Fable for the End of the World

by Ava Reid

“Who was he, do you think?” “Some Outlier.” It sounds too callous. Inesa’s face falls. I try to soften my voice. “Someone who lived and died off the grid, I suppose.”

“Sorry,” I say. It comes out in a whisper. “It’s okay.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “Thank you—again. You didn’t have to.” She just nods. Still not much for words, my Angel.

I wonder when I started thinking of her as mine.

“Sometimes love isn’t enough.” “I think it is. I think it has to be. Otherwise, it’s not really love.

and if we did so much as close the door too loudly, she’d fly into a rage . . .”

“Luka was always her favorite,” I go on. “She never yelled at him the way she yelled at me.

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.

I can’t help imagining what her bare skin would feel like under my hands.

“If humans were collectively capable of compassion, we never would have gotten here in the first place.”

Maybe all my life has been one long gauntlet, running, fighting, searching for her.

There’s something about a man—because Luka looks like a man, even if he’s only sixteen—beating a girl that’s especially exciting to

them. Something about watching her degradation.

The love is what Azrael—and Caerus—can’t afford to lose. And maybe that makes love the most powerful force in the world, after all.

Home. The cold metal of an operating table. The darkness of the shooting range, made sickly green in my prosthetic’s night vision. The floor-to-ceiling window of my bedroom, showing me the glittering cityscape below, all the places I’ll never reach. Home. The low, smoky heat of the woodstove. The warm glow of the oil lamps, casting everything in pale gold. Inesa’s hair spread out across the pillow, turned shiny in the moonlight that slips between the cracks in the wall. I could live like this, I realize. In just the spaces between walls.

How do people love, I wonder, knowing that every moment is so precarious, that at any second, it could all melt like snow, or turn to ash?

You’re not an Angel anymore. Well—at least not a Caerus one. You still feel like some kind of angel to me.”

mar

Or they’re just pleased by the thought that they can humiliate and degrade me over and over again.

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.