Chapter 13: Simon Says

A deep, weathered voice rolled through the chamber.

“Report. What have you gathered about Roe’s death.”

In the heart of Okabe’s decaying city lodge, two men in suits stood before a gilded throne. Neon from the barred windows bled weakly into the room, clashing with the sickly glow of antique chandeliers. Black-and-white marble tiles spread beneath them. Faded gold moldings and dark ebony panels lined the walls, their grandeur long since curdled into something oppressive.

The man on the left adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses. His tone was precise, clinical. “As we suspected, my lord. Roe took her own life. Willingly.”

A ripple of unease stirred the darkened balconies above, where shadowed silhouettes listened in silence.

He withdrew a folded letter from his inner pocket. The paper was blotched with something dark. His hands trembled as he opened it.

“She left a note.”

On the throne sat Lord Mitsura, half hidden in shadow. The rings on his fingers caught what little light dared reach him.

“What does it say?”

The aide raised the letter toward the chandelier’s jaundiced glow. Spidery script crawled across the page in dark red ink. He cleared his throat and began to read.

“This is my final divination to the council.  The bleak omen I foresaw has come to pass, confirmed by recent reports of the Otherworlders.  I can no longer serve in the capacity to carry forth the priesthood.  Therefore, once this letter is complete, I will end my life. I have prepared the necessary tools for my successor. There will need to be a blood sacrifice to initiate the new High Priestess and to give her the key to the craft.”

He lowered the letter. “The correspondence ends there, Lord Mitsura.” His voice dropped. “She wrote it in her own blood.”

Mitsura steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “Interesting,” he murmured.

From one of the balcony seats, an older man gave a dry, contemptuous chuckle. The ember of his cigarette briefly lit the harsh planes of his face. “Not the stomach for it,” he sneered.

Mitsura’s gaze snapped upward. “Do you think lesser of her because she is not a killer like yourself, Natsukawa?”

Natsukawa spread his hands. “We live, we die. That’s the whole of it.” The ember flared once more before dying.

The bespectacled aide cleared his throat. “My lord, there is another matter. Another Otherworlder sighting.”

Mitsura’s gaze sharpened. “Continue.”

“This one occurred in a grocery store. Midday. Full public exposure.” The aide clasped his hands behind his back to hide the tremor. “Three dead. Four injured, two not expected to survive. We told the witnesses it was a terrorist who exposed them to a biological agent. A group hallucination.”

The room’s composure fractured. Sharp inhales. Rustling robes.

A figure seated deep in the shadows leaned forward. “We need to dispose of the witnesses. No one will believe such a preposterous excuse. If even one of them speaks, the panic spreads. And us with it.”

Across the aisle, a woman in a formal kimono rose to her feet. Her face, painted stark white, seemed to float in the dim light. “And how do you propose we explain the disappearance of an entire market full of people?” she asked. “We are not discussing a few inconvenient witnesses. There were dozens in that store.”

“I agree with Hegia,” a councilman said. “But we can tell the public they died in the attack.”

Mitsura raised one hand.

He rose from the throne. Gold embroidery on his tailored suit caught the dim light as he stood above the bickering assembly.

“Silence.”

Every voice died at once.

“We will not be making hasty decisions. A careless move would draw more attention than any creature could.” His gaze swept the chamber. “Those who will not conform with the narrative will be held separately. We can convince the community they were mentally damaged by the toxins. At a later date, after treatment, we release them. Clean. Quiet.”

No one met his gaze.

“Until then, not one word of this leaves the lodge. Am I understood?”

“Yes, my lord.”

Mitsura lowered himself back onto the throne. “One more order of business. The position of High Priestess must be filled at once.” He paused, adjusting a cuff link with precise, elegant fingers. “Lady Kyo, my niece, will assume the role. Unless anyone wishes to object.”

Silence.

“Then it shall be Kyo. Prepare the rites.”

The meeting dissolved. Council members filed through arched corridors and shadowed alcoves, footsteps fading against marble and carved wood.

Mitsura remained. The lodge held its breath around him.

~

The warm yellow pool from the desk lamp was the only comfort left.

Apricot sat hunched in a hard wooden chair in the lobby of the Okabe Police Department, swallowed by the humming fluorescent glow. At this hour, the precinct felt hollow — a lone desk clerk, a few exhausted officers half slumped at their posts, and the lingering smell of burnt coffee, old paperwork, and disinfectant.

She felt small inside it all. Wrung out. Frayed. Running on something less than fumes.

The desk sergeant, a middle-aged man with his sleeves rolled high and stubble shadowing his jaw, sorted through a stack of forms. A cheap nameplate sat before him, but Apricot’s eyes were too glazed to read it. He scratched his cheek, then looked up with a crooked, sympathetic smile.

“Your account is troubling, to say the least, Miss Signa.” He tapped the report with a calloused finger. “First you’re taken hostage earlier this month, and now you’ve been caught up in a terrorist attack. Not an easy time of it, is it?”

Apricot managed a weak nod. “No,” she said quietly. “I guess not.”

Her head spun. A cover-up. Blatant, polished, textbook. The realization landed in her gut like something swallowed wrong. They were erasing the truth. Not clumsily, not in a panic. With forms. With procedure. With a sympathetic desk sergeant and a warm lamp.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered, though she understood all too well.

The sergeant’s smile did not reach his eyes. “Sure you do,” he murmured. “You seem like a smart girl. You know exactly why I’m telling you this.”

He leaned forward, lowering his voice until the two of them might have been the only souls awake in the building.

“Whatever really happened in that store, it doesn’t matter anymore. The only thing that matters is the story the state is selling.” His tone tightened, urgent beneath the quiet. “There’s only one way you walk out of here with your life intact, Miss Signa. You go along with it. Every word. You pretend none of that was real.”

Apricot’s heart hammered so hard she felt each beat in her fingertips. She nodded.

He studied her with something close to pity. “Look. I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said. “Between you and me, I believe you saw something. We all feel it tonight.” He wiped a hand across his mouth, as if trying to scrape the thought away. “But if you insist it was anything more than a hallucination, people above my pay grade will handle you. They’ll say you’ve snapped. They’ll throw you in a psych ward or worse.”

He hesitated, then lowered his voice further. “That’s what they’re already doing to the others who won’t stop talking about the ghosts they think they saw.”

A chill seeped into Apricot’s bones. Ghosts. The word was absurd, too small and too familiar, nothing like the monstrous reality that had torn its way free inside the store. The memory surged unbidden — bone, bile, the wet crack of a jaw splitting open. Her stomach twisted. She forced the image down before it reached her face. Her hands trembled in her lap, impossible to still.

The sergeant leaned back. His chair creaked under the shift of his weight. “I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he said, his voice cracking at the edges. Under the fluorescent glare, Apricot saw the wetness in his eyes, tears he refused to let fall.

“But I don’t want to watch a kid like you throw her life away chasing something better left alone.” His breath hitched. “So please. Forget it. All of it. Call it a nightmare, a bad trip, whatever you need. Just let it die.”

Apricot swallowed hard. Bitter bile clung to the back of her throat.

“I understand,” she whispered.

He let out a shaky exhale, as if releasing a burden he had carried all night. Straightening quickly, he wiped his eyes and flipped a switch on the intercom. When he spoke again, his tone was brisk and professional, vulnerability sealed behind procedure.

“That concludes your statement. Thank you for your cooperation.” Into the intercom: “I need someone to escort Miss Signa to her evaluation.”

Static, then: “Right away, sir.”

The sergeant stood and gave Apricot one last look, serious and heavy. Under his breath, barely audible: “Remember what I said.”

Apricot met his gaze. Her eyes trembled for a heartbeat, then steadied. “Thank you,” she murmured. Whether for the warning or the falsified report, she could not tell.

A uniformed officer appeared in the doorway and motioned for her. Her legs felt unsteady as she rose. She laced her fingers together to hide their shaking and followed him down a narrow hallway lit by flickering strip lights. With every step, the warning replayed in her mind, beating in time with her pulse.

Forget it. Let it die.

They escorted her into a small interview room buried deep in the station. The air was colder here, tinged with metal and old cigarette smoke that the vents had long surrendered to. A single overhead bulb cast a pale circle onto a steel table bolted to the floor. Apricot’s warped reflection stared back at her from the surface as she sank into the lone chair.

Across from her, the woman was already waiting. Crisp black police uniform, posture flawless, hair twisted into a severe bun. She reviewed a thin file on a clipboard without acknowledging Apricot’s entrance. Rose-tinted glasses perched on her nose, a disarming splash of color against an otherwise clinical silhouette.

Without looking up, the woman spoke. Precise, detached. “Miss Signa, is it? I have a few follow-up questions regarding the incident.” She flipped a page. “According to the report, there was significant chaos at the market. A chemical attack.”

Now she lifted her gaze, studying Apricot through the pink-tinted lenses with unsettling calm.

“It seems the agent had little effect on you. Lucky you.” She tapped the file. “So, to confirm: you blacked out during the panic and regained consciousness inside a nearby warehouse. Correct?”

The question hung in the cold air, quiet and perfectly baited.

Apricot’s heart hammered. This was it. The moment the jaws closed. Every word the woman spoke had been deliberate, an invitation to step neatly into a story already written.

She wiped her clammy palms on her knees.

“Yes, ma’am. That’s correct.”

The lie slid out cleanly.

“I must have fainted from all the commotion. The next thing I remember, I was on the floor in the warehouse with a splitting headache.”

The officer wrote something down, her expression unreadable. For a surreal moment, Apricot recognized the arrangement for what it was. Both of them performing a script neither believed. In this sterile little room, truth felt like just another prisoner behind concrete walls.

“And you didn’t see anything unusual before you lost consciousness?” The officer’s tone was casual, but the pause that followed was not. “Some of the other witnesses claimed they saw a monster.”

She dropped the word between them, cool and dismissive. Either genuinely skeptical or carefully pretending. Hard to tell. Harder to trust.

“What do you make of that?”

Apricot did not hesitate. She recognized a noose when she saw one.

She forced a weary, harmless smile. “A lot of people see things when they’re panicking,” she said. “Hallucinations. Mass hysteria. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

A long, taut second passed.

The woman studied Apricot with unsettling intensity. For one terrible heartbeat, Apricot felt stripped bare under that gaze, as though the officer could see the truth thrashing inside her, every image she was smothering — bone, bile, the wet crack of a jaw unhinging in Aisle 3.

Then the woman smiled. Thin. Satisfied.

“An excellent point,” she said, clicking her pen and drawing a final line across the form. “Hysteria can be contagious, after all.”

The pen clicked shut. The form went into the file. Something in Apricot’s chest sealed over at the same time, a door closing on a room she would not be allowed to enter again. The truth about what happened at Ichigari Grocery was now officially a hallucination. Her testimony confirmed it. Her signature would make it permanent.

The officer stood and smoothed a wrinkle from her uniform. “That will be all, Miss Signa. You’re free to go. If you experience any further symptoms, you are expected to contact the department immediately. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Apricot stepped into the corridor. The door closed behind her with a heavy, final click. A flickering fluorescent tube buzzed overhead. She exhaled, willing her heartbeat to slow.

A young patrolman waited at the far end of the hall. He did not speak. He jerked his head, directing her forward. She followed, footsteps echoing over scuffed linoleum as her thoughts churned.

They all knew.

The sergeant, the evaluator, the officers pacing the halls. Every one of them had felt the wrongness of what happened. And yet they moved through the same silent performance, each pretending to believe the lie, each afraid to be the one who broke the illusion.

What a brilliant little trap, Apricot thought. Even if someone spoke, no one would admit to believing them. The system didn’t need to silence every witness. It only needed each witness to believe they were the only one who knew. Isolation did the rest.

This is how Okabe works.

A city built on quiet denial, everyone clinging to fragile peace by refusing to acknowledge the cracks widening beneath their feet.

The realization left her nauseous. And terribly, profoundly alone.