Page 33 of Fable for the End of the World

His head snaps up. “We don’t have time to rest. The Wends—”

“We have a better shot at outrunning them if we’re not absolutely exhausted. How long has it been since either of us slept?”

Luka’s mouth twitches, like it’s forming a protest, but instead of speaking, he looks down at the compass again. A moment passes in silence. Water drips down from the leaves and onto our shoulders, dampening our already soaked jackets.

“I should’ve known,” he says quietly. “I should’ve known all he’d leave us with is a worthless piece of junk.”

And then he hurls the compass across the clearing, hard. It hits a nearby tree trunk and drops to the ground.

Luka draws in shallow, shuddering breaths. His eyes are redwith exhaustion and there’s just the faintest hint of tears in them, a bright, shining wetness.

It would be easy if I could hug him. If I felt like he would find any comfort in it. My arms seem locked at my sides.

I realize, though, in this moment of silence, that I don’t hear the cameras anymore. The soft, insistent buzzing is totally silent; there’s only the hum of my tracker. And while I’m not normally disposed to conspiracy theories, it occurs to me that Caerus wouldn’t want the audience to hear us talking about Dad, about the Drowned County. They must have cut the cameras, or sent them flitting away from us and back to Melinoë.

A sensation of hope rises in me—or maybe it’s just the subtle, sudden absence of total despair. Stiffly and awkwardly, I walk over to where the compass landed and pick it up.

The impact and the fall have broken the hinge. Now it’s in two pieces: the tarnished and scuffed golden case, and the compass itself, glass cracked. The needle has stopped spinning entirely. I dig around through the leaf pulp to see if I’ve overlooked any crucial pieces.

And that’s when my fingers find a tiny, rolled-up scrap of paper. I would’ve missed it completely in the mud if it weren’t so white against the forest floor, curiously unstained. It’s tied with a thin, gossamer string that looks almost like dental floss (Dad was nothing if not resourceful).

I tear off the string and unroll the paper. In Dad’s familiar, barely decipherable scrawl is a series of numbers. I stare at them for a moment, squinting, trying to make sense of them. Luka stridesover to peer over my shoulder, and of course he recognizes what we’re looking at immediately.

“They’re coordinates,” he says. There’s a breathy awed quality to his voice. “Daddidleave us a map.”

I wouldn’t exactly call it amap, but it’s something. Something we can use. And maybe more than that, it’s proof that he didn’t abandon us in the devastatingly complete manner I thought he had. A warm sensation brims in my chest, making my heart beat quickly. And I’m certain this time—it’s just the barest glimmer of hope.

“This must be where he is,” Luka says, in a heated rush. “We just need to get back to the car—get our tablets—and then we’ll know exactly where to go.”

I’m almost as relieved to see the spark back in Luka as I am at finding the note. Dad’s trail. I roll up the scrap of paper again and hold it in my fist, clenched tight enough that my fingernails bite into my palm. I wish that I could feel something radiating from it, some kind of love, but to my surprise I feel a spark of anger instead.

You left us with a scrap of paper, and we’re supposed to be grateful?

When I look at Luka, his eyes blazing, I can’t bring myself to say it. Instead, I hold out the pieces of the broken compass to him.

“Here,” I say. “These are still yours.”

Luka looks down at my open palm for a long moment. Then he shakes his head.

“You keep half,” he says. He points to the golden case, the part without the compass inside. “This part. Maybe you can trap rainwater inside it.”

“No, you take it. You’re better with this survival stuff than I am.”

“Youtake it. You need all the help you can get.”

A smile tugs at the corner of my lips, and I slip the case into my pocket. Luka takes the compass itself. Standing there in the muggy aftermath of the storm, the air both cold and dense at once, and so familiar, because we’ve lived in this drowning world all our lives, I realize that we have to make our own hope. And I think maybe we can.

Without our tablets, I don’t know what time it is, or how much time has elapsed since the start of my Gauntlet. All I can hear is the incessant humming of the tracker, reminding me that every single breath is a stolen one. Oddly enough, I still can’t pick up the buzzing of the cameras.

Luka and I are actually pretty good at finding our way. We spent enough time in the woods with Dad when we were kids, back when his mood swings were more fun than scary and we still believed everything he said, even after four or five beers. He taught us which plants were safe to eat and to boil our water before drinking it—and, most important, how to tell when something was too irradiated to do either. We both know the difference between real deer tracks and the webbed prints of the deer mutations. We can mostly figure out which direction is north by looking at which way the moss grows on trees and rocks, though Dad warned us that this method wasn’t always reliable.

Still, it’s the best we have to go on at the moment. We trekthrough the forest, mostly in silence, the mud sucking at our boots. And in the silence, my mind keeps drifting back to the Angel—her face hovering over mine, flashing white like a strike of lightning. And her eyes. One dark brown, the other black from end to end, throwing my terrified reflection back at me.

The Angels have a number of unnatural features, cyborg traits that Caerus has imbued them with to craft the deadliest killers. Even though I’ve never watched any of the Gauntlets all the way through, it’s impossible to escape the viral clips, usually only a few seconds long. The moment of the kill—a bullet through the heart, a knife to the throat. I remember a red-haired Angel driving her knife right between a teenage boy’s legs. The comments from the live chat were divisive.

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