Fable for the End of the World

Inesa runs a taxidermy shop with her brother in a half-sunken town, in a ruined world where the corporation Caerus rules through debt. When she learns her mother has sold her into the Lamb's Gauntlet to cover what the family owes, she is horrified. The Gauntlet is a livestreamed hunt to the death, and Caerus fills it with people who cannot pay.

Inesa has spent years surviving the wasteland, and she means to survive this too, with her brother helping her. Against her stands Melinoë, a Caerus assassin whose neural conditioning has turned her into a weapon. No mark has ever escaped her, yet she is quietly coming apart after her last kill went publicly wrong.

This is a post-apocalyptic thriller built around a long chase across the wasteland, with two women at its centre: the hunted and the hunter. The setting is bleak and corporate, and the violence is part of a spectacle that the whole of society is made to watch.

As the pursuit drags on, both women begin to ask what their survival has been for. A question of what they might feel for each other runs alongside it. Expect a tense, dark read in which the relationship between prey and predator matters as much as the chase.