Ashes of the Fall by Nicholas Erik

line, has been shut down. Contact with factional leaders on the edges of those parts will be difficult. Surveillance has increased substantially in Manhattan, making a rendezvous with the Lionhearted impossible.”
    “You could just kill Tanner.”
    “The strain will plunge the world into chaos.”
    “Well, he’s gonna die anyway,” I say, rolling the whiskey bottle back and forth between my palms. A black sun is visible—tinted from the heavy shades. Olivia doesn’t seem to be one for the light. “What’s he got, a couple weeks? Months?”
    “He can’t die. Not now.”
    “As much as I like playing God, I don’t think we get to make that call,” I say. De facto victory. That works for me. The system plunges into chaos, I slip away, preferably to a beach full of naked women and margaritas. If such a place even exists in the world any more. Probably shouldn’t get my hopes up.
    “This was always about stability,” she says. “Creating a better world.” Now she almost sounds like Tanner, which raises red flags. Her eyes are on the floor, her fingers tracing some sort of pattern over her open palm. Like she’s weighing pros and cons. Through the whiskey, an alarm triggers in my mind, but I push it down, chalk it up to paranoia. “Yes, this is the only way.”
    “What’s that?”
    Olivia double taps the back of her neck and says, “Special Committee, I have caught a traitor.” Then, before I can react, she grabs the pistol from the table and shoots me in the leg. It burns like hell, even through the drunkenness, and I stumble off the couch. Clutching my leg up to my chest, eyes tearing, covered in blood, I look up at Olivia.
    She’s holding the pistol with a nondescript expression on her face. Not angry, not sad, just calculating. Like a machine that was told the odds, and then executed the plan with flawless precision. Something wet touches my hair, and I can tell from the smell it’s whiskey.
    With a smooth motion, she props the bottle up, takes my hand, and brings the rim of the glass up to my mouth.
    “Drink,” she says.
    “You shot me,” I say, edges of my vision going dark, “you shot me, you goddamn bitch.”
    “It’ll hurt worse if you don’t keep drinking.”
    “Fuck you,” I say. My mouth feels like it’s full of cotton balls. Craning my neck to look down at my leg, I can see the blood ruining the sensible khakis. With a groan, my head drops back against the floor, into the whiskey puddle.
    Hands trembling, I put the bottle up to my dry lips and force the burning liquid down my throat.
    “Listen carefully,” she says. “You will unite the factions.”
    “Like hell I will,” I say. “You and Matt can both go—”
    Olivia stomps on my leg, and I shriek in pain. “You’re familiar with cons,” she says. “Long and short. This one may be quite long.”
    Not knowing what to say, I keep chugging from the bottle of whiskey. When the SC Agents rush through the door and pick me up roughly, it feels like I’m being carried out on air.
    If this is what Matt meant by saying no to great sacrifice, he was right.
    Because I would’ve told him to go fuck himself.

Limping in front of the magistrate judge—the SC Agents were nice enough to staunch the bleeding and dress my wound, even dig the bullet out—I stand and await my punishment. Less than twenty-four hours before, I was Matthew Stokes, esteemed member of the Inner Circle. Tasked with usurping the Circle’s rule by creating some sort of fantastical factional democracy.
    Now I’m Luke Stokes, small-time con, criminal menace.
    The Chancellor, to mark the opening of the Otherlands, has decided to make an example of me. I will be executed there, on live television, instead of in secret. An audacious send-off for an audacious criminal.
    I know this because, before they ripped out Matt’s HoloBand from my neck, they turned on HoloNet. And a voicemail message in that scratchy voice was there, simply saying, “You weren’t part of