Chapter 13
Chapter
Thirteen
He’s been getting better at small talk over the last few days. So have I, to be fair. The first few times I spent my lunch in the observation room, there were a lot of nervous glances and awkward silences. Conversation is still a bit stilted between us, but the quiet has become more comfortable.
Now, I sit at the desk with the privacy screen on the observation window down, while he sits on the edge of his bed, picking at the offerings on his usual plastic tray.
He wears a medical robe, since it’s the only thing that doesn’t irritate his new eyes.
It took him days to stop blushing and apologizing over it every time I lowered the privacy screen.
I hold up my glass container. “Fried rice. Made it last night.”
“It looks much better than mine. You must be a good chef.” He pushes his own meal around with his plastic spoon, making a face.
The meals they give him never look much better than prison slop. I wish I could share my own food with him, but it’s not allowed; I checked after our first lunch together.
“I guess I’m okay. I’ve been doing it since I was young.
” Another flash of memory strikes me—of being a small child, struggling to churn butter in a kitchen warm with the scent of freshly baked bread and earthy herbs.
A basket of soft rolls placed in my hands for me to carry to the kitchen and set on the table.
My mother and I would sit—sometimes my father would join us, though he was often too busy—and we’d bow our heads while he led the prayer.
“Bless us, O Lord, and these, Thy gifts—”
X-16 lets out a hiss of pain.
I blink back to the present and realize I was murmuring the words to myself, fingers unconsciously toying with the cross around my neck. X-16 is bent over on the bed, a hand against his forehead. A light flickers overhead.
I’m on my feet in an instant. “Sixteen?”
“I-I’m all right. Just a headache. Sorry, um, what were you saying?” He lifts his head to look at me and winces again.
I hesitate, hovering over my chair instead of taking my seat. “Are you sure you’re okay? Is it an episode? A physical change?”
“No, no, it doesn’t feel like that. I don’t know why… Something is…” He winces, turning his head away.
I realize I’m still clutching at the cross around my neck and hastily tuck it beneath my shirt again. “I’m going to get Barnes. Alert one of the doctors—”
“No! No, please.” He turns back to me, wiping his face, blinking. A deep breath, and he focuses on me. “I-I’m fine. Really.”
I wait a beat, studying his face, but the furrow of pain in his brow has smoothed out. The light is steady overhead. After a couple seconds pass without anything unusual, I nod and sink into my seat again, returning to my meal.
But our conversation lulls, and it’s hard to eat when unease lingers in my stomach. What just happened? Why did it come on so suddenly, and pass just as quickly? The only things that changed were…
My prayer. And my cross.
My hands go still on the utensils, my eyebrows drawing together as I stare down at my no-longer-appetizing meal before lifting my eyes to the window. Sixteen picks at his own food, oblivious.
I want to tell myself that I’m paranoid. These surging memories and my glimpse of childhood relics have brought on a strange surge of religious paranoia. And yet… I can’t shake the sense of unease, no matter how hard I try.
I’m so preoccupied with trying to understand X-16 that the date almost sneaks up on me.
Almost.
But it’s more accurate to say that I manage to ignore it, for a little while.
I’m aware of it, creeping closer, like something in my peripheral vision that I try very hard to ignore.
Dread is a stone in my stomach, growing heavier every day, until finally one day I am forced to look at the calendar and realize that it’s almost here.
June sixth. 6/06. The very worst day.
When it finally arrives, I wake before my alarm and lie in bed, staring at the ceiling. Even if I hadn’t noticed the date, it feels like my body would know it.
Most news outlets and podcasts forgot about the Children of the Red Sun long ago, but the anniversary of the cult’s doomsday ritual always feels fresh to me.
I learned long ago that taking the day off and curling up in bed will only make it worse.
Being alone with my thoughts is the worst kind of torture, especially when I know they’ll always circle back to the same old refrain: Why did I survive?
Why me, and no one else?
So I drag myself up and to the kitchen, drink down a cup of coffee that tastes burnt and bitter on my tongue, and get ready for work. My thick black eyeliner feels more like warpaint than usual. Like bright colors on a poisonous frog, sending a silent warning: Do not approach.
It’s more likely because of the darker-than-usual scowl I’m wearing, but most people heed the message. The other security guards wave me through without a word, and nobody else approaches me.
Even Ellis, after bounding over with his usual enthusiasm, only wishes me a good morning before taking the hint and making himself scarce. Barnes takes one look at me and suggests I head to the CCTV room for the day, and for once, I don’t argue.
As I monitor the security cameras, my eyes keep wandering back to the monitor showing X-16’s cell, as they too often do. Guilt gnaws at me. I should go visit him, but… He’s always more observant than I want him to be, and I’m feeling especially raw today.
Yet when I watch him on the screen, he seems almost as despondent as I do.
He spends hours lying in bed, curled on his side with his hand pillowing his head, staring listlessly at the wall.
He doesn’t read, or eat, or drink as the hours pass.
I would think he was sleeping, but his eyes remain open in a blank stare.
The extra eye on his forehead is restless, rolling with anxiety.
Something is wrong. My twenty-six-year-old sorrows can wait. I push them down as far as I can manage and head to the observation room.
“Hey,” I say into the intercom as I sink into my usual seat.
“Hi, Willow.” Sixteen’s voice is subdued. He doesn’t sit up and face me like he usually does. Through the pane of glass, he appears even more listless and wan than he did on the screen.
“Did something happen? Any change in your condition?” I’m flipping through the folder on the desk even as I ask, scanning for any overnight incidents, but there’s nothing noted.
X-16 shakes his head. “No. Nothing like that.”
I set the folder down, frowning. “What’s going on, then? Talk to me.”
He rolls onto his back and props himself up onto his elbows. It’s not much, but it’s the most I’ve seen him move since I started watching the cameras this morning, which I take as an encouraging sign. “It’s nothing, really.”
“If it matters to you, it’s not nothing.”
“It’s just…” He hesitates, sucking his bottom lip between his teeth as if he’s not sure if he should say. I wait patiently, giving him time, and after a moment he sighs out a breath. “Bad things always happen on this day.”
A strange, foreboding shiver inches its way down my spine. His words are eerily similar to the thoughts I had when I rolled out of bed this morning. This day. It’s always a bad day. “You’re talking about the date?” I ask, wanting to make sure I’m not making assumptions.
He dips his chin in a nod.
“What…” I pause, wetting my lips. Dread has been pooling in my stomach all day, but now it seems on the verge of overflowing, a cold sensation crawling up the back of my throat like bile. “What about today? Is there some kind of significance?”
He couldn’t possibly know about the cult. He wasn’t there. I was the only survivor—other than the man who caused it, but I refuse to think of him as a survivor.
And Sixteen is younger than me. Would he even have been alive when the incident happened? I doubt it. Or if he was, he must’ve been very young—
Realization hits me like a premonition just before he speaks.
“Today is my birthday.”
Numbness settles over me.
“Hap-happy birthday,” I say, trying to sound normal even though I feel winded. I clear my throat. “How old are you?”
Yet a part of me already knows.
“Twenty-six, now.”
Twenty-six years ago, to the day.
6/06. The day that Sixteen was born was the very same one that I lost everything.
The day that the preacher decided it was time for us to die, because the end of the world had arrived.
“Rejoice,” he said, as we brought the poison to our lips. “The day has come. The Harbinger is here.”
The rest of the day passes in a daze. I excuse myself from X-16’s room and return to the CCTV room, where I stare blankly at the screens until my shift is over. Then I head home, eat leftovers without bothering to heat them up, and grab my laptop.
Some of the haze finally clears from my head once I’m alone. That strange and distant numbness is replaced with a burning need for answers.
So I do something I haven’t done in years: I open up the internet browser and search for The Children of the Red Sun Cult.
As much as that day occupies my mind, I don’t remember much. I was only six years old, barely self-aware, and I don’t think I realized something significant was happening until it was already over. My mind can only conjure that day in brief flashes.
My mother’s face: serene, smiling, as she handed me a cup. Juice, sweet with a strange aftertaste, filling my mouth and dripping sticky and red down my chin. An intense, cramping pain in my stomach, and my mother’s arms around me, her gentle voice singing me to sleep.
I remember pain, but I don’t recall being afraid. I don’t remember seeing the bodies fall around me. I was so small; I must have been one of the first to die.
The real nightmare started after I woke up again.
That I remember more than I want to, although it’s still in flashes.
A strange smell in the air, that bittersweet juice turning sour.
Lights in my face. Unfamiliar people picking me up off the ground, carrying me.
Crying for my mother. Seeing her face-down in the pew—
I shake the memories off. There’s no point in trying to remember.
I was too little to understand what was happening to me.
Too young to have absorbed much of the cult’s teachings.
I’ve avoided reading much about them in the years past. To be honest, I wrote it off as just another episode of religious hysteria.
Fanaticism gone wrong. Another crazy cult that thought the world was ending—and obviously, they were wrong.
But now I’m beginning to wonder if there was a grain of truth in it.
The news stories online focus on the mass suicide, as I expected. It hurts to read about it, especially today, but I press through the swell of pain and guilt and hunt for information on why.
Preacher Samuel Ashford led his flock to drink poison because he believed the end of the world was near…
Claimed he had seen signs that led him to think the arrival of biblical doomsday was imminent…
I read more and more, the knot in my gut twisting tighter with every reminder of that terrible day, but none of the articles provide much insight. Because of course, no one was left alive afterward to tell the truth of what happened that day. No one except for me.
And, as these articles remind me, one other: the preacher himself.