3

Release Day + 422

“He’s beginning to show signs of—”

What was that? Another voice? It was different this time. Different from the last ones. Pressure weighed down his body, pressing him into the surface of a mattress.

“Brain activity is normalizing. He should be…”

“Yes, thank you.”

More voices, fading in and out of the dark. The voices of his family, coming to visit. Here, then not.

Where? Where am I?

“It’s okay, Rian.” He recognized the voice of his uncle, weighted with grief. A hand, clasping his. “You’re gonna be okay.”

He couldn’t think; it took too much effort, like he was trying to rise and break through a surface of water to breathe and regain his strength, but he couldn’t muster the strength to rise up in the first place. A paradox, casting his mind into darkness again.

White light—Rian struggled to open his eyes against it. Everything was a blur. Where was the incredible world that had awaited him? Wasn’t this it? It didn’t seem like much, but at least he was comfortable. Warmth, after the cold of the alleyway.

Alarms began to chime softly. Someone hurried out of the room. “He’s waking up! Call for…”

Moments passed in fractured continuity, light and sounds intertwining with silence before bursting forth again into clarity. A man dressed in white shone a bright circle into Rian’s left eye.

“Rian?” the man said, his voice muffled. “Can you hear me? Blink if you can hear me.”

The beep of a heart monitor pinged incessantly. Rian tried to swallow and gagged. He blinked.

Everything blurred again. Suddenly there were a dozen people standing over him. He lifted his arm, felt wires and tubes pulling back.

“Rian,” the doctor said, leaning over him. “You’re waking up from a coma. Don’t sit up just yet.”

“A…coma?” His voice was thick, unwieldy, but still working. “No, I was just—” Like a shot of adrenaline, Rian felt his body kick into gear, the fog around his mind lifting. The hospital room and the doctor’s face sharpened into relief.

“Do you feel all right?” the doctor said.

“Yeah,” Rian said, nodding. There was no pain, at least, but...how long had he been like that, fading in and out?

“It can take a few days for cognition to return completely, so take it slow.”

Quietly, dreading the answer, Rian asked, “What day is it?”

The doctor, a middle-aged fellow with grizzled hair, set his jaw before he spoke. “It is January 2nd—”

Wow, two months of his life, gone like that. But at least it wasn’t—

“2042,” the doctor said.

Rian’s stomach plummeted like he’d swallowed a bag of rocks. Two years? No, almost a year and a half. Gone.

With a humorless laugh, he breathed out.

Okay. So he’d lost a bit of time. That was fine. He was just grateful to be alive and mostly intact. Or maybe he was just dissociating while trying to process all of this, the weight of it all failing to hit him squarely. A year and a half, really gone? He didn’t feel much older. Although, as odd as it sounded, he’d missed his own birthday. He’d turned twenty-one and hadn’t even known it.

Steadily it all came rushing back: the alleyway, the man cornering him, the headset. And…

A memory—of a vampiric butler and that demonic, horned woman. A dream more vivid than any he’d ever had. But among all the things flooding his consciousness now, there remained one like a splinter painlessly lodged in his chest, waiting for him to pull it free.

His mom.

Rian’s breath caught. “Where’s my phone?”

On the day of Project Mirage Online’s release, the assailants who stole Rian’s headset had left him with a concussion so severe that his brain had begun to bleed. It was thanks to the bystanders nearby, who’d promptly called for an ambulance, that he survived.

The surgeons had managed to drain the excess blood from his brain in time, but not before he’d entered a coma. Even after he’d stabilized, it seemed his body had refused to wake. A part of his brain, he learned, had been destroyed from the attack—not a part which affected everyday functioning, but which had kept him from regaining consciousness. And so he’d been placed on a wait list for neurosurgeon to perform an experimental procedure.

Constructed from bio-engineered material, a neural implant was installed to bridge a certain area of his brain. The device was perfectly innocuous. Running on the natural glucose in his body, it required no external power and had integrated seamlessly. And yet, at first, it seemed the procedure had failed. For reasons no one could explain, Rian had remained in a coma for almost a year and a half—unusually long for the severity of his injury. And now, for some equally unexplained reason, Rian had finally woken up.

Thankfully, the doctor told him after a round of cognition tests, there was little to no impairment resulting from the event. He was expected to make a full recovery.

Weeks passed. As harrowing as everything was, he had still retained his optimism to the surprise of the medical staff as he went through physical rehabilitation. Not many people could come through a traumatic experience like he had and remain positive.

Yes, he’d missed his chance to experience Mirage on launch day, but he was grateful that he would have the chance to play it at all.

And, yes, with the neural implant he was technically a cyborg now, which was rad as shit.

But everything else was most certainly not rad. When he checked his social media to see all that he’d missed, the reality of his loss began to hit him. Most of it was small stuff: He had missed the ending to an anime he’d been following for years. One of his online friends had gotten married.

And he’d lost his world record for Shadow Spirits.

His speedrun wasn’t even on the leaderboards yet, as he’d never had a chance to submit the run for review. But now, when he checked, his time would’ve been sitting at fourth place. Three other people had beaten his record while he was in a coma.

He sat back in the hospital bed. It was strange to think that everything else had continued on without him for so long, that the world had passed him by, and now he was suddenly back. It was bit disconcerting to think that probably none of his friends outside of his family knew he was awake and functioning again, but that hell-of-a “I’m back!” social media post could wait. His family had posted updates about him to their own accounts, but none of them outside of his mom had any connection to his online presence, and she hadn’t posted anything. None of his friends knew, right now, that he was even alive.

But that was no way to think. All these self-pitying thoughts were just distractions from what he’d truly lost.

He’d lost his apartment. His assailants had never been caught. And his mom…

His mom had gone missing.

Four days after he’d been committed to the hospital, Emily had disappeared from her home. Of all the things that had happened, when he learned of it, this came closest to breaking him. But he reassured himself and remained steadfast. There was no confirmation of her death, just that she had somehow vanished.

How her personal nursing staff had let this happen on their watch was completely beyond him. It was sheer, utter negligence. She had to’ve been kidnapped; there was no way she was getting around on her own, due to her illness. In the few days before she disappeared, the nurses and doctors noted that her condition had deteriorated—due to the stress of what had happened to him.

The first wave of rage swept through him. Those assholes who’d followed him to the alleyway, it was their fault this was happening, their fault that he hadn’t been around to keep track of his mom.

They had set him up, somehow. They had known the delivery route, and they’d known when the package containing his headset was coming, because they knew who he was. One of them had known his stream name.

Sorry, Cob, one of them had said.

He grit his teeth. If his mom weren’t missing, the first thing he would’ve done was—

Missing.

Whose voice had said that?

His heart skipped as the memory cut through everything else in his thoughts.

The two people from his dreams. Not the short butler who had called himself Corvis, but the other one. When you wake up, she’ll be missing. The horned woman, what else had she said? That she would be with her.

He shook his head. He wanted to yell, what the hell is wrong with you? at his brain. Over a year in a coma, and this was what he’d dreamed up? Had he been trying to imagine what Mirage was like? He’d probably just subconsciously overheard conversation from his family when they were at his bedside, and his brain had tried to construct a dream from it during the coma. An odd dream, for sure, but he’d always had a pretty good imagination.

And yet, with low-burning fear igniting inside him, he couldn’t resist the urge to slowly roll up his left sleeve—where the woman had burned a symbol into his flesh.

He looked.

Nothing there. Of course. Why was he even entertaining a ridiculous thought like this? It was just a dream.

He needed to focus. Something had happened to his mom while he was asleep. When he spent a day looking into it, scrolling through his phone with dread and fear welling up in his heart, he found the missing person’s case opened by the police. Nothing had been resolved; the case of his mother’s disappearance was still open. As such, Emily’s will hadn’t gone into effect, and both of their funds were running out.

Her house had been bleeding money this entire time. With no resolution to his mom’s case or status, the mortgage payments were still going through. At first Rian was furious that none of his family had stepped in to help, but there was nothing they could’ve done. The house couldn’t be sold until Emily—or her body—turned up, or until the house went into foreclosure when the bank account tied to it ran dry. There was a minimum amount of time, on the order of years, before anyone else could access her funds while she was still a missing person.

On the bright side, Rian’s uncle had at least offered to house him when—or if—he woke up, but that was merely a fallback plan. Rian knew exactly what he needed to do right now.

When he passed the final round of cognition tests and completed rehabilitation, the hospital discharged him. With nothing but his phone, keys, wallet, and the clothes upon him, he headed toward the bus stop through the rising snow. With a strange sense of déjà vu, he stepped onto the bus as it rolled up, then found a seat by the front.

He checked his pockets again, just to make sure they were there: the spare set of keys he had to Emily’s house. All his belongings from his old apartment—namely his computer, his expensive gaming chair, and his beloved mechanical keyboard, among other things—had apparently been thrown out and dropped off at the house merely days after his incident. As much as he wanted to curse his landlord for evicting him while in a coma, he was grateful his stuff hadn’t ended up in the dumpster.

Picking up his belongings, however, wasn’t the main reason he was heading there.

There had to be something the police had overlooked inside the house. Something that everyone else had missed. Even if they hadn’t found anything there regarding Emily’s whereabouts, no one knew her better than he did.

A voice at the back of his mind told him it was pointless. That there was no chance he’d find any sort of clues the pros hadn’t. That it was ridiculous of him to assume there was anything special about him simply because he was related to her.

That he should just give up and find a way to move on.

That wasn’t going to happen. He was going to take a look for himself.