Survival Horror by Seanan McGuire

Author:Seanan McGuire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

The camera didn’t move. Artie sighed. “Okay, well, on the plus side, it’s not going to let us try an advanced puzzle before we clear out the basic ones.”

“Yeah, and on the negative side, we’re stuck here until we either get sucked into another dimension with an ancient evil—which is so Syfy Saturday night, I can’t even—or until we finish the whole game. How big is this thing?”

“I don’t know. A few gigabytes. And hey, we could always die of mysterious causes before we do either.” Artie began mousing around the screen, looking for something clickable.

I groaned. “Way to look on the bright side.”

“I try.”

I resisted the urge to strangle my cousin. It wouldn’t have done either one of us any good, and I couldn’t reach the keyboard from where I was stuck. “All right, while you find the next accessible puzzle, how about you tell me why a bunch of hidebehinds would be targeting you via evil video game. That doesn’t feel like the sort of thing that happens at random, you know?”

“I don’t know! I haven’t done anything!”

I smacked him in the back of the head.

“Ow!” Artie twisted as much as he could, trying to look at me. “What did you do that for?”

“You’re not thinking. You’re supposed to be the smart one. One of the smart ones. Smarter than your sister, or mine. So think. Why would someone be out to get you? What have you been posting on that forum of yours?”

“Nothing.” Something about his tone made it pretty clear that he was lying. I stayed silent. Artie sighed. “Nothing important. There’s a forum about cryptid injuries is all. You know, like ‘how do you patch a tear in the webbing between your fingers,’ or ‘what kind of mange treatments work for therianthropes.’ That sort of thing.” His voice took on a defensive note as he added, “It’s hard not being the dominant species. You don’t always know where to turn for information, you know? So sometimes we turn to each other.”

“What were you posting, Artie?”

He clicked a stripe in the wallpaper. The camera zoomed in, showing another knotwork puzzle, as he said miserably, “Sarah. I was posting about Sarah. How there was this Johrlac girl I knew, and she’d managed to hurt herself pretty bad, and did anyone know what I could do to help her get better.”

I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself from smacking him again. It wouldn’t have done any good, and more, it wouldn’t have been fair. He was asking the same questions we’d all been asking for months. He’d just taken them to a new forum. The fact that he might have gotten us killed in the process was almost irrelevant.

“I guess maybe someone could have gotten upset by me talking about taking care of a cuckoo like she was a person, even though she is a person,” Artie concluded morosely. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know you didn’t mean to,” I said. “Given that there’s a cuckoo

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