowed, blinked three times, then slowly got to her feet and stood back. Sou was eyeing her from the ground the entire time, the traces of a mocking smile tugging at the corners of his lips. He chuckled once more, almost to himself, then clambered to his feet and dusted himself off with remarkable composure. Sara didn’t miss the shaking in his legs when he regained his footing.
“I’m sure this is exactly what Joe would have wanted,” Sou said quietly, with just the slightest tinge of amusement. With that, he marched out of the room, not taking a single look back towards the rather lonely-looking plant in its center.
Sara took a deep breath, blinking the gusts of disturbed soil and cascading sunlight out of her eyes. As she marched back toward the comforting shadows of the dimly-lit hallway, she did her best to avoid the entangled mesh of vines climbing the walls. They had begun to look a little too familiar.