Eighteen Melinoë
Eighteen
Melino?
I wake slowly. Excruciatingly. My eyelids are weighted with lead and every muscle in my body is aching. If I really was a machine, like the Outliers apparently believe, I would be some long-defunct model, dusted off and powered on for the first time in years.
I blink away the film of sleep and look around. It’s bright—brighter than I’ve ever seen it in these woods. Sunlight falls gently through the patchwork of leaves and branches, a deep, pure gold, as if the sky above is cloudless. A cloudless sky in New Amsterdam? Maybe I am still dreaming.
My memory returns to me in increments: the Wends with their rotting gray skin and slavering mouths. The Lamb bracing her arm around my waist, holding me upright. Carrying me. Helping me into the cave. The last thing I remember is my face dive into the dirt.
The Lamb. My eyes open fully and I see her sleeping body next to mine. Her knees are pulled up to her chest and one arm is pillowed beneath her head. Her other arm is stretched out, and her fingertips are—just barely—brushing my arm.
My heart jumps into my throat. I’m sure she didn’t mean to touch me. She was probably tossing and turning in her sleep. But the way she’s reaching out feels intentional, fingers splayed so they’re almost grasping me. Almost.
I want to pull away, but I don’t. Instead, I keep my body still and slow my breathing. Rainwater drips from the cave overhang, bright and delicate as beads of dew. A band of sunlight stripes across her face, illuminating the scattered freckles on the bridge of her nose, her long, thick, dark lashes. Her brows are full, with a canny sort of arch that makes her look playful, even in sleep.
It recalls my hazy dream: her peeking out at me from behind the tree, teasing smile on her face. Blood rushes to my cheeks. I jerk my arm against my chest and push myself into a sitting position.
Her eyes fly open instantly. She scrambles backward, away from me, to the opposite side of the cave. Then she stops and draws a breath. We stare at each other, unblinking.
A swallow ticks in her throat. The bruises I left are even more vicious-looking in the light, purple and lurid.
“Just give me a head start,” she says at last. Her voice is hoarse.
“What?”
“Before you start hunting me again.”
Oh. I push myself up onto my knees. “I’m not going to chase you.”
She stiffens. Her hand searches the leaves, and her knuckles whiten as she takes hold of something. The handle of a knife. My knife.
“No,” I say quickly. “I mean, I’m not going to kill you.”
Her brow creases with confusion. “But you have to.”
My rifle is right between us, just out of my reach. I could lunge forward and grab it, but she already has the knife, and she would be faster. My body still feels sluggish, my instincts dulled. I don’t think I could chase her even if I wanted to.
Slowly, she draws the knife upward, until the hilt is pressed against her chest, blade pointed out. She lets out a trembling breath.
“So kill me, then,” I say. “Why don’t you?”
“I don’t want to.” She swallows again, hard. “I don’t want to be a murderer.”
“You said it yourself—I’m barely human.”
“I didn’t mean that. I was wrong.” Her gaze flicks up and down my body, and red tinges her cheeks. “I’m sorry.”
The absurdity of her apologizing to me when my bruises are pulsing on her throat almost makes me laugh.
“I’d rather die quickly than starve to death out here. I’ll even show you where to cut.”
I’m bluffing, of course. Sort of. With no connection to the Caerus mainframe, only a few days’ worth of meal replacement packets in my suit, and no way of navigating out of the woods, the odds of survival aren’t exactly in my favor. The only thing I can hope is that Azrael is looking for me. That he’ll find me.
Please , that pitiful voice in my mind cries out. Save me, please, get me out of here .
“I know where to cut,” Inesa says. For the first time, her voice is sharp.
Right. “You’re not a murderer, but you have plenty of experience with dead things.”
“ Animals . Not people.” She glares at me. “Are you really trying to convince me to kill you?”
“Are you really going to refuse the quickest and easiest way to win your Gauntlet?”
She falls silent. We stare at each other as the seconds pass, punctuated by the trickle of rainwater from the cave overhang. Her eyes shift from green to brown to green again, changing, like nature does all the time.
“Has it ever happened before?” she asks finally. Softly.
Even without elaboration, I know what she means.
“Of course it has. Not often. But there’s always a chance. That’s what makes the Gauntlet entertaining. The possibility that the roles could reverse. That one of you could kill one of us.”
Inesa just watches me, frowning.
“Haven’t you ever heard of Mara?”
She shakes her head.
“Mara was an Angel before me. Twelve years ago.” I was too young to remember it when it happened, or maybe my original memory has been mangled, cut into pieces, like so many others. But Azrael has forced us to watch the recording of her Gauntlet over and over and over again. “She was... a child. Well, not really. She was seventeen, like me. But she was small. She looked younger. So Azrael always sent her on Gauntlets against these enormous, burly men, because the contrast was fascinating. It seemed like it might be an even match.”
Inesa purses her lips. “I didn’t realize so much thought went into it. The... the pairings.”
“It’s never supposed to look like cold brutality.” I glance down at my fingers, then back up at Inesa. I can’t risk taking my eyes off her for too long. “Azrael works very hard, deciding who to send on which Gauntlet. The optics of it.”
“So we’re always supposed to believe we have a chance.” Inesa’s voice is low. “Even when we don’t.”
I nod.
Silence again. Inesa stares at me intently, but I can’t read the emotion in her gaze.
“What happened to Mara?” she asks.
“Exactly what you’d expect to happen, eventually.” I press my nails into my palm. “Azrael sent her out on a Gauntlet against some bigger, stronger-looking man. It turns out he actually was stronger. He bashed her head in with a rock. So hard you could see the white of her skull. The cameras caught a very good angle of it. Of her brain seeping out between the splinters of bone.”
Inesa’s face goes pale, then slightly green.
“I’m surprised you haven’t seen it before,” I say. “The footage is famous.”
“I don’t like watching them. The Gauntlets.” Inesa’s gaze drops, but just for a moment. “It’s easier to pretend they don’t happen. Even when they do.”
For some reason, I feel my chest tighten with some emotion—relief? She hasn’t seen my last Gauntlet. The dead girl, my pitiful breakdown. And maybe that means she never saw the hacked holoboard, projecting my image into the skies with the headline The Most Hated Face in New Amsterdam . Maybe, somehow, I’m less of a monster to her than I am to the rest of her kind.
I shouldn’t care what she thinks of me. Not when I still have to kill her. I draw in a breath and reply, “Fair enough.”
More silence. Inesa’s eyes are damp as she looks at me from beneath her lashes.
“Who’s Azrael?”
I’m taken aback by the question. It’s something I assumed the Outliers knew. Isn’t he as famous among them as we Angels are?
“He’s our handler,” I say. There’s a catch in my throat. “He invented the Angel program. He trains us, decides who to send on which Gauntlet. He decides how we’re supposed to look and act. And he fixes thing when they go wrong.”
The pitifully hopeful part of me is still waiting to hear the faint buzz of the cameras. To hear his voice in my ear. I would even take his anger, his disappointment, if it meant he would save me.
“When things go wrong,” Inesa repeats. “You mean, like when an Angel fails to kill her mark?”
My teeth come together with an audible click . Inesa watches me intently.
“I’ve never failed before,” I say. My tone is flat and cold—the way it should have been this whole time.
Inesa’s fingers tense around the handle of the knife.
Maybe I should just kill her and be done with it. But I know it wouldn’t be over, not really. A Gauntlet that isn’t live streamed is just a murder. Quotidian and forgettable. I’m a performer just as much as I am a killer. And I can’t perform without an audience.
It’s not exactly a novel realization, but in this moment, it hurts. It hurts to know that I’m nothing without Caerus. I’m the creature they made me and nothing more. Just a cold body in a hunting suit.
Another realization, equally painful: I need Caerus, but right now—I need the Lamb, too. Inesa. This is her world. She knows about the Wends and the mutations, how to survive in this drowning, irradiated wasteland. I won’t make it without her.
And she needs me, too. She’s useless with a gun, and until she finds her way back to her brother, she’s easy prey for anything in these woods. I can see the exhaustion that’s gouged black circles under her eyes and the thirst that has turned her lips white, cracked and dry.
We need each other, as much as the thought turns my stomach. And I think she knows it, too.
I reach over, slowly, and unzip the compartment of my suit that contains the meal replacement packets. There are four left. I remove one and hold it out to her. My hand trembles as it breaches the space between us.
“Here,” I say. “You must be starving.”