Page 64 of Fable for the End of the World

For some reason, this is the most shameful thing I’ve admitted to Inesa so far. The shame feels almost airborne, heavy and hot. Maybe it’s because the surgeries are the epitome of pointless wealth, of excess, and that hearing about them will make Inesa start to hate me again. Or maybe it’s because it’s evidence of how little of me there is left. Not even my face is my own.

I wait for Inesa to curl her lip in disgust, to turn away. Instead, she just says, “That sounds painful, too.”

“It is.”

The wind howls again, rattling the door.

“What happened to her?” Inesa asks, voice low.

This is the clearest memory I have of Keres now. Her glazed, uncomprehending stare. The same eyes that had shone with laughter, drained of their glimmering light, turned dull and matte. The pain explodes inside me like shrapnel.

And there’s the fire again, blooming in the theater behind my eyes.

“They made her forget.”

“Forget what?”

“Everything.” I can almost feel the syringe in my neck, the needle’s cold, sharp bite. “They do it to all of us, at some point. It’s called a Wipe. They can take away your memories of a specific event, or a specific person. Some of them. Or all of them.”

Inesa draws a breath. “Why would Caerus want to do that?”

Azrael’s explanation jumps readily to my lips. “The mind is the most complex organ in the human body. But it can break, too, like a bone. Certain things get stuck. They don’t register in your brain like an ordinary memory. Instead, they feel immediate, like they’re happening to you over and over again. It makes you scared and weak. The only way to get rid of them is to forget they ever happened at all.”

“Surely that can’t really work.” Inesa has put the knife down, and her fingers are curling and uncurling around her bandaged palms. “Just going in, picking through someone’s brain and taking out the bits you don’t like...”

“It doesn’t always work. That’s the problem. Some memories are too stubborn to cut loose.” My gaze burns into the floor. “I’ve gotten Wiped dozens of times now, and still...”

Silence washes over the cabin. There’s only the wind, shrieking thinly, trying to beat down the walls around us.

“Still?” Inesa prompts quietly.

“There are things I can’t forget. Stupid, small things.” I feel a sudden flare of anger. “They’ve made me forget my real parents, my real name, my home, if I ever had one, but they can’t manage to get that stupid girl out of my mind.”

“The girl—you mean Keres?”

“No.” My blood is electric now, making the tips of my fingers hum. The emotions are both new and familiar: grief, rage. I’m not supposed to feel them. But Caerus’s chemicals have flushed out of my system and there’s nothing to blunt them now.

I lift my gaze. Fire consumes me. “It was my last Gauntlet. My target was this little girl. She was twelve. Her father was a stinking drunk, and he used all his credits on booze. Her mother had died and it was just the two of them. And judging from the bruises I saw, I wasn’t the first person to put my hands on her.

“It was raining. I remember that. The water was so heavy and cold that it soaked through my suit, and so loud that I could barely hear Azrael’s voice in my ear. I kept sinking, sinking into the mud. The girl was wearing this white dress... she was so easy to find. I thought, if someone really cared about her, they would have told her to wear dark colors, so she would be harder to see.”

Inesa’s eyes have grown hard. She’ll hate me for this, noquestion about it. I don’t know what purpose it serves, this pitiful confession. But the words just keep pouring out of me and I can’t stop them.

“It’s the type of Gauntlet no one really wants to do.” Fire crackles in the stove behind me, and in the forefront of my vision. “Azrael would have sent Keres, but she was recovering from her surgery. She was usually best with the young Lambs. That was her archetype; she was supposed to be maternal. When she killed them, she could almost make it seem like a mercy.

“But he sent me. I was supposed to be—amsupposed to be—the coldest one. The most merciless. It was a bad match from the beginning. I was never going to...” My voice breaks off. Inesa’s gaze hasn’t shifted. “I’d never done a Gauntlet like this before. I was cold and wet and confused. I was trying to remember what Keres did with the younger ones, how she got close to them and held them while she killed them, but Azrael was in my ear, telling me to just shoot. So I did. But it was a clumsy shot and it clipped her leg. She fell down in the mud. I ended up falling, too. I had to crawl after her, with the rain almost blinding me. She was bleeding and sobbing and begging me to stop. I couldn’t stand to... I couldn’t bear to listen to her. So I just put my hands around her throat until she was dead.”

The deer’s blood is in the air, but it has the same salt-tang as the girl’s. When I inhale, I taste it.

“I don’t remember very much about what happened afterward. But I remember the headlines. The streamers kept replaying the footage, reacting to it. A lot of them cried. They called me the mosthated person in New Amsterdam. They hacked a holoboard in the City—then it caught on and everyone was saying it, going over my old Gauntlets, too. Azrael took my tablet away so I couldn’t see it anymore.”

Inesa lets out a slow breath. “Did he try to take the memory away, too?”

I nod. “Again and again. Wipe after Wipe. I must have lain on that table a dozen times. But it never worked. I couldn’t even hold my rifle without thinking of her.” My chest grows unbearably tight. “I couldn’t do any Gauntlets. I could barely even leave my room. So Azrael tried a different tactic.”

“A different tactic?”

“It’s called an Echoing. Where they replay the memory over and over again. It’s supposed to make you inured to it, kind of like working out the same muscle. Eventually you stop feeling the pain and you get stronger. But it only made it a thousand times worse.”

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