Page 1 of Fable for the End of the World

One

Inesa

Floris Dekker spreads his daughter’s body out on the counter.“Please,” he says.

Sanne is still wearing a limp white dress, stained at the hem with what might be rust, but I know better. The drab linen, gray-hued and rough from too many washes, indicates a Caerus online catalogue purchase. The seams are straining around her shoulders and elbows. Something from the back pages, cheap and mass-produced.

“No,” I say firmly. “No way.”

“Please,” Floris says again. “This is all I have left.”

Strictly speaking, he’s wrong. Sure, his wife, Norah, has been dead since spring—from drinking contaminated water; if he lived in Lower Esopus with those of us who don’t have indoor plumbing, she’d have known to boil her water before she drank it—but Floris still has plenty of her left. All her Caerus debts, floating around the empty house like ghosts, wrapping their cold hands around his wrists and ankles, spectral manacles.

And now, even with Sanne dead, he’ll have company. She was twelve, old enough to accrue her own ghosts.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Sanne’s hair is damp and tangled. If I didn’t know better, I would say she died from drowning. But no one drowns here: as soon as we can walk and speak, everyone in the outlying Counties learns how to tell when the water table is rising and the ground under you can’t be trusted. I didn’t watch her die, unlike all the other inhabitants of Esopus Creek, their eyes trained on their tablet screens until they turned red and bloodshot—because how can you sleep, when you might risk missing the climax? The slaughter?

Her wet hair is all I can bear to look at. If I look at her face, or the utter stillness of her rib cage as it presses up against the fabric of the too-small dress—or, worst of all, the ring of bruises around her throat—I’ll have to duck under the counter and retch.

You wouldn’t imagine, in my line of work, that I’d have such a weak stomach.

Floris sets his jaw. “Is your brother here?”

My eyes narrow in response. I haven’t been hard enough on him. “Luka would tell you the same. No human corpses.”

I almost add anothersorry, but if I do, he’ll ask for Luka again.

“I can pay more,” Floris says instead, voice pitching higher. “Sixty-five credits.”

Our rate for white-tailed deer is sixty, and with the way they’re dying off, soon we’ll be able to charge twice as much. I’m not going to butcher a dead twelve-year-old for two extra packs of peach-flavored decon-tabs, even if it would make Mom happy.

Besides, Floris is lying. He can’t pay more. If he had the credits, Sanne wouldn’t be dead. This fact makes it difficult to pity him. If he runs up even more debts, he’ll have nothing left to pay with but his own life. Sanne was a flimsy shield, thrown up between him and Caerus’s collectors. Their cruel vengeance, disguised as justice.

Floris’s lower lip quivers, and it makes the rest of his face look all the more gaunt and hollow. He’s from Upper Esopus, which means he eats better than we do, but not by much. Though I know it wasn’t food that racked up his debts. It never is.

I let my gaze slide down to Sanne again. Her eyes are half open, pale lashes like dandelions that could still be blown.

That’s one little thing I’ve learned in this job: It’s actually hard to get a dead person’s eyes to close. Everyone thinks that when you die, you become limp and pliable, when really, it’s the opposite. In death, the body seizes up. Rigor mortis. Eventually, of course, it rots away into nothing, but at first it stays stiff and still, as if trying to preserve itself as it was in the very last moment it was alive. In a way, it makes my work easier.

I always think of it like that—like the corpses are helping me as much as I’m helping them. We both want to stay alive, or however close we can get to it.

When that thought occurs to me, a stone lodges in my throat. Not for Floris, but for Sanne. Because maybe this is better than being buried in an unmarked grave and forgotten. And because maybe Floris deserves the constant reminder of what he did to her.

With a quiet, sharp inhale, I reach under the counter and pull open one of the drawers. Floris’s brows leap hopefully.

I take one of the small glass bottles and hold it out to him, with no small amount of reticence.

“This is a mixture of alum and borax,” I tell him. “They’re both desiccants—they draw the moisture out of the flesh and help it last longer. I can’t tell you exactly how—”

But Floris is already grabbing my hand and prying my fingers open. “Thank you, thank you.”

“Wait!” I manage, as he’s sliding the bottle into his pocket. “You have to get it under the skin and...”

I trail off, because in the end I still can’t bring myself to give him step-by-step instructions about how to butcher and stuff his dead daughter.

Floris reaches for Sanne again. A little bead of water drips down her temple, and I have to fight the urge to wipe it away.

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