Get a Sneak Peek of Ava Reid'sA Fable for the End of the World— and Watch the Trailer! (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Ava Reid and ‘Fable for the End of the World.'.Photo:Courtesy of Ava Reid; HarperCollins

Courtesy of Ava Reid; HarperCollins

FromNew York Timesbestselling authorAva Reidcomes a new dystopian romance, reminiscent of fan favoritesThe Last of UsandThe Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

“When Inesa learns that her mother has offered her as a sacrifice, at first she despairs — the Gauntlet is always a bloodbath for the impoverished debtors,” a synopsis teases. “But she’s had years of practice surviving in the apocalyptic wastes, and with the help of her hunter brother, she might stand a chance of staying alive.”

Read an exclusive excerpt fromFable for the End of the World— and watch the book trailer — below:

Book trailer for ‘Fable for the End of the World’

‘Fable for the End of the World.'.HarperCollins

HarperCollins

TWO: 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 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 50 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 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, 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 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 8 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.”

“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.”

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 80, 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.

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.

Fable for the End of the Worldcomes out March 4, 2025 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

source: people.com