Page 39 of Fable for the End of the World

The Angel gives a small, pained exhale. Her hair, loose from its high, neat ponytail, falls over her shoulders in tangled strands. I don’t know what comes over me—instinct, I tell myself,nothing more—but I drop to my knees beside her.

“Here,” I say. I drape one of her thin arms over my shoulders. “Come on.”

Even now, her real eye flickers with suspicion. I half expect her to shove me off. But instead she just hangs on to me limply as I haul us both back to our feet.

As her grip on my neck tightens, I’m aware of how easy it would be for her to start squeezing. My throat is still an unending pulse of pain, garishly purple. But I only feel a faint fluttering of fear. It’s not that I trust her, not really. If she were strong enough, she’d probably try.

Her body feels as limp as a cut sapling. I realize, very abruptly, that if it came to blows, I could win.

She knows it, too. That’s why she tenses around me, jaw clenched, muscles tightening in her throat.

After we’ve hobbled a few steps, I blurt out, “This isn’t just because of Luka, is it?”

Her gaze clips to me, cold as quicksilver. “No.”

“Then what happened?”

She lets out a breath. “Withdrawal. From stimulants.” When I stare back at her blankly, she adds, “Drugs.”

“I know that.” My mother has taken every medication in Caerus’s arsenal, including the little white mood-elevating pills we call lifters. They didn’t make her happy, though. Just paranoid. She kept scratching at her skin, accusing me of stealing food from her, accusing Luka of planning to leave her.

There’s also a fairly active black market trade for drugs in the outlying Counties. It’s not so bad in Esopus, but in Schuyler, the town across the reservoir, the pills move like flotsam down the flooded streets. I’ve seen the twitchy, glassy-eyed, cold-sweatwithdrawals. I just never imagined people in the City abused them, too, much less the Angels.

It makes sense, though. The lifters give powerful but temporary bursts of energy. Enough energy for the Angels to execute their quick and ruthless kills.

“I guess I just assumed you were powered by batteries, not pills.”

She blinks at me. “Is that really what you Outliers think?”

Oddly, there’s no judgment in her voice, just curiosity. Still, my face flushes. “To us you seem like machines.”

“You haven’t seen real Caerus machines.”

Again, her tone isn’t harsh. It’s flat. Observational. She has a heavy City accent, suggesting that she grew up speaking Damish as a first language. Only the most elite City dwellers do. She’s probably thinking that I have a thick Outlier accent, coarse and provincial.

“What do they look like?” I ask.

Her real eye fixes somewhere in the distance, over my left shoulder. “Nothing like people.”

It feels surreal that I’m having a conversation with an Angel and she’s not actively trying to slit my throat. We stumble on a bit farther. I can tell, sort of, from the moss and the position of the sun, that we are heading vaguely north. I don’t exactly have a plan except to put as much distance between us and the Wends as possible.

But I’m very aware of the fact that the farther I get from the Wends, the farther I am from where I last saw Luka. A lump invades my throat. It’s hard not to feel like I’ve made a stupid and traitorous choice: the Angel over my own brother.

Just survive. Then you can find him.

I repeat the words in a steady rhythm in my mind as I shuffle through the mud and the dead leaves, the Angel’s arm braced over my shoulders. But we don’t even make it another ten yards before the wind picks up, feathering the Angel’s pale hair across my face and carrying the smell of rot, thick and pungent as smoke.

Fourteen

Melinoë

I smell it now: the scent of decaying flesh. In my current state,it’s enough to make my gorge rise, and I have to swallow down the bile that fills my throat.

The Lamb stops dead. For a moment, neither of us even dares to breathe. I tighten my grip on her shoulder—an instinct that makes me even more nauseous, repulsed by my own weakness.

The moment the cameras are back on, I tell myself,I’m putting a bullet between her eyes.

But right now there are more pressing matters to worry about.

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