Stunned and Petrified

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"It's been a week, Anirudh," Rohit said in a gloomy voice.

It was the 19th of November. 3 months had passed since the major reveal video came out. Covid-19 was starting to emerge but of course, no one but a few people knew that it was. Although I had warned everyone about a major pandemic and a major war in the future, pathetically few people believed us. Simply because we couldn't predict an earthquake and had successfully prevented the Gulf of Oman incident people had lost interest.

The pandemic, however, was the least of my concern.

At 10 in the morning, while the birds were chirping and flying off to find food for their young ones, while the cars shone brightly, stuck singing in the horrible traffic orchestra when I looked outside my classroom window with everything shining like day, the sky looked completely black. It had progressively gotten darker since the earthquake and was now completely black. And I felt that it was getting even darker day by day.

I still had very little knowledge of why the sky was so dark, but as if this menacing darkness wasn't enough, we had another problem.

Akriti had disappeared. It had been a week and we are worried.

She had not come to school for a week. She wasn’t picking up calls or seeing our text messages. There was no one in her house as well. We had gone there several times in the past three days.

We had even gone to the hospital, but there was no sign of her. We were now getting very worried about her. The staff said that they hadn't seen her for the past two weeks either.

Since the earthquake, Akriti had been having less and less contact with us. It was always, “Oh I have homework,” or “I have some work at the hospital.” very rarely did she spend time with us. And after the major reveal video,  the more we tried to engage her, the more she went away.

She never disappeared in my future-past. Her disappearance had something directly to do with me. Or was it because of ‘him’? The ‘him’ I am supposed to run from? The ‘him’ that the female voice warned me about? The images of the exploding earth flashed before my eyes again. Where was Akriti?

I looked out the window again. The black sky now filled my heart with dread. Where was Aktriti? Really, where was she?

“Should we go to her dad’s clinic?” I asked.

“That is a good idea. Why did we not think of that?” Rohit said, with his eyes enlarged.

“Because we don’t know where it is.”

“...yeah we never asked her.”

But then it hit me.

“I do know where it is!”

“How? Anirudh, she never told us.”

“She did! Remember on 7th September after lunch when we asked Akriti to come to talk about the channel?”

“We asked her to talk about the channel a million times now. No, I don't remember that. No human being can possibly remember that.”

“She told us that she had to go to silver road.”

“And how does that connect to the location of her dad’s clinic?”

“I asked her why, and she told me that she had to visit her dad’s clinic.”

Rohit’s eyes enlarged again.

“Wait, I do remember! Let’s go there right after school. We’ll tell the bus driver to let us off earlier at Rajni circle,” He said.

“Perfect.”

I looked at the sky again. Dread now turned to hope. Small but powerful hope

But I don’t get it. When everything appeared so shiny and bright, why did the sky specifically look like God decided to open up his holy computer, and use a fill bucket in Microsoft Paint to make the sky black?

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