Fable for the End of the World

Thirty-Five Inesa

Thirty-Five

Inesa

If I’d paid more attention to past Gauntlets, I would have had a better idea of what happens when you win. But then again, none of the normal rules really apply to me. I won. Technically. But I lost more than what’s accounted for on Caerus’s stark, impersonal ledger.

There are plans for a series of interviews with Luka and me. They fly a reporter and a camera crew out to our house in Esopus Creek. The reporter complains unsubtly about the cold and the damp, the leaking roof, the dark, cluttered living room. Still, at least it isn’t Zetamon. Luka and I sit on the lumpy couch as the crew fixes microphones to the fronts of our shirts. But just when everything is settled and the cameraman is counting down, the reporter’s tablet pings and vibrates in her purse. The interview is off. She doesn’t even try to disguise her relief.

When I turn on my own tablet, for the first time since the Gauntlet, I see why. My $ponsor app is flooded with donations, my inbox crowded with messages. For every earnest note of support, there’s another that’s snide and cruel and suggestive. Mostly, people send links to the clips of Melino? and me. When we were both exposed. When we thought we were alone. They’re trying to taunt me into an angry, defiant reply, so they can screenshot that and plaster it online, too. Or they’re just pleased by the thought that they can humiliate and degrade me over and over again.

I delete my account, erasing everything.

Luka’s accounts all get flooded with messages, too. His are equally suggestive—but none of them are cruel. It’s hard to hate him, after watching the Gauntlet. He’s the uncontested hero, really. Handsome and tall, stony and determined, a wicked shot with a rifle. It occurs to me, more than once, that he would have been the perfect Lamb. If Mom had chosen him, the Gauntlet would have been over in a matter of hours.

I want to ask him if he regrets it. Not killing her when he had the chance. But every time I try to speak her name, it withers like ash on my tongue.

Not all the attention is bad. As it turns out, Zetamon created a crowdfunding campaign to help us out. His subscribers donated tens of thousands of credits. It’s more than enough to do all the repairs around the house—build a new set of stairs, replace the rotting floorboards—and even make the shop look shiny and new.

Someone reaches out and offers to pay to demolish our house and replace it with a sleek Caerus pod home. But I delete the message before Luka can see it. I don’t think I could bear to live within their stark, white walls. Already it feels like everything is closing in on me from all angles, in all directions. I have to constantly remind myself to breathe.

I do take someone else up on their offer, though. He’s a doctor at one of the big Caerus hospitals in the City, and he gives Mom her own personal, private suite in his wing. She can have as much testing done as she wants, all the food she could ask for, and nurses at her beck and call. She leaves a week after the end of my Gauntlet, in a Caerus helicopter, without looking back.

I wonder how long it will take them to realize that her sickness is an invention, a clever one, a shield against the grueling, daily miseries of the world. Everyone needs something, because most of the time, reality is too much to bear.

When I finally understood that, I thought I could teach myself not to hate her. But I can’t make the anger fade and wash away. It lives inside me, like a second heartbeat, like the pulsing of the tracker, keeping me alive, but also killing me, slowly. Like water eating away at stone.

I do endless internet searches. I have a news alert set for her name. I think about reaching out to Zetamon, asking to be on his stream, so I can send a message that maybe, somehow, she might see. But I doubt Caerus would let me. They’d censor the stream for sure.

Instead, I focus on all the small, stupid things that build up the walls of my life in Esopus Creek. Stuffing and mounting deer. Piling sandbags outside the shop door when it rains. Patching our refurbished raft. We can always afford power now, and I never go hungry at night. Luka is even gifted a new rifle, sleek and state-of-the-art, and some proper hunting attire, a mottled camouflage of brown and green.

At night, I lie awake in my new bed with its plush mattress, the humid dark swimming around me. There’s a proper wall between Luka’s room and mine now. I can’t see his silhouette through the curtain anymore. But we still don’t have doors, so when I pass by his open threshold at night, I see his tablet shining in the otherwise unlit room. It’s playing the Gauntlet. The last moments, when I drove the knife into Lethe’s back.

When Luka realizes I’m watching, he immediately snaps the tablet off and turns around, drawing in a breath.

I see it all the time. My hand clenched around the cold hilt of the knife. The blood dripping between Lethe’s teeth. Over and over again I see her slump to the ground, unmoving, her heart stuttering to its brusque and final halt.

Luka stands and meets me in the doorway. Light from the hallway pours in around him. I can’t really place the expression on his face. It seems so stricken with grief, eyes shining hollowly.

“You didn’t have a choice, Inesa,” he says at last.

I don’t reply.

“She would have killed you.”

I didn’t know it haunted Luka, too. Maybe it was just the fact that he watched it so closely, near enough to smell the tang of Lethe’s blood in the air.

That’s not why it haunts me, though. I’ve done ugly things to survive; so has he. What keeps me from sleeping at night is the knowledge that I gave everything I had, and it still wasn’t enough to save her.

At last, after a month, it happens. A slant of light, slivering through the clouds. I’m stitching up a deer pelt when my tablet vibrates. I drop the needle, peel off my gloves, and tap hurriedly on the screen so it flickers to life.

The headline is short. Six swift, hard blows to the back of the head. FORMER ANGEL TO WED CAERUS EXECUTIVE.

It’s accompanied by a video, just a minute and a half long. In it, Melino? stands behind a podium inside a large glass theater. She looks painfully thin in sky-high stilettos, her long legs covered in beige stockings, not quite the right shade to match her pale skin. It must be to hide the burn scars, I realize. The stretches of still-healing skin, grafted over the old wounds.

Her dress is short, icy blue, with skintight sleeves down to the wrist and a high neck. Her hair has been cut bluntly to her chin, and it shimmers, smooth and white, beneath the production lights.

There’s an eyepatch over her prosthetic. Or where her prosthetic once was. She told me that when Angels are decommissioned, their prosthetics are removed. Replaced with a glass eye that mimics their real one, aesthetic but nonfunctional. I guess not even Caerus technology has gone far enough to exactly re-create what has been lost.

Clutching her around the waist is a tall but slope-shouldered man. His face has the pillowy appearance of someone who has undergone too many cosmetic procedures, leaving him looking more bloated than young. His hair is too black to be natural, and it gleams like a slick of oil. He wears the charcoal-colored suit that’s the uniform of Caerus upper management, and its sharp angles look unsettling against the puffy roundness of his cheeks.

Hendrik Visser, the article says. Caerus CTO.

He speaks in Damish, but the video is subtitled. His words sound slightly stilted in translation, just a little bit off. Too literal.

I’m pleased to reintroduce Melino? to New Amsterdam as my wife. We are very happy together. The wonderful thing about love is that it makes irrelevant all that came before. A vow of marriage is stronger than blood, a promise to leave behind all previous appetites and indulgences. I look forward to our new life, and many happy years of matrimony.

They don’t mention me. They don’t talk about the Gauntlet. Caerus doesn’t want anyone to think about the fact that I held her first, that I held her closest, before she was ever on this strange man’s arm. And they certainly don’t want Mel to remember anything.

The camera pans close to Visser as he speaks, but it never focuses on Melino?. She stays in the background, partially blurred, and completely still. Her face is as smooth as a stone in the river. Her eye is glassy and empty.

The air is suddenly too oppressive and heavy. I could drown in it, I think, just like water. I slam out of the shop and step onto the porch, taking deep, shuddery breaths. But my lungs still clutch and seize, my throat too tight to allow them relief. I slide down against the shop’s outer wall, putting my head between my knees. I might vomit, just from the lack of oxygen. But what I really want to do is scream.

I stare down at the wooden floor of the porch and watch the muddy water rush and churn through the gaps between the slats. How much has Azrael stolen from her, I wonder. Did he take enough that she hardly feels anything when Visser parts her thighs? Did he take enough that she forgot that she was made for anything else but this, that she was ever touched by someone who loved her?

I sit there for so long that my legs start to prickle with numbness. I wish it would spread through my whole body and into my heart. It’s about this time that I start wishing for the relief of a syringe to the throat.

I go back inside, but I can’t make myself return to work. Instead I just bend over the counter, replaying the video over and over again. What did Melino? call it—an Echoing? Maybe, if I watch it enough times, I’ll teach myself to feel nothing at all.

After six repetitions, the door to the shop swings open. I blink the tears out of my eyes so I can talk to the customer without choking, but it’s just Jacob. I don’t know if that’s better or worse. Either way, my cheeks instantly fill with color.

“Hi,” he says.

He doesn’t cross the room toward me; he just waits in the threshold, hands in his pockets.

“Hi.”

“I meant to come sooner,” he says, gaze skimming the floor. “I just wasn’t sure what to say. If you’d want me to.”

I’m not sure I do, either. “Luka transferred the credits to your dad last week. For the car and all the gas. He got them, right?”

“Yeah, he got them.” Rain begins to drum on the shop’s tin roof. Jacob inhales, making his broad shoulders rise and then drop. Then, after a painful stretch of silence, he says, “I brought you something.”

“You did?” After we wrecked his car, I can’t imagine Dr. Wessels is feeling particularly generous toward us. Warily, I ask, “What is it?”

Jacob reaches into his pocket and fishes out a plastic package of chewable tablets, in a gleaming rainbow of colors. An instant fondness and nostalgia wells up in my chest. They’re cheap cannabis pills, which Dr. Wessels gives to his patients with chronic pain. Jacob has been filching them from his dad since we were twelve. We’d hang out in his living room, giggling uncontrollably at things that only seemed funny in the haze of our mild high. I’m sure Dr. Wessels caught on to what we were doing, since we had all the subtlety one would expect from a pair of doped-up preteens, but he never reprimanded us for it. I remember wishing, sometimes, that Dr. Wessels were my dad, and it was my house, and I didn’t have to go back to Mom.

We step out into the little grassy area behind the shop. The rain has lightened to a faint sprinkling that mists my skin like morning dew. It catches in Jacob’s hair and gleams. I count out three of the raspberry-flavored red tablets. Jacob takes the lemon.

I only have to wait a few minutes for them to kick in. Then my flesh feels soft and soggy, like it could fall off the bone. My head feels like it’s wrapped in warm cotton. I lean back against the wall of the shop and exhale, my breath white in the cold. Jacob stands next to me, close but not touching.

We don’t speak. And nothing seems funny now. My mind is just drifting away from my body, like smoke escaping from the pipe of a woodstove. I can’t think of much except what’s in front of my eyes. Relief makes my vision fuzzy.

“Inesa.”

Jacob’s voice pierces through the haze. I turn toward him, his face a little cloudy. “Yeah?”

He stares at me intently, biting his lip. I’m afraid, suddenly, that he’s going to try to kiss me again. My stomach curdles.

But he just says, “It’s her, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“ Her .” The revulsion in his tone is obvious. “You can’t let her go.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But the truth of the accusation thrums at me from the inside out, like a hollow drum. My mouth is dry.

“Yes, you do. And it wouldn’t matter, anyway,” he says, in a scratchy voice that makes me think his anger is just a guise for tears. “You would never really be just mine. I mean, all of New Amsterdam has seen you naked.”

My own anger surges up, quick and burning. Heat blooms across my face. I’ve suspected it, of course, but now I know for sure: I don’t belong in Esopus Creek anymore. The people who used to smile at me in the streets now turn their heads and avert their gazes. Mrs. Prinslew never makes small talk anymore, and when a customer comes into the shop, they say as few words to me as possible.

I’m ruined in their eyes. Tainted by the things I did on the Gauntlet. Not the murder or the violence. They wouldn’t blame me for that. It’s the fact that I held her and I loved her.

Blood sparking with outrage, I snatch the packet of pills right out of Jacob’s hand.

“Then get away from me,” I bite out. “Just leave me alone.”

It will never stop. Not even now that the Gauntlet is over and the cameras are off. Jacob is right—anyone who wants to can search my name and find those clips, can fondle me in their mind. At first my life was Mom’s to barter with. Now it’s everyone’s to consume.

I turn and flee back into the shop before Jacob can reply.

In bed that night, I take out the pills. Holding them up to the light, they shine translucently, like gemstones. I remove three, then four. Five. How many will it take, I wonder, for me to forget her? Forget her like she’s forgotten me? They might give me an hour or two of reprieve, but I’ll need something much, much stronger for the kind of true oblivion I’m seeking.

At this point, I’m starting to understand what Dad found so irresistible about the bottom of a beer bottle.

But I don’t know if I want that. Not really. If I had a choice, would I excise her from my mind, as if she never existed? It would stop her from haunting my dreams. It would stop me from seeing her every time I close my eyes. But I would lose myself, too, I think. I once told her it took strength to hurt, to grieve, that it was braver than feeling nothing at all.

I’m grieving for the living, though. It feels different than mourning the dead.

The door opens and closes with a thud . Luka is home. I stuff the package of pills under my pillow and try to look innocent as he strides past the threshold of my room.

Obviously I don’t succeed. He pauses in the doorway, his hair dripping onto the floor. The rain has picked up again and I hear it pounding the roof. Under his wet mop of dark hair, I can still see it. The gash, which has healed into a thin, white scar.

He regards me for a long moment, silence stretching out between us in cords that I feel like I could touch.

At last, I say in a rush, “I’m sorry.”

Luka just frowns. “For what?”

I glance from the scar on his forehead down to the ones circling his wrists, the not-quite-healed wounds that he hasn’t explained to me. That I’ve been too afraid to ask about. When I look at him, I can see the compass held out so plaintively in his open palm. My throat starts to seize up, my breath growing hot in my chest.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, “that I didn’t make it there.”

Luka goes utterly still; he seems not even to breathe. In the half darkness of my bedroom, an unexpected metamorphosis takes place. He’s a little boy again, appearing at my bedside, tears streaked down his face after a bad dream. It was so easy to hold him then, to comfort him. I don’t know why it feels so impossible now.

And then, finally, he says, “There was nowhere to go, anyway. It was never real.”

The truth that we’ve both been afraid to speak aloud, for weeks now. After the Caerus helicopter lifted off and vanished into the icy gray sky, we walked north for miles, following Dad’s directions. But when we reached the marked place on the map, there was nothing. Just a vast, irradiated wasteland that reeked of smoke and oil, dead black trees forking out of the barren earth. If there was ever any life there, it had been wiped out in a brusque, decisive nuclear blast.

The Drowned County was just one of Dad’s fairy tales. Maybe he even believed it himself. Maybe he left us those coordinates because he thought he could make it, too. Or maybe he never meant anything by it; maybe it was just some fumbling drunken scheme that he’d forgotten about by the next morning.

But it was Luka who believed, more strongly than I ever did. He wanted it to be real so badly that he mortgaged his life for it. He would have stayed Caerus’s prisoner, if it meant that I could be free, if it meant that just one single time, Dad had told us something true.

Some ancient, half-buried instinct is resurrected within me, and it moves my body across the bedroom to where Luka stands. It wraps my arms around my brother and holds him tight and close.

He’s stiff against me for a moment, tense with shock. And then he bends down to embrace me back.

The cabin isn’t that far from Esopus Creek. On foot, it would take me only a few days to reach. I’ve mapped out the exact distance on my tablet. Of course, it would mean risking an encounter with the Wends, and I’m zero for two on fending them off successfully by myself.

But I can’t leave Luka. And it’s just a dream, in the end, that if I find my way to the cabin, I might also find some peace. The deepest, truest part of me knows that I would only find more to grieve.

Besides. I can’t stop remembering what Melino? said, about what it would be like for us if there were no Gauntlet. How she would walk into the shop, clear-eyed, pale hair damp from the ever-present rain. It’s so easy to imagine it. The faint purple flush that would paint her cheeks. The way our fingers would brush over all the blood and guts—and it almost makes me smile; between the two of us, we’ve seen plenty of it.

So I wait. And every time the door swings open, my breath catches in my throat and I hope to see her face. A face that knows me. A face that remembers.

A week later, there’s another ping on my tablet.

VISSER TO DEPART CTO POSITION

In a surprising move, Hendrik Visser is resigning from his position as chief technology officer at Caerus. A fellow executive, who has chosen to remain anonymous, states that Visser tendered his resignation this past Saturday.

“It was totally unexpected,” says the source. “The CEO was blindsided.”

Turnover among high-ranking executives at Caerus is exceedingly rare. As CTO, Visser not only oversaw all projects under the technological arm of the corporation, but a number of government initiatives on solar power, wind power, and hydropower; carbon computing; electric vehicles; and biotechnology.

Visser declined to comment directly on the reason for his departure; however, his office released an official statement.

“After many productive, fulfilling years at Caerus, including ten as chief technology officer, I will be voluntarily resigning from my post. This does not reflect at all on my relationship with other Caerus executives, dissatisfaction with the day-to-day workings of the company, or philosophical differences between myself and the company’s direction. I maintain the utmost respect for my fellow executives and will look back fondly upon my tenure. And, of course, I am honored to have played a role in the development of technologies that have been used to promote the welfare of all citizens of New Amsterdam.”

Visser also did not disclose whether he would be taking a new position elsewhere. The same anonymous source stated, “He is essentially retiring. He’s going to Elan, of course.”

Elan is the City’s most exclusive luxury apartment complex, which has long been home to retired Caerus executives. Elan’s reputation as child-friendly and family-oriented lends credence to the theory that in light of his recent marriage, Visser is retiring to focus on domestic life.

The article includes a slideshow of photos from Elan’s website. It’s a mammoth cluster of buildings, all glass and smooth gray metal, surrounded by squares of immaculately landscaped grass where children play and dogs chase after Frisbees. There are swimming pools larger and longer than the main street of Esopus Creek, glistening with clear, artificially blue water. Naturally, all of it is housed within a climate-controlled dome, to keep the polluted air out.

And the rain. I wonder if, somehow, she’ll be able to hear it. See it. Maybe the dome can’t fully muffle the sound of rolling thunder. Maybe the droplets will still audibly patter on the glass. Maybe she’ll wake in the dead of night, lightning streaking across the removed, distant black sky. And maybe, as the clouds gather overhead, paradoxically, the haze will clear from her eyes.

She told me that the brain is the most complex organ in the human body. When something breaks, it can’t just be set in a splint and left to mend. Brain cells, when they die, can never regenerate. You can only hope that the mind develops new pathways to circumvent the hole. And memory is the trickiest element of all. Not even Caerus has mastered the science of it. There will always be gulfs in their understanding—long, black chasms large enough to fall through.

And there will always be those things that shoot up like river rocks in the dark water. The current pulls your raft downstream, and maybe you don’t know there’s anything in your path until the wood splinters under your feet. And you can strike and strike your flint, but you don’t know how many strokes it will take until the tinder goes up in flame.

It was the rain that undid her. Or rather, undid all of Caerus’s hard work. Wipe after Wipe, and there was always the sharp stone in the water. Always the spark that caught fire. I wonder how many times she’s been strapped down to the table, syringe in her throat. I wonder if maybe it’s impossible for Caerus to take everything, no matter how hard they try. I wonder, and the wonder turns to hope.

One of the splurges we made with Zetamon’s crowdfunded money was a car. It’s even older than the one we borrowed from Dr. Wessels, and it came to us with mud painted up and down the sides and three airless tires, but it runs okay for short trips. And the train station isn’t far.

As we drive down the bumpy, unpaved roads, the car jostling us as it rolls through puddles and potholes, neither Luka nor I speak.

The train is waiting when we arrive, as sleek and silver as a bullet. Passengers are gathered at the doors. Luka puts the car in park and just stares, fingers tightening around the steering wheel until his knuckles turn white.

“Luka?” I ask softly.

He turns. A muscle feathers in his jaw. His eyes are my eyes, and when I look into them, I see them shining with unshed tears. “Yeah?”

“I’m coming back,” I say. “I promise.”

He just avoids my gaze, and the air in the car grows thick with silence. I don’t blame him for his distress. All our lives, there’s been nothing but leaving. I can’t undo the pain of what came before, the months we spent waiting and hoping that Dad loved us enough to return, the hours we spent waiting hand and foot on Mom and wondering if she saw us as anything more than servants. But I can start shaping a new world, one that isn’t marked by closing doors and hollow, silent, lonely grief.

I’m going to reiterate my promise—I’ll say it over and over again until he believes me—but then, astonishingly, Luka leans over in his seat and wraps his arms around me. I’m so surprised it takes me a moment to hug him back. I press my face into his shoulder, the darkness behind my eyes fuzzy and incomplete, and my heart cracks and then mends itself, with a fiercer, stronger bragging than before.

“I’ll see you soon,” Luka says, when he lets go.

“I’ll see you soon,” I echo.

I’ll step off the train. I’ll follow the crowd anxiously through the station, stumbling and fumbling through unfamiliar corridors. I’ll navigate the gridded, smog-choked streets. My hair is long and loose down my back, and I wear all white.

I’ll take another train, if I have to, or a cab, or a bus. I’ll find my way to those hulking glass buildings. I’ll walk circles around the manicured lawns; I’ll peer through the windows; I’ll pass by the pools and the tennis courts and the little patios where the City folk drink candy-colored cocktails and stretch out under the rare and precious rays of sun.

Maybe she won’t appear today. But I’ll come back tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, if I have to. I’ll push through the crowds. I’ll watch and I’ll wait. I’m seventeen, and I have a thousand brilliantly hued hazardous sunrises to spare.

And yet not a moment of it will feel like a waste. Because I know that when our eyes meet, through the glass, over the heads of strangers, in the bright, shining dawn or the soft, fading twilight, she’ll remember.