“How much farther?” she asked for the millionth time.

“I don’t know, hopefully not much farther,” her sister answered again.

“How long have we been here? How long have we been walking?” she kicked a piece of rock as she passed it, and it predictably shattered into a hundred smaller chunks.

“I don’t remember. It’s blending together.” Her sister sighed, the steady sound of two pairs of feet faltering for a second as she thought.

“Don’t you think we would have found our way back by now, if it’s been long enough to forget?” she wondered more to herself than to her sister, staring out at the dusty grey horizon. “Maybe… maybe it isn’t even there anymore. Maybe we’re the only un-broken things here. Maybe we’ll never get out again. Maybe we’re just gonna turn to dust like everything else in here.”

Her sister looked back over her shoulder. “You’re really morbid, you know that?”

“Yeah…” she turned forward again. The march was depressing enough without existentialism.

The pair passed and climbed over miles and miles of crumbling buildings, slowly dissolving, as everything else had, into dust. The remains of the city spread outward in every direction, farther than they could see, fading into the distance.

Her sister insisted she knew where she was going, but she thought they were going in circles. She remembered The Source fondly, it was her first and most treasured memory of this world. A beautiful, impossible fountain. Hundreds of feet tall and separated into multiple layers of flowing white water, all seeming to stem from a square pillar with a waterfall pouring out of it. The whole thing had been extremely recognizable, and surrounded by equally unique buildings.

Of course, that was before everything had broken. Now it could be anywhere, since everything looked the same. It had been in the city center, but did the city even have a center anymore? And if it did, was it in the same place? As she wondered and stared at the dust, it began to swirl and jump. In seconds, the dust built itself back into a plain grey cube, perfect on all sides, which began the slow process of breaking down into dust all over again.

She sighed. Her sister sighed.

Something else sighed behind them.

Spinning on her heels, her sister pulled a sharp bit of rusted, crumbling metal out of the tattered rags that had once been pants and shoved her back, away from the silent thing that had shambled up to them.

How had it snuck up on them? The sound of the dust must have masked it. She screamed as it’s many faces, hundreds of skin colors and eye shapes, every possible combination of facial features all clipping over and through each other, opened their mouths and lunged forward. The wireframe teeth sunk into her sister's arm, pushing the model in every direction at once.

Her sister jabbed the thing with her makeshift knife, knocking one of the many forms away from the rest. It was enough. The stabbed form rubberbanded back into the rest, tearing the living corpse apart from the inside and converting into thousands of infinite planes for half a second before it winked out of existence.

She grabbed her sister’s arm and ran, dozens more of the broken husks shambling out from behind the nearby “buildings.” It was too late. She knew it was too late. She could feel her sister’s arm bending and snapping in a million directions in her hand. She could hear her sister screaming, begging her to let go and leave her behind. Her sister was Breaking.

There wasn’t any room in her head for thinking, there was only running. Running and screaming. She had to keep moving. She had to-

Her foot hit dust that wasn’t solid. When she put her weight on the ground, which was covered in a thin layer of dust, there was no ground. Her leg went right through it, dragging the rest of her down with it, and her sister down after her.

Suddenly she couldn’t breathe. The air wasn’t air, it was liquid. She was sinking through water. Jet black water. And then, just as suddenly, she could breath again as the water ended and she fell down.

And down.

And down.

And down.

 

The rock pillar she landed on was soft, but not soft enough. She heard her leg snap below her, and then she was on the ground. She could see the water above her now, and in fact she could hear it all round her like a hundred waterfalls. A hundred, jet black waterfalls. That were flowing upwards and onto the ceiling.

The Source. She had made it to the source. Years of marching through the dead city had finally paid off, they were here, she and her sister-

The thing that had once been her sister shambled to it’s feet. She watched it twitch and shake, Broken and corrupted. A hundred feet away, on a separate rock pillar below her, it turned it’s head and it’s hundreds of empty, expressionless eyes turned her blood to ice.

The terminal. She had to get to the terminal. She had to log out. Crawling now, ignoring the pain in her leg, she tried to ignore the sound of the living corpse behind her too but it unnerved her as she desperately clawed at the ground and dragged herself towards the huge square pillar, towards the now upwards-flowing waterfall pouring out of it.

A pre-recorded jingle signaled the terminal opening, it had realized she was there, she was so close-

 

In a room filled with thousands of black, darkened glass pods, two pods glowed green. Two pods, next to each other and the only ones still functioning, held the bodies of two sisters.

Until one sister thrashed in the pod for a few seconds, and that pod turned black. And then the other sister, only minutes later, thrashed and died too.

 

The administrator’s terminal, a rectangular panel of light floating in midair at the center of the fountain that was The Source, displayed six letters to the two Broken husks that stood silently and mindlessly next to it. They held hands and walked on, with no purpose or reason or thought, just for the sake of walking, as the terminal asked if they wanted to log out.