Page 80 of Fable for the End of the World

The unexpectedness of the question momentarily cleaves through the fog of despair. “No,” I say. “What is that?”

Inesa hesitates a moment, as if she’s listening for something. “They’re not watching,” she says. “Azrael has cut the cameras.”

“What? How do you know?” I can’t hear their faint buzzing, but only because Azrael is purposefully keeping them out of earshot now.

“He did it before,” Inesa says. “When Luka and I talked about the Drowned County. Caerus doesn’t want anyone to know it exists. It’s a place north of here, near the border with New England. It’s where Luka and I were headed. It’s off the grid.”

I believe her—about the cameras, at least. Especially now, with so many people tuned in, Azrael will be very, very careful aboutwhat he allows the audience to see and hear. But the rest?

“It can’t be.” I shake my head. “Nothing exists off the grid. Just bombed-out wastelands.”

“That’s what Caerus wants you to believe.” Inesa reaches into her pocket. She pulls something out, clenches it in her fist. “They don’t want anyone to know it’s real. I thought it was just a myth, one of my Dad’s stories, but...” She holds out her hand. On her open palm there’s a tiny scrap of paper. “He left this for us. They’re coordinates.”

I stare down at the sequence of numbers. The ink is blurred, but legible. Degrees of latitude and longitude.

“I forgot about it until now,” she admits. “Until Luka showed his half of the compass. Dad left the coordinates tucked inside it.”

I just keep staring at it. A tiny scrap of paper with some hastily scrawled numbers. How can we stake three lives on it? Hers, mine, and Luka’s. What she’s talking about—this Drowned County—sounds like a fantasy. There’s not supposed to be anything along the border with New England except for the irradiated aftermath of exploded nukes. If there were, Caerus would have destroyed it.

“No,” I say, shaking my head again. “Caerus wouldn’t allow something like that to exist.”

“Maybe they don’t know it’s real.” Inesa closes her fingers around the scrap of paper, hard enough to turn her knuckles white. “And they couldn’t wipe it out—it’s too close to the border. It would break the stalemate with New England.”

I consider it. Inside the bubble of the City, all the talk of nuclear winter and radiation poisoning seemed hazy and unreal,like scenes from a movie. Horrible, yet too distant to fear. But I’ve already seen impossible things out here, things that shouldn’t exist. Deer with webbed feet and scales. All sorts of creatures, adapting to a drowning world.

“Even if it is real,” I say, “what about your brother?”

At that, all the color drains from Inesa’s face. Her gaze flickers briefly, and then the light returns to her eyes, that blaze of determination, of defiance. I didn’t see it in her photo, when Azrael first showed it to me on the holoscreen. But I saw it on Luka’s face, and on her father’s. Now the family resemblance is finally clear.

“He wants me to go,” she says softly. “That’s why he held up the compass. That’s why he said he knew I could make it.”

Luka’s voice echoes:I know she’s strong enough to make it. Please, Nesa.

Is it him making a sacrifice? Giving up his life for his sister’s? I think back to the rest of the interview, to Zetamon’s comments.Everyone say hi to New Amsterdam’s latest internet boyfriend. The most famous guy in New Amsterdam right now.I can believe it. I know exactly how much the audience loathes me, and how desperate they are to see me—or any Angel—fail. Watching Luka—handsome, strong, and charismatic in his brooding silence—knock me out has probably become one of the most-watched clips of all time. And it’s skyrocketed him to fame and adoration, instantly.

Which means Azrael can’t afford to kill him. With how beloved Luka is, his death would provoke much worse than hacked holoboards. A Lamb dying on a Gauntlet is one thing—it’s supposed to happen. Everyone has accepted this level of brutality.Azrael has done a lot of things, but he’s never coldly executed an unchosen civilian. It’s beyond what even the callousness of the audience would allow. The ratings of the Gauntlet would plummet. The CEO would pull the plug on the Angel program. And Azrael would be the most hated person in New Amsterdam.

I meet Inesa’s unflinching gaze, and I know she’s come to the same conclusion. The unspoken message sparks between us, like a current through an electrical wire. That’s what all of this is—every one of our gestures, down to our blinks or swallows—sparks that could kindle a blaze. The whole of New Amsterdam is watching. Which means that Azrael finally has something to lose.

Caerus wasn’t always invincible. I have to remind myself of that, too. Their domination happened slowly.

Debts. It all began with debts. Student loans, medical bills, mortgages, credit cards—all of it weighing down New Amsterdam’s government like an anchor attached to a bloated corpse. People died and passed their debts on to their children, on to their children’s children. Shackled by the debt that followed them for generations, people stopped buying houses and cars. The birth rate plummeted. There was a shortage of doctors and skilled professionals because who was going to take on the extra debt of getting an advanced degree, on top of everything else?

In an act of apparent benevolence, Caerus bought all of New Amsterdam’s debts. They began a staggered program of loan forgiveness to jump-start the economy. This was all while northern New Amsterdam was being ravaged by border skirmishes with NewEngland. And in order to entice people to buy houses and cars and to get their degrees, Caerus offered a massive line of credit to anyone purchasing their products: up to five hundred thousand credits.

The number was shocking. At first people couldn’t believe it was real—five hundred thousand credits to spend on everything from groceries to home goods, anything that was sold on the Caerus website. The economy recovered in record time. The governor of New Amsterdam created a special cabinet post—economy czar—for Caerus’s CEO, to help guide the state’s recovery from its crippling depression.

To mitigate the effects of climate change that devastated the outlying Counties, Caerus was also given the grant for the Hudson River Valley Relief Project. They were supposed to build reservoirs, plant trees, mend power lines, and provide compensation to people whose homes were destroyed by flooding. And that’s what they did, at first. But then they stretched the margins of the bill’s purview. In order to account for who was receiving aid, where people were being relocated, and to track demographic trends, everyone in the outlying Counties was given a Caerus ID number. With the tablets they distributed freely to every New Amsterdam resident, Caerus could track your online activity, your movements, listen to your conversations. Everything.

At the time, the Outliers were all assured this was a temporary measure. Just until the recession ended. Just until the Counties were rebuilt, the flooding was managed, the border wars with New England settled with an armistice.

Looking back, anyone could’ve predicted what happened next.The erosion of lines between corporation and government. People clamoring for Caerus’s CEO to replace the governor. An election with questionable democratic integrity. Schools that used to be state-run dissolved and replaced with a new standard curriculum created by Caerus.

At the time, I’m sure it all seemed understandable, efficient. Caerus was running every other aspect of life in New Amsterdam—why not education, too? Why not military and defense? Why not housing and transportation? Why not health and human services?

But in spite of the Gauntlets, in spite of the economy that never really bounced back, the flooding that never really ceased, the border wars that continued to drag on to this day... approval ratings for Caerus’s CEO are still above 90 percent. Because the truth is, things could always be worse. Sure, some people can’t pay their debts and have to die for it, but those people are the stupid, the indulgent, the weak. As long as it’s always somebody else, it’s easy to blame them, easy, even, to cheer for their deaths.

I didn’t fully understand it before. The Outliers love Caerus the same way I love Azrael. You can hate the person who imprisons you, but you can’t hate the person who sets you free. So what do you do when they’re one and the same?

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