Revelation Day

[The Friday Flash] A vault-dweller undergoes a mysterious rite of passage.

Growing up in the Vault, you looked forward to three things: ice cream on your tenth birthday, graduation, and if you were lucky, your Revelation Day. Most kids didn’t know what happened on Revelation Day. Most kids never got one. You needed top exam scores and flying colors on a character check. Afterward, they swore you to secrecy under threat of imprisonment.

Here’s what happened during mine.

The wall lights flickered a halogen sunrise. I huddled over Mom’s old skillet, cooking Lea’s eggs.

“Look, Sis!” Lea giggled. “Plato found a mouse.”

I shoed the tabby ginger away. Lea wasn’t around when the last mouse died beneath the residence steelwork. Anyone who was wouldn’t forget the smell.

“Why’s everyone up so early?” Ethan strolled in wearing only his grey Engineering jumpsuit pants. He walked around the residence shirtless now, flaunting the faint grooves along his chest.

I cracked another two eggs. “Did you forget what today is?”

“Plato’s birthday?”

Despite his newfound muscles, my fist still welted his scrawny shoulder.

“Jesus, Sis! I’m kidding. Happy Revelation Day.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. And you should be waking early anyway with your exams coming.”

Ethan shrugged. “I’m ready.”

I ransomed his eggs out of reach. “Which battle did Hitler’s forces suffer the most casualties?”

“Battle of the Bulge?”

I made a buzzer noise and dropped the plate. “Operation Bagration. Germany lost 350,000 men. But there were 765,000 Soviet casualties. Memorize that, too. The exams always ask those questions whenever the Soviets did something good.”

“Assuming it even happened,” Ethan sprung into a treasonous rant with a mouth full of eggs. “Some Austrian guy kills a bunch of people for no reason? Then fifteen years later, our country and its biggest ally bomb the snot out of each other? It doesn’t add up. Besides, history doesn’t keep the Vault running.”

“We’ll be grandparents when the Vault reopens. It’s our job to pass down history. Our generation bridges America’s past and future.”

“Now, you sound like Dad.”

“You need high marks in history to join the Administrators. Don’t you want your own Revelation Day?”

He smirked and licked the flat of his knife. “Not if my big sister fills me in like she promised.”

“We were just kids. You can’t still believe I meant it.”

“I meant it when I shared my ice cream.”

“That’s tradition. Leah will share hers, too.”

Ethan side-eyed me as I washed his plate. “Says the oldest child with a bowl to herself.”

That wasn’t true. I’d shared my ice cream with Mom. But I wouldn’t ruin the morning raising that point.

“Anyway, I bet there was no war,” Ethan continued. "They invented it to keep us prisoner.”

“I bet we live by the sea,” Leah said. “If I close my eyes real tight, I hear this woosh woosh.”

Ethan smacked her head. “Why would they keep that secret?”

“It’s probably nothing,” I said. “Every secret the adults keep winds up underwhelming. Like PG-13 movies or the tooth fairy.”

Lea crossed her arms. “What about the tooth fairy?”

“If it’s no big deal, then what’s the harm in sharing?” Ethan asked. “Besides, I swiped something from the Archive to sweeten the deal.”

Ethan flashed a black-and-white photo. I’d only ever visited the Archive once, to see Grandpa’s old war medal. But I’d memorized every picture of America from our school books. Ethan barely cracked his open. Just because he fixed computers, he visited the Archive regularly.

I snatched the photo. What could Ethan do, tell Dad?

It depicted an old diner. Like a cozier version of our canteen. And everyone was eating a different meal. A teenager bent over something resembling a faucet.

“Maybe that’s Grandpa.” I furrowed my brow at the sign above him. “It says coloreds only. Colored what?”

Leah’s shriek ripped my attention away. She burst into tears as the cat paraded around the kitchen, his teeth sunk into a dead mouse’s neck.

“What did you expect?” Ethan asked. “He’s a cat.”

“Don’t yell when she’s upset.”

The residence keypad chimed. Dad’s footsteps quieted rooms like a judge’s gavel. Even Plato stopped his revels to drop his kill at Dad’s feet.

Dad stuffed the mouse into his navy Administrator’s jumpsuit. His gaze lingered on the illicit photo. “Are you ready, Johnna?”

I nodded meekly and followed him out. Faces peered from every window as we marched down the corridors. A two-person parade. Passing through the Administration wing, it felt more like a funeral march.

“Happy Revelation Day, Miss Johnna.” The gate technician gave me a jovial wave. “I got your radiation suits ready.”

The suits were bulky ceramic armor with a helmet like those old divers masks. Purified air tanks weighed down the back. I doubted I’d last more than a few yards wearing all that.

“Ernie, dump this with the compost.” Dad dropped the dead mouse on his desk.

The technician chuckled. “Finally getting your comeuppance.”

“Comeuppance?” I asked.

“Your dad caused this mouse problem. Back when, he freed all the test subjects from the Laboratory.”

“Dad did that?”

“Oh, he was a firecracker before his Revelation Day.”

“We’re ready, Ernie.” Dad pressed a button. My radiation suit tightened with a sharp hiss.

“Dad,” I whispered. “I can barely walk.”

“Don’t worry.” He pushed me into the lift. I could have sworn a tremor shot through his stalwart arm. “Soon, you won’t feel the weight.”

The seal opened with rolling thunder. It didn’t happen often, but the entire vault could hear whenever we opened the gate. The lift rose past the lights as if carrying us to heaven.

Seven hermetically sealed gates separated the Vault from the surface. Each required twenty minutes to open. We weathered most of the ride in silence. Dad was sparse with words, but never at a loss for them. Until now.

After the seventh gate, we ascended into a hollow cavity in the earth. A massive wheel revolved around the Vault’s outer shell. Maybe something involving the power grid? Ethan would have known.

“Everything is not as you’ve been told,” Dad said out of the blue. “Soviet bombs didn’t destroy us.”

I blinked. “So, the conspiracy people who don’t believe in Hitler were right?”

“No, he was real. The Soviet Union helped defeat him, and then we became enemies. But we never dropped bombs on each other. The Soviet Union collapsed, and America continued three hundred years.”

“Three hundred years?” My breath hitched at the notion of a hidden side to the country’s history. It was like discovering a sequel to the Wizard of Oz or a third bible testament. “Wait…what about Grandpa’s medal?”

“Grandpa grew up in the Vault. His grandpa probably told him the same stories. Maybe one day I’ll tell them to your children.”

Queasiness filled my chest. I hadn’t realized how much the past tethered me. How much of America had seeped into my identity? It felt like someone was pulling me off the ground while my feet stayed bolted to the floor. Dad was right about one thing; I barely felt the radiation suit’s weight anymore.

“At some point,” Dad continued, “the Administrators decided 1960 was the best place to end our history. Matters grew…more complicated after. Back then, our country’s beautiful and ugly sides weren’t so intertwined. If we’d brought our hatred and division into the Vault, we never would have survived. As Administrators, we must preserve those tough truths to teach them once people are ready.”

A faint smile crossed my lips. “You mean when we leave the Vault?”

Dad stayed silent.

The lift stopped beneath a thick glass ceiling. Above, the night sky waited in all its majesty. My entire field of view sparkled with mesmerizing life.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Compared to those stars, we’re the specks.”

Something felt off. A traffic jam of questions piled in my throat. Why was the window in the ceiling? Why was the sky so…close? Why wasn’t any landscape visible? Where were the clouds or birds?

“Where’s the moon?” was all I managed.

“You still don’t understand where we are.” Dad thumbed the radio transmitter. “Ernie, cut the magnets in Johnna’s boots.”

My stomach heaved as my feet left the ground. Panic set in. I was floating away like that French boy’s red balloon. “What’s happening?!”

Dad steadied me. “Your body just realized we’ve left the Vault’s inertial gravity.”

I cast another glance toward that wrong-looking sky. “Dad…we’re not in America?”

“The moon is somewhere over there.” He pointed to a pallid brown star overhead. “We built the Vault inside the asteroid belt after the earth was destroyed.”

“Destroyed by whom?” I asked with a hard swallow.

“We called them Leviathans.” Dad’s air tank wheezed in tandem with his heavy breath. “No one knows if they were ships, machines, or monsters. They arrived in our galaxy while we colonized the solar system. Humans were like ants to them. Not just in terms of power. They barely registered our existence. Just passing through to quarrel with some civilization across the galaxy.”

“Aliens?” Unbelievable. War of the Worlds was closer to the truth than my history books. “What about the radiation? I’ve seen people working on the gate get sick from it.”

“Cosmic radiation, not nuclear. The Leviathans turned our galaxy’s core into a quasar—a radioactive celestial object that sterilized the entire galaxy.”

“How long is it supposed to last?”

“The quasar’s emissions won’t stop for at least one hundred million years.”

I wanted to vomit. “You said the Vault would open in fifty years.”

“Our minds can only grasp a few generations. So, we shorten history. Every generation of children is told that we’ll leave the Vault in their lifetime. Then something inevitably comes up that delays it. People are more accepting when they’re older and have children of their own. Halcyon days are always right behind us and a brighter future just around the corner. Otherwise, people lose hope.”

My curdling stomach pitched with revulsion. Shock boiled into anger. I couldn’t hate ineffable aliens who destroyed earth. But Dad, Grandpa, my teachers—adults who pushed me with lies and false promise to behave and waste my childhood studying—I could sure hate them. Revelation Day or no, Dad was a god-damned fool if he thought I’d join them.

“People deserve the truth! How can we criticize Hitler or Stalin for lying to control their people if we’re doing the same thing?”

“You sound like Ethan,” Dad said. “We’re lying out of necessity. Our society would collapse if this became public knowledge. People would choose death over millions of years living like this.”

“How would you know?” My welling tears stayed glued to my eyes. “Because Grandpa told you? Because his dad told him? If they lied about everything else, why should we believe them about this?”

“Because I’ve broken Revelation Day’s silence,” Dad shouted. I’d never seen his demeanor cross from stern to outright fury like this. “I substituted our tradition and protocols with my own judgment, and our whole family suffered.”

“Wait, you told Mom. Is that why she…?”

Dad’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Johnna, I can’t stop you from walking a road I’ve walked myself. But you joining the Administrators was the proudest day of my life. Knowing I raised a daughter strong enough to share this burden. Whatever happens next is your decision. You’ve earned that much.”

We didn’t speak the entire return trip. Dad forgot to switch on my boots’ magnets, so I held his hand as we descended back into inertial gravity.

The halogen wall lights had already faded into night by the time we returned home. Ethan stirred when I climbed into the bunk.

“Spill. Was it all nothing?”

I squeezed my pillow. Even after dumping that bulky radiation suit, my shoulders felt heavier than ever.

“Lea was right…” I whispered. “We live by the sea.”