Page 16 of Fable for the End of the World

In the silence I can hear something like a second heartbeat, staticky and incessant—the tracker that the Mask implanted in my throat. Like water dripping from the ceiling, the beat is so measured, it could drive me mad. But I’ll be dead long before I have the chance to lose my mind.

“Inesa, wait,” Jacob says as I lurch unsteadily to my feet. “Your head... you need to take it easy.”

“Let her go,” someone says gruffly. Mr. Hallick, I think. Luka and I used to sneak into his yard and play on his tire swing when we were kids. “She doesn’t have time to rest.”

The Mask’s voice echoes in my ears.Twelve hours.Twelve hours for the Lambs to prepare, to say our goodbyes, to scrounge together a plan that might give us the slimmest chance of survival. Twelve hours for Caerus to run their ads, to promote their Gauntlet-themed and -adjacent products, like VR headsets forbetter viewing and energy drinks to keep you awake so you don’t miss a moment of the slaughter.

How many of those hours did I lose while I was unconscious? I stagger toward the door, but my vision is still swimming. I catch myself on the windowsill. Through the gaps in the wooden slats I can see that evening has fallen, the sky a smoky, mottled gray.

There are murmurs of protest as I jerk open the door and stumble onto the porch. Then, instantly, the crowd hushes. At first, I don’t understand. Then I look up. My face is projected into the sky, a pale hologram against the storm-swollen clouds. The weather in Esopus is usually too bad for us to see holo-ads. But this one is as clear as a bolt of lightning. My face, my name—and next to it, seconds ticking away, the countdown until my Gauntlet starts.

“Inesa.” Jacob grasps me by the wrist, turning me toward him. “Listen—we’ll help you. My dad and me...”

He keeps talking, but white noise builds like a wall between us. The hum of the tracker and the more distant sounds of rumbling thunder make Jacob’s voice fade to an unintelligible murmur. It’s like I’m underwater, everything muffled and dim, and I’m sinking and sinking and sinking.

I almost drowned once, when I was nine. I slipped off the porch at the house during a storm, and the water almost swept me downstream. It happens to pretty much everyone in Esopus Creek at one point or another. I managed to grab hold of a rock and hang on until a passing punter fished me out. I don’t rememberthe almost-drowning itself, except that it was loud. So loud. And I remember, afterward, the punter delivering me home, and Dad wrapping me in a Mylar blanket while my clothes dried on a line in the kitchen.

And I remember, maybe a couple of weeks later, watching a TV show set in the City. The characters lived in a massive apartment building, hundreds of stories tall, all glass and sleek metal. The building had a huge room with a giant pit in the ground, which was filled with impossibly clear, teal-green water. I had never seen a swimming pool before. They dove in and splashed around, doing handstands and somersaults. Every so often they would swim to the edge of the pool to catch their breath, laughing, just kicking lazily to keep themselves afloat.

I didn’t think it was real at first. A lake in the clouds. But Dad told me that almost every apartment building in the City had a pool, that they laced the water with chemicals to keep it that clean, and that the City folk swam all the time, just for fun. I watched that episode over and over, fascinated by the way the water clung to their skin like drops of dew, crystalline, almost otherworldly. I remember their wide, white-toothed smiles.

I blink, and the pain brings me back to the present, searing through my forehead again. The tracker fizzes and hums. Jacob is still talking, eyes huge and frantic with worry.

“I need to get home,” I blurt out. “Please. I just need to get home.”

“Did you hear me? I said we can help. My father has—”

“Please.” I raise my fingers and press two of them over his mouth. “Let me go home.”

Jacob stares back at me, mollified and silenced. My hand against his lips is trembling. He just nods.

Dr. Wessels offers to pay for a punter to take me back to the house, and I’m too exhausted to protest. I don’t think I could make my knees steady enough to stand or my hands firm enough to grip an oar. The punter poles me silently upstream, both of us pretending we don’t see my face in the sky, flickering like the most ominous constellation.

I can hear Mom and Luka before I even open the door.

“What else could I have done?”

“You know what.”

Luka’s voice is as cold as ice. I’ve heard him talk this way before, but not to Mom. Ever. I push open the door.

Their heads shoot up as I enter. The door creaks shut behind me, and with the force of the wind it slams too loudly, making the whole house shudder. Such a fragile, pitiful little house. Its walls feel thinner and its floor more unsound than ever.

For a long time, no one speaks.

“Inesa,” Luka says at last. His gaze meets mine.

It’s always like looking in a mirror, but now, our expressions are perfectly twinned: watery, haunted stares, lips pressed together, cheeks bloodless.

Mom crosses her arms over her chest. She’s wearing the same nightgown I left her in this morning, with a blanket draped overher shoulders. Her mouth twists into a defiant scowl.

“Don’t start with me,” she bites out. “I’m not going to apologize.”

I didn’t expect her to.

“You can’t be so naive. You know how these things work. This just made the most sense. Luka hunts. He takes care of the family. We couldn’t get by without him. Putting him up wasn’t an option.”

Of course she’ll never state the obvious aloud: that she could have offeredherselfup. Forherdebts. Not Luka’s. Not mine. The air crackles around us.

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