Four Melinoë
Four
Melino?
“Full name: Inesa Yael Soulis. Account number: 6415506781. Age: seventeen. Legal residence: Eighteen Little Schoharie Lane, Esopus Creek, Catskill County. Is there anything else?”
I stare at the girl’s picture on the holoscreen. It’s an older photo, probably self-taken, since the camera is angled slightly downward and the poor lighting makes everything look grainy. Still, I can make out a ripple of dark brown hair, wavy and casually messy. Full lips and thick brows. A mole under her left eye. The eyes are peculiar, requiring an extra moment’s attention. They’re a deep, murky color, and I can’t quite decide if they’re brown or green.
But it’s not worth mentioning. She looks nothing like my last target, and that’s what’s most important.
“Occupation?” I ask.
“She runs a taxidermy shop in Esopus Creek with her younger brother. Luka Elian Soulis, account number 43678812131.” Azrael puts another picture up on the holoscreen. Side by side, the siblings look like twins, with the same brown-green eyes and olive skin. But Luka has a defiant slant to his gaze. Inesa looks cheerful, innocent.
I can’t stop the next thought that flashes through my mind: Just like a Lamb should.
“The brother,” I say. “He hunts?”
Azrael taps something else onto the screen. Photo after photo of Luka beside dead deer, dead rabbits, their bodies hung from tree branches in lifeless suspension, letting the blood from his kills drain out. But he doesn’t wear the kind of gloating smile that most hunters do when they pose with their prey—the ones who hunt for sport. I’ve seen enough already to know that for the Soulises, every dead deer is another day of food, hot water, electricity.
“By all accounts, the Soulis children are hardworking and well-respected in their community,” Azrael says. His tone is careful. He’s worried that if he humanizes the Lamb too much, I’ll get weak again. That I’ll balk at killing her. He taps to the next screen almost hesitantly.
There are pictures of Inesa standing at a worktable in a too-long apron, medical-grade gloves, and plastic goggles. Even under the goggles I can see the furrow of concentration in her brow. Clearly she’s not the indolent, surrendering type who usually ends up five hundred thousand credits in debt. The ones who are addicted to television or alcohol or sour green soda or greasy delivery food. There’s another story here, lurking under these photos and statistics. She must have a sponsor.
“The mother,” I say. “What does she do?”
Azrael doesn’t reply. Instead he taps through to another screen, which shows Janina Soulis’s account history. Her charges fly past me: two hundred thirteen credits for an appointment with a neurologist. Another three hundred for a surgery consult. A monthlong prescription for pain pills that cost forty credits apiece. The doctor’s note reads that the pills are prescribed for patients who live with severe and life-inhibiting levels of pain .
If Azrael wants me to be strong and heartless, I don’t know why he’s showing me this. “She’s sick?”
Peppered among the medical debts are the small, idiosyncratic indulgences I’ve come to expect. Eighty credits for top-of-the-line hair dye, jet-black. Peach-flavored detox tea. Boxes of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts. Chenille slippers.
“Sick in the head,” Azrael says, tapping his own temple. “Convinced she has every disease and ailment under the sun.”
I wonder why none of the many doctors she’s seen have told her that. Maybe she’s gotten adept at tricking them. Or maybe they have no incentive to tell her the truth. It’s more profitable to treat someone for a disease they think they have than to cure them of an illness that never existed.
But there’s really no cure for her kind of sickness, anyway. The brain isn’t like other organs. You can’t suture its wounds and wait for new skin to grow. Even the scientists at Caerus don’t fully understand it. If they did, I wouldn’t feel my fingers start to shake when I look at the Lamb’s picture on the holoscreen. Inesa Yael Soulis.
She’s nothing to me. Nothing except a heat flash in the scope of my rifle. The hum of a tracker in my ear. The promise that I’ll go another cycle without being decommissioned.
“So,” I say, my voice cracking a little, “is there a father?”
Azrael gives me a grim look. He taps around on his tablet until the screen shows a man’s face. He has echoes of Inesa’s features, only harsher, leaner. Black hair. Scornful, angry eyes. A sneer pulling back his lips. It looks more like a mug shot than an ID photo. When his vital info appears on the screen, the text is red.
“Dead?” I ask.
“Unclear,” says Azrael. “Our last records of him are from two years ago, but no one in the family ever registered his passing. They would have good incentive to, because a death certificate qualifies them for welfare benefits. But there’s nothing in the system.” When I don’t reply, Azrael goes on. “I suspect ugly business, probably with the mother.”
Domestic abuse is more common in the families of our Lambs than not, and it’s easy to imagine that’s the ugly business Azrael means. I try to bridge the distance between the waifish, sickly looking mother and the angry-eyed father. But the connection fizzles out. The more I look at the photo, the father’s gaze seems turbulent, not hostile. It’s the mother’s eyes that have a sheen of malice in them, glossy and cold as water under moonlight.
But none of this matters. Not really. As much as people like the Soulises want it to be, anger isn’t strength. Hate isn’t power.
“The parents won’t be a concern, then,” I say.
“No.” Azrael taps away from the father’s photo. Inesa’s face reappears, and Luka’s beside it. “And there’s nothing to suggest the Lamb herself will be capable of putting up a fight. The brother, though...”
I stare at Luka’s face on the screen. He’s a hunter—like me, I suppose. I measure myself beside his vitals. He has six inches on me, and more than fifty pounds. But he doesn’t have state-of-the-art Caerus rifles, a prosthetic eye that sees in the dark and can follow heat signatures like a hawk, and other enhancements that are under the surface, invisible. Still, brute strength shouldn’t be underestimated. And in terms of sheer numbers, I’m sure he’s killed more than I have. His survival means making new corpses every day.
Animals, though. Deer and rabbits. Not people. In that, I’ll always have the upper hand.
“He’ll help her,” I find myself saying. “He’ll do everything he can to save her.”
“I expect so,” Azrael says. “Be prepared.”
There are no rules against having help during a Gauntlet—for the Lambs, at least. They’re allowed to do whatever it takes to survive. Still, help usually isn’t enough to level the playing field. It just gives the illusion of hope. Of choice, of freedom. Although having another player in the Gauntlet can make aiming trickier—Angels aren’t allowed to harm civilians. That will be Inesa’s advantage.
Azrael selects his Lambs carefully. Every day, dozens of people reach the limit of their credits, but if we gave them all a Gauntlet, it would become too mundane. More a snuff film than a riveting spectacle. It’s important not to let the banal barbarity of it all settle in. So every two months, Azrael chooses Lambs that he can build a narrative around, something that keeps eyes glued to tablet screens and fingers typing furiously in the live chat. At the CEO’s instruction, he coordinates the timing carefully to coincide with product releases and key marketing moments.
It’s easy to see the narrative he’s building around Inesa. Her relationship with her brother, her embittered mother and absent father, her traumatic past—huge entertainment value. It doesn’t hurt that she’s pretty. My skin prickles at the thought; I’m annoyed at myself for noticing. But it’s just a fact, like her height, or the color of her eyes. That elusory brown-green.
It has all the contours of a good story, and I have my own role to play in it. This is the sort of Gauntlet I was made for. The kind where my legendary coldness contrasts with the warmth and spirit and unaccountable hope of the Lamb. Inesa Soulis’s vitality seems to pulse through the screen. It will be something to watch, when I drain that life from her.
This is my territory; my act. I wasn’t created to kill the hopeless, the helpless, the utterly innocent. That was always Keres’s purview, and she was skilled enough that she could make murder seem like mercy. I kill the ones who seem like they might have a fighting chance.
After my last Gauntlet, someone hacked one of the holoboards in the City. It showed me in a clip from the live stream, the camera roving around for a 360-degree view. Beside it were words in a harsh red font: The most hated face in New Amsterdam.
Caerus had the image taken down instantly. I don’t know what they did to the hacker—probably something too hideous to imagine. But enough people had seen it, and I couldn’t exactly argue the fact. I read all the chat logs from the live stream. I searched my own name and found message board upon message board, pages and pages and pages of vitriol and rage. There was even talk of boycotting the Gauntlets, which provoked an irate threat, directly from Caerus’s CEO, to cut off power to the Valley if they went through with their plan.
If it were any other Angel, they would have been decommissioned immediately. They would be more trouble than they were worth. But I’m not just any Angel. Not to Azrael.
“The CEO will be watching,” Azrael tells me, and the words break my reverie. “Give him a good show.”
The remark is a veiled threat. I know the CEO wanted me gone after my last Gauntlet. I know Azrael fought for me to have another chance, a chance at redemption. And I know what fate awaits me if I fail this time. The memory of Visser’s hand on the small of my back makes me shiver. And Keres’s blank, empty eyes—
“I will,” I say, lifting my chin. “I promise.”
“Good girl.” Azrael rests his hands on my shoulders, and they feel inexplicably heavy, as heavy as steel. Then he moves them up to cup my cheeks. His flesh is warm where mine is cold. “You’ll do well, Melino?. You’ll do perfectly.”
I return to my room and find Lethe standing outside the door. I stiffen, my shoulders going up around my ears and my black-gloved hands curling into fists.
“ You’re on the next Gauntlet,” she says, before I can utter a word. “Azrael picked you .”
Her voice drips with poison. It’s almost enough to make me flinch. “Yes.”
“It’s not fair. It should be me.”
Lethe’s eyes gleam like knifepoints. She can’t disguise the anger in them, or the hate. Our natural tears have been replaced with a synthetic saline solution that our eyes only release when we need to flush out foreign matter, never when our emotions reach a pitch—but Lethe looks about as close to crying as an Angel can.
“It wasn’t my decision,” I say. It’s true, and she knows it. Azrael plots out every aspect of the Gauntlets, maneuvering us like game pieces. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t refuse him.
But Lethe just says again, “It’s not fair . All you’ve done is fail, over and over again. You should’ve been decommissioned. Like Keres. Everyone knows it.”
Keres’s name is a blade twisted between my ribs. “Take it up with Azrael.”
“Azrael plays favorites. I don’t know what you’re doing to make him give you so many extra chances, but it’s disgusting.”
Something shimmers up in my mind, a whaleback breaching the water’s placid surface. Another half memory, flickering across the inside of my eyelids. I remember cold metal against the bottom of my belly. A flash of silver. My stomach turns over on itself, but then the not-memory dissipates, curling into the air like smoke.
My tone is flat and chilly. “I’m not doing anything. And you’ll get your chance soon enough. There’s never any shortage of Lambs.”
Lethe sucks in a breath. “I hope you fail. I can’t stand to see your face on another holoboard.”
“If I fail, you’ll never stop seeing it.”
Our failures as Angels—those rare occasions when the Lambs actually triumph—are as famous as our successes. Maybe more. Most of the time it’s because they find somewhere to hide, somewhere deep or distant enough that it muffles the frequency of their trackers. They can wait out the timer. But sometimes, very rarely, it’s because they fight back. That’s what the audiences ache to see the most. A dead Angel, blood pooling around her head like a halo.
Lethe’s nostrils flare. “I don’t know why you think you’re so superior. You’re just going to end up on Visser’s arm.”
That’s what Lethe is really jealous of, I think. The more successful and famous an Angel is, the better her position when she’s decommissioned. When they do the final Wipe and we become what people call, in whispers, corporate concubines. A bauble flaunted on the arm of a Caerus executive.
Lethe stands there seething at me, but I’m cloaked in coldness. I don’t know anything about her. With precision and efficiency, Azrael turns us all into blank slates the moment we come to him. Her past is a black hole, like mine. She’s beautiful, I suppose, like all Angels are meant to be. No more or less than I am, really.
But this is why I’m better than Lethe, even with the unwashable stain of my last Gauntlet: because I can just push past her, as her lips tremble and her eyes blaze, and feel almost nothing at all.
I close the door to my room, leaving Lethe to rage outside. The lights come on when I enter, overly bright at first, before calibrating themselves to a dimmer, warmer glow. One of the maids has been in here, and she’s tucked in my sheets and fluffed my pillows.
The entire west wall of my bedroom is a window, facing the City skyline below. Against the darkness, the buildings glow like a tangle of circuitry. Holo-ads beam into the starless dark. Tonight they’re advertising my upcoming Gauntlet. My face, flickering with static, and beside it, the Lamb’s. Inesa’s. Animated by Caerus’s media department, her eyes widen and her mouth opens ever so slightly, as if she’s shocked to see herself there in the sky above the City.
I press the pad next to the window and the City view vanishes. I scroll through the list of possible holograms to replace it: a field of flowers, the ocean at night, mountain peaks wreathed in mist. But in the end I choose nothing at all, and just let my window turn black. I can’t afford to be distracted.
I take out my tablet and pull up the map of Esopus Creek. I don’t need to memorize it. Tomorrow, all this information, along with the pulse of the Lamb’s tracker, will be fed into my brain via my prosthetic eye and the comms chip in my temple. To see it, all I’ll have to do is blink.
I type in Inesa’s address and the map zooms in. Her house is tiny, made of wood and perched precariously on cinder block pillars that hold it above the flooded street. Once, winter turned the outlying valleys crackling dry, brown leaves and brittle branches crusted with snow. It hasn’t snowed for as long as I’ve been alive. Now every season is the rainy season and every day the water rises farther than before. I wonder how long it will be before Inesa’s house goes under.
There’s something oddly familiar about it, something that jabs at me like a needle to the throat. The words themselves, Esopus Creek , blink across my vision. They’re familiar, too. But I can’t quite knit the sensations together into thoughts, into revelations. Maybe it’s a false familiarity. My mind is pitted with black holes. There’s no use puzzling over it.
My childhood is almost entirely gone, but a few memories have survived the countless Wipes. I remember that during my first days with Caerus, I would come to the window and press my palms flat against the glass, staring down at the City below. Sometimes I would imagine that the glass would shatter and I would plummet through it. But sometimes I imagined that instead of falling, I would fly. I was an Angel, after all. I spread my wings, and I was free.