It is mid August, the air is thick as blood, and the sky is blemished with melancholy clouds.  Thorpe watches them trudge across the sky, like tired soldiers returning from battle.

"I suppose you mean to frighten me, then?"  She smiles up at the man, eyes wide with mock innocence.  He raises the gun to her throat.  

"You think this is a game?"  She's running out of time, and they both know it very well.

"Oh, sir, I know it is, and I bet I can play it better than you."  Her voice is a child’s taunt.  The man draws in a deep breath, fingers curling around the glinting steel of the trigger.  He won't shoot, Thorpe knows that.  The gun probably isn't even loaded.  It's all but a ruse to make her afraid.  They have much worse things to do to her in the concrete room anyway.

"Arrest her," the man orders, and two more officials scramble to her side to usher her away.  Cold rain pours down her face, soaks through her clothes, pierces into her eyes like daggers.

"What will you tell the public about me?" she asks.  She makes sure her eyes remain on the murky horizon.  She is not afraid.  This fate has been hunting her down since the very first secret of theirs she wrote down and exposed for everyone to see.  "Will you make an example of my severed head in the square?  Or cremate the remains of my disfigured body and pretend I've been lost in the river?  What?”  The officials don't even look at her as they bring her in. 

She laughs.  How strange, that this is the most free she's ever been in her whole life.

"Did you know, sir," she starts, interrupted intervally by her own laughter.  "Did you know that most people find truth to be more meaningful than fiction?"  She nods, smiling.  "That's the reason I'm here."

"No," an official states, tone unreadable, still refusing to meet her eyes.  The eyes of the girl he's just led to her grave.  "The reason you're here is that you've been charged with treason.  Do you understand this?"  Thorpe simply hurls into another fit of guffaws. 

"How funny," she replies.  "You've betrayed the people over and over and over, while I've done nothing but served them their due truth.  So it seems a bit odd that I should find myself here, for a charge of treason, and not the other way around.  Don't you think so?"

"Treason is the betrayal of one's country, not one’s people," he says, still monotonous as is his order.  Thorpe shakes her head, droplets of water sprinkling from her dark hair.  Her lips twist into a rueful smile.

"But don’t you know? The people are my country."  

The man shoves her to her knees.  The impact of concrete cracks her bones, but she is silent nonetheless, even as she is weighed down by chains.  

"Sir, if you have any good left in your soul, please grant me one thing."  The cloaked executioner marches into the room, carrying a heavy, steel ax.  The dim light in the room reflects against the blade, painting a silver halo around her bowed head.  

"Speak," the man says, reluctantly.

"Watch what happens to me here."  All the honey is gone from her voice.  "Watch me die, and tell the people everything you saw in the morning.  I will know."  Thorpe isn't sure, but she thinks he nods.  

And with a gruesome thud, the gleaming ax strikes down cold.