And there she was, suddenly, hooked up to beeping machines in a hospital room somewhere, filmed from above from the nurse’s monitor camera on the wall. Her eyes were closed. The beeping on the machines was slow and steady. It kept her chest rising up and down.
Her name in type across the video feed said JANE DOE, AGE ~17–19.
Charlie felt a moment’s relief just knowing she was still alive.
Then on the screen, Death appeared, a hazy pixelated character, cloaked and hooded. His skeletal hands held gardening shears with long blades, which he placed on either side of the real tubes running between Vanhi and the machines.
He looked at the screen and grinned.
Then he snapped the shears shut.
“Oh, no!” the crowd roared in unison.
The respirator shut off, and Vanhi’s chest stopped moving. The machines around her went crazy, their screens flashing warnings and dropping vitals. But no alarms went off. No nurses came. The camera switched to the nurses’ station, where they sat boredly, checking email and surfing the Web. The Game intercepted the alarm signals and squelched them before they reached the nurses, never to be heard.
The camera switched back to Vanhi. She was fading now, with a life meter over her head, ten little hearts in the top left corner, ticking down.