Timothy appeared to be dominating the bustling and dynamic streets of Cyber City by sprinting nimbly across their line of sight at a consistent pace. He hurried around like a fool, inspecting the gadget on his wrist, bending his arms forward.
"This stupid clock doesn't help me at all! It's consistently switching directions; this was a scam!" Two women repeatedly lined up and threw their sight from right to left, seeing him sprinting around on the same spot every other momentum, "Who's this weirdo? Does he not realize the "compass" always turns its needle north, away from where he's facing? And why is he not using the GPS instead?"
The other woman shrugged her shoulders, "What a moron..."
-
Timothy foxtrotted into the luminous street, vivid people circling around him. He could still not find his companions while holding the device's edges, trying to conclude his inability to follow directions.
"I feel more stupid than usual. Uh, this can't be right. I can't navigate in this city at all." He grappled his own forehead, doddering his head, baffled. "And the air feels unsteady. Is it because of pollution? No, there's something else wrong with this place that I can't seem to figure out." He peered into the distance, beholding the fascinating and well-spirited city. Something was happening at every building, house, or store.
Aurora supported Trinity as much as possible, but it wasn't easy. Her infection got in her way, and the longer she moved, the quicker she increased her chances of passing out on the floor and leaving Trinity behind.
But luck was on their side, and Aurora spotted Timothy in the distance, misplaced and abashed due to his lack of navigation skills. "It's him... Tim! Please, Trinity needs help!"
While Timothy rubbed the side of his cheek, he regulated some composure. But that immediately altered upon interacting with his wounded sister and ill friend.
-
An hour passed.
Timothy stood in the hallway outside the room, Aurora sitting on the chair before him. They got transported to a man named Denton Reese. The database they found approved him as a lone doctor, treating people to heal their wounds or provide them with new cybernetic equipment.
His business stands somewhat close to the outskirts but not too far from other citizens and close to more harmonious corners of the city.
Timothy seemed frustrated, clenching his fists and containing that rage and temper inside his thoughts. "Kate... Please, tell me what happened. Are you hurt too, or is it just Trinity?" he demonstrated himself as peaceful and considerate as possible, not to get riled up.
Her eyes dropped and faced the floor serenely, uneasy to talk about the event she and Trinity went through. "We found ourselves in the same, unusual room after entering Cyber Refuge. For a while, things went smoothly. We were on our way to the rest of you, but that's when a bunch of men surrounded us and considered us "outsiders" from another "world." We got attacked and nearly defiled, but some of Trinity's combat skills allowed us to escape," she peeped to the side with her eyes, "It was "eventful" I suppose, and we managed to outrun them, but then my illness came in the way, and I almost lost consciousness. Trinity helped me out. She knocked me to the side and took a bullet for me."
Aurora displayed her feeling of guilt. It was evident in her pessimistic eyes and her shivering body. She was becoming depressed, anxious, and displeased, "She would've been fine if I didn't have this "trivial" illness!" she was becoming exasperated, enraged, and impassionate, "Now, do you know why I didn't want you to come with me?! All I do is slow you down and endanger everyone's lives!"
Even though it happened recently, Aurora's face still burned when she thought of her helplessness, "If I didn't come with you! If I *didn't* agree with your demand to help me out! And if I at least had some useful talent to help you guys out, things would be different! I wouldn't need to be the one "protected" but the one *to* protect!"
Like a fiery stove heating up the teapot, her desperate aspiration and ambition to choose valuable — to be effective in supporting them — charred her heart and blew out the bonfire of her hope, rendering her defenseless, like a harmless butterfly, trying to open its wings to reach their wish of soaring through the air.
Her tears from her disabled condition — her powerless physique to help and be productive — swept her away like a tumbleweed, losing her inside a paralyzed, unshakeable void of emptiness that wouldn't become colored any time soon.
Those tears flushed her away through an emotional lake, forcing her to sweep away into a lifeless river where not a single life existed and only the atrocious memories ascended, "How can you think risking your *own* lives to save my illness is right?! Finding people to help, getting harmed in the process, and taking a bullet for someone as impotent as me is the correct choice!?"
Her thick yet soft-spoken voice, drumming through the room and stammering, fluttered through the silent corridors, filled Timothy with thousands of successive emotions in a flash, and once as if he became a rock unable to move or speak, the left-behind echoes of Aurora's morose and disheartened voice ceaselessly spun in his dome like a disk of a long and short sensitive melody.
"Kate..." Timothy fielded his palm on his torso, "Hey, what's gotten into you? I'm worried about everyone else too. Do you think I'm fine with seeing my *own* younger sister with a hole in her chest? I'm scared for her life. And if I lose her, I'll fall apart. I'll blame myself, despite knowing it wasn't my fault." He responded pleasantly.
"It's not *just* about you. I want to do this for everyone. But it was the "game master" who dragged us into this, breaking his promise of sending us to the *exact* location. You have to stop thinking everything's your fault. Besides, all of us knew the danger coming down here. Trinity knew as well, and she protected you because she knows her condition's more stable than you. If you got penetrated by that bullet — with the bacteria still in your body — you wouldn't make it. It would be a fatal wound."
He snagged Aurora's shoulder, trying to calm her down and evaporate the frustration and the grief cycling through her head, "Please, listen to me..." He suggested, believing he could retrieve her confidence.
But that's not what happened.
Instead, Timothy's eyes brimmed with astonishment and disturbance by the unexpected movement. He felt as if the time around him slowed and heard the continual noise of his arm getting smacked in the reverberation of his ears.
She slapped and knocked his arm away, making his eyes jolt and crushing him into a cycle of silence.
"Leave me alone!"
Aurora's sudden disappearance of her cheerful and hopeful personality quieted him as if his head got reduced to a blackout — a wheel of whispers — dragging his view onto her dashing down the hallway.
"Kate! Stop! It's dangerous!" he wanted to rush after her, but he couldn't leave his sister behind.
He became trapped in the core of two different problems; to stay with Trinity and wait for her to get better, not wanting to leave her behind on her own, and the other, the possibility of Aurora's life getting endangered outside in the criminal streets.
Never in his life has he met with two problems at once.
To be continued...