Page 23 of Fable for the End of the World

Esopus Creek vanishes in the rearview mirror. Mrs. Prinslew’s words echo.For you. For you.And then Jacob’s words return to me.I want you to come, too.The seeds of an imagined future bloom up, layering over my vision. A future where I survive this, where I leave Esopus and move to the City with Jacob. It’s what most people in the outlying Counties dream of. Getting out of here. Except when I try to pull the images together, they keep slipping away. I don’tknow if it’s because I can’t focus on anything except surviving the Gauntlet, or because that future, Jacob’s future, isn’t really what I want.

The tracker pulses, reminding me that not even my next breath is guaranteed. But this part of the Gauntlet I’m prepared for. It’s how I’ve lived my entire life: as if at any moment, the ground under my feet could crumble.

I steal a glance at Luka. Now he’s staring straight ahead, eyes narrowed. I wonder if he’s thinking about Jacob kissing me. I still feel embarrassed by it, like I’ve unknowingly exchanged something I didn’t want to exchange in return for a car and some canisters of gasoline. But Luka and I have never judged each other for what we do in order to survive. I don’t want to believe he’d start now.

We drive on for a while in silence. Then Luka reaches over and covers my hand on the steering wheel, just for a moment, and gives it the faintest squeeze.

Five minutes until the Gauntlet. My tablet won’t stop vibrating. Dusk is settling in an uneven, hazy way, shadows long and sunlight still beaming through gaps between the tree branches. After a few moments of ceaseless rumbling from my tablet, Luka picks it up and shoves it into the glove compartment.

The first part of our plan is just to get as far away from Esopus Creek as possible. According to the Gauntlet’s rules, the Angel has to start at my legal residence. So at least we have a head start.

But just running away is easier imagined than done. To say that the roads in the outlying Counties are treacherous is anunderstatement. The ones that were once paved are now pocked with low, deep potholes. The dirt roads are so uneven that sometimes I have to slow to a ten-mile-per-hour crawl just to make it through in one piece. Some of the lanes we try to turn down are completely flooded, or lead to dead ends, which means I have to make creaky, perilous U-turns to get out. My driving is still liable to get us killed before the Gauntlet even starts.

We’re not completely directionless, though. Luka’s tablet is propped up on the dash, giving me, at the very least, the vague sense that we’re heading north. North and north and north.

One thing Dad believed—one thing he never stopped talking about—was that there was a place completely off Caerus’s grid. A place where even the feed from my tracker would go dead. I could never really make myself believe it, since Dad mostly brought it up when he was a few beers deep, but we don’t have a solid plan otherwise, and it’s worth exploring.

I know Luka believes it. And I know he believes Dad made it there.

“It would have to be somewhere around the contested territory,” Luka murmurs. He scrolls up on the map, zooming in and then out again.

The contested territory he’s talking about is in the far northwest of New Amsterdam, where it shares a border with the Dominion of New England. Historically, the border was the lake that we call Lake Renssaeler and New England calls Lake Burlington—a lake that, a long time ago, everyone called Lake Champlain. But then there were the storms, and the lake overflowed its banks, drowningnearly the entire county on New Amsterdam’s side.

New England seized the moment and invaded. The marshy remains were occupied by the Dominion, its residents placed under martial law. New Amsterdam fought back. New England fought back harder. Then came the Era of Atomics, and once both sides got their hands on nuclear weapons, every border skirmish instantly exploded—for one terrifying moment—and then turned cold. Mutual assured destruction granted the contested territory a reprieve, but I wouldn’t quite call it peace.

Because both sides are afraid of igniting that powder keg again, Drowned County, as it’s been nicknamed, exists in a sort of limbo. New Amsterdam’s government won’t officially confirm anything, of course, but there are rumors that it’s a blackout zone. The residents aren’t even wired to a power grid, so electricity is scant, and of course there are no Caerus helicopters airlifting rations to its residents, which might be construed as taking sides. It does seem like the sort of place Dad would go.

Unfortunately, even if you do believe Drowned County is some kind of rebel’s paradise, there’s still about two hundred miles between it and Catskill County. Miles occupied by half-sunken roads, impassable mountains, and dark, swampy forests, where things even worse than Angels lurk.

In the back seat, my tablet suddenly stops vibrating. There’s a single, almost musicalding, and then it goes totally silent. We’re driving through an impenetrable canopy of trees, so I can’t see any projections in the sky, but with cold-blooded certainty, I know that my Gauntlet has begun.

Luka looks over at me, like he’s expecting me to break down, to start hyperventilating or sobbing. Strangely, I feel almost nothing at all. It’s just my body that reacts, not my mind, bile churning in my empty stomach and adrenaline spiking through my veins. But it’s fair enough for him to wonder. Mom always mocks me, saying that I cry over every little thing.

I didn’t speak to her again after last night. I know I should try to erase her from my mind. Yet even now I feel a petulant hint of pride that I’m not being weak the way she thinks I am.

But then of course there’s the sneaking doubt that follows. The small voice that tells me Mom was right to do what she did. That between the two of us, Luka is always the one worth saving.

I bite down on my lip, hard. Because I feel like I have to break the horrible silence, I ask, “How long have we been driving?”

“About three hours now.” Luka’s voice is tense.

That doesn’t mean much—I’ve only reached a peak speed of forty miles per hour, and every thirty minutes or so we’ve come upon a flooded road and had to backtrack. I steal a glance at Luka’s tablet. We’ve only managed to put about twenty miles between us and Esopus Creek.

I wonder if the cameras have flickered on to start the live stream. They’re microscopic, flitting through the air like the ever-present mosquitoes, and I can’t hear them over the growling engine and the clatter of the wheels on the uneven terrain. I try to tell myself it doesn’t matter, that the only thing I should focus on is surviving. But it’s hard when I know there are millions of people tuned in, watching and analyzing my every move.

“Do you really think this will work?” I whisper—because I’m self-conscious about the cameras, and afraid of speaking my fears aloud, as if that will make them more real. “Do you really think Dad is... alive?”

Luka is silent for a long moment.

“I do,” he says at last. “Dad is a survivor.”

“Yeah. Like a cockroach.”

Luka lets out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “A cockroach that couldn’t stay off the booze.”

“A cockroach that thought it was stronger than the shoe about to squish it.”

Luka’s laugh is genuine and unmistakable this time. “Yeah.”

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