The Mindless Man's Paradise

Chapter thirty-eight

  The rest of the counseling session was quiet.

  Aside from the pounding of my pulse in my ears and the instructions from our counselor, all was silent. Cyrus and I met eye contact a few times, and just from his eyes, I could tell that he was terrified. And I knew he could see it in my eyes as well.

  The longer I thought about it, the more I thought about my trip to SHQ. I thought that was bad. If we screwed up again, the outcome would be much worse. I had no doubt that execution by guillotine would be the least of our problems. If it came to it, by that point, we would be begging for our deaths. It would be too easy if death was the only concern.

  They would torture us. Make us say things. Do things.

  From now on, Cyrus and I were on lockdown.

                                                                                 ***

  Once the session ended, we returned home in silence.

  Every once in a while, I turned my head to take note of the cameras lining the streets.

  I had noticed these, and taken good care to avoid them.

  How had they discovered us? Our secret escape? Our names?

  I had looked around our apartment for cameras over and over; checking and double checking. There hadn’t been a thing. Not a camera, a microphone, or any other sort of bugs.

  Someone had reported us.

  But who had heard anything?

  Who had seen anything?

  The answers eluded my mind at that point.

  When we arrived home, I couldn’t contain myself any longer.

  I shut the door, practically running to Cyrus’s arms, my whole body shaking. For the first time in a long time, tears began to fall down my cheeks.

  This was a proper reason to cry, surely.

  “I’m so scared.” I whispered, my voice faltering, and my eyes darting to check for cameras once again.

  He stroked my hair with his large hand and said, “Me too.”

  Kissing the top of my head, he held me in our tight embrace for as long as it took me to calm down. I was hiccupping, and my breathing was shuddering, but I wasn’t an emotional mess any longer.

  Perhaps it was my past catching up to me and the events of today that had combined and caused my emotional breakdown, but it didn’t matter. It was very likely Cyrus and I were going to die.

  Cyrus’s rebellious nature, combined with my newfound inability to be a normal Landie, sentenced our death.

  Not that I wouldn’t try to put it off for as long as humanly possible, but in the end, it was inevitable.

  I took a moment to imagine myself, with my head perched at the base of the guillotine, tears streaking my face, and then suddenly, blood splattering as my head fell to the floor, rolling around; my eyes taking in the last moments of their life before my brain stopped functioning.

  The thought was frightening, but I found myself more willing to die as myself than pretending to be someone that I was not.