Two Melinoë
T wo
Melino?
When the lights go off, my real eye shuts and my prosthetic blinks to life. My artificial eye sees everything in a different way: streaks of heat, blue and red and yellow, motion and stillness. The little girl’s movement pattern is erratic. She’s stumbling in the dark; I can hear her clumsy footfalls and labored breathing. Against my temple, the feed from her tracker throbs like a second pulse.
In the darkness I lift my gun, tracing her heat signature. Sometimes my targets stop, freeze, try to make as little movement as possible, try to not even breathe. That’s how prey animals survive. But people aren’t rabbits or mice, and as much as I sometimes wish it, I’m no snake or raptor.
The little girl whimpers as my prosthetic eye blinks, adjusts, and trains on her like the scope of a rifle. Then I line up my shot, finger brushing the trigger.
At the exact moment my bullet meets its mark, the feed from her tracker goes dead silent. I can only hear my own heartbeat, so loud in the empty room, almost angry in its determined bragging. The lights flicker back on, and fifty yards down the shooting range, the girl’s body is slumped against the cold metal floor. There’s no blood, and I don’t see the bullet wound until I get closer.
With every step toward her, my heartbeat grows louder. I feel it throbbing in my throat, making my gorge rise. By the time I reach her, the vision in my real eye has blurred, and I have to lift my hand to close the lid over my prosthetic, because it’s programmed to stay open always, even when I sleep.
I turn the girl over. Dead bodies are heavier than you think they’d be. Her stained white dress is limp and her hair looks damp—why is it damp? The stains are dark, but they aren’t blood. Where did they come from? My vision doubles and then fractures, like the whole room is a broken mirror. I can’t even feel the ground as I kneel beside her. My gloved hand spreads over the bullet wound.
Both of her eyes are still open, glassy and staring at nothing. There’s a choking sound that I know comes from me, but it feels so distant, like something I’m hearing from underwater. I rub at my real eye over and over again until it stings, until the pain driving tiny needles into my skull brings me back.
I let the eyelid over my prosthetic slide open. And then I can see the perfect falsity of her limbs, the tough silicone flesh that doesn’t give way when I touch it. Her eyes are spheres of plastic. The wound is just a hole with mesh and wires and circuit boards inside. There’s no sinew, no muscle, no blood.
The girl isn’t real. But all the others have been. I get to my feet again, breathing in short, hot gasps. There’s no mud seizing at my boots, sticking me down. I’m inside—standing in a stark, familiar metal gallery.
When I look up to the observation chamber, Azrael is frowning at me from behind the glass. His arms are folded over his chest. He used to think that killing was harder in the dark, when I had to rely on my prosthetic and heat signatures and the auditory implants that make my hearing as sharp as any hunting dog’s. But he must know now that he’s wrong. It’s so much harder to kill in the light, when I have to see everything, with all the human parts of me that are still left.
“Melino?,” he says, his voice low and grainy through the speaker, “let’s talk.”
It’s not a long walk from the shooting range to the lab, but it feels like it. My knees are weak and trembling. As I approach, Azrael scans me up and down, eyes zeroing in on all the little chinks in my armor: the way my hands are shaking inside my gloves, the way my breath is coming too fast, the way I can’t stop blinking, trying to make the memory of the dead girl stop playing on the insides of my eyelids.
“It’s been three Wipes now,” he says. His voice is still low, though it’s not quite gentle.
“I know.”
“We need to find a solution. You need to move on from this, Melino?.”
There’s nothing in the world I want more. To move on from this. To forget. I could start sleeping at night again. I could take a shower without ending up curled on the bathroom floor, breathing hard and clasping my hand over my mouth as the water pours down and down around me.
I could do another Gauntlet.
Azrael starts to lead me to the lab, but then stops, right there in the middle of the hallway. I stare up at him, gaze running over his familiar features. The dark hair that betrays no trace of silvering, the eyes that seem almost pupilless, the white skin pulled taut over his bones. He’s all sharp edges, from his cheeks to his chin to the crisp lines of his black suit. I know that he’s getting transfusions, like all the high-level Caerus employees, and that’s why he looks so young. Why he hasn’t changed at all since I first met him, when I was eight years old and still asking after my real father.
I take a deep breath, because I don’t want my voice to betray any hesitation.
“Wipe me again,” I say.
Azrael’s mouth twitches. “You know it isn’t that simple. Every time we Wipe, we risk losing something we didn’t intend to lose.”
Memories, as he’s explained to me, are tricky things. Even Caerus’s top scientists can’t figure out why certain ones hang on while others slip away, eroded by time. Why certain ones get buried in us like shrapnel so we can’t move without feeling the pain of the thing that’s killing us slowly.
“I don’t care.” I’d rather die than see the girl again.
Azrael inhales, and then he lays a hand on my shoulder.
“I know you’re desperate to get back into the field,” he says. “But you’re too valuable to risk. What happened with Daena—it can never happen again.”
We’ve heard the story a hundred times by now, all of us Angels. Daena was Caerus’s best killer, equal parts ruthless and beautiful. Her record was impeccable; the streams of her Gauntlets were replayed millions of times, to the point where anyone you met could recount them, almost beat for beat. The time she chased down her mark in the middle of a crowded street and still managed to get off the perfect shot, clean and almost bloodless, a bullet right through the heart. Or the time she found her mark cowering in a hollow tree and, holding the woman’s hand, slit her throat so tenderly it seemed almost a kindness.
Daena’s icy smile was projected onto the sides of buildings, and she was rented out almost every night for parties with the City’s elite. Even now you’ll hear some of them talk about her, in low and wistful tones, eyes darkening over their glasses of Scotch. The City folk loved her, and the people in the outlying Counties feared her, which was the best you could hope for as an Angel.
It shouldn’t have happened the way it did. Now Caerus has a system in place to prevent us from ever getting assigned marks we know. A more extensive program of memory wiping, so after our parents hand us over to Azrael, we’re blank slates. If we don’t remember who we were before becoming Angels, there’s no chance of us encountering someone we recognize on a Gauntlet.
Daena’s mark was an old woman, more than eighty, which is an astonishing age for an Outlier—even more astonishing for a Lamb. It’s usually the opposite way, parents putting up their children, but in this case, the woman’s son had racked up a huge debt with Caerus, buying bottles of sapphire-blue liquor and collectible action figures, of all things. So Daena was dropped into some tiny mountain village in Adirondack County, where she found her mark sitting on the porch of her house, a serene smile on the woman’s face.
But the house had once been Daena’s house. And the mark was Daena’s grandmother. If she had laid down her rifle then, she’d still be an Angel. She’d still be hired out for parties and put up on every holoscreen in the City. But instead, Daena had killed her, and only afterward did she realize that it was her grandmother’s blood pooling on the porch.
Caerus tried an initial Wipe, of course. It didn’t take. Then Azrael tried an Echoing—the opposite of a Wipe, where the memory is replayed over and over again so that we become inured to it. But that only made it worse. It brought Daena to a precipice he was afraid she couldn’t return from. So he tried another Wipe, and that time it did work—except it took everything else with it. Everything that made Daena who she was—all the people she’d known, places she’d been—all of it, gone. She was a mute, empty husk. The City folk were repulsed by her, and the Outliers no longer feared her, and that’s about the worst you can imagine, as an Angel.
Azrael thinks the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t get too arrogant or trigger-happy when trying to erase someone’s memories. But I think the moral is that there’s always one memory that will ruin you, no matter how perfect your record, no matter how many times you’ve killed and felt nothing at all.
I’m afraid this is that memory for me.
With the utmost tenderness, Azrael brushes back a bit of hair from my face. Usually I don’t let a single strand escape from my tight white-blond ponytail.
“All right,” he says, softly now. “Let’s try. Just one more time.”
My stomach contracts with relief and fear, both at once.
And then he takes me into the sterile, metallic room, everything gleaming silver. I lie down on the cold table. I don’t need the straps anymore; I’ve trained my limbs not to protest when he presses the nodes to my temples and drives the needle into my throat. All the clear liquid from the syringe drains into my bloodstream.
“Please,” I whisper, but I don’t know if I’m saying it aloud or speaking it into the silence of my own brain. “Please work.”
After that, there’s only darkness.
I wake back in my room. I only know it’s been hours because the sky outside my window is a deep, jewel-toned blue, gashed through with white streaks of ever-present smog. There’s a steady hum of yellow radiating from the skyline as lights all across the City are turned on for the night.
With a deep breath, I sit up in bed. I’m still wearing my black hunting suit, but my hair has been let down. I imagine Azrael combing it himself, equal parts dutiful and tender. He must have remembered that I’m due at the CTO’s party later. The diamond-encrusted dress I took out this morning is still folded over the back of my chair, glittering like broken glass.
There’s only one way to tell if the Wipe worked. I can remember our walk down the hallway, Azrael’s hand on my shoulder. His fingers gently brushing the hair from my face. I can remember the syringe draining and the cold metal against my back. Before that is a rheumy gray space, vague and ill-defined. The lights dimming over the shooting range—
I walk to the bathroom, my gait swift and purposeful. I peel off my hunting suit. Even though I usually try to avoid it, I catch a glimpse of myself in the narrow mirror. My hair, long and bone-straight, falling to the small of my back. In this light, it looks more white than blond. My cheeks are utterly drained of color. When I do blush, which isn’t often, my face turns a bruised shade of purple—thanks to Caerus’s physiological alterations. They slow our heart rates to make us better snipers; the side effect is that our blood is blue, not red.
I don’t let my eyes linger on the scars that ring my wrists and ankles, my elbows and knees, my hips, even my throat. The only other people who have ever seen them are Azrael and the surgeon who worked on my anesthetized body. They’re otherwise hidden under our hunting suits, and Caerus provides us with civilian clothes that are fitted to cover them completely. The scars are just for us to look at in private, to remind us we’re not quite human. Not anymore. That there’s no life for us, other than this.
Turning my back to the mirror, I scroll through the tablet screen outside the shower door, selecting the coldest possible setting.
I can feel the memory start to creep into the corners of my mind— the girl’s wet hair, the girl’s wet dress, the mud-stained hem— but as soon as the water hits my skin, the world behind my eyelids explodes in a riot of color. I’m there again, in the woods, in the pouring rain, the green smell of rotten leaves and damp wood flooding my nose. I can hear the girl crying, pleading, and I can see my arm rising alongside the rifle, like the rudder of a boat and the black wave that follows it.
I’m hardly aware of collapsing onto the shower floor, knees hitting the tile with a flinching but hollow sound. With one hand, I feel for the interior control panel, fingers scrabbling against the waterproof screen, and manage to switch the setting to HOT . Steam clouds around me.
We’ve all gone through rigorous neural reconditioning, which blunts the edges of our emotions, but the closest thing I know to anger is flooding my chest. What’s the point of keeping us just human enough to feel? They’ve grafted titanium onto our bones and pumped hormones into our blood, but they’ve left something essential at the core of us unchanged.
I know what Azrael would reply.
“Think of it as a means of communication, Melino?. Otherwise, Caerus might as well send the Dogs.”
The Dogs are quadruped robots programmed to do one thing only: kill. Their AI is simple and brutally efficient, and their armored hulls, heat-seeking vision, and clutch of titanium bullets ensure they get the job done. They never falter.
But there’s no tension to watching a Dog take down its target. It’s like watching the wheels of a car turn a skittering creature into roadkill. Ugly and inevitable. Being struck down by an Angel is meant to be a beautiful thing: riveting, theatrical, perfectly paced, like your favorite TV show. That part is for the City dwellers, the ones who will never have to worry about seeing their loved one as the Lamb in the Gauntlet.
Most important, though, it’s meant to impart a message, a warning to the Outliers: We will take your son or daughter from you. And we will bite our nails and murmur anxiously and, in the end, breathe a sigh of relief as they’re slaughtered.
Duty trumps my pathetic sentimentality. Two hours later I’m smiling over cocktails with the Caerus CTO, Hendrik Visser.
The blood infusions from young donors make him look no older than forty, but there’s an undeniable falsity to his smooth face. When he smiles, the corners of his eyes don’t crease and his cheeks don’t wrinkle. He’s sipping a sickly purple cocktail that makes my eyes water when I get near enough to smell it.
“Debts are piling up in the Valley,” he says to the HR director, whose name I haven’t bothered to learn. “Every time a big storm comes in—and the thing is, these people don’t even want canned goods or Mylar blankets or whatever the fuck. They want candy bars and sixty-inch tablets. I kid you not. And they blame us when they’re five hundred thousand credits in the red.”
He’s drunk already, slurring his words. He’s slipped from Damish, the language of the City, the language of newscasts and board meetings and political speeches, into English, the informal tongue of the Outliers. It’s what we’re all raised to speak until the Damish consonants and vowel sounds are drilled into us for the sake of job interviews and corporate shop talk. Mostly, we speak in Damish to separate ourselves from the Outliers. When I’m on my Gauntlets, sometimes I have to remind myself to moderate my City accent.
“Cheers to that,” the HR director says, his artificially white teeth gleaming. “And cheers to second-quarter profits up ten percent.”
They clink glasses. I stay quiet, cradling my glass of water. Angels aren’t supposed to drink. We aren’t supposed to have any vices, anything that might compromise our missions. The neural reconditioning means I’m not even tempted. Not by alcohol, not by cigarettes, not by anything the other people at this party are enjoying—or craving.
As I stare into the middle distance with practiced blankness, Visser’s arm slides against my back.
“I hear we might have another Gauntlet soon,” he says.
If he weren’t already slipping back and forth between English and Damish, this is how I would know for certain that he’s drunk. Even the HR director flinches. I seize up, my fingers curling into my palm.
Everyone knows about my last humiliating, disastrous Gauntlet, and everyone knows I haven’t been on one since. The guests around us go quiet, their gazes darting anxiously toward me. As if I’m a mine, rigged to explode. As if I’m going to collapse onto the floor at any moment. Just like I did during the live stream, for every pair of eyes in New Amsterdam to see.
The clip of it went viral, of course. Last I checked, it had been viewed over twenty million times. I’m sure it fills the Outliers with a vengeful satisfaction to see an Angel on her knees for once. And the City folk must watch it out of morbid curiosity—the same thing that keeps them glued to TV shows where garishly horrible fates befall the characters. I’m no more real to them than I am to the Outliers. No more human.
In a flat, measured voice, I say, “Who’s the Lamb?”
More silence. There are a few titters from the other guests, dressed in their suits of gunmetal gray and adorned with glittering silver jewelry. The head of HR gives a quiet cough, clearing his throat.
“I’ve only heard rumors,” Visser says—too loud, oblivious to the discomfiting silence. “A girl in the Valley, her mother with some kind of addiction. It’s always the same, isn’t it? Same old tragic story.”
Yes , I want to say, it’s always the same . Because that’s Caerus’s design, and nothing exists outside of their design.
I take a sip of water, but it burns my throat like acid. The guests return to their conversations, but it seems that Visser’s hand has found a permanent place against the small of my back.
My next sip of water chokes me, and I cough, trying to use that as an excuse to dislodge Visser’s hand. But I can still feel it, hot and clammy through the fabric of my dress. It’s a thin silver nylon, encrusted in diamonds to hide all the places no one is supposed to see. Not just my breasts or my privates, but the scars ringing my wrists and elbows, my neck. A diamond choker covers that old wound easily.
As if on cue, Azrael sweeps over to us. As if he means to rescue me. Just like he did the day of my last Gauntlet, the black Caerus helicopter whirring overhead. I remember him reaching out his hand, gathering me into his arms, and not much after that. They left the girl’s body on the ground, rain drenching her, sinking slowly into the mud.
My heart leaps a little bit, seeing him. I wish it didn’t. I wish the voice inside my head didn’t cry out to him, Save me, please, get me out of here. But it does. It always has.
“Mel,” Azrael says, “having a good night?”
“Yes,” I answer. It’s as quick as a reflex.
“Good,” says Azrael. “And you, Hendrik?”
Visser nods gruffly, his nose in his cocktail glass.
The holoscreen in the corner is playing back the live stream of another Gauntlet, volume muted. Another Angel is running along the edge of a cliff, blue-brown water foaming and churning below. The video drones buzz around her like flies. Her helpless Lamb must be close.
The stream cuts to the live feed from her prosthetic and I see a young man stumbling down the cliffside, his shirt and pants torn. Even though there’s no volume, I can still hear the thrum of his tracker in my ear, the hitch of his panicked breathing.
I turn my eyes away as the Angel lifts her gun. But then she’s here in front of me, not a hologram, not a playback. She slinks through the crowd toward me, her frosty auburn hair looking radioactively bright.
“Azrael,” she says with a demure smile when she reaches us. “Mr. Visser.” When she turns to me, the smile vanishes and her nostrils flare. “Mel.”
“Lethe,” I greet her. “I see we’re celebrating your Gauntlet.”
Lethe’s smile returns, a cold beam of pride. “Last week. Nineteen-year-old boy put up by his grandfather. It took him eighty years, but eventually he reached the threshold.”
Five hundred thousand credits. That’s how deep you can go into the red before Caerus comes to collect. How long you can go on buying until one of the Masks shows up at your door, demanding payment. Demanding a name.
There’s not a Mask in sight tonight. No sleek, featureless silicone with a voice modulator—required dress for all Caerus employees when they’re on the clock. Caerus is meant to be a total meritocracy, and the masks ensure that no one is treated any differently because of their looks, their gender... anything.
Supposedly. Once you get to upper management, though, the masks are cast aside. I recognize everyone in the room, a sea of pale, artificially unwrinkled male faces.
“Good job,” I say to Lethe. “It looks like he didn’t put up much of a fight.”
Lethe’s eyes narrow—the real one, and the prosthetic, which is black from end to end.
“More of a fight than a twelve-year-old girl,” she says.
I draw in a sharp breath. I feel like a knife has been jabbed between my ribs.
“Enough, Lethe,” Azrael says stonily. “You’re not each other’s competition.”
Not officially. But it’s kind of inevitable, when you have viewers in the chat commenting on who their favorite Angel is, when you have people in upper management asking for one of us specifically, when you have Caerus’s ad department deciding whose face they should put on their holoboards. Lethe hates me because she thinks I’m Azrael’s favorite and, by extension, Caerus’s.
Lethe sniffs. “I wish I had weeks to mope around in my room instead of working, that’s all.”
It isn’t often that Azrael looks truly angry, but the way his eyes flash now—it scares me, even though I’m not the target of his cold fury.
When he speaks, his voice is deathly quiet. “I said enough .”
Lethe’s mouth snaps shut, but she still glares at me. At least Visser is too drunk to have noticed a thing.
Relief shudders through me. Relief and gratitude. I’m not naive enough to think that Azrael is silencing Lethe just to protect me. He doesn’t want to draw attention to his own mistakes. It was him who put me through a week of Echoing, thinking he was fixing me. He was wrong; we both were. All it did was force the memory further into my head, like a hammer driving in a nail. Forcing me to relive that moment over and over again in the hopes that it would eventually settle within me, as harmless and innocuous as a layer of dust. But the Echoing had the opposite effect. Now the memory is planted so deeply, I’m afraid I’ll never dig it out.
There’s some murmuring among the guests, and suddenly the crowd parts, forming a path wide enough for two people to walk through. One of them is Caerus upper management—head of accounts, maybe. I’ve seen him a couple of times before. But my eyes glide over him to the woman on his arm. Her black hair is loose around her shoulders and she wears a deep-blue gown with sleeves down to her wrists, its collar buttoned up to her chin.
“Keres,” I whisper.
She can’t hear me, of course, and she doesn’t see me. As she gets closer, I notice the patch over one of her eyes. They took her prosthetic out, and the wound hasn’t healed enough to set the new one in. One that doesn’t have night vision or heat tracing or anything else we use to hunt.
But Keres was one of us. She was the one who trained with me at the shooting range, our rifles aimed at identical targets, our trigger fingers perfectly in sync. We ducked Azrael’s rules to sneak into each other’s rooms at night, speaking in hushed tones until the sun rose over the City and turned all the glass faces of the buildings to liquid gold. She used the shower in my room once, and I watched her, guiltily, through the crack in the door, marking the places where our bodies were identical. Wrists, ankles, elbows, knees, throat. My eyes had lingered, more guiltily, on other parts of her, until I was so flushed I turned away and bit down hard on my lip.
Thinking of that now, with Visser’s hand against my back, makes me want to retch.
It’s wrong of me, but I leave him. I almost can’t help it—my body floats through the crowd, as if buoyed on invisible strings. I ignore the protests of the other guests, the livid look of disapproval on Azrael’s face. When I reach her, my chest is heaving.
“Keres,” I say again. “It’s you.”
She blinks her real eye, lifting one hand to her mouth. It’s a gesture I’ve seen a million times, but it looks different now. It looks like I’m watching a disembodied hand, a disembodied mouth. The man next to her gives a disgruntled huff.
“Melino?,” he says. “I didn’t think I’d see you here tonight.”
I scarcely hear him. My pulse is pounding in my ears. I stare at Keres, watching her blink, waiting for her to smile back at me.
She doesn’t. Her hand drops from her mouth and falls limply to her side. It doesn’t reach out for mine. She looks back at me as if I’m a stranger.
And then Azrael grabs me by the elbow, dragging me away as Keres continues on, fixed to the man’s side. Karl van Something, I think. Like all the others, his face is pale, stiff, and artificially young. Azrael’s grip on my arm feels like fire, searing through my flesh.
When I’ve been pulled off to the side, Lethe gives a wide-toothed smile.
“Oh, you didn’t hear?” she asks, all too innocently. “Keres was decommissioned. Van Wyck wanted her.”
Azrael lets my arm drop. I look up at him, bewildered, full of both stupid hope and plunging despair. He doesn’t speak.
I’ve spent the last few weeks in isolation, shuffled from the shooting range to the lab to my bedroom, my life made simple and monotonous, a dull and grinding rhythm. Rifle in my hands, back against the cold metal table, knees digging into the shower tiles, water running over me, real and not real. So many half-failed Wipes that I’m not even sure it’s been only a few weeks. It could’ve been a year.
Long enough for Keres to get pulled from the Angel program. Long enough for her to get married .
“I didn’t want to put any extra strain on you,” Azrael says at last, his voice soft. “I know you were such close friends.”
Water, unreal water, is rushing all around me, pulling my head under.
Keres is older than me, twenty. That’s a short life span, even for an Angel. And Keres was good—better than Lethe. Her record was almost as perfect as mine.
“Why?” I whisper.
“Keres asked, Melino?,” Azrael says. His voice has gained a sharper edge. “When I told her you were out of commission, she said she didn’t want to be an Angel anymore, not without you.”
You’re lying. It’s the first thought that leaps into my mind, and it shames me. Azrael has no reason to lie. But... my gaze travels to Keres in the crowd, her sleek black hair shining under the lights, empty expression on her face. She wouldn’t choose this. Not if there was a chance I might come back. We had talked about it, before. Promised each other we would retire together.
Lethe’s voice plays over again in my mind. Van Wyck wanted her. I blink and blink and blink. Caerus dulls the nerves around our tear ducts so we can’t cry, but I feel it rising in me, the urge to sob. I want Azrael to fold his arms around me, press my face into his chest, so I can hide my shameful, distraught expression.
I know if I asked, he would.
Did Keres think of me, when Azrael strapped her to the table for the last time? Does it even matter now? All the nights we spent huddled under the covers together, laughing and whispering, all the times she helped me take down my hair, peel off my sodden hunting suit, her fingers dancing gently along the notches of my spine—gone. I’m left holding on to them alone, and the memories are so, so heavy for one pair of hands.
Visser sidles up to me again, seemingly oblivious to the disruption. And then I can’t—I can’t take it anymore; the water is rising up and drowning me. I lift my gaze to Azrael’s. I don’t speak, but he knows me well enough to recognize the desperate pleading in my eyes.
Save me, please, get me out of here.
And he does. With a few polite words, he shakes off Visser. Then it’s Azrael’s arm sliding around my waist and down to the small of my back, leading me out of the room. In the hallway, I take off my heels, leaning heavily against Azrael to steady myself. Neither of us says a word.
He walks me to my room in utter silence. When we’re standing outside the door, an almost-memory rises in me. Somehow, I can gaze through his crisp black suit to his bare chest—I know what it looks like; I’ve seen it before. And then the not-memory dissipates, as quickly as it appeared.
“Get some rest, Melino?,” Azrael says. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
Inside, I strip off my dress, my jewelry. My scars look cartoonishly ugly in the bathroom’s fluorescent light. I choose the shower’s coldest setting, and step into the unforgiving stream.
In the morning, I’m at the shooting range again, rifle in my hands. I see the girl at the end of the long gallery, blond hair flashing, the pulse of her tracker pounding in my left temple. It matches my steady heartbeat. My breathing is measured, even.
I kill her twelve times. Thirteen. I let the memories run over me like rainwater. This time, they slide off my back, painless, disembodied. I was in the wet tangle of those trees once, but I’m not now. I killed the girl as she sobbed and begged for her life, but it’s what I was made to do. She was doomed long before I cornered her in the forest. I’m Azrael’s instrument, a mere extension of the rifle in my hands. Her death had already been determined by a tally of red marks, by a Caerus algorithm, by a Mask tapping numbers into a tablet.
When the girl’s tracker has gone silent and I let my rifle fall, Azrael walks down from the observation room to join me. He holds my face in his hands delicately, turning my head slightly from side to side. As if to examine me, very intimately and with pride. I am, after all, his greatest creation. There’s more of his machinations within me, titanium and circuit boards, than my own parents’ DNA.
“Melino?,” he says, voice soft and thin with relief, “I’m so proud of you.”
I want to say that it was easy once I realized I wasn’t just doing it to put on a show for the anonymous live stream audience. Once I realized it was a fight for survival. Every Lamb I kill is more distance between Visser and me, more distance between a final Wipe that will turn me into an empty, mindless doll, opening my legs numbly for a husband three times my age who I barely know and could never love.
It was easy once I understood that it was the girl’s life or mine. Survival is the most natural thing in the world, as natural as breathing. Stripped down to its essence, any creature will choose to save itself. Even if it means stealing the breath from another.
The next girl, whoever she is, will be no different.