The girl turned away from the Doctor and ran into the infinite red-black forest. Across the table, the Doctor allowed herself a little smile she knew the girl could not see from behind her VR glasses they were both wearing.
Running away was a good sign: it meant she had understood the question and remembered enough to know she would rather face the forest than the answer. It was more of a reaction than the Doctor had gotten from her outside the game. More than anybody had since the girl had seen whatever she had seen.
The Police had told the Doctor they needed to know what that had been. The Doctor knew the girl needed to share the weight of it, one way or another, before it crushed her.
Steeling herself, the Doctor followed her into the forest, which had been a brilliant green before the game adjusted itself to what it could sense of her mental state. The deeper they went the more it would change, and the Doctor had disabled the filters in the neural networks that dreamed the world. By the time she caught up with the girl they'd have both traveled through horrors nobody but them had ever seen. The Doctor hoped that they'd have enough common ground then to face the girl's private ones.
Far ahead of her came a faint indescribable scream no human had ever heard until software had rolled a million dice to seed mathematics configured by a terrified girl's brain. The Doctor's throat seized closed with terror for the first time in the long night.
She ran faster - towards the scream.