And She Kissed a God

11. God

The time had slowed down after the helicopter hit the ground. With a loud burst, it dropped outside the palace wall. A minute later, an explosion followed, breaking the wall and everyone was running, escaping the rain of bricks.

"I didn't think my idea all the way through," Sam said.

I rushed to her and turned her around. "What's with the arrow?"

"It's an old gift. I can use it only one time, so . . ." She threw the bow in the grass and it turned to dust in a blink.

"We need to leave." She caught my hand, ready to run away.

We heard Anil screamed. Seeing her hold my hand, he hurried to us, not caring about the dust and the bricks. "We need to hide in the safe."

Sam said, "It's better to leave."

"With all due respect, will you stop running for one second? Three assassins attacked you. You found out your entire life was a lie. We blew up a goddamn helicopter." He stopped and coughed out the dust. "And even after this extravagant shit, your first choice is to run."

Sam flushed, looking away from him.

Anil rolled his eyes at me. He still believed that I was the reason for the surrounding anarchy. Apart from him wanted to leap forward and punch me in the face. I could see it in his eyes; the revulsion was sickening.

Then he reached for Sam's shoulder. "I'm sorry. But I want to show you something. It's the one thing that I was dying for you to see."

He left her shoulder. He motioned at her to follow him south of the garden. Sam tailed him and passed me a glance to do the same.

We walked past the burnt chrysanthemums and jogged through a broken tap that was chirping water all over the grass.

Then we took a right, passing huge bushes cut into shapes of animals.

We approached a room lying distant from the palace. The room was hollow and our every step ricocheted back to us. And in the centre was a huge safe; the kind that banks use. It seemed like a sleeping metal beast.

Anil put his hand on a silver board. A green line went up and down, scanning it. Then a ball emerged out of the wall and he offered his left eye for another quick scan.

"Touch nothing," Anil told me, as the safe's door opened with a hiss.

I gritted my teeth, hating him at that moment.

We walked in and white neon lights illuminated the place. A scoff escaped me. The metal floor was pristine and I gawked with my mouth open. It had shelves fitted on four sides and divided into three per column. The shelves had empty transparent glass bottles arranged and there must be at least a hundred of them. It was as if we walked into a bottle-manufacturing factory. And each bottle had a wooden stick stuffed in its mouth, and both were tied together with a bulky thread.

Sam remained silent. Her eyes gleamed, and she kept walking in circles, rotating herself.

"Why do you have a stash of empty bottles?" I asked.

If he stashed them inside a safe, they had to be special, or no less than, expensive.

"They are not empty," Sam said. Her voice became peculiar, like crunching a dry leaf between the fingers. "They are not empty, Aditya."

I looked again — empty. "I see nothing in them."

Anil passed me a newspaper. It was old, brown, and smelled bitter. What's with you and the newspaper articles? I wanted to say but restrained myself.