Page 69 of Fable for the End of the World

I hold my body completely still, though every nerve ending is fizzing with panic. Melinoë crouches beside me, peering through the scope of her rifle. There’s a tiny crack in the wooden door, hardly wide enough to fit a finger through, and that’s where she aims her gun.

She shoots.

Abruptly, the scrabbling stops. As the smoky smell of gunpowder fills the air, my muscles relax slightly, but Melinoë doesn’t even twitch. She’s staring down the barrel of her gun, the side of her face with the prosthetic eye turned toward me, so I can’t begin to guess what she’s thinking.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

The sound makes my heart leap into my throat. It’s on the opposite wall this time, the pounding of forelegs against wood.

Melinoë whirls around. She fires another shot, right through the cabin wall, and the scrabbling ceases again. My body is starting to ache from being pressed against the floor, my muscles stretched and taut like copper wire. Melinoë’s finger hovers over the trigger. Waiting.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

It’s coming from both sides now, from the door and the wall to my right. My blood curdles to ice.

“Two of them?” I whisper.

Melinoë gives a small, tight nod.

“How?” I manage, my voice breaking. “How did they find us?”

A swallow ticks in her throat. “I don’t know. Maybe—maybe your tracker. Maybe it came back online.”

I’m all too aware of it now, that second, alien pulse. When I focus on it, all other sounds turn distant and obscure. It becomes a timer again, ticking down the seconds to my death.

Melinoë shoots again, and my ears ring. This time there’s no pause in the scrabbling, and after a moment, the wood splinters inward as the Dog’s black foreleg punctures a hole in the door.

It’s stuck there briefly, gears whirring, and Melinoë fires. The bullet glides right across its metal hull, leaving a silver scuff mark but nothing more.

My heart drops back into my stomach.This is how I’m going to die, I think,not by my Angel’s hands, but blasted apart by some Caerus machine. Melinoë shoots again. Again.

The second Dog plunges through the wall, its body wedgedhalfway into the cabin and halfway out. I can’t help it—I scream. Melinoë whirls around and fires, but the bullets just ping off like pebbles. The next scream gets caught in my throat, strangled before it can come out.

“We have to get out of here.” I manage to push up onto my knees, as the Dogs make more and more progress through the wood. “Come on.”

Melinoë shakes her head, without taking her eye from the scope. “They’re faster. We can’t outrun them.”

As her bullets continue to ping off, I almost want to laugh, in the blackest, most humorless way. Of course Caerus would make their Dogs bulletproof. And now, with them closing in, I understand that the Gauntlets really are a mercy, because at least the Outliers stand a sliver of a chance against the Angels. We have no chance against such monstrous machines.

Twenty-Six

Melinoë

Something is rising behind my eyes as I shoot, a red-tinged wave,blistering at the edges of my vision. This should be the easiest thing in the world. It’s what I was made for. Caerus scientists labored over my body for hours and hours so that I could kill anything that’s put in front of me, without fear and without remorse.

But I’m terrified now, and not just for myself. It’s Inesa, kneeling by my side, who stays at the forefront of my mind. Her blanched face, her panicked stare. The gears of the Dogs whir like helicopter blades as they crush and crush their way inside the cabin.

I shoot, because there’s nothing else to do. And because the whistling of the bullets is so familiar, almost comforting, like a song, a prelude for the end of my life.

Quickly, before I can stop her, Inesa gets to her feet and darts across the cabin. My finger slips from the trigger. “Don’t!” I cry. “Stay down!”

But she’s already skidded to her knees in front of the woodstove and grasped the bottle of kerosene. She meets my eyes, gazeflickering between fear and determination. “What about this?”

What about this?

Somehow, these are words I’ve heard before. The fire blooms upward behind my eyes. I feel like everything is converging, except I don’t know whateverythingis, only that the flame isn’t a dream, isn’t a glitch in my system; it’s a memory. It layers over my vision and makes Inesa’s face flicker like static in front of me.

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