Page 83 of Fable for the End of the World

Something inside me cracks: a long, bleak fissure, like the earth itself coming apart and showing veins of slow-moving liquid fire beneath. I take the compass case out of my pocket and squeeze it in my hand, then raise my closed fist to my mouth. My lips brush against the scar on my index finger, the one that Luka gave me, the one that matches the healed white gash through his eyebrow.

“I love you,” I whisper, voice muffled against the salt of my own skin.

We’ve never spoken the words aloud before. I think about all the walls we built around each other, and around ourselves, and all the time we wasted, being too afraid to say something so simple and so true. My lashes flutter as I blink back the tears that gather in my eyes.

For a moment, I wish Luka were the only one to see it, the only one to hear my words. Then, with a flash of anger, I realize that I want the audience to witness this. The only reason the Gauntlets continue is that the viewers can separate themselves from the Lambs, can imagine it would never happen to them. But the truth is, it can happen to anyone. We’re not uniquely weak or uniquely indulgent or uniquely stupid, no matter what Caerus would have us believe. And all of a sudden, I’m furious again, furious with them for making us think that other people are less than human.

It’s the first time in my life that I’ve let the anger fill me. That I’ve swallowed it down instead of choking on it. I was afraid to feelit, because I didn’t want to be like Dad, drowning my righteous fury in a bottle, but now I think this anger might keep me alive. It doesn’t obliterate everything else. It just rests beside my love for Luka, my love for all the small things like brilliant sunsets that make my life worth fighting for. It settles in my chest, as warm as hope.

I put the compass case back into my pocket. When I look up, Melinoë is standing before me.

She looks every inch an Angel again, zipped into her black suit, hair pulled back in a sleek ponytail. Without speaking, she unfolds her fingers.

Her knife rests in her palm. I lift my gaze to meet hers. My eyes are unflinching.

“Do it,” I say.

The hum of my tracker is louder than it’s ever been. It’s like an enormous bird mutation, beating its wings in my throat.

This isn’t the way the story is supposed to go. If I were a good little Lamb, I would run. If I were the girl my father always wanted me to be, I would take the knife, drive it into her heart. Instead, I tilt my head to the side and pull down the collar of my dress. I push my hair back and bare the side of my throat, where the tracker is embedded, a tiny lump pressing up from under my skin.

Melinoë’s eyes, steady and gleaming dark, stare back at me without blinking. Then, slowly, she raises the knife to my throat.

I gritted my teeth, preparing for the pain, but it’s more panic that shoots through me as I feel my blood leap up against the blade. Melinoë is delicate but quick, working the point of the knife under my skin, digging for the tracker. Her other hand comes to grip mythroat, holding me in place. I squeeze my eyes shut.

It’s over more quickly than I imagined it would be, and then Mel is pressing gauze to the wound. Blood sluices from my neck, soaking the bandage. Every swallow is painful now, breath squeezing out of me through a constricting siphon of fear.What if she cut too deep, what if we can’t stop the blood, what if—

“Hold this,” Melinoë says quietly.

I take over the task of pressing the bandage to my throat while she searches through the supplies on the table. There’s not much left that we didn’t destroy, but she finds a silver pill and raises it to my lips. I swallow, flinching.

The effects of the painkiller are immediate; I can almost feel the medication slipping coldly through my veins, numbing me to the tips of my fingers and toes. My breathing becomes almost even again. I look down and see the tracker on the table, gummy and red with my blood and bits of tissue. Nausea stirs in my belly.

“There are painkillers in the bandage, too.” Melinoë brushes her thumb gently over the wound. “They should start to work in just a minute.”

It’s one of her fancy Caerus bandages, the kind that dissolve into your wound and form new flesh to knit it shut. The sensation of it soaking into me is strange, and it makes my skin prickle all over, a tiny needling through the numbness of the painkillers. My eyelids feel suddenly heavy. I remove my hand, the pads of my fingers sticky with blood. But the flow of it has stopped. Only the reddish stain on the collar of my dress remains as proof. That, and the still-blinking tracker on the table.

The absence of its pulse suddenly becomes the only thing I can focus on. I’d grown so accustomed to its second heartbeat that I feel oddly bereft without it. The tyranny of its ticking was a strange but familiar friend.

The timer on Melinoë’s sleeve shows two days, two hours, and thirteen minutes. I take the knife from the table, its blade still slick with my blood. And the new anger that’s found a home in my chest surges up, directing my hand, guiding it upward and then down again.

I crush the tracker under the hilt of the knife. It shatters, and its blinking light winks out like a dying star. For a moment we just stare at it, almost uncomprehending. The timer on Melinoë’s sleeve freezes. It must have been linked to the tracker, just like the cameras. They might be able to follow us for a little while longer, but eventually the signal will die, when we reach the dead spot of the Drowned County. And Azrael will likely cut them before then, because he doesn’t want the audience to see where we’re going. There’s nothing that threatens Caerus more than giving people the dream of freedom.

“It’s over,” I whisper, which is both true and not. The Gauntlet has ended, but we’re still not free. Not yet.

Melinoë looks up and over at me. Her eyes are shining—even the prosthetic. It’s stopped seeming depthless and impassive to me. Now I can see a thousand emotions reflected within it.

“I can’t hear you anymore,” she says, a bewildered note of grief in her voice. I’m glad she feels the same strange sense of loss that I do.

“Yeah,” I say softly.

A furrow emerges between her brows—just briefly, and then it smooths again. Her face is so beautiful, it sort of hurts to look at.

“But I can feel you,” she says.

We’re not even touching. Yet my heartbeat brags so strongly as I reply, “Me too.”

Thirty-Two

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