Page 91 of Fable for the End of the World

“Her.” The revulsion in his tone is obvious. “You can’t let her go.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But the truth of the accusation thrums at me from the inside out, like a hollow drum. My mouth is dry.

“Yes, you do. And it wouldn’t matter, anyway,” he says, in a scratchy voice that makes me think his anger is just a guise for tears. “You would never really be just mine. I mean, all of New Amsterdam has seen you naked.”

My own anger surges up, quick and burning. Heat blooms across my face. I’ve suspected it, of course, but now I know for sure: I don’t belong in Esopus Creek anymore. The people who used to smile at me in the streets now turn their heads and avert theirgazes. Mrs. Prinslew never makes small talk anymore, and when a customer comes into the shop, they say as few words to me as possible.

I’m ruined in their eyes. Tainted by the things I did on the Gauntlet. Not the murder or the violence. They wouldn’t blame me for that. It’s the fact that I held her and I loved her.

Blood sparking with outrage, I snatch the packet of pills right out of Jacob’s hand.

“Then get away from me,” I bite out. “Just leave me alone.”

It will never stop. Not even now that the Gauntlet is over and the cameras are off. Jacob is right—anyone who wants to can search my name and find those clips, can fondle me in their mind. At first my life was Mom’s to barter with. Now it’s everyone’s to consume.

I turn and flee back into the shop before Jacob can reply.

In bed that night, I take out the pills. Holding them up to the light, they shine translucently, like gemstones. I remove three, then four. Five. How many will it take, I wonder, for me to forget her? Forget her like she’s forgotten me? They might give me an hour or two of reprieve, but I’ll need something much, much stronger for the kind of true oblivion I’m seeking.

At this point, I’m starting to understand what Dad found so irresistible about the bottom of a beer bottle.

But I don’t know if I want that. Not really. If I had a choice, would I excise her from my mind, as if she never existed? It would stop her from haunting my dreams. It would stop me from seeing her every time I close my eyes. But I would lose myself, too, I think.I once told her it took strength to hurt, to grieve, that it was braver than feeling nothing at all.

I’m grieving for the living, though. It feels different than mourning the dead.

The door opens and closes with athud. Luka is home. I stuff the package of pills under my pillow and try to look innocent as he strides past the threshold of my room.

Obviously I don’t succeed. He pauses in the doorway, his hair dripping onto the floor. The rain has picked up again and I hear it pounding the roof. Under his wet mop of dark hair, I can still see it. The gash, which has healed into a thin, white scar.

He regards me for a long moment, silence stretching out between us in cords that I feel like I could touch.

At last, I say in a rush, “I’m sorry.”

Luka just frowns. “For what?”

I glance from the scar on his forehead down to the ones circling his wrists, the not-quite-healed wounds that he hasn’t explained to me. That I’ve been too afraid to ask about. When I look at him, I can see the compass held out so plaintively in his open palm. My throat starts to seize up, my breath growing hot in my chest.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, “that I didn’t make it there.”

Luka goes utterly still; he seems not even to breathe. In the half darkness of my bedroom, an unexpected metamorphosis takes place. He’s a little boy again, appearing at my bedside, tears streaked down his face after a bad dream. It was so easy to hold him then, to comfort him. I don’t know why it feels so impossible now.

And then, finally, he says, “There was nowhere to go, anyway. It was never real.”

The truth that we’ve both been afraid to speak aloud, for weeks now. After the Caerus helicopter lifted off and vanished into the icy gray sky, we walked north for miles, following Dad’s directions. But when we reached the marked place on the map, there was nothing. Just a vast, irradiated wasteland that reeked of smoke and oil, dead black trees forking out of the barren earth. If there was ever any life there, it had been wiped out in a brusque, decisive nuclear blast.

The Drowned County was just one of Dad’s fairy tales. Maybe he even believed it himself. Maybe he left us those coordinates because he thought he could make it, too. Or maybe he never meant anything by it; maybe it was just some fumbling drunken scheme that he’d forgotten about by the next morning.

But it was Luka who believed, more strongly than I ever did. He wanted it to be real so badly that he mortgaged his life for it. He would have stayed Caerus’s prisoner, if it meant that I could be free, if it meant that just one single time, Dad had told us something true.

Some ancient, half-buried instinct is resurrected within me, and it moves my body across the bedroom to where Luka stands. It wraps my arms around my brother and holds him tight and close.

He’s stiff against me for a moment, tense with shock. And then he bends down to embrace me back.

The cabin isn’t that far from Esopus Creek. On foot, it would take me only a few days to reach. I’ve mapped out the exact distance on my tablet. Of course, it would mean risking an encounter with the Wends, and I’m zero for two on fending them off successfully by myself.

But I can’t leave Luka. And it’s just a dream, in the end, that if I find my way to the cabin, I might also find some peace. The deepest, truest part of me knows that I would only find more to grieve.

Besides. I can’t stop remembering what Melinoë said, about what it would be like for us if there were no Gauntlet. How she would walk into the shop, clear-eyed, pale hair damp from the ever-present rain. It’s so easy to imagine it. The faint purple flush that would paint her cheeks. The way our fingers would brush over all the blood and guts—and it almost makes me smile; between the two of us, we’ve seen plenty of it.

---