Calling all dystopian fiction fans, BookTok favourite author Ava Reid is here to save your TBR, with her brand new novel Fable for The End of The World, which was released earlier this week. Think of it as a mix between The Hunger Games and The Last of Us, as it tells a dual narrative story set in the world of Caerus which runs a deadly competition called The Lamb’s Gauntlet.
One half of the story is told from the perspective of Inesa, who is used to living on the margins and surviving by any means possible alongside her brother. What the siblings don't know is their mother has amassed a bunch of debt, which will force one of them to enter the deadly assassination livestream The Lamb's Gauntlet.
There's also Melinoë, who is one of said trained assassins and can't afford to not have a successful kill this time around. But when the two women face up against each otter on the battlefield what will happen?
Intrigued? Yep, we thought so. And here's an extract from the novel to get you even more into Fable for The End of The World.
MELINOË
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 laboured 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.
“Melinoë,” 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 armour: 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, Melinoë.”
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 pupil-less, 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 recognise 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 realise 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.
