Free Ashes of the Fall by Nicholas Erik

teeth, clamping down in this pristine, perfect apartment where I’m utterly and completely alone.
    I clutch the list of HIVE developmental engineers’ names to my bare chest, all of them crossed off except for one—all dead or missing, Tanner covering the project’s tracks—but right now, I’m not concerned about the future.
    The black dog growls in my brain, my chest feeling like it’ll implode, the world going dark. I think about how far the fall will be from here if I plunge through the window, whether I’ll pass out on the way down.
    He’s really gone.
    Fuck.
    Not a single person in the world knows who I am. Or cares.
    Slick, the crew, Matt, Pops, mom. All that life does is take, take, take, until you’re emotionally broke, overdrafted into moral bankruptcy. Forced to assume the identity of a dead man, screw religious girls to save your own ass.
    I hear all this through the black dog’s slobbery jowls, it telling me to do it. Get rid of yourself. Give it up, Stokes. You’re a piece of garbage, no hero, nothing at all. No one will miss you when you’re gone. There have to be knives here. Or just call up Tanner, fire up the HoloNet, tell him everything. He’ll have the gestapo here in two minutes. Bogden will slit my throat with a smile on his face, Sten looking aghast that he ever paid me any respect at all.
    With a chill, I realize that this loneliness is the same as death. But not the real one, where you get to sleep forever in blackness. The Lionhearted’s version—hell. Where you’re aware of every passing moment, trapped in quicksand, getting just enough air through your cracked and bleeding lips to survive and continue the torment.
    What’s the point?
    The even-ifs fire through my brain relentlessly.
    Even if I pass the scan tomorrow, I won’t have HIVE—or the beta.
    Even if I get HIVE, I won’t have whatever Tanner needs to complete the project.
    Even if I could get out of the city, I’d be headed into a broken wasteland of misery. If the West was lawless before, I can only imagine that the standard of living has dropped precipitously in the past twenty-four hours. Looting and pillaging have to be rampant.
    Even if I can maintain the con, I’m stuck in skyscraper purgatory forever. And that’s if the ashes don’t claim us all.
    Wait.
    Reason and cold rationality chain my mental black dog down, leave it in the backyard, where a junkyard dog truly belongs, and I’m off to the races again.
    That’s what I’ll do.
    I’ll take it all down. This isn’t some Robin Hood act, where I reclaim Sherwood Forest from the evil powers that be to balance the social scales. This is pure Darwinism, becoming the best fit for the current environment. When you’re short-stacked in a game of hold ‘em and get an okay hand, but the blind’s growing and gonna bleed you out, you got no choice but to play aggressively.
    Okay hand is generous for what I’m sitting on, but then I’m a con man. And we all lie best to ourselves.
    I rewind the mental tape, back to my series of pitiful even-ifs . First thing—I gotta placate Tanner. Hook him on the opium drip of hope and anticipation. Get him so focused on HIVE, he doesn’t see the other hand coming around to stab him in the ribs. I take the list of engineers off my chest, and scan through the sea of red ink until I hit the second-to-last name.
    The sole survivor. Jaime Aslan. The address is on the paper.
    It’s ten o’clock, but I feel like I just woke up.
    Time to pay this engineer a visit, before the Circle finishes the job.

I step out of the auto-cab, onto the sidewalk, next to a few wispy stalks of grass struggling to survive in the middle of a dirt-pit of a yard. I’m at the northern tip of the island, and when I look behind me, I see the specter of civilization leering over my shoulder. In the distance, National Hall winks at me, a reminder to all citizens that the Circle is always watching.
    But out here, by the water, the buildings are no more than