A budding writer with a bunch of ingenious rebels risk their lives to try and overthrow an oppressive government to earn back their liberty of expression. They need to unify and put aside their differences, interests and pasts, and race against time...
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The excruciatingly sharp pain seemed to be ripping apart her limbs. Her body was on fire. She tried to move her legs and felt the dead weight of them lying limp. The attempts to move caused the shooting pain to intensify. She gasped, fluttering her eyelids, trying to force them open through dried tears and sticky medicine glueing together her eyelids. They felt heavy.
She opened them once. It was all darkness. Tears swam in her vision and she quickly blinked them away. But it was painful and she closed them shut again.
"Sleeping beauty awakens," a very familiar voice commented from the other side of the room with a sigh, "We thought we had..."
"Wait, I know the voice," she forced open her dry, chapped lips that had stuck to each other like Velcro. But her mind couldn't grasp any conscious thoughts. It was all getting addled up in a drug-like trance. The voice was so intimate, so distinct and the name came almost on her lips and escaped again.
"Well, that is..."
"Lean," she finally muttered. "You're Lean," she winced again.
"Yeah about that..."
"Oh my God. I'm really dead!" she wailed.
"Yes, and you're suffering for your sins by getting boiled in the cauldron by Hades himself," the voice sounded angry and amused at the same time.
"You're dead. You were dead," she still mumbled, her half-conscious thoughts trying to grasp onto stray pieces of words.
"Alizeh, I'm not dead and neither are you. Though you almost died," the voice sighed finally, coming closer. Alizeh turned her head to the side, forcing her eyes open.
Coppery hair, green eyes and that same queenly grace. It really was Aileana. Unwarranted tears sprang to her eyes. She tried to find her arms to hug her friend that she had given up for dead. But she couldn't move her arms. She looked down at her body and saw only a white sheet spread on a frame which was covering her from below her neck.
"Yeah, but was I supposed to be dead?" the surprise and the shock was evident in her voice.
"Yes, our apartment burnt down in an ElectroBot attack," Alizeh reminisced.
"And so you thought that dying in a fire would be a befitting punishment for your sin of killing me. Are you crazy?"
"The entire mission was a vengeance..." Alizeh mumbled amd paused for a second.
"The mission?" her voice rose higher.
"You've been successful. The risks you all took for earning back our freedom, paid off. Cloud Nine has been evacuated. There are no barriers now. Laws have been amended to guarantee freedom of speech and the moon travel has been opened again," Aileana ranted in one breath, her eyes shining.
"Oh!" Alizeh looked up at the ceiling again, contemplating the implications of what happened, "So, how did I survive the fire?"
"You forgot that we were monitoring your moves, nitwit. You kept me on watch for any untoward incident. Couldn't you have sent us an SOS?" Aileana scolded, coming closer, and touching her cheek with her hands. She ran her fingers down the sides of her face.
