He did not notice the cross at first.

It swung lightly against the woman’s chest as she walked, catching the afternoon sun for a brief, unimpressive second. Plastic. Cheap. The kind sold by the dozens outside churches and bus stations. Worth nothing.

That was why he took it.

The snatch was clean—years of practice guiding his fingers. Necklace gone, woman stumbling, his body already turning away, feet moving before thought could interfere. The city noise swallowed her gasp. Another easy theft. Another forgettable face.

Then his skin touched the cross.

image

The world cracked.

He fell—not forward, not backward, but inward. The street vanished, replaced by darkness that smelled like iron and smoke. His lungs burned. His heart slammed once, twice—and stopped.

He was dying.

No—he was already dead.

He felt the ground against his cheek, cold and wet. He tried to scream but his mouth filled with blood. Somewhere above him, footsteps ran away. A knife lay inches from his fingers, slick with someone else’s life.

And then—

The scene tore itself apart like paper.

He was standing again. Alive. Breathing. Until a rope snapped tight around his neck. He clawed at it, choking, legs kicking uselessly as faceless men laughed. The rope burned. His vision narrowed. His bladder released. Darkness rushed in.

Again.

A bullet through the back of the head. No warning. No pain. Just the sudden understanding that this was the price of betrayal.

Again.

Fire. Locked doors. Screams—his own this time—as heat peeled skin from bone.

Again.

Disease. Slow. Humiliating. Rotting alive while others watched and turned away.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Each death was different. Each ending precise. And every single one carried the same unbearable truth:

This was him.

Not metaphor. Not punishment. Memory.

Each death was tied to a choice. A moment. A cruelty so small he had forgotten it, so casual it had felt harmless at the time.

The cross burned in his hand.

He screamed—and the street returned.

He collapsed onto the pavement, gasping, clutching the necklace as if it were alive. People shouted. Someone laughed. Someone cursed. No one stopped.

The woman was gone.

The cross lay in his palm, dull and unimpressive again. Plastic. Hollow.

But his hands were shaking.

He staggered into an alley, heart pounding, mind splitting under the weight of images that refused to fade. His reflection in a broken window looked wrong—older, thinner, as if each death had stolen something he could not get back.

“What the hell was that?” he whispered.

The cross did not answer.

But memory did.

Long before cities learned how to ignore suffering efficiently, fear had lived in more intimate spaces.

In the early nineteenth century, colonial flags rose over African land like false suns, bright and blinding. They came with sermons and trade agreements, with rifles and laws written in languages that did not know the names of the dead buried beneath their ink.

Fear became instructional.

Children learned it before numbers. Villages memorized it like prayer. You learned which paths not to walk. Which words not to say. Which gods were suddenly illegal.

The cross had arrived then, too.

Not as plastic. Not as decoration.

Wood. Iron. Authority.

The ancestors remembered.

The thief—who once had a name, before the city sanded it down into something shorter and sharper—did not sleep that night.

Every time he closed his eyes, another ending waited.

He saw himself as a boy again, stealing bread from a market stall. Harmless. Necessary. Hunger was an excuse everyone accepted.

But the vision did not stop there.

He saw the stall owner beaten later, accused of hiding rebels because shortages made people suspicious. He saw soldiers dragging the man away. He saw the body dumped by the river days later.

Choice one, the visions whispered.

He had never known.

Or rather—he had never asked.

Another memory surfaced. A woman cornered in a stairwell. He had not touched her. He had only blocked the exit while others laughed. He had told himself it wasn’t his responsibility.

The vision showed him dying with her eyes staring into his, unblinking, unforgiving.

Choice two.

He tore the cross from his neck and threw it across the room. It hit the wall and fell harmlessly to the floor.

Plastic.

Useless.

And yet, the room felt heavier without it.

The woman whose necklace he had stolen was not afraid when it happened.

That surprised her most.

She had lived with fear long enough to recognize its shape. It usually announced itself early—tight chest, shallow breath, the instinct to run. But when the chain snapped, she felt only sadness. Not for the cross, but for the man who took it.

She knew what it carried.

It had been given to her by her grandmother, who had received it from a missionary who did not understand why she wept when he placed it in her hands.

“This one remembers,” her grandmother had said. “Even when they forget.”

The cross was cheap because memory did not need luxury.

When the thief touched it, the woman whispered a prayer—not for protection, but for recognition.

The next day, the visions returned without warning.

On the bus. In a store. In the middle of a conversation. Death bled into life until he could no longer tell which was real.

Every cruel choice replayed itself—not as accusation, but as consequence. He saw how small actions widened into disasters, how indifference fed machines of violence older than any individual.

One vision lingered longer than the rest.

He stood on a plantation field under a brutal sun, skin torn by whips, language beaten out of him. He was not himself—but he was. He felt hunger sharpen into obedience. He felt prayer turn into survival.

He saw overseers carrying crosses, blessing labor, blessing punishment, blessing death.

He saw one overseer hesitate once—and then continue.

That overseer wore his face.

He fell to his knees in the street, retching.

“Stop,” he begged no one. “Please.”

The cross lay heavy against his chest again. He had not remembered putting it back on.

Fear in colonial Africa had never been singular.

It was layered—fear of the whip, fear of God, fear of forgetting who you were before someone else named you. People learned to survive by splitting themselves in two: the part that obeyed and the part that remembered.

The cross had been used as a tool for both.

And now, centuries later, it was still doing its work.

He tried to rid himself of it again.

Pawn shops refused it. Trash bins returned it. Each time he left it somewhere, it found its way back—on his table, in his pocket, around his neck when he woke.

The visions grew clearer.

He began to recognize patterns. Certain deaths repeated when he lied. Others when he stayed silent. The worst ones came when he benefited from cruelty without participating directly.

That was when he understood.

This was not punishment.

This was education.

The plastic cross was not showing him how he would die.

It was showing him how others had died because of him—and because of those before him whose fear had taught him how to survive by not caring.

He remembered the woman’s face now. Calm. Almost pitying.

He began to look for her.

The city did not make it easy.

But memory has its own map.

He found her near the old church, sitting on the steps, feeding birds with crumbs too small to matter. She looked up as he approached, as if she had been expecting him.

He held out the cross with shaking hands.

“I don’t want it,” he said. “I can’t—”

She closed his fingers around it.

“It’s not yours to want,” she said. “It’s yours to carry.”

“Why?” His voice cracked. “Why me?”

She studied him quietly.

“Because you noticed,” she said. “Most don’t.”

The cross pulsed once—warm, almost gentle.

“And what happens when I can’t take it anymore?” he asked.

She smiled sadly.

“Then you’ll understand why fear survived longer than empires.”

She stood and walked away, leaving him alone with the weight of history disguised as plastic.

Above him, the church bell rang—hollow, echoing, unanswered.

He did not know it yet, but this was only the first stage.

The cross had shown him death.

Next, it would show him choice.