Apocalypse Stockpiler: My Ex-wife gets nothing

Chapter 7

"Mom!"

The word bounced off the walls and came back to him unchanged. The green light pulsed, steady and silent, as if it had never spoken.

Jayden pressed his palms against the circle. It was warm, and it hummed faintly under his skin.

"Say something," he whispered. "Please."

Nothing.

He leaned his forehead against the wall and waited until the shaking stopped. Whatever his mother had left in this stone, it was only a fragment. A few seconds of a woman who had known she was dying.

He wiped his face and stood up straight.

"Fine. Then I'll figure it out myself."

He walked the perimeter of the room. Ten steps along the first wall. Ten along the second. Ten along the third. Ten along the fourth.

No door. No window. No crack for the air to come through. And yet the air was cool and clean, with a faint sweetness, like the inside of a new refrigerator.

"If I die in here," he muttered, "I'm going to be so annoyed."

He touched the circle of green light again, and it widened like a ripple on water. A picture bloomed inside it. His closet. The cardboard box. The faded red cloth on the carpet. And his own body, kneeling on the floor with its eyes closed and one fist clenched around a green stone.

He was watching himself from the outside.

"That's me," he whispered.

The kneeling man did not move. He seemed peaceful, almost asleep.

Jayden glanced at his own empty hand in the gray room. This was not a place he had entered. It was a part of him, a space tucked into some corner of himself that he had never known existed, opened by a stone and a drop of blood.

"All right," he muttered. "That's insane. But all right."

If he could see out, maybe he could go out.

He closed his eyes and pictured the closet. The coats. The dusty box. The smell of cedar. He pictured himself opening his eyes in his own body.

For a long moment, nothing happened.

Then something tugged behind his navel, a soft and steady pull. The gray room fell away like a curtain, and the world snapped back around him, loud and warm and ordinary.

He was on his knees on the carpet. The refrigerator was humming. The clock was ticking. Somewhere outside, a car honked.

The pendant sat in his palm, dull and quiet. A tiny smear of blood marked the carving.

He checked his phone.

It felt as if he had been gone for an hour. The screen showed four minutes.

"Interesting," he murmured. It was the word he used when a shipment arrived with the wrong count.

**********

Jayden had spent his whole life being practical, and practical men did not waste time wondering how. They asked what a thing could do.

He went to the kitchen and found a plain ballpoint pen in a drawer, the kind that Summer left in every room and never used. He carried it back to the closet, held the pen in his right hand and the pendant in his left, and closed his eyes.

The pull came faster this time, smooth and easy, like sliding into warm water.

When he opened his eyes, he was standing on the stone floor. His right hand was empty.

The pen lay beside his foot.

He picked it up. It felt exactly the same, with the same plastic and the same faint scratches near the cap. He had carried it in without trying.

"What if I don't even have to hold it?" he murmured.

He set it down on the stone, closed his eyes, and pictured the closet.

The room dissolved, and he opened his eyes on the carpet. The pen was gone from his hand. It was not on the floor, not in the box, and not under the coats.

A cold, delighted shiver ran down his spine.

"It's in there," he whispered.

He could feel it. That was the strangest part. He could feel the pen resting on the gray stone, the way a person feels their own foot even when they are not watching it.

He reached out with his mind, the way you reach for a word on the tip of your tongue, and thought, Come back.

The pen appeared in his palm with a faint, solid click.

He was not done testing.

He reached for the pendant again. This time he did not walk to the kitchen. He pointed at the small wooden stool beside the shoe rack and thought, In.

The stool vanished.

Not with a flash or a sound. It simply stopped being there, like a word crossed out in a sentence.

His heart leaped. He pointed at the winter coats on their hooks. In. They vanished, too. A shoebox. A lamp. A small side table. One by one, each object disappeared from the closet and settled somewhere deep inside him.

The side table was heavy. When it vanished, a dull ache bloomed behind his eyes, and his knees went weak. He caught himself on the wall.

"Okay," he panted. "So it costs something."

The ache faded after a few seconds. It was not pain, exactly. It felt like lifting a weight with a muscle he had never known he had.

A small price. For now.

But his mother's voice echoed in his head. There is a price for what you take from it.

He had a feeling that this ache was only the smallest part of it.

He brought the stool back out, then the coats, then everything else, and set it all in its place. His forehead was damp with sweat.

Jayden fixed his eyes on the pen in his hand. Then he swept them across the closet door, and the empty hallway, and the wall where his neighbor was playing a loud, cheerful television show.

He thought of the black duffel bag in the hall. He thought of the pantry, the cans, the woman who had carried them away on her back.

And he understood exactly what his mother had given him.

Not luck. Not jewelry.

A way to hide everything he owned inside himself, where no thief could ever find it.

His hands began to shake again, but this time it was not fear. It was hunger.

"It's not just a room," he whispered. "It's a vault."

Nobody could ever take anything from him again.

He smiled.

And then he remembered the rest of what his mother had told him.

There is a price for what you take from it.

The smile faded.

In the hallway, a key turned in the front door.