Five Inesa
Five
Inesa
I wake with blood in my mouth and someone jostling my shoulder . There’s a white-hot pain in the middle of my forehead and it hurts to open my eyes to the light. The vague, blurry outline of a face is hovering over mine, but I have to blink a few times before its features sharpen and clarify. Jacob.
“Inesa,” he says, voice high and tight with panic, “are you all right?”
Even in my semiconscious state, it strikes me as an absurd question.
There are more voices, and more blurry faces. I think I hear Mrs. Prinslew sniffling. Someone else lets out a choked sob.
I try to get up. Instantly, Jacob reaches around to cradle my back, easing me into a sitting position. My vision ripples. I lift a hand to my forehead, and wince when I touch that sore, throbbing spot in the center. I remember now: I hit my head on the counter.
The room returns to me in increments: the bucket of filthy water in the corner; the damp, creaky floorboards; the sharp, acrid smell of preserving chemicals. And the crowd of people around me, their heads bobbing like buoys in the water. Their eyes are bleary but bright, tearful with concern.
“We saw the Mask come in.” Mrs. Prinslew’s voice is so hushed I can barely hear her. “We thought—and then we got the notification on our tablets. But it didn’t seem real until...”
“Until?” I prompt. My tongue is swollen in my mouth and it hurts to talk.
Silence. Mrs. Prinslew’s gaze drops to the floor. When I shake Jacob off and push myself onto my knees, the crowd shifts away from me, as if tragedy is radiating from me like an illness they’re afraid they might catch.
In the silence I can hear something like a second heartbeat, staticky and incessant—the tracker that the Mask implanted in my throat. Like water dripping from the ceiling, the beat is so measured, it could drive me mad. But I’ll be dead long before I have the chance to lose my mind.
“Inesa, wait,” Jacob says as I lurch unsteadily to my feet. “Your head... you need to take it easy.”
“Let her go,” someone says gruffly. Mr. Hallick, I think. Luka and I used to sneak into his yard and play on his tire swing when we were kids. “She doesn’t have time to rest.”
The Mask’s voice echoes in my ears. Twelve hours. Twelve hours for the Lambs to prepare, to say our goodbyes, to scrounge together a plan that might give us the slimmest chance of survival. Twelve hours for Caerus to run their ads, to promote their Gauntlet-themed and -adjacent products, like VR headsets for better viewing and energy drinks to keep you awake so you don’t miss a moment of the slaughter.
How many of those hours did I lose while I was unconscious? I stagger toward the door, but my vision is still swimming. I catch myself on the windowsill. Through the gaps in the wooden slats I can see that evening has fallen, the sky a smoky, mottled gray.
There are murmurs of protest as I jerk open the door and stumble onto the porch. Then, instantly, the crowd hushes. At first, I don’t understand. Then I look up. My face is projected into the sky, a pale hologram against the storm-swollen clouds. The weather in Esopus is usually too bad for us to see holo-ads. But this one is as clear as a bolt of lightning. My face, my name—and next to it, seconds ticking away, the countdown until my Gauntlet starts.
“Inesa.” Jacob grasps me by the wrist, turning me toward him. “Listen—we’ll help you. My dad and me...”
He keeps talking, but white noise builds like a wall between us. The hum of the tracker and the more distant sounds of rumbling thunder make Jacob’s voice fade to an unintelligible murmur. It’s like I’m underwater, everything muffled and dim, and I’m sinking and sinking and sinking.
I almost drowned once, when I was nine. I slipped off the porch at the house during a storm, and the water almost swept me downstream. It happens to pretty much everyone in Esopus Creek at one point or another. I managed to grab hold of a rock and hang on until a passing punter fished me out. I don’t remember the almost-drowning itself, except that it was loud. So loud. And I remember, afterward, the punter delivering me home, and Dad wrapping me in a Mylar blanket while my clothes dried on a line in the kitchen.
And I remember, maybe a couple of weeks later, watching a TV show set in the City. The characters lived in a massive apartment building, hundreds of stories tall, all glass and sleek metal. The building had a huge room with a giant pit in the ground, which was filled with impossibly clear, teal-green water. I had never seen a swimming pool before. They dove in and splashed around, doing handstands and somersaults. Every so often they would swim to the edge of the pool to catch their breath, laughing, just kicking lazily to keep themselves afloat.
I didn’t think it was real at first. A lake in the clouds. But Dad told me that almost every apartment building in the City had a pool, that they laced the water with chemicals to keep it that clean, and that the City folk swam all the time, just for fun. I watched that episode over and over, fascinated by the way the water clung to their skin like drops of dew, crystalline, almost otherworldly. I remember their wide, white-toothed smiles.
I blink, and the pain brings me back to the present, searing through my forehead again. The tracker fizzes and hums. Jacob is still talking, eyes huge and frantic with worry.
“I need to get home,” I blurt out. “Please. I just need to get home.”
“Did you hear me? I said we can help. My father has—”
“ Please .” I raise my fingers and press two of them over his mouth. “Let me go home.”
Jacob stares back at me, mollified and silenced. My hand against his lips is trembling. He just nods.
Dr. Wessels offers to pay for a punter to take me back to the house, and I’m too exhausted to protest. I don’t think I could make my knees steady enough to stand or my hands firm enough to grip an oar. The punter poles me silently upstream, both of us pretending we don’t see my face in the sky, flickering like the most ominous constellation.
I can hear Mom and Luka before I even open the door.
“What else could I have done?”
“You know what.”
Luka’s voice is as cold as ice. I’ve heard him talk this way before, but not to Mom. Ever. I push open the door.
Their heads shoot up as I enter. The door creaks shut behind me, and with the force of the wind it slams too loudly, making the whole house shudder. Such a fragile, pitiful little house. Its walls feel thinner and its floor more unsound than ever.
For a long time, no one speaks.
“Inesa,” Luka says at last. His gaze meets mine.
It’s always like looking in a mirror, but now, our expressions are perfectly twinned: watery, haunted stares, lips pressed together, cheeks bloodless.
Mom crosses her arms over her chest. She’s wearing the same nightgown I left her in this morning, with a blanket draped over her shoulders. Her mouth twists into a defiant scowl.
“Don’t start with me,” she bites out. “I’m not going to apologize.”
I didn’t expect her to.
“You can’t be so naive. You know how these things work. This just made the most sense. Luka hunts. He takes care of the family. We couldn’t get by without him. Putting him up wasn’t an option.”
Of course she’ll never state the obvious aloud: that she could have offered herself up. For her debts. Not Luka’s. Not mine. The air crackles around us.
“It doesn’t matter how many deer I kill if Inesa isn’t there to mount them,” Luka says icily.
“Don’t you try to make me feel guilty.” Mom’s pitch rises, and color comes into her cheeks. “It’s my right, as your mother. Neither of you would be here without me.”
She’ll always have this as her trump card. The debt that every child owes their parent, a levee that never breaks, no matter how hard the water rushes against it.
“I sacrificed everything for you,” she chokes out, forcing tears into her eyes. I’ve heard this a thousand times before, too. “I came to this miserable place for your father, and look what happened. I could have lived in the City. And I never would have gotten so sick. I’m doing what I have to do for our family, and look how you’re treating me. Trying to make me feel guilty —”
“There won’t be a family anymore, after this,” Luka says. “It’ll just be you and me.”
I fix my eyes on Mom. I’ve gone so long without speaking that my voice is hoarse when I say, “I know that’s what you’ve always wanted.”
Her shoulders rise to her ears.
“You’re ridiculous, Inesa,” she says. “I can’t reason with you. You blame me for everything wrong in your life—you never take responsibility for yourself.”
My chest tightens and the tip of my nose grows hot, like it does when I’m about to cry. And I hate myself as much as I hate Mom in this moment, because I can’t stop my eyes from welling, can’t stop myself from being the weepy, weak, pathetic daughter she thinks I am. Because I can’t stop myself from crying over something I should’ve seen coming. Because I’m mourning a corpse that’s long dead. It feels like all I’ve ever done is cared for things that everyone else has left to rot.
“You’ve always wanted me to be the worst mother ever,” Mom goes on. “Are you happy now that I’ve proved you right?”
“Am I happy? Am I happy ?” My voice rises, and I’m shouting now, playing the daughter who’s too unstable, too emotional. When the cameras come on, this is what everyone in New Amsterdam will see. Tears blur my vision, and I try to blink them away.
“Why don’t you ever blame your father for anything?” Mom snarls back. “At least I’m here . I’m the one who stayed.”
She surges toward me, all her false fragility forgotten. I put my arms up over my head—it’s been a long time since she’s laid a hand on either of us, but I remember the sting of her palm against my cheek. The way she gripped my face so tightly that her nails left half-moon gouges in my skin.
This time, Luka steps between us before she can reach me. He’s as impenetrable as a wall of steel, and Mom collapses against him. She inhales sharply and then lets out a great, heaving sob, eyes squeezed shut, hands balled into fists. Ordinarily Luka would let her lean on him, help her to the couch, lay her down and cover her with a quilt. Now he lets her slide to the ground, onto her knees, the blanket pooling around her.
She wails and blubbers, wordlessly now. It’s hard to feel sorry for her, but it’s also hard not to. Her sicknesses are feigned, but the pain behind them is real. The feeling that gathers in my chest is mostly pity. It thickens over my own hurt like a scab.
My bedroom isn’t private enough. I can still see Mom’s silhouette from behind the curtain and I can still hear her bawling. The sound is punctuated by the incessant dinging from my tablet, notifications from the $ponsor app from all the people who searched my name the moment the Gauntlet was announced and found my account. Messages piling up by the dozens. New subscribers that are worthless to me now. I’ll be dead before I can stream again.
I march out onto the porch. Luka follows me. The storm clouds have gathered, fat and gray-bellied, blotting out my face and name from the sky. The air is heavy, almost unbearably so.
I lean against the side of the house, head tilted back, and close my eyes. I can’t hear anything except the eerie, unrelenting buzz of the tracker, counting down the seconds until I die.
“Nesa.”
I open my eyes. Luka is standing in front of me, slightly hunched so that our faces are level. I see the faint, pale scar that cleaves his left eyebrow. I gave it to him when he was seven and I was eight, sword fighting with sticks on the hillside. He gave me an almost identical one on my left pointer finger, a small crescent above my knuckle. Sometimes I think that’s what love is, really—giving each other matching scars.
“I’m going to die, Luka,” I say.
There’s a strange relief in speaking it out loud. A dragonfly flits through the air above us. They were smaller when I was little. Now some of them are the size of sparrows, the hum of their wings as loud as helicopter blades.
“No,” Luka says, voice low. “You’re not.”
“You saw what happened to Sanne.” The image of her laid across the counter flashes in my mind.
“You’re not Sanne.”
“No,” I say, “but I’m not strong, or brave, or smart. You’ve watched the Gauntlets. Everyone knows how this story ends.”
Before Sanne, the Lamb was a man in his mid-forties, thick and muscled, who had carried a machete in his belt. If there was no mercy for a twelve-year-old girl and no bloody, hard-won victory for him, there’s no chance for me.
“We aren’t like everyone else,” says Luka.
“Yes, we are!” The anger that spikes in my chest surprises me. “We’re exactly like everyone else—that’s the problem. Land animals in a drowning world, like Dad said.”
“I didn’t think you listened to anything Dad said.”
“Well, I did.”
Luka pretends he’s the only one who really knew Dad, the only one who misses him. Sometimes I pretend, too. But deep down, both of us know the truth. Deep down, where we have another set of invisible, identical scars.
“People have survived their Gauntlets before,” says Luka.
He takes out his tablet. There’s a notification on the lock screen that shows my face, my name. He swipes on it and opens up the countdown clock. Ten and a half hours until the Gauntlet starts. I feel nausea overtake me when I look at the numbers, so stark, so cold and unforgiving. I wonder how many people will tune in to watch the live stream of my death. Thousands. Millions. The tracker whirs in my throat.
“Not people like me,” I say.
“Maybe not alone.” Luka looks up from the tablet and meets my eyes. “You’re not helpless, Nes. You never have been. You’re not just going to trot off to your death like a lamb to the slaughter—” He stops abruptly. I know he didn’t mean to call me a lamb, but the metaphor is too apt. That’s why Caerus picked it, after all. He clears his throat and then goes on. “I’m not going to let you.”
His gaze is fierce, steady. I don’t feel quite hopeful , but some of the nausea begins to recede.
“I’m not exactly what you’d call competent with a rifle,” I mumble.
Luka lets out a breath. “I won’t argue with you there. But I am. We just need... a plan.”
“An escape plan.” Running is better than fighting. No Outlier is any match for an Angel. Just a few minutes of watching Sanne’s Gauntlet was enough to convince me of that. The Angels are more machine than human. The Angel that killed Sanne certainly looked more than human. Or less.
“Yeah,” Luka says. He runs a hand through his hair. Then he turns away from me for a moment, staring out over the railing of the porch at the black water below. It’s too dark to see much beyond that. But the forest is out there, the damp knot of trees and bushes, disguising dangers that are only kept at bay by Esopus Creek’s electrified barbed wire fence.
Luka’s eyes are narrowed, a little too bright. I haven’t seen him cry since we were kids. Even now, the tears gather, but they don’t fall. He’s always been so much better at staying composed than I am.
His gaze follows the line of the fence, a slash of silver in the dark. “I think I have an idea, though.”
I push myself off from the side of the house and square my shoulders. I will my voice not to tremble when I reply, “What is it?”
Finally, Luka looks back at me. There’s a defiant glint to his stare, one I recognize but rarely see in myself.
“I’ll show you,” he says.
When Dad first left, we all thought he would come back. It wasn’t unusual for him to disappear for a couple of days—once he was even gone for nearly two weeks. But he always returned, full of booze and whimsical excuses that were half true at best. He’d pass out on the couch for hours, in a deep and impenetrable slumber, while we all tiptoed around him and tried to convince ourselves that this would be the last time, that nothing would pull him away from us again.
I wish I had known, before he left for good, that it would be our final day. I don’t even remember it well. I didn’t say anything special to him. I poled down to the shop as he smoked on the porch. He and Luka talked; I don’t know about what. There was nothing, not even a subtle sign, to suggest that he was saying goodbye. Or maybe I just wasn’t paying close enough attention.
Clearly Luka knows something I don’t, because he marches back inside, wordless, not even sparing a glance at Mom, who’s huddled on the couch. She looks over at him hopefully, as if she thinks she’ll be forgiven. She doesn’t even try to meet my eyes.
Mom’s bedroom is a proper room, with a door and everything, unlike the curtained-off space that Luka and I share. Ordinarily, neither of us dare to step past the threshold of Mom’s room. But now I follow Luka inside, with only a split second of hesitation.
It’s an unholy mess of open boxes, packing supplies strewn across the floor, and a pile of blankets so thick that I can hardly see the bed underneath. Luka clicks on the battery-powered lamp, and I step over crushed cans of diet soda to join him as he pauses in front of the closet door.
He opens it and pushes aside an overstuffed rack of musty-smelling clothes. There are sequined dresses, woolen slacks, even shiny patent-leather heels, though I haven’t seen Mom out of a nightgown in years. Bitterly I picture her scrolling through Caerus’s clothing catalogue, adding items that she’ll never wear to her cart, oblivious to her account plunging further and further into the red.
Luka flings away a fur-lined coat and a silky button-down shirt. Underneath, layered in dust so thick that my nose instantly begins to itch, is a gray metal box. I watch in shock as he removes a key from his pocket, fits it into the lock, turns it, and flips the lid open.
I don’t say anything, but I can’t stop my sharp inhale of breath. I’m not offended that he and Dad had secrets just between the two of them. I’m just hurt that even after Dad left, Luka kept them from me.
Almost as if he can read my thoughts, Luka says quietly, “This is why I thought he might come back.”
I understand now. Luka’s secret wasn’t the box itself. The secret was that he had kept hoping, kept believing, even when I had long since given up.
With deliberate, practiced motions, Luka begins to remove the items from the box. It seems almost depthless as he piles its contents on the floor. I can tell he’s done this before.
There’s a vinyl backpack. Binoculars. Weatherproof ponchos and a drinking straw. Bandages and gauze and antiseptic wipes. Steel pliers, screwdriver heads, and even a hand chainsaw. Waterproof matches, work gloves, two sleeping bags. A flashlight and fishing line. Iodine tablets. There’s even a gas mask.
And, last of all, Luka removes a small object of tarnished gold. Unlike the other items, it looks old, as if it’s passed through many pairs of hands. When Luka holds it out, his fingers shake a little bit, but he manages to flip open the tiny clasp. It’s an analogue compass, probably a hand-me-down, maybe the closest thing we have to a family heirloom. They don’t sell anything like this in the Caerus catalogue.
All together it’s a treasure trove of survival gear, clearly accumulated over the course of years, packed and prepped and ready. I can’t believe Dad left all this behind. But then again, he left us behind, too.
I sit back on my knees and let out a breath. The tracker hums and pulses in my throat. It’s not quite hope I feel—not yet, maybe not ever again. But Luka is beside me, his body radiating a steady warmth, and I know that when the cameras turn on and the Gauntlet begins, at least I won’t be alone. And with this, with Luka, there’s the slimmest, farthest-flung hope that I might survive.