Twenty-Four Melinoë
Twenty-Four
Melino?
My hour or so of sleep has just left me more disoriented. At least, that’s the only reason I can imagine why my heart hums as I listen to Inesa speak. It’s not a droning, choppy sound like helicopter blades, but a soft, insistent murmur that warms me from my cheeks to the tips of my gloved fingers.
Inesa stands up, hiking the borrowed pants up around her waist. “Well, come on,” she says. “I’ll show you how to light the stove.”
“You look ridiculous,” I tell her, gesturing at the oversize clothes.
The corner of her mouth lifts in a deadpan smile. “Maybe Caerus should outfit the Lambs with fancy suits, then. It’s only fair that we should get to look so graceful and pretty, too.”
She says it in an offhand way and then immediately turns her back to me, so I’m sure that I’ve misheard. I stay glued to the floor, heat rushing to my face. She thinks I’m pretty?
She’s been paying attention to me, too. I still can’t believe those words slipped from my tongue. We must both be decompensating from hunger.
Inesa kneels in front of the stove and opens the firebox. There’s nothing but soot and ashes inside, the remnants of a fire that burned out a long, long time ago. There’s also no wood or coal to be found in the cabin. It makes me wonder again if the owner died of sickness, because something must have prevented him from chopping down the trees just outside.
As it turns out, it’s even simpler than that—we don’t need the axe at all. There are enough fallen logs on the ground, and branches that we can break off with just our hands. Carefully avoiding the trip wire, we gather as much wood as we can. Then we bring our piles inside and heap them next to the stove.
The main problem is that all the wood is damp. Inesa strikes match after match, trying to get the wood to catch, but the flame keeps sizzling out against the wet bark. Her eyes search the room. Then she stands up, suddenly, and seizes a white bottle tucked in the corner behind the door.
“Kerosene,” she says. “It’s what’s inside the oil lamps. We can use it to start the fire, too.”
She starts to douse the wood, then stops. Giving a humorless laugh, she says, “My dad would be so ashamed of me, if he could see this. No real survivalist would have to resort to kerosene to make a fire.”
“You’ve survived longer than ninety-six percent of Lambs.” Azrael’s statistics are stamped inside the most rigid part of my brain. “That must count for something.”
“I think it’s possible there are other explanations for that.”
My cheeks prickle with warmth.
When she’s finished dousing the wood, she places the kerosene bottle at a safe distance, then goes over to rinse her hands in the bucket. The bandages on her palms have become almost completely saturated in blood, both old and new. I’ll have to replace them. For some reason, my skin prickles at the thought of this, of touching her again.
“Just to be safe,” says Inesa when she returns. “It’s not as flammable as gasoline, but—well, you’ll see.”
She strikes a match and tosses it inside, then quickly slams the door to the stove shut. The explosion follows a fraction of a second later. I find myself jolting slightly forward, as if to pull her back, but I manage to quash the instinct. Behind the door, flames burst to life, roaring red and orange, licking ferociously at the soot-stained glass. Heat swells outward.
Something pulls my gaze to the fire behind the glass. I can’t blink, and I can’t look away. It happens so suddenly that I’m stunned to silence, just watching the flames flicker and rise, yellow tongues licking within the wisps of smoke, and I think, I’ve seen it before.
A memory, surfacing from somewhere deep within me. Layered across my vision, another fire blooms. A sensation unfurls from the pit of my stomach—the shaky juddering of adrenaline. And for some reason, my brain forms a word, a name.
Keres .
And then, just as abruptly as it appears, it’s gone. The glass fragment of a memory and the sensation that accompanied it. Keres’s name sinks back down into the murk and depths of my black-pitted mind.
When I come to, Inesa is watching me intently.
“You aren’t afraid of fire, are you?” she asks, brow furrowed.
“No.”
At least, I don’t think I am. Surely Azrael would have wiped that phobia out of me, like I’m certain he did for many others. But I don’t mention that. And I don’t mention that what I felt when looking at the fire wasn’t fear. It was closer to anger. Closer to defiance.
Those are definitely not emotions an Angel is supposed to feel. I’m grateful that they’ve vanished so quickly. I shake my head, as if to clear the last of the fuzzy memory from my brain.
I hold my hands out toward the rising heat, relieved at how it chases away the chill from the tips of my fingers. Inesa holds hers out, too, and I’m equally relieved to see her visibly relax, her shoulders slumping. At least for the moment, we’re both safe and warm. All thanks to her.
“Maybe survivalists would be better at surviving if they took some tips from you,” I say.
Inesa laughs. It’s a clear sound, bright and somehow shining, almost visible in the air.
“It’s just a shame,” she says, “that we don’t have anything to cook over it.”
“I think I can fix that.”
If I’ve been feeling slightly useless to our survival efforts so far, this is the perfect remedy. Hunting is something I know I can do. It’s as instinctual as breathing. Granted, I’ve never tracked animals before, but it can’t be any more difficult than tracking people.
Unless it isn’t. Animals might technically be less intelligent, though in a way they’re more adept. Their brains are optimized, dedicated solely to survival. They aren’t clouded with things like empathy, or tripped up by tangled human questions of morality. Their memories are short, and full of holes, but they preserve the essential things: how to escape and how to stay alive.
Azrael’s voice echoes through my mind, quick as a fizzing bar of static. You are my perfect creation.
If only he could see me now. Digging graves for Outliers. Bandaging the hands of my Lamb. I wonder how many Wipes it will take to mend these cracks in my facade. To obliterate all memories of this weakness.
Fire erupts across my vision, that same outward, blooming heat. And this time, it’s his face I see within it, his name that catches on my tongue. My stomach clenches with revulsion.
Stop , I tell myself sternly. Snap out of it. These are false memories, I decide, something going wrong with the circuitry in my brain. The blow Luka struck me with his rifle must have done more damage than I thought. A tiny fissure in the glass. That’s all. Azrael will seal it up and make me new again.
But my fingernails are digging so hard into my palm that I’ve broken the skin beneath my gloves.
I start pacing through the forest, silent and swift on my feet. The biggest challenge will be finding a deer that isn’t too irradiated to eat. Inesa told me the best places to look: upstream, where the water is fresher, and where the woods are damper and denser. I make sure to stick close to the creek, though, so I don’t get hopelessly turned around.
But even if I do lose the creek, Inesa’s tracker is still pulsing in me like a second heartbeat. All my other systems have collapsed, except for this one. I’ll always be able to find my way back to her.
The sun slowly works its way across the sky as I walk, draining toward the line of the horizon. Evening settles thick and heavy across the forest, shadows stretching and air bristling with cold. I’ll have more luck now. Inesa told me that deer come out to graze at dawn and dusk, when the light is muddled and they’re safest from predators. Or so they think.
The stream diverts into a small pool, with deer droppings ground into the dirt around it. It’s not something I would’ve picked up on before, but being out here has reframed my vision. Made me notice things that I would never even have bothered to look for. For as long as I can remember, the air has just felt like dead space around me. Now it seems like I can sense every atom, seething and blooming with life.
This new awareness is equal parts blessing and curse. I narrow my eyes, trying to focus on nothing more than the hunt. I clamber up into a nearby tree and cache myself among its low-hanging branches. Then, with my rifle propped against my shoulder, I wait.
I don’t have to wait long. The deer come trotting out of the trees in a group of three: a mother and two fawns. They’re still young enough that their pelts are dappled with white. It’s not dark enough yet for the night vision in my prosthetic to click on, so I have to strain with my real eye to see if I can spot a third eye or a webbed hoof. They all look like ordinary deer to me. Anxious, trembling, gentle things.
Using the scope, I train my rifle on the mother. My artificially slowed heart gives an inexplicable stutter, and I wonder which is crueler: to kill one of the shaky-legged fawns before it’s even had a chance to outgrow its white spots, or to kill the mother and leave her children to fend for themselves? Crueler to make a child live without its mother, or a mother live without its child?
It’s nothing I’ve ever had to consider before. These are the types of inane human concerns that make a person weak. Concerns that should be below me. I shoot the mother because she’s bigger, which means more to eat. But when I see the fawns scatter at the gunshot, still unsteady on their legs, their large, black eyes damp with uncomprehending terror, I feel another tremor in my heart. Another crack in my system, spiraling outward from the first.
The temperature drops violently while I’m hauling the deer back to the cabin. All of a sudden, my breath is clouding in front of my face and the air is taut with cold. Under my hunting suit, gooseflesh rises on my arms and legs.
Careful to avoid the trip wire, I drag my kill into the cabin. As soon as I open the door, I’m met with a flushing wave of heat. Relief makes my bones quiver. The stove in the corner is steadily crackling, chuffing gray-white smoke. All the oil lamps have been lit, casting the room in a sheen of gold.
Inesa has spread out a series of tools on the table, most prominent among them a knife and a handsaw. She’s still wearing those ridiculous clothes. When she sees me, her head tips up and a smile stretches across her face, one that shows the dimple in her cheek.
“You did it,” she says.
I drop the carcass on the floor with a heavy thud . “You didn’t think I would?”
She gives a coy shrug. “I’ve never seen one of your Gauntlets before.”
“You’re one of the few.”
She’s mentioned it before, but it still surprises me to hear it; I almost can’t believe it. The Gauntlets get millions and millions of views. They’re the height of entertainment, better than any soap opera or sitcom Caerus could dream up. There are streamers who build their entire careers off live-reacting to the Gauntlets. Online retailers who sell merchandise bearing the images of Angels and Lambs. Websites that use AI technology to transpose my face onto naked bodies, so men don’t even have to use their imaginations.
“Yeah,” Inesa says. She picks up one of the tools, turns it over in her hands. “I guess I just never wanted another reason to lose faith in people.”
I let her words wash over me, as the heat from the stove warms my skin. In truth I’ve never felt a particular allegiance to people. Too many of my own parts were cleaved away, excised like rotting flesh and replaced with titanium and circuitry, leaving me both more than human and less. I wonder if that’s still how Inesa sees me. As a machine wearing the skin of a girl.
But I don’t ask. I just watch as she sets to work dismembering the deer. It’s a neat, efficient process, and she seems totally unperturbed by the gory aspects. Gutting the animal and draining it. Skinning the pelt. Carving the meat. She has a bucket to catch all the blood and innards, and her hands are soaked red up to the wrist.
I’m unable to take my eyes off her. For all Inesa’s self-deprecation, she looks anything but weak now. She’s focused, assured. Capable. And even though there’s a gulf between killing people and cleaning the carcasses of dead animals, I understand now—we’ve both seen plenty of ugly things.
“We’ll have to clean this up quickly, then salt and dry the meat,” Inesa says. “So it doesn’t attract the Wends.”
I nod and sink down into one of the chairs, eyelids growing heavy. Half asleep, half awake, I find myself thinking about what it would be like to do this every day. Going out to hunt, coming home to a blazing fire and Inesa’s earnest smile. My life in the City feels inconceivably distant. The long, sleek black shooting range, the enormous glass windows looking down on the ever-glittering lights, the dresses and the parties and the sapphire-blue liquid. The climate-controlled rooms and the showers with a dozen different settings.
All the things I thought I needed seem less important now. I’ve been surviving without them. Maybe more than just surviving.
I don’t know when I stopped wondering how Outliers lived like this and started imagining myself among them.
“Mel? Can you pass me that other knife?”
The sound of my name jabs me like a syringe. Fire breaks across my vision. Crackling tongues of flame.
My name.
I go still in my seat, blood turning slowly to ice.
Inesa just watches me, brow furrowed. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
I swallow hard around the stone that’s formed in my throat. When I manage to speak, my voice is just a thin croak. “That’s not my name.”
“Oh,” Inesa says. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking, really. It just slipped out.”
The tip of my nose and my cheeks are starting to burn. I blink and blink, to put out the fire behind my eyes. It doesn’t work. Through it all I see Inesa, watching me, her gaze glimmering with concern.
“No one has ever called me that,” I whisper at last, “except for Keres.”
A sudden, strong wind buffets the cabin—just a shack, really. Its walls are thin, rotted wood. They could collapse on us at any moment.
When the wind subsides, Inesa asks softly, “Who is Keres?”
My memory is as rotted as the wood. Filled with dark holes, spaces to fall into. But if I close my eyes, I can see her clearly: her shiny black braid and blue eyes, the way her teeth flashed when she smiled. I still remember her bones, when I helped zip up her hunting suit, the notches of her spine pressing against her pale skin. The delicate, swanlike column of her neck.
“She was another Angel,” I say. “There are only three or four of us. I don’t get along with the others. Just her.”
“Keres,” Inesa repeats. “What was she like?”
“Kind.” It seems insufficient a word to describe her, but it’s a start. I’ve never been good with words, anyway. “But in a natural way, as if she couldn’t imagine being anything else. It’s not natural at all for an Angel to be kind, but she was. Azrael must have programmed her that way. To fulfill a certain role.” I’ve always known it to be true, but I’ve rarely wanted to admit it, even to myself. That maybe the things I loved about her were just the parts that Caerus made.
I clear my throat and go on. “Whenever either of us had a procedure, we would stay in the other’s room, just in case we need anything...” I trail off because my chest is aching. I feel like my ribs could crack.
“A procedure?” Inesa frowns.
“Surgeries. Sometimes they’re functional, like the eye. A lot of them are aesthetic. They did my lips and my nose. They made Keres do her breasts.”
For some reason, this is the most shameful thing I’ve admitted to Inesa so far. The shame feels almost airborne, heavy and hot. Maybe it’s because the surgeries are the epitome of pointless wealth, of excess, and that hearing about them will make Inesa start to hate me again. Or maybe it’s because it’s evidence of how little of me there is left. Not even my face is my own.
I wait for Inesa to curl her lip in disgust, to turn away. Instead, she just says, “That sounds painful, too.”
“It is.”
The wind howls again, rattling the door.
“What happened to her?” Inesa asks, voice low.
This is the clearest memory I have of Keres now. Her glazed, uncomprehending stare. The same eyes that had shone with laughter, drained of their glimmering light, turned dull and matte. The pain explodes inside me like shrapnel.
And there’s the fire again, blooming in the theater behind my eyes.
“They made her forget.”
“Forget what?”
“Everything.” I can almost feel the syringe in my neck, the needle’s cold, sharp bite. “They do it to all of us, at some point. It’s called a Wipe. They can take away your memories of a specific event, or a specific person. Some of them. Or all of them.”
Inesa draws a breath. “Why would Caerus want to do that?”
Azrael’s explanation jumps readily to my lips. “The mind is the most complex organ in the human body. But it can break, too, like a bone. Certain things get stuck. They don’t register in your brain like an ordinary memory. Instead, they feel immediate, like they’re happening to you over and over again. It makes you scared and weak. The only way to get rid of them is to forget they ever happened at all.”
“Surely that can’t really work.” Inesa has put the knife down, and her fingers are curling and uncurling around her bandaged palms. “Just going in, picking through someone’s brain and taking out the bits you don’t like...”
“It doesn’t always work. That’s the problem. Some memories are too stubborn to cut loose.” My gaze burns into the floor. “I’ve gotten Wiped dozens of times now, and still...”
Silence washes over the cabin. There’s only the wind, shrieking thinly, trying to beat down the walls around us.
“Still?” Inesa prompts quietly.
“There are things I can’t forget. Stupid, small things.” I feel a sudden flare of anger. “They’ve made me forget my real parents, my real name, my home, if I ever had one, but they can’t manage to get that stupid girl out of my mind.”
“The girl—you mean Keres?”
“No.” My blood is electric now, making the tips of my fingers hum. The emotions are both new and familiar: grief, rage. I’m not supposed to feel them. But Caerus’s chemicals have flushed out of my system and there’s nothing to blunt them now.
I lift my gaze. Fire consumes me. “It was my last Gauntlet. My target was this little girl. She was twelve. Her father was a stinking drunk, and he used all his credits on booze. Her mother had died and it was just the two of them. And judging from the bruises I saw, I wasn’t the first person to put my hands on her.
“It was raining. I remember that. The water was so heavy and cold that it soaked through my suit, and so loud that I could barely hear Azrael’s voice in my ear. I kept sinking, sinking into the mud. The girl was wearing this white dress... she was so easy to find. I thought, if someone really cared about her, they would have told her to wear dark colors, so she would be harder to see.”
Inesa’s eyes have grown hard. She’ll hate me for this, no question about it. I don’t know what purpose it serves, this pitiful confession. But the words just keep pouring out of me and I can’t stop them.
“It’s the type of Gauntlet no one really wants to do.” Fire crackles in the stove behind me, and in the forefront of my vision. “Azrael would have sent Keres, but she was recovering from her surgery. She was usually best with the young Lambs. That was her archetype; she was supposed to be maternal. When she killed them, she could almost make it seem like a mercy.
“But he sent me. I was supposed to be— am supposed to be—the coldest one. The most merciless. It was a bad match from the beginning. I was never going to...” My voice breaks off. Inesa’s gaze hasn’t shifted. “I’d never done a Gauntlet like this before. I was cold and wet and confused. I was trying to remember what Keres did with the younger ones, how she got close to them and held them while she killed them, but Azrael was in my ear, telling me to just shoot. So I did. But it was a clumsy shot and it clipped her leg. She fell down in the mud. I ended up falling, too. I had to crawl after her, with the rain almost blinding me. She was bleeding and sobbing and begging me to stop. I couldn’t stand to... I couldn’t bear to listen to her. So I just put my hands around her throat until she was dead.”
The deer’s blood is in the air, but it has the same salt-tang as the girl’s. When I inhale, I taste it.
“I don’t remember very much about what happened afterward. But I remember the headlines. The streamers kept replaying the footage, reacting to it. A lot of them cried. They called me the most hated person in New Amsterdam. They hacked a holoboard in the City—then it caught on and everyone was saying it, going over my old Gauntlets, too. Azrael took my tablet away so I couldn’t see it anymore.”
Inesa lets out a slow breath. “Did he try to take the memory away, too?”
I nod. “Again and again. Wipe after Wipe. I must have lain on that table a dozen times. But it never worked. I couldn’t even hold my rifle without thinking of her.” My chest grows unbearably tight. “I couldn’t do any Gauntlets. I could barely even leave my room. So Azrael tried a different tactic.”
“A different tactic?”
“It’s called an Echoing. Where they replay the memory over and over again. It’s supposed to make you inured to it, kind of like working out the same muscle. Eventually you stop feeling the pain and you get stronger. But it only made it a thousand times worse.”
By this point, I can barely do more than whisper. The deer’s blood is dripping onto the floor.
“Those weeks were just a blur. I was in the shooting range. I couldn’t even lift my gun. I was back on the table for another Wipe. I woke up in my room. A Mask forced food into my mouth. I went back to the range to try again. Another Wipe. Over and over... by the time I surfaced, by the time I was sort of lucid again, Keres was gone. Azrael had retired her and done a final Wipe. She didn’t even remember my name.”
Finally, the truth. At least, all the truth I know. I have no explanation for the fire. And I have no explanation for why, when I close my eyes, I keep seeing Inesa’s face; I keep remembering her touch. There’s some glitch in my mechanics, all the carefully constructed systems sparking and then going dead silent. It’s gotten dark enough in the cabin that my night vision keeps flickering on and off again, plunging the world into eerie green and then back into low, golden light.
“That’s why you didn’t kill me,” Inesa says. “I didn’t understand before. You were on top of me, and then it started raining.”
I press my fingernails into my palm. “All those Wipes and Echoings for nothing. I’m still weak.”
“I can’t exactly say I’m sorry you didn’t succeed.” Inesa looks down. The blood on her hands has dried to a bleak, rusty color, more brown than red. A few moments pass, and then she looks up again. “You don’t remember her name, do you? The girl’s?”
I shake my head. At least Azrael managed to strip that away, for all the good it’s done me.
“Sanne,” Inesa says. “Her name was Sanne.”
Something flickers inside me, like the flame in the chimney of an oil lamp. And then I remember what I thought, when I first touched down in Esopus Creek. I’ve been here before.
My breath catches in my throat. The walls of the cabin are still standing, but I feel like every wall inside me has collapsed, folded in on itself, and I’m left crushed in the wreckage.
“She was from your town,” I whisper. “I... I remember now.”
I had been in Esopus Creek. My stomach fills with bile. All the Wipes that didn’t take, the Echoing that jammed the memory like a knife between my ribs—all of it, just for Azrael to send me back again. A single word crests out of the dark water of my mind. Why? Why? Why?
“Sanne Dekker.” Inesa’s voice is low, but resonant. Without hesitation or contrition. “Her father is Floris Dekker. He brought her body into my shop, a few days after the Gauntlet. I saw her spread out across the table.”
Sanne. I remember now. Her name humming on the screen above her vital statistics, Azrael pointing and gesturing. I felt sick to my stomach then, the way I do now. And then—
“It was a test,” I bite out. “That’s why Azrael sent me. That’s why he chose you for the Gauntlet. He wanted to see if he’d fixed me. If I could kill another girl from Esopus Creek.”
There’s no silence in the cabin, because the wind is howling and beating at the wood, spasming off the tin roof with a thunderous rumbling sound. Inesa stares at me without blinking, and there’s a damp glaze in her eyes. Anger at the forefront, and grief burning low behind. Moments pass in the eddy of what I know is a coming storm.
“And I’ve failed,” I say. “Again.”
The knife glints on the table between us, the blade slicked with deer blood. Inesa could snatch it up and have it at my throat within seconds. I could reach for it, too, and I’d probably be faster. But the instinct just runs through me and then vanishes, like an electrical current reaching a wire’s dead end.
“You know,” Inesa says at last, “there’s something my dad used to tell me.”
I stare back at her, brow furrowing. Surely , I think, this is all just a preamble to killing me .
But instead of lunging for the knife, she just continues: “He said that Caerus has created the conditions that allow some organisms to thrive and others to die. That we’re land animals in a drowning world and they’re sea creatures. But if the lakes and the rivers dried up and the sea level fell, we would survive, and they would die.” She pauses. “He said a lot of nutty things, especially when he was drunk. But I think he was right about that.”
A clever breeze sneaks in under the door, and the flames inside the oil lamps snap. But just for a moment. Then they flare to life again.
“So what are land animals supposed to do,” I ask, “when the sea levels rise?”
“Survive,” Inesa says. “Just survive.”
There’s a strange pricking at the corner of my real eye. “In order for some creatures to live, there are always others that have to die.”
“That’s true.” Inesa holds my gaze. Steadily. “You know, everyone in Esopus Creek hates the mutations. They think they’re disgusting aberrations of nature. I should hate them, too, considering they’re eventually going to put Luka and me out of business. But I can’t make myself hate them. I never have. They’re just surviving. Even the Wends are just surviving. Who knows what they would do, if they had another choice? If they knew they were safe? If they were free?”
By the time we eat and clean the mess the best we can, the oil lamps are burning low, more dark smoke than fire. Hung close to the billowing heat of the woodstove, Inesa’s clothes have finally dried. She picks up the shirt, the pants, the socks. Drapes them over her arm. Waits.
“I’ll turn around,” I say. My voice sounds odd and strangled.
“Okay,” she says.
I face the opposite wall, where the cabin’s original owner hammered in pegs to hold his various tools. The hand axe, the bone saw, the rusted rifle I haven’t gotten a chance to test yet. My eyes trace the shape of its barrel, trying to focus on anything but the knowledge that Inesa is changing behind me.
I hear the rustle of fabric, the gentle swishing as her hair falls down against her naked back. I bite my lip, gaze boring into the wall. But I can’t see what’s in front of me anymore. Even the fire is gone. All I see is Inesa. She grows like ivy on the insides of my eyelids. The roots of her are in my rib cage, winding up around my heart. I can’t help imagining what her bare skin would feel like under my hands.