Apocalypse Stockpiler: My Ex-wife gets nothing

Chapter 6

The red cloth was soft with age.

Jayden lifted it out of the box with both hands, the way a person carries something that might wake up. It was heavier than it appeared. Slowly, he unwrapped the folds.

A pendant lay in his palm.

It was jade, the color of deep water, about the size of a walnut. It was smooth as a river stone, with a thin silver loop at the top and a cord so old that it had frayed to threads. A tiny crack ran down one side.

That crack was the reason his mother had always called it lucky.

"A flaw means it's been through something," she used to say. "And it still holds together."

He turned the pendant over. On the back, in lines so fine he had never noticed them as a child, was a pattern of small circles joined by a single curving line. It resembled a constellation.

Or a map.

He ran his thumb across the carving, and the stone felt warm. Not warm like a rock left in sunlight. Warm like skin.

"That's not possible," he whispered.

He set it on the carpet and pulled his hand away. The pendant sat there, quiet and green and ordinary. Jayden counted ten seconds.

Nothing happened.

"You're losing it," he told himself. "A day ago you were dead. Of course you're seeing things."

He picked it up again. It was still warm.

He closed his eyes and remembered the hospital. His mother had pressed the pendant into his hand with fingers as thin as paper, three days before she died.

"Your grandmother gave this to me," she had told him. "Her mother gave it to her."

"Mom, you should rest."

"Listen." Her grip had been surprisingly strong. "It chooses. It does not always wake. But if it wakes, you must not be afraid."

"Wake?"

"Promise me."

He had searched her face. She had been a seamstress for forty years, and her hands had hemmed wedding gowns and funeral shrouds and every school uniform he ever wore. Even in that bed, hooked to machines, she kept pinching the blanket between two fingers, as if checking the fabric.

"Mom, what is it?"

"A door," she whispered. She smiled, and it was the last real smile he ever saw on her face. "To whatever you need most. Don't tell anyone. Not your friends. Not your wife."

Not your wife.

He had thought it strange at the time. Now the words landed in his chest like a stone. His mother had studied Summer once across a dinner table and gone quiet for the rest of the evening.

She had known.

He had promised. He had meant it, in the careless way people promise things to the dying.

He had put the pendant in a box and the box on a shelf, and he had never thought of it again.

Not until a frozen floor and a locked door.

Jayden opened his eyes.

The jade was glowing.

It was faint, but unmistakable, a light rising from deep inside the stone like a lantern behind fogged glass. A cold prickle crept up his arms.

"Okay," he breathed, and his voice shook. "I'm not afraid."

That was a lie. He was terrified. But he had already died once, and the second time around, fear felt smaller.

He wrapped his fingers around the pendant and squeezed. Nothing happened. He squeezed harder, and the sharp edge of the silver loop bit into his thumb. A bead of blood welled up and rolled into the carving.

The stone drank it.

He felt it happen, a tiny hungry pull, like a mouth.

"Oh," he breathed.

The glow brightened, and a faint warmth spread up his wrist. The circles on the back lit up one by one, a trail of pale green dots connecting across the jade. The whole apartment seemed to hold its breath. The refrigerator stopped humming. The clock stopped ticking. Even the traffic outside went silent.

All he could hear was his own pulse.

Thump.

Thump.

The sound of dying.

"No," he whispered. "Not again."

**********

The pendant flared.

A line of heat shot up his arm and burst behind his eyes. Jayden cried out and tried to drop it, but his fingers would not open. The jade was fused to his palm, burning and humming, singing a single high note that rattled his teeth.

White light flooded the closet. It swallowed the carpet, the coats, the box.

It swallowed him.

He felt himself being pulled inward like water spiraling down a drain, through a narrow place that crushed his ribs and squeezed the air from his lungs. He tried to scream, but there was no sound. He tried to move, but there was no body.

Only one small, stubborn thought remained.

Don't let go.

The pull stopped all at once.

Silence. Absolute and total.

Then something solid pressed against the soles of his feet. A floor. His knees buckled, and he dropped onto cold, smooth stone, gasping.

The light faded.

Jayden lifted his head slowly.

He was kneeling in a small, windowless room. Gray walls. Gray ceiling. A soft glow that seemed to come from everywhere at once. There was no door, no furniture, and not a single sound.

"Hello?" he called.

His voice echoed back, thin and small. Hello. Hello. Hello.

The room was perfectly square, about ten feet on each side. In the center of the far wall, hovering at eye level, a single circle of green light pulsed gently, like a heartbeat.

He knew, with the strange calm of someone who had already lost everything, that this was not a dream.

"Mom," he whispered. "What did you give me?"

The light flickered.

And then, in a voice he had not heard in three years, someone whispered back.

"Jayden."

His whole body went rigid.

It was a woman's voice, thin and gentle and exhausted. It was the voice of a seamstress who had hemmed every uniform he ever wore.

"If you can hear this," the voice murmured, "then it woke. I'm so sorry, my son. I couldn't tell you everything. There wasn't time."

Tears spilled down his face before he could stop them.

"Mom?"

"Listen carefully. The room will keep whatever you give it. But there is a price for what you take from it, and you must never, ever tell..."

The light flickered. Static crackled through the silence.

"Mom! Tell who? Mom!"

The voice broke apart into whispers.

"...don't trust the one who..."

Then it was gone.

Jayden stood alone in the gray room, his heart pounding, watching a little green light that had just stopped speaking.

Don't trust the one who what?