Page 9 of Fable for the End of the World

“Good job,” I say to Lethe. “It looks like he didn’t put up much of a fight.”

Lethe’s eyes narrow—the real one, and the prosthetic, which is black from end to end.

“More of a fight than a twelve-year-old girl,” she says.

I draw in a sharp breath. I feel like a knife has been jabbed between my ribs.

“Enough, Lethe,” Azrael says stonily. “You’re not each other’s competition.”

Not officially. But it’s kind of inevitable, when you have viewers in the chat commenting on who their favorite Angel is, when you have people in upper management asking for one of us specifically, when you have Caerus’s ad department deciding whose face they should put on their holoboards. Lethe hates me because she thinks I’m Azrael’s favorite and, by extension, Caerus’s.

Lethe sniffs. “I wish I had weeks to mope around in my room instead of working, that’s all.”

It isn’t often that Azrael looks truly angry, but the way his eyes flash now—it scares me, even though I’m not the target of his cold fury.

When he speaks, his voice is deathly quiet. “I saidenough.”

Lethe’s mouth snaps shut, but she still glares at me. At least Visser is too drunk to have noticed a thing.

Relief shudders through me. Relief and gratitude. I’m not naive enough to think that Azrael is silencing Lethe just to protect me. He doesn’t want to draw attention to his own mistakes. It was him who put me through a week of Echoing, thinking he was fixing me. He was wrong; we both were. All it did was force the memory further into my head, like a hammer driving in a nail. Forcing me to relive that moment over and over again in the hopes that it would eventually settle within me, as harmless and innocuous as a layer of dust. But the Echoing had the opposite effect. Now the memory is planted so deeply, I’m afraid I’ll never dig it out.

There’s some murmuring among the guests, and suddenly the crowd parts, forming a path wide enough for two people to walk through. One of them is Caerus upper management—head of accounts, maybe. I’ve seen him a couple of times before. But my eyes glide over him to the woman on his arm. Her black hair is loose around her shoulders and she wears a deep-blue gown with sleeves down to her wrists, its collar buttoned up to her chin.

“Keres,” I whisper.

She can’t hear me, of course, and she doesn’t see me. As she gets closer, I notice the patch over one of her eyes. They took her prosthetic out, and the wound hasn’t healed enough to set the new one in. One that doesn’t have night vision or heat tracing or anything else we use to hunt.

But Keres was one of us. She was the one who trained with me at the shooting range, our rifles aimed at identical targets, our trigger fingers perfectly in sync. We ducked Azrael’s rules to sneak into each other’s rooms at night, speaking in hushed tones until the sun rose over the City and turned all the glass faces of the buildings to liquid gold. She used the shower in my room once, and I watched her, guiltily, through the crack in the door, marking the places where our bodies were identical. Wrists, ankles, elbows, knees, throat. My eyes had lingered, more guiltily, on other parts of her, until I was so flushed I turned away and bit down hard on my lip.

Thinking of that now, with Visser’s hand against my back, makes me want to retch.

It’s wrong of me, but I leave him. I almost can’t help it—my body floats through the crowd, as if buoyed on invisible strings. Iignore the protests of the other guests, the livid look of disapproval on Azrael’s face. When I reach her, my chest is heaving.

“Keres,” I say again. “It’s you.”

She blinks her real eye, lifting one hand to her mouth. It’s a gesture I’ve seen a million times, but it looks different now. It looks like I’m watching a disembodied hand, a disembodied mouth. The man next to her gives a disgruntled huff.

“Melinoë,” he says. “I didn’t think I’d see you here tonight.”

I scarcely hear him. My pulse is pounding in my ears. I stare at Keres, watching her blink, waiting for her to smile back at me.

She doesn’t. Her hand drops from her mouth and falls limply to her side. It doesn’t reach out for mine. She looks back at me as if I’m a stranger.

And then Azrael grabs me by the elbow, dragging me away as Keres continues on, fixed to the man’s side. Karl van Something, I think. Like all the others, his face is pale, stiff, and artificially young. Azrael’s grip on my arm feels like fire, searing through my flesh.

When I’ve been pulled off to the side, Lethe gives a wide-toothed smile.

“Oh, you didn’t hear?” she asks, all too innocently. “Keres was decommissioned. Van Wyck wanted her.”

Azrael lets my arm drop. I look up at him, bewildered, full of both stupid hope and plunging despair. He doesn’t speak.

I’ve spent the last few weeks in isolation, shuffled from the shooting range to the lab to my bedroom, my life made simple and monotonous, a dull and grinding rhythm. Rifle in my hands,back against the cold metal table, knees digging into the shower tiles, water running over me, real and not real. So many half-failed Wipes that I’m not even sure it’s beenonlya few weeks. It could’ve been a year.

Long enough for Keres to get pulled from the Angel program. Long enough for her to getmarried.

“I didn’t want to put any extra strain on you,” Azrael says at last, his voice soft. “I know you were such close friends.”

Water, unreal water, is rushing all around me, pulling my head under.

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