Page 15 of Fable for the End of the World

But Lethe just says again, “It’s notfair. All you’ve done is fail, over and over again. You should’ve been decommissioned. Like Keres. Everyone knows it.”

Keres’s name is a blade twisted between my ribs. “Take it up with Azrael.”

“Azrael plays favorites. I don’t know what you’re doing to make him give you so many extra chances, but it’s disgusting.”

Something shimmers up in my mind, a whaleback breaching the water’s placid surface. Another half memory, flickering across the inside of my eyelids. I remember cold metal against the bottom of my belly. A flash of silver. My stomach turns over on itself, but then the not-memory dissipates, curling into the air like smoke.

My tone is flat and chilly. “I’m not doing anything. And you’ll get your chance soon enough. There’s never any shortage of Lambs.”

Lethe sucks in a breath. “I hope you fail. I can’t stand to see your face on another holoboard.”

“If I fail, you’ll neverstopseeing it.”

Our failures as Angels—those rare occasions when the Lambsactually triumph—are as famous as our successes. Maybe more. Most of the time it’s because they find somewhere to hide, somewhere deep or distant enough that it muffles the frequency of their trackers. They can wait out the timer. But sometimes, very rarely, it’s because they fight back. That’s what the audiences ache to see the most. A dead Angel, blood pooling around her head like a halo.

Lethe’s nostrils flare. “I don’t know why you think you’re so superior. You’re just going to end up on Visser’s arm.”

That’s what Lethe is really jealous of, I think. The more successful and famous an Angel is, the better her position when she’s decommissioned. When they do the final Wipe and we become what people call, in whispers,corporate concubines.A bauble flaunted on the arm of a Caerus executive.

Lethe stands there seething at me, but I’m cloaked in coldness. I don’t know anything about her. With precision and efficiency, Azrael turns us all into blank slates the moment we come to him. Her past is a black hole, like mine. She’s beautiful, I suppose, like all Angels are meant to be. No more or less than I am, really.

But this is why I’m better than Lethe, even with the unwashable stain of my last Gauntlet: because I can just push past her, as her lips tremble and her eyes blaze, and feel almost nothing at all.

I close the door to my room, leaving Lethe to rage outside. The lights come on when I enter, overly bright at first, before calibrating themselves to a dimmer, warmer glow. One of the maids has been in here, and she’s tucked in my sheets and fluffed my pillows.

The entire west wall of my bedroom is a window, facing theCity skyline below. Against the darkness, the buildings glow like a tangle of circuitry. Holo-ads beam into the starless dark. Tonight they’re advertising my upcoming Gauntlet. My face, flickering with static, and beside it, the Lamb’s. Inesa’s. Animated by Caerus’s media department, her eyes widen and her mouth opens ever so slightly, as if she’s shocked to see herself there in the sky above the City.

I press the pad next to the window and the City view vanishes. I scroll through the list of possible holograms to replace it: a field of flowers, the ocean at night, mountain peaks wreathed in mist. But in the end I choose nothing at all, and just let my window turn black. I can’t afford to be distracted.

I take out my tablet and pull up the map of Esopus Creek. I don’t need to memorize it. Tomorrow, all this information, along with the pulse of the Lamb’s tracker, will be fed into my brain via my prosthetic eye and the comms chip in my temple. To see it, all I’ll have to do is blink.

I type in Inesa’s address and the map zooms in. Her house is tiny, made of wood and perched precariously on cinder block pillars that hold it above the flooded street. Once, winter turned the outlying valleys crackling dry, brown leaves and brittle branches crusted with snow. It hasn’t snowed for as long as I’ve been alive. Now every season is the rainy season and every day the water rises farther than before. I wonder how long it will be before Inesa’s house goes under.

There’s something oddly familiar about it, something that jabs at me like a needle to the throat. The words themselves,EsopusCreek, blink across my vision. They’re familiar, too. But I can’t quite knit the sensations together into thoughts, into revelations. Maybe it’s a false familiarity. My mind is pitted with black holes. There’s no use puzzling over it.

My childhood is almost entirely gone, but a few memories have survived the countless Wipes. I remember that during my first days with Caerus, I would come to the window and press my palms flat against the glass, staring down at the City below. Sometimes I would imagine that the glass would shatter and I would plummet through it. But sometimes I imagined that instead of falling, I would fly. I was an Angel, after all. I spread my wings, and I was free.

Five

Inesa

I wake with blood in my mouth and someone jostling my shoulder. There’s a white-hot pain in the middle of my forehead and it hurts to open my eyes to the light. The vague, blurry outline of a face is hovering over mine, but I have to blink a few times before its features sharpen and clarify. Jacob.

“Inesa,” he says, voice high and tight with panic, “are you all right?”

Even in my semiconscious state, it strikes me as an absurd question.

There are more voices, and more blurry faces. I think I hear Mrs. Prinslew sniffling. Someone else lets out a choked sob.

I try to get up. Instantly, Jacob reaches around to cradle my back, easing me into a sitting position. My vision ripples. I lift a hand to my forehead, and wince when I touch that sore, throbbing spot in the center. I remember now: I hit my head on the counter.

The room returns to me in increments: the bucket of filthy water in the corner; the damp, creaky floorboards; the sharp, acridsmell of preserving chemicals. And the crowd of people around me, their heads bobbing like buoys in the water. Their eyes are bleary but bright, tearful with concern.

“We saw the Mask come in.” Mrs. Prinslew’s voice is so hushed I can barely hear her. “We thought—and then we got the notification on our tablets. But it didn’t seem real until...”

“Until?” I prompt. My tongue is swollen in my mouth and it hurts to talk.

Silence. Mrs. Prinslew’s gaze drops to the floor. When I shake Jacob off and push myself onto my knees, the crowd shifts away from me, as if tragedy is radiating from me like an illness they’re afraid they might catch.

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