Page 7 of Fable for the End of the World

We’ve heard the story a hundred times by now, all of us Angels. Daena was Caerus’s best killer, equal parts ruthless and beautiful. Her record was impeccable; the streams of her Gauntlets were replayed millions of times, to the point where anyone you met could recount them, almost beat for beat. The time she chased down her mark in the middle of a crowded street and still managed to get off the perfect shot, clean and almost bloodless, a bullet right through the heart. Or the time she found her mark cowering in a hollow tree and, holding the woman’s hand, slit her throat so tenderly it seemed almost a kindness.

Daena’s icy smile was projected onto the sides of buildings, and she was rented out almost every night for parties with the City’s elite. Even now you’ll hear some of them talk about her, in low and wistful tones, eyes darkening over their glasses of Scotch. The City folk loved her, and the people in the outlying Counties feared her, which was the best you could hope for as an Angel.

It shouldn’t have happened the way it did. Now Caerus has a system in place to prevent us from ever getting assigned marks we know. A more extensive program of memory wiping, so after our parents hand us over to Azrael, we’re blank slates. If we don’t remember who we were before becoming Angels, there’s no chance of us encountering someone we recognize on a Gauntlet.

Daena’s mark was an old woman, more than eighty, which is an astonishing age for an Outlier—even more astonishing for a Lamb. It’s usually the opposite way, parents putting up their children, butin this case, the woman’s son had racked up a huge debt with Caerus, buying bottles of sapphire-blue liquor and collectible action figures, of all things. So Daena was dropped into some tiny mountain village in Adirondack County, where she found her mark sitting on the porch of her house, a serene smile on the woman’s face.

But the house had once been Daena’s house. And the mark was Daena’s grandmother. If she had laid down her rifle then, she’d still be an Angel. She’d still be hired out for parties and put up on every holoscreen in the City. But instead, Daena had killed her, and only afterward did she realize that it was her grandmother’s blood pooling on the porch.

Caerus tried an initial Wipe, of course. It didn’t take. Then Azrael tried an Echoing—the opposite of a Wipe, where the memory is replayed over and over again so that we become inured to it. But that only made it worse. It brought Daena to a precipice he was afraid she couldn’t return from. So he tried another Wipe, and that time itdidwork—except it took everything else with it. Everything that made Daena who she was—all the people she’d known, places she’d been—all of it, gone. She was a mute, empty husk. The City folk were repulsed by her, and the Outliers no longer feared her, and that’s about the worst you can imagine, as an Angel.

Azrael thinks the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t get too arrogant or trigger-happy when trying to erase someone’s memories. But I think the moral is that there’s always one memory that will ruin you, no matter how perfect your record, no matter how many times you’ve killed and felt nothing at all.

I’m afraid this is that memory for me.

With the utmost tenderness, Azrael brushes back a bit of hair from my face. Usually I don’t let a single strand escape from my tight white-blond ponytail.

“All right,” he says, softly now. “Let’s try. Just one more time.”

My stomach contracts with relief and fear, both at once.

And then he takes me into the sterile, metallic room, everything gleaming silver. I lie down on the cold table. I don’t need the straps anymore; I’ve trained my limbs not to protest when he presses the nodes to my temples and drives the needle into my throat. All the clear liquid from the syringe drains into my bloodstream.

“Please,” I whisper, but I don’t know if I’m saying it aloud or speaking it into the silence of my own brain. “Please work.”

After that, there’s only darkness.

I wake back in my room. I only know it’s been hours because the sky outside my window is a deep, jewel-toned blue, gashed through with white streaks of ever-present smog. There’s a steady hum of yellow radiating from the skyline as lights all across the City are turned on for the night.

With a deep breath, I sit up in bed. I’m still wearing my black hunting suit, but my hair has been let down. I imagine Azrael combing it himself, equal parts dutiful and tender. He must have remembered that I’m due at the CTO’s party later. The diamond-encrusted dress I took out this morning is still folded over the back of my chair, glittering like broken glass.

There’s only one way to tell if the Wipe worked. I can remember our walk down the hallway, Azrael’s hand on my shoulder. Hisfingers gently brushing the hair from my face. I can remember the syringe draining and the cold metal against my back. Before that is a rheumy gray space, vague and ill-defined. The lights dimming over the shooting range—

I walk to the bathroom, my gait swift and purposeful. I peel off my hunting suit. Even though I usually try to avoid it, I catch a glimpse of myself in the narrow mirror. My hair, long and bone-straight, falling to the small of my back. In this light, it looks more white than blond. My cheeks are utterly drained of color. When I do blush, which isn’t often, my face turns a bruised shade of purple—thanks to Caerus’s physiological alterations. They slow our heart rates to make us better snipers; the side effect is that our blood is blue, not red.

I don’t let my eyes linger on the scars that ring my wrists and ankles, my elbows and knees, my hips, even my throat. The only other people who have ever seen them are Azrael and the surgeon who worked on my anesthetized body. They’re otherwise hidden under our hunting suits, and Caerus provides us with civilian clothes that are fitted to cover them completely. The scars are just for us to look at in private, to remind us we’re not quite human. Not anymore. That there’s no life for us, other than this.

Turning my back to the mirror, I scroll through the tablet screen outside the shower door, selecting the coldest possible setting.

I can feel the memory start to creep into the corners of my mind—the girl’s wet hair, the girl’s wet dress, the mud-stained hem—but as soon as the water hits my skin, the world behind my eyelidsexplodes in a riot of color. I’m there again, in the woods, in the pouring rain, the green smell of rotten leaves and damp wood flooding my nose. I can hear the girl crying, pleading, and I can see my arm rising alongside the rifle, like the rudder of a boat and the black wave that follows it.

I’m hardly aware of collapsing onto the shower floor, knees hitting the tile with a flinching but hollow sound. With one hand, I feel for the interior control panel, fingers scrabbling against the waterproof screen, and manage to switch the setting toHOT. Steam clouds around me.

We’ve all gone through rigorous neural reconditioning, which blunts the edges of our emotions, but the closest thing I know to anger is flooding my chest. What’s the point of keeping us just human enough to feel? They’ve grafted titanium onto our bones and pumped hormones into our blood, but they’ve left something essential at the core of us unchanged.

I know what Azrael would reply.

“Think of it as a means of communication, Melinoë. Otherwise, Caerus might as well send the Dogs.”

The Dogs are quadruped robots programmed to do one thing only: kill. Their AI is simple and brutally efficient, and their armored hulls, heat-seeking vision, and clutch of titanium bullets ensure they get the job done. They never falter.

But there’s no tension to watching a Dog take down its target. It’s like watching the wheels of a car turn a skittering creature into roadkill. Ugly and inevitable. Being struck down by an Angel is meant to be a beautiful thing: riveting, theatrical, perfectly paced,like your favorite TV show. That part is for the City dwellers, the ones who will never have to worry about seeing their loved one as the Lamb in the Gauntlet.

Most important, though, it’s meant to impart a message, a warning to the Outliers:We will take your son or daughter from you. And we will bite our nails and murmur anxiously and, in the end, breathe a sigh of relief as they’re slaughtered.

Duty trumps my pathetic sentimentality. Two hours later I’m smiling over cocktails with the Caerus CTO, Hendrik Visser.

The blood infusions from young donors make him look no older than forty, but there’s an undeniable falsity to his smooth face. When he smiles, the corners of his eyes don’t crease and his cheeks don’t wrinkle. He’s sipping a sickly purple cocktail that makes my eyes water when I get near enough to smell it.

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