Page 82 of Fable for the End of the World

“Caerus has poisoned everything.” The bitterness in my voice curdles my tongue.

Inesa bites her lip. Silence settles over us, like new-fallen snow. Then she says, “Will you help me with the buttons?”

I let the quilt slide from my hands and puddle to the floor. There’s a line of tiny white buttons up the back of the dress, each one made to fit an equally tiny loop. Inesa reaches back and sweeps her hair out of the way. I’m careful not to catch any of the angling strands. Slowly, her bare skin vanishes, clad in impossibly clean white linen. The buttons go all the way up to her throat, the final one closing over the soft flesh at the nape of her neck.

When I’m finished, she lets go of her hair and it tumbles down around her shoulders. “Thanks,” she says quietly.

My instinct is just to nod. But I force my mouth open and reply, “You’re welcome.” It feels strange to say the words, but not unpleasant.

“Well,” Inesa says, tugging the sleeves down to her wrists and turning around, “how do I look?”

My eyes follow the line of her body, clothed in all white, from the bodice to the hem of the flared skirt, which falls to her ankles. My vision blurs. Reality starts to shiver away, and the memory rises up in its place, licking at me like flame.

“You look like her,” I whisper. “Sanne.”

The name I know and the face I’ll never forget. She doesn’t look anything like Inesa, not really, but my mind is caught on that memory like a fishhook, and it won’t let go. Her limp body in the mud, rain pelting over us both, her skin growing colder and colder under my hands. And as the real world shudders in and out of myvision, the bald and ugly truth I’ve always known seeps into my skin: that I am a predator and she is the prey. That for me to survive, she has to die.

My fingers are shaking uncontrollably. Inesa reaches out and takes them, pressing my hands to her chest. Her heartbeat thrums through my skin.

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay.”

She leans forward, and I lean forward to meet her. The tips of our noses brush. I think about how, just over a day ago, I wanted so badly to touch her but never thought I would get the chance. How do people love, I wonder, knowing that every moment is so precarious, that at any second, it could all melt like snow, or turn to ash?

“If, somehow,” I start, in a strangled voice, “we knew each other before, without all of this, do you think...”

I can’t finish, but Inesa knows what I mean to say. A small smile spreads across her face.

“If you were just another City dweller who came into my shop one day,” she says, “I think I would be so flustered, I’d make a complete idiot of myself. And then I’d think: She hates me, she’s never coming back.”

“But I would come back,” I whisper.

“Yeah,” Inesa says. “But I’m clueless, so I’d probably think you were coming back because you have an extreme passion for stuffed deer.”

I laugh, a low, breathy sound. “No, I’d just run myself broke buying them, so I’d have an excuse to see you again.”

In this universe, there are no credits, no debts. No Gauntlets.

“And would you come live in Esopus with me?” Inesa’s tone becomes hesitant.

“I suppose,” I say. “I could hunt. You could cook. It would be very domestic.”

This time, she laughs. “I’m a terrible cook. I’ll microwave you pasta, but that’s the best you’re going to get.”

“Deer meat and microwaved pasta.” I chew my lip. “What a life it would be.”

“Yeah,” Inesa says. Her voice is soft. “A life.”

Thirty-One

Inesa

Two days. Three hours. Twenty-six minutes.

Time seems to pass too quickly, clouds sweeping across the sky to blot out the sun. The snow has almost all melted by now, turning the dirt into sucking mud. I put my jacket on over the white dress. When I do, the case of the compass rattles in my pocket.

I think of the compass itself, lying on Luka’s palm. I don’t want to remember, but my mind throws up the images anyway: When Luka was eight and I was nine, Dad was on one of his obscure research kicks and he taught us about palmistry. We compared the sizes of our hands, the spans of our fingers. I was older and Luka was still a scrawny kid, so my hand was bigger. But we had the same pattern of creases in our palms. A very narrow, nearly invisible fate line, but a deep, fixed heart line.

Another memory. Hoisting ourselves up onto the roof of our house with a frayed rope, pretending to be mountain climbers, until Mom yelled at us to come down. I remember painting the sign for Soulis Taxidermy Shop.Luka was tall by then, and as hehung it, we both tried to smile proudly, even though our stomachs were roiling with an identical fear.What if no one comes? What if we can’t do this on our own?

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