Her driver that afternoon was a different Martyr, slightly older but still quite young. She was so preoccupied with thoughts of Alexander that she almost forgot to greet the man. He didn’t seem to be in a talkative mood either, though, and they rode in silence back to the center of town. Sasha was so focused on the butterflies in her stomach and trying to catch glimpses of her hair and face in the rearview mirror that she didn’t notice the crowds thronging downtown until the jeep rolled to a stop and it was time for her to disembark.

A familiar sense of queasy dread gripped Sasha’s guts as she exited the vehicle and looked out over the crowd. They were converged around the gallows once again. Sasha craned her neck, and she was able to see four men in filthy, tattered rags standing before the killing instrument. It took her a second to recognize two of the men as the porters who’d first unloaded her from her crate. An older, bearded Martyr in jet-black body armor stood before them. He held a Bible in one hand and a formidable looking handgun in the other. Sasha started to push her way through the crowd for a better look. She hadn’t made it far when the bearded Martyr addressed the crowd.

“These four men were all once employees of the secular abomination that called itself the Republic of Texas,” he said in his booming, stentorian voice. “The Heavenly Kingdom offered them mercy, in the form of indentured servitude. All we asked…” he scanned his eyes across the crowd, the left corner of his lip curled up into a slight growl, “All we asked for was their honest, obedient labor. And they repaid this mercy by stealing food and supplies meant for the Heavenly Kingdom’s brave soldiers.”

He lifted his big pistol up into the sky and fired off four shots in quick succession.

“These men stole from God. There is only one proper punishment for such a sin.”

He turned back toward the gallows and nodded at a hooded Martyr who stood behind him with a hand on the thick wooden lever that operated the whole grim apparatus. The other man pulled downwards and the four bodies on the scaffold dropped with a sickening chorus of snaps. Sasha felt her stomach turn sour. This time, though, she watched. She didn’t take her eyes off the gallows until the last man had ceased his twitching.

“It’s not a pleasant sight, is it?”

That voice. Sasha recognized it immediately. It was the voice she’d heard a hundred different times over her deck, hidden up in her room back in the AmFed. It was the voice of the first man she’d ever really loved. It was Alexander.