Page 89 of Fable for the End of the World

I twist, straining in the Mask’s arms, a sob breaking through my lips. I can just barely see Inesa, growing smaller and smaller as the helicopter takes off, blades beating the air violently. I watch her until she becomes just a streak against the frost, both dark and bright against the endless white. I watch her until she vanishes into nothing.

Azrael drives a syringe into the base of my throat. Instantly, my vision blurs and warps. The roof of the helicopter, with all itsswitches and blinking buttons, becomes an unknown constellation. But I can still see her. Inesa. Her memory is in my mind like the fire, keeping me awake, alive, even as the medication tries to numb me and pull me under.

I won’t forget. I won’t—

Even as I slip into my dreamless, anesthetized slumber, the world behind my eyelids explodes in color.

Thirty-Five

Inesa

If I’d paid more attention to past Gauntlets, I would have had abetter idea of what happens when you win. But then again, none of the normal rules really apply to me. I won. Technically. But I lost more than what’s accounted for on Caerus’s stark, impersonal ledger.

There are plans for a series of interviews with Luka and me. They fly a reporter and a camera crew out to our house in Esopus Creek. The reporter complains unsubtly about the cold and the damp, the leaking roof, the dark, cluttered living room. Still, at least it isn’t Zetamon. Luka and I sit on the lumpy couch as the crew fixes microphones to the fronts of our shirts. But just when everything is settled and the cameraman is counting down, the reporter’s tablet pings and vibrates in her purse. The interview is off. She doesn’t even try to disguise her relief.

When I turn on my own tablet, for the first time since the Gauntlet, I see why. My $ponsor app is flooded with donations, my inbox crowded with messages. For every earnest note of support,there’s another that’s snide and cruel and suggestive. Mostly, people send links to the clips of Melinoë and me. When we were both exposed. When we thought we were alone. They’re trying to taunt me into an angry, defiant reply, so they can screenshot that and plaster it online, too. Or they’re just pleased by the thought that they can humiliate and degrade me over and over again.

I delete my account, erasing everything.

Luka’s accounts all get flooded with messages, too. His are equally suggestive—but none of them are cruel. It’s hard to hate him, after watching the Gauntlet. He’s the uncontested hero, really. Handsome and tall, stony and determined, a wicked shot with a rifle. It occurs to me, more than once, that he would have been the perfect Lamb. If Mom had chosen him, the Gauntlet would have been over in a matter of hours.

I want to ask him if he regrets it. Not killing her when he had the chance. But every time I try to speak her name, it withers like ash on my tongue.

Not all the attention is bad. As it turns out, Zetamon created a crowdfunding campaign to help us out. His subscribers donated tens of thousands of credits. It’s more than enough to do all the repairs around the house—build a new set of stairs, replace the rotting floorboards—and even make the shop look shiny and new.

Someone reaches out and offers to pay to demolish our house and replace it with a sleek Caerus pod home. But I delete the message before Luka can see it. I don’t think I could bear to live withintheir stark, white walls. Already it feels like everything is closing in on me from all angles, in all directions. I have to constantly remind myself to breathe.

I do take someone else up on their offer, though. He’s a doctor at one of the big Caerus hospitals in the City, and he gives Mom her own personal, private suite in his wing. She can have as much testing done as she wants, all the food she could ask for, and nurses at her beck and call. She leaves a week after the end of my Gauntlet, in a Caerus helicopter, without looking back.

I wonder how long it will take them to realize that her sickness is an invention, a clever one, a shield against the grueling, daily miseries of the world. Everyone needs something, because most of the time, reality is too much to bear.

When I finally understood that, I thought I could teach myself not to hate her. But I can’t make the anger fade and wash away. It lives inside me, like a second heartbeat, like the pulsing of the tracker, keeping me alive, but also killing me, slowly. Like water eating away at stone.

I do endless internet searches. I have a news alert set for her name. I think about reaching out to Zetamon, asking to be on his stream, so I can send a message that maybe, somehow, she might see. But I doubt Caerus would let me. They’d censor the stream for sure.

Instead, I focus on all the small, stupid things that build up the walls of my life in Esopus Creek. Stuffing and mounting deer. Piling sandbags outside the shop door when it rains. Patching our refurbished raft. We can always afford power now, and I never gohungry at night. Luka is even gifted a new rifle, sleek and state-of-the-art, and some proper hunting attire, a mottled camouflage of brown and green.

At night, I lie awake in my new bed with its plush mattress, the humid dark swimming around me. There’s a proper wall between Luka’s room and mine now. I can’t see his silhouette through the curtain anymore. But we still don’t have doors, so when I pass by his open threshold at night, I see his tablet shining in the otherwise unlit room. It’s playing the Gauntlet. The last moments, when I drove the knife into Lethe’s back.

When Luka realizes I’m watching, he immediately snaps the tablet off and turns around, drawing in a breath.

I see it all the time. My hand clenched around the cold hilt of the knife. The blood dripping between Lethe’s teeth. Over and over again I see her slump to the ground, unmoving, her heart stuttering to its brusque and final halt.

Luka stands and meets me in the doorway. Light from the hallway pours in around him. I can’t really place the expression on his face. It seems so stricken with grief, eyes shining hollowly.

“You didn’t have a choice, Inesa,” he says at last.

I don’t reply.

“She would have killed you.”

I didn’t know it haunted Luka, too. Maybe it was just the fact that he watched it so closely, near enough to smell the tang of Lethe’s blood in the air.

That’s not why it haunts me, though. I’ve done ugly things to survive; so has he. What keeps me from sleeping at night is theknowledge that I gave everything I had, and it still wasn’t enough to save her.

At last, after a month, it happens. A slant of light, slivering through the clouds. I’m stitching up a deer pelt when my tablet vibrates. I drop the needle, peel off my gloves, and tap hurriedly on the screen so it flickers to life.

The headline is short. Six swift, hard blows to the back of the head.FORMER ANGEL TO WED CAERUS EXECUTIVE.

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