Page 63 of Fable for the End of the World

I drop the carcass on the floor with a heavythud. “You didn’t think I would?”

She gives a coy shrug. “I’ve never seen one of your Gauntlets before.”

“You’re one of the few.”

She’s mentioned it before, but it still surprises me to hear it; I almost can’t believe it. The Gauntlets get millions and millions of views. They’re the height of entertainment, better than any soap opera or sitcom Caerus could dream up. There are streamers who build their entire careers off live-reacting to the Gauntlets. Online retailers who sell merchandise bearing the images of Angels and Lambs. Websites that use AI technology to transpose my face onto naked bodies, so men don’t even have to use their imaginations.

“Yeah,” Inesa says. She picks up one of the tools, turns it over in her hands. “I guess I just never wanted another reason to lose faith in people.”

I let her words wash over me, as the heat from the stove warms my skin. In truth I’ve never felt a particular allegiance to people. Too many of my own parts were cleaved away, excised like rotting flesh and replaced with titanium and circuitry, leaving me both more than human and less. I wonder if that’s still how Inesa sees me. As a machine wearing the skin of a girl.

But I don’t ask. I just watch as she sets to work dismembering the deer. It’s a neat, efficient process, and she seems totally unperturbed by the gory aspects. Gutting the animal and draining it. Skinning the pelt. Carving the meat. She has a bucket to catch all the blood and innards, and her hands are soaked red up to the wrist.

I’m unable to take my eyes off her. For all Inesa’s self-deprecation, she looks anything but weak now. She’s focused, assured. Capable. And even though there’s a gulf between killing people and cleaning the carcasses of dead animals, I understand now—we’ve both seen plenty of ugly things.

“We’ll have to clean this up quickly, then salt and dry the meat,” Inesa says. “So it doesn’t attract the Wends.”

I nod and sink down into one of the chairs, eyelids growing heavy. Half asleep, half awake, I find myself thinking about what it would be like to do this every day. Going out to hunt, coming home to a blazing fire and Inesa’s earnest smile. My life in the City feels inconceivably distant. The long, sleek black shooting range, the enormous glass windows looking down on the ever-glittering lights, the dresses and the parties and the sapphire-blue liquid. The climate-controlled rooms and the showers with a dozen different settings.

All the things I thought I needed seem less important now. I’ve been surviving without them. Maybe more than just surviving.

I don’t know when I stopped wondering how Outliers lived like this and started imagining myself among them.

“Mel? Can you pass me that other knife?”

The sound of my name jabs me like a syringe. Fire breaks across my vision. Crackling tongues of flame.

My name.

I go still in my seat, blood turning slowly to ice.

Inesa just watches me, brow furrowed. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

I swallow hard around the stone that’s formed in my throat. When I manage to speak, my voice is just a thin croak. “That’s not my name.”

“Oh,” Inesa says. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking, really. It just slipped out.”

The tip of my nose and my cheeks are starting to burn. I blink and blink, to put out the fire behind my eyes. It doesn’t work. Through it all I see Inesa, watching me, her gaze glimmering with concern.

“No one has ever called me that,” I whisper at last, “except for Keres.”

A sudden, strong wind buffets the cabin—just a shack, really. Its walls are thin, rotted wood. They could collapse on us at any moment.

When the wind subsides, Inesa asks softly, “Who is Keres?”

My memory is as rotted as the wood. Filled with dark holes, spaces to fall into. But if I close my eyes, I can see her clearly: her shiny black braid and blue eyes, the way her teeth flashed when she smiled. I still remember her bones, when I helped zip up her hunting suit, the notches of her spine pressing against her pale skin. The delicate, swanlike column of her neck.

“She was another Angel,” I say. “There are only three or four of us. I don’t get along with the others. Just her.”

“Keres,” Inesa repeats. “What was she like?”

“Kind.” It seems insufficient a word to describe her, but it’s a start. I’ve never been good with words, anyway. “But in a natural way, as if she couldn’t imagine being anything else. It’s not natural at all for an Angel to be kind, but she was. Azrael must have programmed her that way. To fulfill a certain role.” I’ve always known it to be true, but I’ve rarely wanted to admit it, even to myself. That maybe the things I loved about her were just the parts that Caerus made.

I clear my throat and go on. “Whenever either of us had a procedure, we would stay in the other’s room, just in case we need anything...” I trail off because my chest is aching. I feel like my ribs could crack.

“A procedure?” Inesa frowns.

“Surgeries. Sometimes they’re functional, like the eye. A lot of them are aesthetic. They did my lips and my nose. They made Keres do her breasts.”

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