I've decided to live this week as the happiest week in the history of mankind.

The two robots cooked and cleaned, anticipating our every need, so even the dreaded washing up did not spoil our holiday. Grant and I ran around the beach and forest for days on end like carefree little kids, and in the evenings we built fires, roasted marshmallows on sticks, and listened to the wind rustle through the leaves and the soft whisper of the surf.

I tried desperately to feel and savour every moment, knowing that the slightest slip in removing the bomb would be the end of me. I wasn't afraid of making a mistake, I just didn't want Grant to die. So I thought my plan through to the last detail, going over it again and again in my head, trying to find the pitfalls.

The Circul sighed and tossed aside the branch on which he had been roasting pieces of marinated meat; we had eaten to our hearts content and were now recovering from an overly heavy dinner.

“Why are you so disgruntled?” I grinned against my will.

I wanted to piss off the guy who had been teasing me all day, laughing at me for being afraid of dolphins and mistaking them for sharks. Only the dorsal fins were visible from a distance, and was there time to look closely? I screamed wildly and rushed ashore, dragging the young man face down to the bottom because he'd tripped on the chain and couldn't get out until I came to my senses and helped him.

Sharks have always frightened me. As a child, left alone at home, I once watched a horror film about these predators. Since then, fish with huge jaws have made me shudder.

“Your dream has come true. We're by the sea. There are shells to collect,” I chuckled.

Circul gave me a fierce glare. It had been too long since we'd fought, and Grant hadn't used much magic, so sparks flew through his black hair.

“I'm sorry,” I held up my hands and crawled as far away as I could, “I won't piss you off again.”

The guy exhaled, relaxed. He put his glowing hand into the fire, and a few heartbeats later, flames leapt over it. The red-orange petals danced on his pale skin without scorching it.

I watched with excitement as the flames shimmered on Grant's palms.

“If I may?” I was surprised at my own recklessness.

The guy looked at me in disbelief, but threw a blob of his magic anyway. I caught the hot ball with a quiver in my heart, and it melted on my fingers with a pleasant warmth that felt as if I'd dipped my hands in liquid honey.

The magic enveloped my wrist, flickered, tickling the sensitive skin, and dripped down to the base of my ring finger where it solidified into a ring.

“What's that?”

“A gift,” Circul smiled menacingly, with a ‘if you don't accept it willingly, it'll be worse for you’ look.

A faint glow emanated from the thin ring, and a flame seemed to be smoldering inside the jewellery.

“Thank you. Is it something special?”

“No, just a magical trinket.”

“And why did you give it to me?”

Grant shrugged his shoulders. “Don't know, I just wanted to. I had to use the magic somewhere anyway.”

I smirked. So he wasn't being romantic, he just needed to release some tension?

“Legally, do I have to get you something too?” I bit my lip; I didn't want to waste my magic. I needed it tonight.

Grant lay down on the sand and put his hands under his head.

“If you answer my question, I'll make it count,” the guy didn't even look at me as he spoke.

I squinted, sensing that the answer wasn't going to be easy. He was staring up at the sky, his black eyes reflecting the stars that twinkled in abundance in the darkness.

“What's your name?” the guy asked without waiting for me to think.

I tensed up, not wanting to share the one precious thing I had left in my life – my name.

“Why don't you ask another question?”

My chain mate smiled bitterly and shifted his gaze to me. “But still, Siri, what's your real name?”

“I won't tell,” I stood up abruptly and turned my back on Grant, facing the darkness with the sea splashing in.

“Why?” he asked quietly.

I remained silent, letting the hush envelop the world with pleasure. I felt I would betray myself if I told. Not many people knew my real name: a few friends, a few acquaintances, my father and the president. My whole life was in Virtul, in the game I had a pseudonym, so I rarely heard my name from the lips of others.

They said it used to be bad form for people to call each other by their birth names. I was still not used to the word my parents had given me.

“So why did you decide to call yourself Siri?”

I sighed, Grant wasn't backing down. Okay. I smiled, that was a truth I could tell. I turned and sat down right in front of the guy, craning my neck. “You see it? What does it say?”

“Siri-22,” the young man read, running his finger over the rough surface of the collar.

I bared my teeth in a grin. “Isn't that funny?”

“What?”

“Siri has lots of subtle, metaphorical and contradictory meanings. But I’m not at liberty to discuss any of them. Sorry.”

Grant hovered, not getting my joke.

“All right,” I felt sad for some reason. I would have liked to extend the evening indefinitely, but curiosity and an unhealthy desire to experiment, coupled with the possible fatal consequences, were getting the better of me. “Shall we go to bed?”

“Last question. What is your dream? Other than death...”

I closed my eyes for a moment, suppressing the urge to bathe my vis-à-vis in sand. Why did he have to be so clueless today? I'd been pushing him towards home for a long time.

“Lots and lots of money,” I breathed out as I stood up.

“What will you do when you have lots and lots of money?”

I could see that Circul was trying to get me to talk to him, to have a heart-to-heart, as he had been doing so often lately, but I had to work hard to hide the mad gleam in my eyes and the trembling of my fingers with impatience and fear. So I responded with ridiculous jokes, hoping that the irony in them would scare Grant away. “Do something crazy. I'll draw a rabbit, start a blog and take pictures of it against the backdrop of places of interest on my travels around the world.”

The president's son raised his eyebrows in surprise, and as he slowly realised what I was saying, I put out the fire, took the young man by the arm and hurried to the house. The breeze played with our hair, glad of the sea, and the night was clear, so the magic flowed obediently through my blood, waiting for its time.

I exhaled nervously, my heart pounding in my ears. I was afraid that my emotions would soon get out of control and Grant would suspect something was wrong and interfere with my crazy plan.

Once the robots were satisfied that we were in bed, they went into the next room to recharge. And after about five minutes of turning around, Circul quietly drifted off to sleep.

I carefully got out of the embrace of the guy who had recently made a habit of falling asleep with me in his arms. I removed the chain bracelet from my wrist and slipped into the bathroom, where I had already prepared a box of medical instruments.

I took two painkillers at once and brushed my teeth several times while I waited for them to take effect. My fingers trembled as I unscrewed the cap of the alcohol solution to rinse out my mouth.

I've always hated hospitals and everything associated with them. I looked in disgust at the tools Dav had handed me, along with instructions on how to remove my poor, innocent tooth.

‘The first upper molar on the right is the sixth tooth from the top. Put some sterile gauze on it first, then loosen it and try to pull it out of the alveolar socket. And don't be in a hurry. If you rush in and pull too hard, you may leave the roots behind and you'll be in even more pain. Remember, you only have ten seconds...’ I read it for the thousandth time.

Ten seconds. In a few heartbeats I had to run away from Grant with a bomb torn from my gums, launch it into the sky and admire the epic explosion.

I opened my mouth wide and tried to lift my head as high as I could to see the reflection in the mirror. The filling on the sixth tooth on the right side of my mouth was blue.

I stared at it hatefully for a few seconds, this bomb had ruined the last weeks of my life. I cursed the blue-eyed Asanor who'd come up with this crazy invention. I wish he'd get sick of my curses.

The tooth extraction pliers glinted dangerously in the light of the lamp, and with a heavy heart I took them and turned them in my hand, getting used to them.

Right, I'd almost forgotten. I looked out the bathroom door and Circul was still sleeping peacefully, unaware of what was going on under his nose. I whispered a spell and a cloud of silence enveloped the bedroom.

I took one last look at myself in the mirror, bidding farewell to my worthless life, then applied the gauze and grabbed the pliers with desperate determination. It seemed that if I hesitated even a second longer, I would never be able to rid myself of this deadly mockery of fate.

The tooth reluctantly gave way, and despite the painkiller, my jaw seized in a flash of pain and blood rushed into my mouth, but there was no time to stop it.

I picked up the most dangerous thing for many dozens of kilometres around, ran out of the house, put it on the tip of the air, attached it with magic and shot an arrow of wind into the sky. It was not for nothing that I had spent so much time training to create this spell. A few thousand a day, until I was exhausted, to increase the speed to the maximum.

A bright flash, like a thousand suns, illuminated everything around, and an eerie yet beautiful dark cloud was born.

With tears in my eyes, I stared at the cooling cloud ring, unable to believe it was over.

The shockwave raised the waves in the sea slightly, and the wind whipped my hair and clothes a little harder. I breathed a sigh of relief – it meant the arrow had carried the tooth a considerable distance from the ground. And I hoped that no birds or aeroplanes were flying by at the time, I didn't want to cause a catastrophe.

I spat out the blood and sank to the porch steps, losing all my strength in an instant. The collar shrank a little, beeping softly. Yes, it still had to be unlocked. Dav had promised he'd do it soon.

I got up wearily and staggered to the bed. Threw off the cover of silence, fell onto the sheets and crawled over to Circul to warm myself. The young man's hair smelled of mint and sea salt.

I smiled at the edge of reality and the realm of Morpheus, realising with simultaneous joy and sadness that our paths would soon part and I would never again hear his deep breathing and hearty laugh as he slept.

The next morning we received a call from the president. He was pleased to tell us that the lab had finally found a way to remove the collar bomb from me.

A few hours later, Lias was driving us into the capital. Grant was smiling with anticipation, tapping his right hand on his knee, and I was looking at the world with apathy, my emotions exhausted the night before.

“A-a-gra-a!” Tibai made a clever face as he removed the ‘deception spells’ from my collar. The man squinted, leaned over me and winked, the corner of his lips twitching in a discreet smile. “Just a little left.”

Dav had surprisingly arranged for us to meet his henchman, who was now engaged in the important and dangerous task of removing a bomb from my neck that no longer existed.

The president watched the pseudo-lab assistant's every move with nervous eyes, sometimes even clutching the arms of the chair he was sitting in. Grant stood beside me, holding my palm in his hands, supporting and reassuring me.

“Now, keep her still,” Asanor's aide said to Circul Junior. “She must not move.”

I was about to ask why it was so important when Tibai pulled out a small circular saw with tiny teeth and switched it on. I jerked back, horrified to hear the tool whirring.

“The collar can't be magically removed,” the man said, as if to apologise.

I nearly howled as the saw came close to my head. Grant tried his best to hold me back, but as soon as I smelled the scent of metal from the teeth running across the surface of my collar, I screamed and prayed that I'd either be killed or left alone. The idea of wearing a collar for the rest of my life didn't seem so crazy anymore.

“Maybe we should put her to sleep,” Rizor suggested.

My opinion was not asked, the president's son simply brushed his fingers across my forehead, a warm palm covering my eyes.

The next time I woke up, I felt the draft on my skin. The moment the garrotte was removed from my neck was the happiest moment of my life. I ran excitedly to the mirror to make sure the nightmare was over. It was so unusual to be without the heavy weight around my neck. It felt so light.

I nodded, stretching my stiff muscles.

“What?” I looked indignantly at the laughing Circul in the mirror. “You have no idea how horrible it was to sleep with that thing under my head!”

The young man opened his mouth to reply, but was interrupted.

“Would you like to keep it as a souvenir?” Tibai asked with a predatory grin, holding up the sawed-off collar.

I shuddered, while Grant grinned.

“Just destroy it,” said the president as he left the lab.

I nodded in agreement and followed the head of the country, removing the chain and bracelet on the way. What an incredible pleasure it was to be free. Now I could go anywhere without looking back at Circul Junior and trying to keep up with his pace.

I got into the car with a smile on my face. The sun, the sky, the birds, all nature and all living things were singing of freedom.

Farewell, bomb, I hope the nightmare of you never again disturbs the last days of my existence.