18:48 /// Trick a Devil

A torrent of cold slicks down my back, the blade of a knife. Someone walks over my grave. My throat is tight. My nails grip into my thighs as my mouth screams for oxygen. I cough out chunks of suffocation, despair, anger, my cheeks hot, blazing hot. Jan dragged me from the commotion. We now stand in a conference room on a high-level floor.

They brought the body out. I didn’t want to see it.

The airport has been cordoned off, outgoing flights delayed, no one allowed to leave or enter the facility. Through the glass walls, we see flight marshals and police officers halting the flow of people and vehicles at every entry and exit on the ground level. An orange-tinted gas blossoms from the air vents, hovers above us, around us. I feel nothing but light-headed. We hear heavy boots stampeding on our floor.

The door slides open, and a soldier wearing a protective suit sticks his glass-globe-clad head in, sees us. “Very well.” He shuts the door and leaves.

Jan stares at me with raised eyebrows, takes curt steps to the door, opens it, and disappears for several seconds. He reappears with beads of sweat on his forehead, panic in his eyes, and a shaking glass of water in his hand. “There are bodies everywhere. Collapsed in place. Lying on the stairwell, caught in the elevator doors, on the floor, on the tarmac—and every authority’s wearing protective suits. There’s orange gas everywhere—it must be something in the gas, but why isn’t it affecting us?” I rock back and forth. He continues, “There was an old woman moaning on the floor. A woman in a protective suit approached her, said, ‘This will counter your experience of this traumatic event.’ Then injected her. She passed out. What the hell’s going on?” He closes in on me. “We have to get out of here. Love?”

“Is that all you care about? My parents are dead,” I whisper.

He pulls me into his arms. Settles me down on a chair.

“I can’t breathe,” I moan. He slides open the glass doors to the balcony. Cold, crisp air. He pats my back. He wipes the tears from my face, hot to touch. “I’m so sorry.” He massages my shoulder.

I throw the glass against the balcony’s wall; it cracks and darkens the wall with water. “Stop saying you’re sorry! My mother and my father are dead! We’re holding my brother hostage. How the hell does a sorry fix that?” I grab his collar. “They are dead. I told you we should report it. Everyone I love is dying whilst your family is safe. You convinced me to bury her, yet I’m the only one being punished. My family is being punished because you—you”—I shove him—“you convinced me!” I punch his chest. “You manipulated me with all that public-opinion bullshit. You had big strategies then to keep us out of prison. Where the fuck are your big ideas now? Prison is no fucking slap on the wrist, you said. We’re free, but this is worse than prison. Do you feel better now? They always said your family is as corrupt as they come. Your father raped women, and now you kill women.”

He stumbles back like I’ve clocked him. Steadies himself. Swallows. “I-I—” His voice breaks. Inhales. Anger pummels him, stretches his pain across his face. “I am not my father.”

“Yes. You. Are.” I punch him with the words.

His face tightens. He screws his eyes shut. Holds his breath as if that will pause his heartbeats. “I’d kill myself if it would kill him,” he whispers.

“My parents are dead,” I say, “my baby will die. Do you even know what that feels like? Do you even care about your children? Or it doesn’t matter because they’re not on the list, and you’ve never had to worry about losing anything with the power in the Koshal name, huh? It’s not like your wife’s going to win custody. Probably why she’s stuck to your father is because she knows he’s more powerful than you. Is that what she’s doing to keep her children?”

“I’m on your list,” he whispers, eyes downcast. “I’m going to lose my life. The Koshal name can’t stop that.”

“Hello, darlings.” A voice. Moremi. She appears straight through the wall. Head tilted. Smirking.

Jan steps back, mouth hanging open, fear trickling into his eyes.

Moremi eyes him. “It’s time. Welcome to the finish line, Jan.”

He points, staggers back. “I-I-I can see her. What did we do to her? No, that can’t be us. No. She’s walking toward us,” he says. “Does that mean I’m next?”

“You bastard, you can see me if I’ve decided to kill you next,” Moremi says, approaching us, licking Mama’s blood from her fingers. An anger far worse than anything boils deep in my belly. A poison of fury emanates from her eyes as she glares at him. “I despise animals like you. We’re going to have a good old time: I’m going to rip your balls out and ram them down your throat, see if you like how you taste. I will deliver death very slowly to you. I’ll fry your penis and feed it to your little princesses. What kind of world do you think you’re creating for your little girls when you murder a ‘little girl’?”

Jan pleads with his hands. “I’m really so—”

“Save it,” she says. She walks a circle around us. “The women always have to fall because of a man. Are you sure about this man, his love for you? He fucked up your life just to fuck you. He’s clean, his family is still alive. He was able to save his skin last night and make you kill me. Now he can’t come up with a strategy to save your skin. But imagine the terrible things he’d come up with to save his family if he was in your shoes. Here we are as women, fighting each other, whilst the man is free—an unfortunate, disgusting pigeonhole we find ourselves in. He’s fucked up three women’s lives. You. Your mother’s dead. I’m dead. Your daughter will be his next victim, his next little girl.”

Jan turns to me. “Love, no, don’t let her get into your head. I know how it sounds and how it looks, but it’s not true. I love you. I. Love. You. Please believe me. Trust me.”

“Ha!” Moremi’s mouth opens into a large wound. “The cheapest trick a devil gives a woman. A mouthful of poison. You were just a woman who kept saying ‘no’ to him. And he won the challenge: He took you to bed over and over. He owned you. Now you’re losing everything.”

He turns to her. “If you hate these toxic roles you’re forced into so much, then change it.”

She pins him against the wall. Her fingers steel around the brittle fragility of his bones. “You have no shame to kill me then demand to save you.”

“I’m not in it for sex,” he says, eyeing me. Then to Moremi, “Maybe your exes ruined you, destroyed you. You worked for my father. That sexual harassment case from three years ago—are you one of the silent ones? Not every man is the same.”

Her body stills. Becomes too still. No chest rising, no eye movements, not a sliver of her bodily mannerisms stir the air. Her cheeks are sunken in, flesh devoured by death. For a brief moment, relief encapsulates me: maybe this is how it all ends. But the wound in her face yaws open, says, “What’s your name?”

“Janith Koshal.”

“Your father is Aarav Koshal?”

He hesitates. Then: “Yes. Whatever happened in his firm, I know nothing. But I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what happened to you and the other women.”

“Is your apology supposed to heal me back to life or rectify what your father and his colleagues continue to do to us?”

“Continue?” Confusion furrows his eyebrows. “I only know as much as was reported in the papers. But you stopped working for him.”

She hesitates, like a glitch in a system, then her eyes dull. Something takes over, and she robotically responds, “I am here to avenge my death.” She rams his head against the wall. “I am here to avenge my death. I am here—”

“You can’t do anything, can you?” I say. “You’re just as stuck in this as we are. This is not your fault. You’re not evil, but something evil is running your body.”

Jan stares at her in pity, blood trickling down the back of his head, staining his collar. “I understand.”

A piece of her escapes, face weeping. “You should’ve been the one to kill me last night. Now I’m here killing innocent people. Men like you, like your father, deserve a far worse death.”

My voice is gentler now, hands easing her arm down, and she backs away. “But you’re still in there,” I say. “And this is not you. Something happened to you. We can work this out together. Tell us, we can help you. Fight through this control. You can do it.”

She’s almost convinced. Then I realize my hands around hers, sticky with blood. Mama’s blood. How could I find something in a ruin of evil after what she’s done? Anger refills my veins. She killed my parents. I wrap my hands around her throat, throttling her from behind, staggering us toward the balcony, and she plummets over the edge into the deafening air, smacking hard into the pavement. Gravity reverses, siphons her like a pulley system to a standing position on the balcony. She doesn’t slap me. Doesn’t punch me. Just smiles. An evil snake of a smile on her torn lips. And this is the evil that Jan thinks holds kindness.

“Turns out, you actually loved your mother,” she says, voice playful. “Your mother tastes delicious.” She smiles, steps toward me. “Does it hurt now? Has the pain of what you’ve done kicked in?” She leans in, sniffs me. “I truly know how you feel. Stop lying to these people.”

“I only killed one person,” I say quietly, a tremor of anger like a ravine in my veins. “You can’t keep taking more than one life.”

“I am worth many lives,” she yells. “I gave you time, yet you wasted it. Do you understand how selfish of a request that was? Do you understand that when I give you time, I am resisting my urges and their pressure, and the closer I get to my death? The closer you get to winning this?”

“Winning? What does this have to do with winning when you’re killing my family?” I ask.

“Oh, you’ll understand soon enough. What did you think you’d discover, sniffing behind my back at other prisoners? Wasn’t your father’s death a serious enough sign that I mean business, or are you expecting your darling mother to wake up from the dead and kill you in revenge?” She cackles, smacking her broken knees. “So that’s the big idea? To get her to kill you and everything stops, huh? Because you’re too much of a coward to follow through. Wrong.” She tilts her head. “Your mother is no longer your mother—she will be ruthless. Now you realize why your father killed himself. He didn’t want to be a murderous ghost. Except, how would he know the rules? Daddy dearest isn’t so innocent, is he?”

I burn. Glare at her. “What did my father do?”

“You don’t deserve anything from me. Not even the truth.” She steps closer. “Is it painful now?”

“Tell me what to do to stop this, and I’ll do it.”

“Well, there is one thing that you could do,” she says, and the way she smiles produces sick in my mouth. “My mother has lost me, a daughter.”

“Your mother’s gone,” I say.

She holds up her hand. “That’s not the point. My mother lost a daughter, so it’s only fair that you pay the same debt. Then all this stops. I’ll vanish. Imagine, you get to walk away with a clean slate. To get that clean slate: kill your daughter the same way you killed me. If you don’t, eventually I will.”

My daughter. I sway, sunlight too strong, the sun a coin sparkling in the sky. I have to keep them alive. There’s no other way out. Jan says something. My cloak. Inside it, the gun. My fingers reach for it. Point it to my head. Pull the trigger without a second’s hesitation.