Page 5 of Fable for the End of the World

I can’t bring myself to add asorry. But as soon as the words are spoken, I regret them. I’ve summoned up an even uglier side of Mom. Maybe the ugliest.

“Inesa,” she says, her voice pitching up, high and reedy, “I cannot deal with your selfishness right now.”

I suppose itisselfish, if you look at it the way Caerus wants you to. Because that’s the whole point of their credit system. Everything is affordable—if you’re willing to go into the red. I doubt there’s one person in Esopus Creek who isn’t at least a thousand credits in debt to Caerus. You can keep buying and buying, watching your account sink further into the scarlet ledger, until the collection alerts start popping up. And if you sink far enough, they’ll send one of theiremployees—Masks—to come and collect you. Then you can labor away in one of their packaging plants, for however long it takes to pay off what you owe.

But sometimes, there’s too much debt for work to wipe it clean. Five hundred thousand credits. That’s what Floris owed.

Unlike our neighbors, we refuse to let ourselves go into the red. For Luka, I know it has a lot to do with Dad. For me, there’s nothing quite so principled behind it. I’m just afraid. I’m afraid all the time. And maybe that’s the real reason I refuse to watch the Gauntlets. I don’t want it to feel real. I want to pretend it’s just a show.

It’s hard to pretend, when I’ve seen Sanne’s body stretched out across the counter.

So I let Mom have her little fit, scowling at my laziness, criticizing my lack of compassion. She goes on for so long that eventually Luka gets up and retreats to his bedroom in silence. He might think he’s the protector of the family, now that Dad is gone—and that’s probably how it looks to everyone in Esopus Creek. But behind closed doors, I’m still the one protecting him. I take Mom’s bullets every single time.

Eventually I manage to escape to my bedroom. It’s just a cot shoved up against the east wall of the house, with a bedsheet strung as a curtain between Luka’s section and mine. We can see each other’s shadows passing behind the curtain and hear the low murmur of each other’s voices, though we both keep our headphones on most of the time. I don’t know what he does on his tablet. And I’m glad he doesn’t know what I do on mine.

I force myself to choke down some leftover pasta—out of Mom’s sight—and set the empty plate on the floor, then prop my tablet up on my pillow. From the other side of the curtain, I hear Luka roll over in his cot.

I put on my headphones and open the $ponsor app, checking to see if any of my subscribers are online. After dinner is usually a good time. Everyone is home from work and there are a few hours to kill before bed. The little counter in the top right corner shows 172. Good enough. I turn on my front camera and click the red button that saysSTREAM.

“Hi, everyone,” I say, keeping my voice to a whisper. “Sorry I have to be quiet—my mom and brother are both trying to sleep.”

My subscribers know more about my life than anyone, because they pay me just to talk. They’ll pay to watch me eat pasta in bed and recount my day. I wondered, at first, what they could possibly get out of it—and sure, there are a fair number of men with shudder-inducing intentions. But if they say anything too creepy in the chat, I can click a single button and block them. They’re all anonymous, a string of random numbers—Caerus account numbers—with no picture attached. Still, I’ve come to recognize their different typing styles, if they watch my streams often enough.

A lot of them tell me about themselves, too. There’s the same thread that runs through every story, whether it be a negligent spouse, grown-up children moved far away, a luckless love life, a failed marriage. Their loneliness pulses through the screen.

Sometimes I wonder why they choose to watch me, when there are thousands of other streamers out there, and a lot of them muchmore, well,forthcomingthan I am. As I stream, I watch my face, warped slightly by the cracks in my tablet. My skin is olive-toned, and I suspect it would be almost as dark as Dad’s if I didn’t live in Esopus Creek, where the sun only peeks out from the clouds one out of every three days. My hair is the same shade of ash brown as his, my eyes a wavering hazel, my brows arched and dense, my lips full. It’s hard to look at myself without thinking of what Mom would say: that I look too much like my father.

“Luka takes after me,” she always says proudly, one of her more egregious delusions. Luka and I are mirror images of each other. Some people in Esopus Creek still mistake us for twins.

It’s funny, how the same features can look so different on different people.

The streams are something I keep secret from Mom, and even from Luka. We don’t judge each other for the things we do to survive, whether that’s swiping coal from the shed in the Mulders’ yard or sucking the marrow out of rabbit bones while Mom turns her head away in disgust. On that front, we’re a team, just like we are when it comes to running the shop—him hunting, me mounting. But streaming feels like a different kind of desperation, one that embarrasses me too much to share.

“It’s raining so hard today,” I tell my chat. “And I had this one client come into my shop—you won’t believe what he wanted me to do...”

I just talk and talk and talk, into the fuzzy tablet screen. I answer questions from the chat and sometimes they tell me about their days in return. With my longtime subscribers, I know whatkinds of questions they’re going to ask, and how they expect me to reply. It’s five credits for every question; five more if they want the app to read their questions aloud in a staticky, robotic voice. Some nights I can make more in an hour than I do my entire week at the shop.

It’s easy to lose track of time when I’m streaming. At first it was awkward, but now I can talk almost nonstop for hours. The things I find impossible to say to Luka are somehow simple to say to strangers. My subscribers know about Mom and all her dramatically feigned ailments, about how long it took me to realize that when Dad disappeared, he was never coming back. Topics that Luka and I have a silent agreement to never touch.

Seven turns into ten turns into midnight so quickly. When I finally switch off my camera, I’m so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open. Some of the subscribers linger a little while after I’m gone, their questions hanging limply in the chat, unanswered. I think they watch me because they can feel my loneliness echoing back, identical to their own. While my voice and face fill up their empty houses, their questions build like a seawall. A barrier against the bleak, oblivious silence that would crush me, if I let it.

I scroll through the remaining messages in the chat. One comment sticks out to me, from a user that I don’t recognize. A new subscriber.

have u seen it??

Then they post a link.

Usually the only commenters who post links are bots, trying to send me to spam websites, and I block them immediately. But Iknow this one isn’t a bot because they’ve actually subscribed to my stream—though only as of ten minutes ago. Not long enough to be aware of my personal convictions. All my other subscribers know better than to ask.

I recognize the link. It’s the same one at the top of Mom’s browser screen.Caerus.gov/Gauntlet.

Luka’s words drift through my mind.Maybe you should watch them. Maybe then you’d understand.And then I think of my humiliating encounter with Floris, how I’ve damaged our reputation, all because I’m too much of a coward to so much as peek at what everyone in New Amsterdam watches greedily, eagerly, or with a repulsed sense of obligation.

I click the link.

The page takes a few agonizing seconds to load, and I steel myself to see Sanne—blue eyes flung wide in silent horror, skinny legs pumping desperately as she runs, stained dress streaking against the trees. If I can imagine it first, maybe seeing it won’t be so bad. But it’s stupid of me to think I can conjure anything more nightmarish than the truth.

When the page finally loads, I don’t see Sanne at all. Instead, I see the dark belly of a helicopter lowering itself over a familiar patch of forest. I hear the deafening whir of its blades. It hovers a few feet above the ground, stirring up dead leaves, mud flecking its sleek black hull.

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