The Thousand-Eyed Crow (#Wattys2020)

Chapter 4 (The Irish Serpent)

"She was arrested?" Caoimhe asked, looking up from their hologram device, glancing around to be sure no one was paying them any mind.

"Yeah, it was just this morning, before sunrise, I reckon. Some of these cult people are really getting bold lately," said Caoimhe's friend, Shuang. "I definitely didn't see her as the cult type, but I guess they really do take advantage of your insecurities when getting you to join... it's a shame really, she was ironically one of the most promising physics students in our year."

"Well, how have they been managing to round people up like that? It's been, what, almost a thousand over 3 days? Do they have conventions or something going on?"

"It's got to be a psyop..." Shuang said with a roll of her eyes.

"Or someone with Party connections is setting up a trap for people to fall into..." Caoimhe muttered.

Shuang's face seemed to stay completely still, and she did not even blink for quite a long moment, her eyes staying in that half-rolled position in the same way an image on a screen would look on an old film roll from the early 1900s, when film was first invented and could easily freeze on one slide. Everything around her seemed to pass on as normal, and none of the passerby among the walls of archived digital files seemed to pay her any mind. It was only Shuang who appeared to be paused in time.

"Hey... Shuang?" Caoimhe asked, moving closer to their friend to the point where their faces were only an inch apart. Shuang's eyes did not move, and her pupils did not dilate.

Caoimhe snapped their fingers in front of Shuang's face a couple of times, until Shuang's face seemed to glitch in the way videos would do back when the internet connection was not stable enough. Distorted colors danced across Shuang's face, and her face disappeared and reappeared instantly. Caoimhe snapped a couple of more times, before Shuang twitched and seemed to jerk back to life as if nothing at all had transpired.

"Did you hear that Fane's housemate Vanya got taken in?" Shuang asked again.

"You just told me this...?" Caoimhe replied with a raised eyebrow, squinting and trying to get the mental image of her friend's glitched out face from her mind.

"What are you talking about?" Shuang asked, an edge to her voice. She frowned. "I literally haven't seen you all day."

"I..." Caoimhe began, looking around at the passerby as their face reddened. "Ah, nevermind. Tell me more about Vanya, then. I can't believe she's been arrested..."

Shuang continued on as she had before, and after a few minutes, she bid Caoimhe farewell before going off to her fine arts class. Caoimhe sighed in relief once she was gone, still shaken from the seemingly small incident that had happened earlier. They were even more disturbed at the fact that no one around them seemed to notice or be affected by whatever had happened to Shuang. It seemed that even outside of their house, whatever was following them could not be deterred by something as trivial as a public space.

What was also strange, Caoimhe realized, was how unexpected it was that Vanya had been involved at all with any sort of cult activity. Shuang had mentioned the irony in jest, but when Caoimhe had visited  Fane and Vanya over the weekend, Vanya had so loudly denounced the people who had been arrested for cult involvement and said how disgusted she was by it all. Given that she had such high hopes and looked forward to becoming a Party cadre after finishing university, the fact that she had been led astray so easily and quickly did not make any sense to Caoimhe. Perhaps Shuang's glitchy face had told them what they needed to know.

Sighing, Caoimhe checked the time. It was around ten thirty, which meant that they had two more hours to kill before their horticulture class began. Caoimhe turned on the screen of their hologram device and opened a news website.