**CURRENTLY A FEATURED STORY**
highest ranking: #11 in Science fiction
❝true happiness is only achieved without freedom.
There is a girl who wakes to a world that she was supposed to protect. Instead, she fights it.
There is a man who is cursed wit...
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evanna
Burning the photograph had been more of an obligation rather than a personal necessity or a result of true will- but I had to prove to Julian that I was beyond material shows of sentimentality, and that my mundane, former life was no longer something anybody needed to be concerned with. If my purpose is to become the catalyst for the revolution, then it will be so, no matter what.
Half an hour after having watched the paper curl into smoke, their smiling faces are already beginning to slip from the confines of my mind, and I let them go without concern. Perhaps they were not so important after all. They're dead and were once alive: those are the facts.
Julian and I find the bodies of doctors as we walk through the facility. At one point, Julian tells me to stay in one spot whilst they go and investigate down a corridor full of laboratories.
Anything interesting?
No.
I know it's a lie. As we walk back, I catch the glimpse of a child's hand hanging off a laboratory table, the wrist, the fingers, stuck in with needles, tubes. That could have been me, I think.
Julian can't stop swearing as we get back into the wall, and they shove the gun into the waistband of their trousers, their loose grey vest and scarf hiding the form of the weapon.
Shut up.
Fuck. Damn this fucking construction- crap, a guard. Get over here.
The walk back to the Red Hand through the sterile snow around us is slow, arduous, tedious. I don't bother asking for the handgun back. Julian falls uncharacteristically quiet as we near the centre of Tetrahmon, keeping the pace brisk, even, unaltered. There's something laboured about the way Julian's walking, though- perhaps it was that walk through the corridor, although I doubt it. Julian's always come across as... well. Someone who welcomes death.
