V2Ch4-The Witness

Mina awakened, blinked her eyes at the sunlight streaming in through the window, and smiled.

She was still smiling softly, looking through the window at the early morning light, when her sister stirred beside her a few minutes later.

“You seem happy, sis.”

“I had a nice dream,” Mina said. “James was there.”

Yulia half-smiled in return. “Was he alright?”

Mina snorted. “He seemed alright. He was actually worried about us.” She frowned for a moment, as if just then realizing that it had been only a dream. “That was the best sign. Wherever he was, however he was doing, he had space to worry about us.”

Then she noticed the population counter. She’d seen it when she first woke up, but she hadn’t really noticed it until her mind left the dream world. [3,396/3,397 Survivors]

The numbers don’t match, she thought in a daze. Then: Something’s seriously wrong.

Someone had died during the night on the very first day. It has to be murder, right? No, maybe it was an accident. She could hope, at least.

“Sweet, let’s get ready for the day and get outside as quickly as we can,” Mina said.

She didn’t want to alarm her sister, but she wanted—no, needed!—to find out what had happened. Maybe it was an accident, she told herself again.

Both sisters rushed through the application of makeup, Mina giving Yulia side-eye until the latter finished. Then they stormed outside, dressed in their warmest clothes. Yulia was looking at Mina curiously. She definitely knew that something was up from how Mina had rushed her, but Mina was hoping she hadn’t noticed the change to the population counter. She didn’t want Yulia alarmed unless there was a good reason for it.

Maybe they would find out that someone had gone for a moonlit stroll and slipped on the ice.

But then again, maybe not.

As they left the little building where they were staying, they saw a crowd of around thirty people had gathered. Mina took in the crowd for a moment, noticed how their breaths fogged the air as they spoke among themselves, and how they all appeared to be looking at something in their center. Then, hoping not to stand out, Mina and Yulia gently tried to insert themselves in the closer circle.

Mina was a bit less than graceful; with her belly as swollen as it was, she waddled more than walked. But fortunately, people weren’t pushing and shoving. They were staring, quietly murmuring among themselves, at a thick greatcoat that lay on the ground. Mina saw immediately that there was a thick layer of dried blood around the neck, staining the otherwise pure black with an ugly reddish-brown.

Her first, absurd, thought was that now that coat would go to waste. It could have kept someone warm, but some careless person had spilled blood all over it.

As the reality hit her, she felt a little twinge of nausea at her own thought process. Someone died in that coat! I wouldn’t want to wear it unless I was freezing to death.

Then she wondered: Where is the body? Surely someone was murdered, based on the population count and this obvious physical evidence. But what happened to the body?

“Excuse me, pardon me, comin’ through!” A business-like male voice from Mina’s left side caused her to step aside. A moment later, a man stepped through the gap that she’d left.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” he said, flashing her a friendly smile.

She forced herself to smile back at the stranger. His sweetheart, she wasn’t.

He turned and moved toward the coat, and she couldn’t help wondering who he was.

Just an inch or so taller than her, around fifty, bald as a cue ball, with a thin mustache and olive-toned skin. Wearing a greatcoat like the victim’s, but in deep blue rather than jet black. Despite the fact that he was now crouching over a dead man’s coat, he seemed to brim with confidence. As if he’d seen this all before.

Perhaps he had.

The bald man rose. He flashed a badge from one of his coat pockets.

“I’m Detective DaSilva,” he said. “Since I seem to be the only law enforcement officer anyone could find in here, I’ll be taking charge of this investigation. Does anyone know where we can find a medical examiner or other medical professional?”

Someone standing behind him tentatively raised his hand but seemed too shy to speak up. So Mina caught DaSilva’s eye and pointed behind him. DaSilva turned and saw the bashful young man.

“You, go fetch me whoever you can,” DaSilva said. “Next, I’d like to take witness statements. Anyone who saw anything or believes they know anything that might be pertinent to the investigation, please step forward. Everyone who doesn’t know anything or hasn’t seen anything, please disperse.”

Mina didn’t want to stand out any more than she had to on day two of Orientation, but she also felt that knowing what was going on in the investigation of this murder could be directly relevant to her safety and Yulia’s. So she was reluctant to leave.

Most of the others started to walk away, but she stood her ground. She quietly asked Yulia to walk back to the inn on her own, but her sister gave her a stubborn look.

“I don’t want to leave you,” she mouthed.

“Fine,” Mina whispered. “Just stay out of people’s way.”

Once all but a few were gone, DaSilva looked at the four people surrounding him and said, “Alright. Who’s first?”

As he looked at Mina, a young Black woman with her hair in cornrows came running up.

“You were, ah, looking for, ah, a medical examiner?” she asked, panting.

He looked at her quietly for a moment, then nodded.

“Are you she?” he asked.

“I’m new, but yeah. I haven’t done a lot.”

He sighed. “And I know we don’t have the kind of equipment you’d like to work with.” He pointed to the neck of the greatcoat on the ground. “We know that this person bled a significant amount from the neck just from the stain there. I’m hoping you can enlighten me on the injuries, whether they were fatal and any other likely wounds besides the neck.” He paused, then spoke again as if in an afterthought. “By the way, I’m Detective Leon DaSilva.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Adelaide Davis.”

They shook hands, and then he turned away from the medical examiner. “The first question I have for my witnesses, since I was called here a while after the coat was found, is where the rest of the blood is. And the body. If anybody knows.” He looked around as if hoping someone would raise his hands to tell him that.

“I f-f-found the c-coat,” a voice said.

Mina looked at the figure, and Detective DaSilva turned around to see her too. A small, tanned blonde woman, around two inches shorter than Mina’s height. Early twenties, by Mina’s guess. She stuttered with either cold or nervousness. Mina could easily have believed either explanation, since the woman was wearing shorts and a midriff-baring shirt, hugging her arms against her chest.

“Is this the place where you found it?” DaSilva asked.

The woman shook her head.

“Show me where,” DaSilva ordered immediately.

The few people who remained around DaSilva and the medical examiner, including Mina and Yulia, followed the blonde woman. She walked through the space between two of the inn-like buildings, and she led them to a patch of snowy ground that was covered in reddish-brown.

“The coat was over here,” she said, gesturing at the ground.

“I can see that,” DaSilva replied. “Thank you. What was your name, young lady?”

“Cara Dahlhaus,” the blonde woman said.

“Cara, pleasure to meet you,” he said. The detective turned back to the others. “Any of the rest of you here when this discovery happened? Or see anything additional?”

One of the two men with them shook his head.

The other, a dark-skinned man with close-cropped black hair, said, “I was with Cara when she made the discovery.”

DaSilva looked hard at him. “You were with her. And the coat wasn’t hidden at all?”

The man shook his head.

Mina heard Detective DaSilva mutter something like, “So much for the person who discovered the body,” to himself. His voice trailed off so that she couldn’t hear the last few words after “body.”

Then he cleared his throat. “Alright. And nobody saw a body? Not even any parts of a body besides blood?”

More head-shaking.

Then a silky voice interrupted the conversation.

[Good morning, everyone! Congratulations to all of you on surviving the first night. Please prepare yourselves for the first of our challenges. The winners will receive provisions as a prize, so you will want to do well here! There will be a timer in your System interface counting down from now until the challenge begins.]

DaSilva looked extremely irritated at the interruption. “Alright then. I suppose you all can go if you have nothing additional to say. We seem to be on a timer again, and I don’t suppose this ‘System’ waits for law enforcement to do its job. Cara, I will want to get a written statement from you as soon as we can. Are you available later today?”

She nodded.

“Good, good.” He appeared to be distracted by something hanging invisibly in the air. “You stay in which building?”

While Dahlhaus was giving her answer, Mina looked to the corner of her vision, and she saw that a timer had appeared while she was focused on DaSilva and Dahlhaus. As she watched, it ticked down.

[00:07:32]

I’m not ready for whatever this is, she thought to herself. Nor is Yulia. But they would have to be. Then she noticed that the witnesses besides herself and Yulia were walking away.

“And what did you two stay for?” DaSilva’s voice had a slight air of menace now. “Just to catch a glimpse of the investigation? Or did you witness something you didn’t want to share in front of the others?”

Mina had already thought through her response.

“Forgive me for not sharing in front of the others,” she said. “I just have a suggestion, based on my understanding of how the System works. Whoever killed this person would have received experience from it. They might have leveled up already, and there won’t be a lot of people who will have done that on the first night. You could get volunteers using Identify to figure out who leveled up on the first night. It might help narrow your suspect list down a bit.”

“Hn.” DaSilva grunted, but it sounded affected to Mina. Like he was trying to pretend he was unimpressed. “Well, I suppose I’ll look into it. You two had better get back to the center of this little settlement before the proctor comes.” He looked at the medical examiner. “Adelaide and I will see what we can make of this scene.”

Mina and Yulia returned to the settlement, and they saw that a much larger crowd had gathered now. No one was standing near the greatcoat, but everyone was chattering. Some, Mina could hear, were talking about the murder. Others were focused on the challenge ahead of them.

As the timer ticked down, Mina explained to Yulia why she’d felt the need for the two of them to learn what had happened to the murder victim.

“The police were already imperfect in the world we knew,” Mina said. “Now we have to try and take care of ourselves. If we can, I would like to help Detective DaSilva track down this killer. Otherwise, we could end up next.” She sighed. “I was hoping I could do that without making us stand out, but I don’t know if I’ve come close to succeeding. The killer might think we witnessed something now.”

“I think you did the right thing, sis,” Yulia said. “That detective seemed pretty clueless. It was nice of you to give him a hand.”

Mina found herself laughing in little snorts at that. “Hopefully, aha, not as clueless as you think.” She shook her head.

They turned to face the crowd again. More people had poured out of the buildings as the last minute began ticking down on the clock. This included the self-appointed leader who had been practicing his public speaking yesterday by assigning rooms.

And then Mina suddenly realized the proctor was among them. That same masked figure in green and red that they had seen yesterday. She was just there, standing atop the greatcoat that no one else had been willing to go near. Mina didn’t see anything until there was a presence in her peripheral vision.

How can they do that? She wondered.

[Thank you for gathering so well, residents of Earth-73! Nearly all of you are here.]

The masked figure’s head moved; she seemed to be looking down.

[On second thought, perhaps all of you are here. Someone was quite unlucky on the first night, I suppose.]

“Hey!” someone yelled. “That shit’s not funny! One of us is dead, and what are you going to do about it?!”

The proctor straightened up.

[It is not my concern what the population of the Orientation chooses to do to each other in here. I am not law enforcement. As long as you follow the rules I set, I will not interfere. However, if you interrupt me again, Jeffrey Danvers, I will kill you myself.]

There was a quiet rush of wind from a collective gasp at that.

The self-appointed leader tried speaking up next, much more politely and with a winning smile. “I’m sorry, proctor, we understand you’re not the police, but couldn’t you at least tell us who killed this person? Our actual law enforcement is working on it, but any information from you would help.”

Mina looked to the crowd, to see if anyone reacted to the prospect of the proctor passing on information to the humans. There were a few reactions, but it was hard to read, and then the proctor spoke and changed the focus of the tension completely.

[No further interruptions of this announcement will be tolerated.]

The proctor seemed to ignore the substance of what the leader had said. She sounded irritated, as if she didn’t think they were taking her seriously. Mina looked at Yulia and put a finger to her lips.

She felt certain that the next person who spoke up other than the proctor would suffer a horrible death. The System and its representatives hadn’t outright lied about anything yet.

Fortunately, everyone clammed up at that.

[The first challenge will be a marksmanship competition. The System will supply each participant with a bow and a handful of arrows. You can keep the bows and any unused arrows for future use. You are to organize yourselves into teams of ten to twelve people. There will be no time limit in shooting. Each team will get to fire a total of 24 shots. The teams that perform best will receive food and access to better dwellings than those we initially provided.]

[There is another thing you should know. Although we provided food for you in your current dwellings, it’s not plausible that the food provided could last for more than a week. Therefore, failing to participate in these competitions could diminish your ability to obtain food.]

It’s starting to feel as if the System wants us to kill each other, Mina thought. Despite what the proctor said on the first day, that would be the easiest way to survive here. Kill people who win and steal their food. Right? And now she’s made explicit that there are no penalties… She wondered how James was holding up. If this Orientation had already included one death, and the proctor hadn’t batted an eye, there was no telling how his Orientation was going.

The proctor paused, and Mina saw there was a young Hispanic woman raising her hand.

[Go ahead and ask your question.]

“Thank you, ma’am,” the woman said. She looked very nervous. “Are we allowed to use magic?”

[Excellent question. Absolutely. But individual bursts of magic count as a single shot out of your 24, just like your arrows. Are there any other questions about the competition?]

There was silence.

[Very well. You will have a quarter of an hour to pick your team members. Stand with your group as the timer concludes to be recognized as one of them.]

The timer reappeared in the corner of Mina’s vision. [00:15:00]

Then she noticed that the proctor had disappeared again.

And a thin bead of sweat trickled down Mina’s neck. Her worry about the murderer on the loose disappeared, and she became much more concerned about the present moment. What kind of people will want to team up with me and Yulia?