Ashes of the Fall by Nicholas Erik Page B

says. “Your execution is scheduled immediately after your arrival in the Otherlands at midnight.”
    I still can’t stand up, but it doesn’t matter. Two SC Agents come in, their shiny boots taking shots at my ribs before they haul me up. One of them is Bogden.
    “Nice to see an old friend,” I say.
    He wrenches my arm almost out of its socket and says nothing as they haul me into the back of a bulletproof prisoner transport. They toss me inside like a worthless sack of rotten potatoes, and then drive me to the Hyperloop station.
    Either as a kindness or some sort of cruel extra knife turn, Old Silver Fox is playing on the screen in the corner of the van. There’s my picture, with an instruction to tune in for my public hanging.
    A minute later, something more surprising comes on. A picture of Carina—identifying her as Carina Alonso—pops up in the corner. Apparently, she was my main contact in the Lionhearted. And she is considered highly dangerous and a threat to the existence of the NAC itself.
    For a moment, it doesn’t register.
    Then, with a grim smile, it hits me—the reason they didn’t charge me with the technology count. The Circle really didn’t have the drive.
    Because Carina, pissed off and spurned, stole it from me before they could come in.
    I wonder how that throws a wrench in Olivia Redmond’s analysis. One of the factions already has a sliver of power meant to balance the scales.
    That’s always been the problem with logic.
    It never accounts for human variables.

The scenery blurs by and the landscape grows worse as the Hyperloop travels further from New Manhattan. Due, I suppose, to my impending death, I’m more reflective than usual. Rather than looking for a buck or a lay, I look for meaning in life. As, I suppose, most people my age do.
    A strange sense of vertigo washes over me as I stare at wispy trees and patches of scorched soil. It’s the realization that everything I’ve bought into is a lie—that our personal reality is a story we tell ourselves to escape the absolutely insane proposition of actually being alive.
    I’ve never been in a bad situation—and it’s only now that I realize that all the other scrapes and problems were pretend, make-believe, a giant con with myself as the mark.
    We all have different ways of lying to ourselves, avoiding the truth. The Lionhearted pray to an invisible god, the Circle to a more tangible one of power and control. A religion promising absolution through a tithe of steady materialism. But it’s all the same in the end. We sacrifice what is truly right in front of us, exchange our lives on faith for the promise of something better.
    Something not real.
    We trade our freedom to be shackled to false ideals like safety. I look at the blackness, the sickly sky. Safety is illusory. Things will turn on you in an instant. It happened in ’26, which got us to here. It happened to me yesterday, an ally transforming into an enemy.
    But no—shifting the blame elsewhere is a fool’s errand. The enemy is always us. Not the government. In a democracy, citizens get what they want. And what they wanted was anti-septic, white-washed, total control. What they really wanted was fascism. Safety from anything that was a challenge. Relieved of the burden of actual responsibility.
    That’s why I’m here, right—I built my own gallows by trying to save my own ass. At least I’m not unique in my folly. We’re all guilty of fighting against the system, but really, we build it. We are the system that crushes our dreams and sentences us to die.
    Funny how that works.
    “Real shithole out there,” I say, taking a break from my thoughts by nudging the nerdy guy next to me.
    He keeps staring out the window. “Nicer than where I grew up.”
    He’s got thick glasses, the type I haven’t seen since, well, about ever, and a razor thin frame that looks about near to blow away. I don’t mention it, but I can’t imagine how this kid possibly got sent away to