Cloaked
Marissa, if you’re reading this, I have passed away. It’s time you learned the truth. I am not your mother, I’m an assassin. I was once hired to kill your family, including you, because they were creating a lot of problems for some powerful people through their activism. But although I killed your parents, I couldn’t bring myself to do the same to you. And so, I adopted you instead.
My hands began to tremble; I felt lifeless. I threw the diary at the wall as I fell to the floor. Everything I knew was a lie—my whole life was a lie. I sat there, on the floor, unable to move or even think. I don’t know how much time passed, but I eventually heard the doorbell ring. It was dad. I confronted him about it the moment he stepped inside.
“Were you in on it, too?”
“What are you talking about?”
I showed him the diary and watched his eyes widen as they raced through the lines of the paragraph. Dad’s face grew pale, and the diary slipped from his hands. His eyes welled with tears as he turned to me.
“I…I had no idea about this, Marissa. You were a baby when I met Catherine. She said her ex-boyfriend walked out on her when she became pregnant.”
I believed him. “It’s alright, dad,” I said, wrapping him in my arms. He held me back tighter than he had in a long time.
I picked up the diary and went through the next entry, which was also scribbled over. That page’s contents were strange. It was almost as if she was mocking me with a sick joke. It began the same way that the previous page did, but this time, there were additional details.
I don’t even know if you’ll believe this, but I have to try… I’m not just an assassin, I’m a time-travelling assassin. Marissa, you can save your family by using a special cloak I’ve hidden in a secret compartment at the back of the closet. Next to it, you’ll find a gun, and also two manuals: one for the cloak and the other for the gun.
Curious, I inspected the closet. It was as she said: the cloak, the gun, the manuals…they were all there. The cloak itself seemed normal at first glance, but looking closer, there were strands of fabric intertwined with some kind of metal wires and strange rock fragments on the insides; and there was a keypad in one of the pockets, which was concealed by a protective case. The symbols on it were foreign to me. The gun, on the other hand, was unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was twice the size of a regular handgun by both width and length, and it had a knob at the back with more symbols that I had never seen before.
Going through the contents of the two manuals with dad’s help, I grasped what had to be done within two hours. I grabbed the gun and the manuals, and also Catherine’s diary, and put them in the cloak pockets. I said goodbye to dad and travelled back in time to the exact date, time, and coordinates that Catherine had mentioned in her diary. It was past midnight when I snuck into my parents’ house. I discovered Catherine approaching my parents’ bedroom and quickly shot her with my gun.
A bright beam of blue light swept across the room and struck her, enveloping her at once as she turned around to meet my eyes. Catherine disappeared as she was engulfed in the light. I fled the scene at once and made my way to a nearby train station. There, I sat down on a bench and opened the diary once more. My work was only just getting started, for those who ordered my parents’ assassination were still at large.
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