Sometimes a single cut from a film keeps replaying in your mind. Mine was like that. Two people falling before my eyes into a pit that had been savagely torn open in the ground, replaying over and over with disturbingly vivid actors at the very last conscious threshold of my half-awake mind. On the hologram, the task "Learn the rules" had been checked off.
Rules… Was the rule death?
If so, why were they trying to impose order on anything?
Why would one feel the need to regulate the life of a dead person?
While I was floundering among questions, Sis seemed unable to shake off the same horror.
"This… I can't believe I'm alive," she murmured in a low, broken voice.
"My mind… it's a mess… You…"
I felt her looking at me from where she sat.
"Do you know anything?" she asked, her voice crushed under terror.
I answered by helplessly shaking my head.
At that moment, my eyes drifted toward the scene in front of us.
The man called Mert had collapsed right there, in the middle of the area. Then he lay back. We could hear him muttering from where we sat.
But we chose not to listen.
"I'm hungry," I said, forcing the words out.
"I'm thirsty…"
Sis didn't respond. Perhaps she was measuring and weighing things in her head.
"I wonder how long this road is," she asked, resting the back of her head against the wall.
"How many meters?"
"How many kilometers?" I corrected instinctively.
She merely nodded.
"Where does it end?" she whispered.
"I don't know…"
Perhaps because there was no one else to talk to, I said this to Sis:
"We only played a deadly game, that's all…"
My breath lodged itself in my chest.
"There were no rules… Only consequences. We just looked at the screen. And they—whatever their reason—wanted to kill us for pleasure, like savages, like cannibals."
As I reached the last words, my anger surfaced.
"Why?" I asked with what little courage I had left.
"For what? You know… You know they said they were going to heal us."
My voice trembled.
"Where is it? There's nothing here but a trap."
As she listened to me, her eyes were fixed on Mert's head, which kept turning from us to the space behind.
"There has to be a reason," she said.
"There must be a reason."
No matter how much one wants to display rationality in situations like this, it never truly succeeds.
Without waiting any longer, I stood up.
"Where?" Sis's icy voice quivered at the same time.
My legs knew the ground.
"To the group leader," I replied without turning around.
A brief silence followed.
"For what? Do you think they care about us?"
Her voice rose a notch.
"No," I said simply.
"But the game…"
That was when I felt the urge to turn back.
"We played it. That damn, bloody game. If there's even a single chance left… maybe they'll at least tell us where the toilets or the food are…"
As I was focused on Sis, this time a bitter, broken voice rose from my left.
"I know…"
I turned toward the sound and focused.
It was Mert who spoke.
"You'll have to walk kilometers to reach food and toilets," he said, his voice carrying the hidden pain of someone shaken to the core.
"You won't want to keep going along the way. You'll want to turn back. You'll say there's nowhere here…"
He pushed himself upright on his hands and sat up.
"Even if you go through all of that, believe me…"
His elbows were trembling.
Sis looked at him more carefully.
"Look," she said to Mert.
Mert turned to her with half-living eyes. Through his cracked lips, his faint voice asked,
"What do you want?"
Sis spoke with a thoughtful expression in her eyes.
"There must be something you know here. Something you know more than we do. This game you played… do you know why you played it?"
A heavy silence followed.
"How is it played? Do you know anything about its rules? Or… or had you ever played it before?"
Mert's lips were sealed shut as if with wax.
"Yes," I cut in.
"We can't endure this horror anymore. If you know something, you have to tell us."
At my words, Mert laughed as if a fragment of madness spilled from his lips.
Sis's face had grown serious as well.
"Don't stray from the group," he said at last, hesitation clinging to his tone.
"And also…" he added, ignoring our questions.
"Be careful while walking."
"This is a long road," I murmured.
"A city," Mert said with a nervous laugh.
"And more than that… a slaughtering city. A savage city…"
As his elbows trembled again, he continued,
"Anything can come across your path. Everything you see here…"
He paused, as if the weight of it was too much.
"Exists solely to destroy you."
"A single patch of sky?" I asked myself in that moment.
Even that?