Page 6 of Fable for the End of the World

Then the camera cuts to a close-up. I see a sheet of blond hair, so pale it’s almost white, pin-straight and shimmering. An oval face, equally pale, as pristine as the snow that hasn’t fallen overNew Amsterdam in decades. Angular cheekbones and lips set in a thin, impassive line. A girl, no older than me.

I almost catch myself thinking she’s beautiful. But then I remember that she’s not a girl—not really. She’s a cold creature that was crafted in the Caerus labs, starting with a human body and then adding or subtracting whatever they need to turn her into their perfect weapon. She wears a girl’s face, and maybe it is an exceptionally lovely one. But inside, she’s wires and hardware, alloys and electrical circuits threaded around flesh and bone.

Caerus calls them Angels, the name fitting in its cruel irony. Yet I find that I’m captivated, sickeningly, just like everyone else in New Amsterdam, by the coldly beautiful face of Sanne’s killer.

Two

Melinoë

When the lights go off, my real eye shuts and my prostheticblinks to life. My artificial eye sees everything in a different way: streaks of heat, blue and red and yellow, motion and stillness. The little girl’s movement pattern is erratic. She’s stumbling in the dark; I can hear her clumsy footfalls and labored breathing. Against my temple, the feed from her tracker throbs like a second pulse.

In the darkness I lift my gun, tracing her heat signature. Sometimes my targets stop, freeze, try to make as little movement as possible, try to not even breathe. That’s how prey animals survive. But people aren’t rabbits or mice, and as much as I sometimes wish it, I’m no snake or raptor.

The little girl whimpers as my prosthetic eye blinks, adjusts, and trains on her like the scope of a rifle. Then I line up my shot, finger brushing the trigger.

At the exact moment my bullet meets its mark, the feed from her tracker goes dead silent. I can only hear my own heartbeat, so loud in the empty room, almost angry in its determined bragging.The lights flicker back on, and fifty yards down the shooting range, the girl’s body is slumped against the cold metal floor. There’s no blood, and I don’t see the bullet wound until I get closer.

With every step toward her, my heartbeat grows louder. I feel it throbbing in my throat, making my gorge rise. By the time I reach her, the vision in my real eye has blurred, and I have to lift my hand to close the lid over my prosthetic, because it’s programmed to stay open always, even when I sleep.

I turn the girl over. Dead bodies are heavier than you think they’d be. Her stained white dress is limp and her hair looks damp—why is it damp? The stains are dark, but they aren’t blood. Where did they come from? My vision doubles and then fractures, like the whole room is a broken mirror. I can’t even feel the ground as I kneel beside her. My gloved hand spreads over the bullet wound.

Both of her eyes are still open, glassy and staring at nothing. There’s a choking sound that I know comes from me, but it feels so distant, like something I’m hearing from underwater. I rub at my real eye over and over again until it stings, until the pain driving tiny needles into my skull brings me back.

I let the eyelid over my prosthetic slide open. And then I can see the perfect falsity of her limbs, the tough silicone flesh that doesn’t give way when I touch it. Her eyes are spheres of plastic. The wound is just a hole with mesh and wires and circuit boards inside. There’s no sinew, no muscle, no blood.

The girl isn’t real. But all the others have been. I get to my feet again, breathing in short, hot gasps. There’s no mud seizing at myboots, sticking me down. I’m inside—standing in a stark, familiar metal gallery.

When I look up to the observation chamber, Azrael is frowning at me from behind the glass. His arms are folded over his chest. He used to think that killing was harder in the dark, when I had to rely on my prosthetic and heat signatures and the auditory implants that make my hearing as sharp as any hunting dog’s. But he must know now that he’s wrong. It’s so much harder to kill in the light, when I have to see everything, with all the human parts of me that are still left.

“Melinoë,” he says, his voice low and grainy through the speaker, “let’s talk.”

It’s not a long walk from the shooting range to the lab, but it feels like it. My knees are weak and trembling. As I approach, Azrael scans me up and down, eyes zeroing in on all the little chinks in my armor: the way my hands are shaking inside my gloves, the way my breath is coming too fast, the way I can’t stop blinking, trying to make the memory of the dead girl stop playing on the insides of my eyelids.

“It’s been three Wipes now,” he says. His voice is still low, though it’s not quite gentle.

“I know.”

“We need to find a solution. You need to move on from this, Melinoë.”

There’s nothing in the world I want more. To move on fromthis. To forget. I could start sleeping at night again. I could take a shower without ending up curled on the bathroom floor, breathing hard and clasping my hand over my mouth as the water pours down and down around me.

I could do another Gauntlet.

Azrael starts to lead me to the lab, but then stops, right there in the middle of the hallway. I stare up at him, gaze running over his familiar features. The dark hair that betrays no trace of silvering, the eyes that seem almost pupilless, the white skin pulled taut over his bones. He’s all sharp edges, from his cheeks to his chin to the crisp lines of his black suit. I know that he’s getting transfusions, like all the high-level Caerus employees, and that’s why he looks so young. Why he hasn’t changed at all since I first met him, when I was eight years old and still asking after my real father.

I take a deep breath, because I don’t want my voice to betray any hesitation.

“Wipe me again,” I say.

Azrael’s mouth twitches. “You know it isn’t that simple. Every time we Wipe, we risk losing something we didn’t intend to lose.”

Memories, as he’s explained to me, are tricky things. Even Caerus’s top scientists can’t figure out why certain ones hang on while others slip away, eroded by time. Why certain ones get buried in us like shrapnel so we can’t move without feeling the pain of the thing that’s killing us slowly.

“I don’t care.” I’d rather die than see the girl again.

Azrael inhales, and then he lays a hand on my shoulder.

“I know you’re desperate to get back into the field,” he says.“But you’re too valuable to risk. What happened with Daena—it can never happen again.”

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