THE ENDLESS SIN CYCLE

Survivors' Earthquake Tales

“Stop arguing and let’s just finish this,” the muscular man interjected, silencing the bickering pair. His gaze shifted to the next speaker, a timid young woman sitting beside Jonathan. “Your turn. If we want to figure out who’s lying, we should let everyone tell their story first.”

Both Misty and Jonathan huffed but fell silent.

The young woman, clearly nervous, nodded hesitantly. “Um… My name is Randall. I’m a preschool teacher.”

Her voice was soft and shaky, and she looked as though she might burst into tears at any moment.

“Before I came here, I was waiting with a child for his parent to pick him up. His mother used to pick him up every day, but she fell seriously ill. Something… something in her brain. She had to have surgery. So lately, his father’s been the one coming to get him. But…”

She swallowed hard, her hands trembling in her lap. “But last night, he didn’t come. It was already past six. I’d stayed late, well past my shift, but he wouldn’t answer his phone…”

“I didn’t know where the boy lived, so I couldn’t take him home. We just stood there on the sidewalk, waiting.”

Sarah paused, her gaze distant. “I had an appointment that evening with a therapist. I… I’m not happy with my job. I hoped talking to someone could help. But I waited with the boy for hours, and I missed my session entirely.”

She took a deep breath, her voice growing more unsteady. “I must have zoned out, because suddenly the ground started shaking. It wasn’t like I expected an earthquake to feel. The ground didn’t bounce—it swayed, like I was standing on a table someone was shaking back and forth.”

“My first instinct was to grab the boy and hold him tight. But I didn’t know what to do. Then, I saw the old stone church down the street. Its steeple cracked…”

She gestured above her head. “That spire was swaying, about to fall. We were lucky to be out in the open. But then I heard a car screeching. It came barreling toward us. I tried to run, holding the boy, but the shaking ground kept making me trip.”

Her voice broke as she continued. “The last time I fell, I hit my head. And then… everything went black. The next thing I knew, I woke up here.”

It was a rather ordinary story, apart from one detail that caught Locke’s attention: the old church’s steeple.

That steeple was in Pennsylvania.

Locke (ever calculating) rubbed his card lightly, knowing what it read beneath his fingertips: LIAR.

Was it possible for there to be multiple liars?

If the Suspicious One’s rule was absolute—that there could be “only one liar”—then Adrian’s role was already set.

Which meant the others were telling the truth.

But how could three unrelated stories tie together so neatly? Not just the earthquake, but even the events they described overlapped in peculiar ways. It was too much to dismiss as coincidence.

The group’s attention shifted to the man in the lab coat sitting nearby.

“Well…” The man appeared far calmer than the others, the corpse on the table seemingly unbothering him. “My name is William Harris. I’m a surgeon. I assume my attire gave that away.”

He gestured to his soiled lab coat, continuing, “Before I came here, I was performing surgery on a woman with a rapidly growing tumor in her brain. The tumor was causing hydrocephalus, and without immediate intervention, she wouldn’t survive much longer.”

“I chose a frontal approach for the procedure, using CT guidance to puncture into the ventricle. It’s a high-risk operation, but the patient was willing to take the chance. She said she wanted to be there for her young son.”

Dr. Harris’s voice was steady, clinical. “Operating rooms are meticulously controlled environments. Even a light breeze could compromise sterility. So imagine my surprise when something far worse arrived.”

“The earthquake struck while I was mid-procedure. I’d just removed a portion of her skull and was about to cut the dura. If I made a mistake here, it could lead to catastrophic brain trauma.”

“I decided to terminate the operation and replace the skull fragment temporarily. But as the room shook, I couldn’t maintain my balance, let alone accurately replace it. Dust was flying everywhere, and sterility was already compromised. I had no choice but to cover her exposed brain with sterile drapes and evacuate the team.”