The rebel base wasn't very "secret." It was a handful of misfits crammed into an abandoned church: cracked plaster, leaky roof. "Sanctuary" was a generous name—it felt like a budget motel that charged with lives instead of money.
When I stepped in, I thought, half-aloud, "If this is heaven's waiting room, I'd rather book the hell economy."
The joke proved bitterly apt. They hadn't finished three nights of sleep before betrayal set the place on fire.
We were arguing strategy against the Bureau's "Happiness Assimilation" plan. The leader was pounding a battered map and shouting, "We must hold this place—this is the last free spot!"
I said, "Hold it? Buddy, if one more tile falls from that roof, you'll punch the floor with your chant."
People laughed. Then the doors were kicked in. Nightmares and soldiers poured through like tide.
Screams, gunfire—chaos. Some fought, some surrendered, some immediately betrayed their fellows.
The traitor? The man who'd shared half his bread last night and cursed the Bureau with them. Now he was grinning, shouting, "Don't blame me! I chose to live!"
I laughed. "Live? Bro, you just wrote yourself a death sentence and delayed the execution."
—
The fight was theater: stained glass shattered, nightmare energy and blood mixed into a greasy gloss. The rebels had old rifles and willpower; the enemy had numbers and the luxury of inevitability.
"Killing a lot of them isn't fighting," my friend spat. "It's purge."
My partner added, "No, purge requires a reason. This is liquidation—they have a list."
I should have been despairing. Instead, I laughed through gunfire like a lunatic. "Ha! We're temporary actors in this show! The plot kills us whether we improvise or not!"
Some rebels chose sacrifice. They strapped charges, they charged the gate. Flames and bodies braided into the sanctuary's last hymn.
A seventeen-year-old girl—hands too small for a rifle—ran with explosives on her back and detonated in the crowd. Her scream turned into a hollow, terrible laugh.
—
The blast swallowed everything. I stumbled out, coughing through smoke. From outside I said hoarsely, "Great. History will remember them as: a bunch of lunatics committing collective arson."
Karl was quiet, his eyes bright with something like sorrow. My partner, colder, said: "Don't lie to yourself. History will say: 'A rebel cell bred dissent and was neutralized by righteous forces.' Those sacrificed? No names. No epitaph."
I stopped. "What about us? We are the only historians left. If we forget them, their sacrifice becomes a private joke the world never reads."
Karl nodded. "Then let's remember. Even if the world ends with lunatics, at least we can say they didn't die in vain."
My partner didn't comment. He just looked at us heavy.
Wind carried the last echoes of laughter and screams across smoking ruins.
On that black, absurd pile, a grim clarity rose inside me: betrayal and sacrifice are two sides of the same damn coin. Flip it enough times and the outcome's the same—death.