Page 29 of Fable for the End of the World

Luka and I don’t talk. I can’t even think, really. My mind feels fuzzy, like static. And always,always, when I allow my thoughts to wander, they return to the Angel’s face, that shock of white in the murky darkness. I get so lost in the memory—those impossibly dark, empty eyes—that I stumble over an upturned rock. Luka turns around.

“I’m okay,” I say.

He just nods.

In the absence of adrenaline, I start to feel the weight of the hours. Hours without sleep, food, or water. My throat is dry and my empty stomach is in knots. And the exhaustion makes my vision blur as I try to tread carefully along the edge of what has become an increasingly steep ravine.

Luka stops so suddenly that I slam into his back. I stammer out an apology, but he gives me a fierce look, finger pressed to his lips. That’s when I see it: strips of fabric draped among the tree branches.

My blood turns to ice.

It’s not just tattered cloth. There are crude stick sculptures, twigs held together with dried mud. There are wooden signs driven into the tree trunks, the writing too weather-blanched to read.

Luka takes a hesitant step forward. I follow, heart lodged in my throat. The stick sculptures grow more elaborate as we make ourway through the arbor. They hold stones with strange markings etched into them, clumps of moss the size of my head.

I stop to examine the nearest one. Inside is a bundle of small, dried-out bones, wrapped in twine and smeared with still-drying blood.

“Animal bones?” I whisper to Luka.

He doesn’t reply. He just raises a trembling finger to point.

Just ahead of us, nailed to the trunk of a large, spreading oak, is an arrangement of sticks and bones. In the very center is a human skull. It’s crowned with a set of enormous antlers, and where its eyes should be are two smooth, white stones.

There are people who choose to unplug from Caerus’s grid entirely—either because their debt is so staggering, it would take seven lifetimes to repay, or simply, like Dad, out of high-minded dogma. But unlike Dad, who vanished like a ghost, a lot of those people hang around.

Once, in the woods outside Esopus Creek, I came across one of these off-gridders in his campsite. It was just a tarp pulled between tree trunks, hanging limply over a wooden raft. I wondered how he didn’t drown when the water table rose.

“You can never win with Caerus,” the man said.

Luka would have told me to run, but he looked too thin and too worn-out to be dangerous. At least, not yet.

“It’s not a game,” I replied warily.

“Not to us.”

I was lucky the man I encountered was still sentient and mostly human. His mind untainted and his appetites contained. By now,though, I’m sure he’s far gone.

The off-gridders have to hunt for their food—no Caerus drones airlifting them freeze-dried chicken thighs—and what they hunt, of course, are mutations. Sometimes in the outskirts of Lower Esopus you can find the picked-over corpse of a deer mutation, its antlers still dripping with moss, flesh hanging in strips from its rib cage, all four eye sockets empty. I saw one once, and the swarm of blackflies was so loud, I couldn’t even hear my own breath. I fled before I could catch a glimpse of the thing that killed it.

There’s a reason no one hunts the mutations for food unless they have no other choice. The animals are corrupted, irradiated, their gene pools so tainted that eating their flesh is like swallowing poison. If you consume enough of their meat, you become something corrupted, too: feral, violent, not quite human.

Wends, we call them. I’ve never seen one up close. Sometimes there are flashes in the brush, a quick snatch of grayish skin. The smell of decay, heavier than swamp air, thick enough to make you retch.

Now a breeze picks up, ruffling my hair and carrying a scent toward us. The scent of rotting flesh, of meat gone bad. The bones in the trees rattle like wind chimes. And then, in the distance, there’s an ear-splitting, unearthly howl.

Ten

Melinoë

One of the advantages of being an Angel is that I don’t needmuch sleep, though that’s mostly for the audience’s benefit, not mine. It would be horribly boring to watch a live stream of me napping. If I really can’t fight the exhaustion, I can usually climb into a tree, strap myself to a sturdy branch, and get in an hour or two.

But I can’t afford it now. Not on this Gauntlet. I’ve already spent far too long hunched on the side of the road, waiting for the bullet wound in my shoulder to knit shut and for the blood to stop running. The viewers are probably starting to get restless and fed up. So I use one of the other tools Azrael has granted me: stimulants.

The sleek, silver capsules turn my veins into live wires and fling my eyelids open. My limbs feel lighter, my muscles stronger. They come with the slight drawback of increasing my heart rate—and thus making me a slightly worse shot. And when the effects of the pill wear off, my body feels unbearably heavy, heavier than it did before, and dark thoughts crowd my head like storm clouds.

I know the risks of taking a stimulant right now. But I tell myself that I’ll be dealing with the withdrawal symptoms from the safety of a Caerus helicopter, away from the cameras, the Lamb’s body growing cold hundreds of feet below. Azrael will tuck me under an electric blanket for the chills and smooth back my hair, letting me sleep until the drugs pass through my system. Or at least until the post-Gauntlet parties and photo shoots start.

So I take one of the pills and swallow it. The capsule slides coldly down my throat. The effect is almost instantaneous: My muscles seize, my heart starts to pound, and my real eye fills with a rush of blood. A little bit of moisture pools along my lash line, and I raise my hand to dab it away.

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