Existence
Author: James Frey
Date: 2014-11-22 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Young Adult; Science Fiction; Short Stories; Dystopia; Fantasy
Description: This third thrilling digital prequel novella to Endgame: The Calling follows the lives of four of the twelve Players before they were chosen as the one to save their ancient bloodline--and win Endgame. Before the Calling . . . Twelve Players-in-training are tested to the very edge of their physical and mental abilities. Endgame: The Training Diaries Volume 3: Existence follows Sarah, Jago, An, and Hilal, as they prepare for the apocalyptic game that may or may not occur. They must shed their normal lives and transform into the Players they were meant to be.They must train, learn, prepare.To Pl
Publisher: HarperCollins

Contents

1. Olmec
JAGO

2. Shang
AN

3. Aksumite
HILAL

4. Cahokian
SARAH

5. Excerpt from Endgame: The Calling
6. Marcus Loxias Megalos
7. Chiyoko Takeda

8. Excerpt from Endgame: The Training Diaries Volume 2: Descendant

9. La Tène: AISLING
10. Back Ads
11. About the Author
12. Books in the Endgame Series
13. Copyright
14. About the Publisher

Guide

1. Cover
2. Contents
3. Chapter 1

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Twelve thousand years ago, they came. They descended from the sky amid smoke and fire, and created humanity and gave us rules to live by. They needed gold and they built our earliest civilizations to mine it for them. When they had what they needed, they left. But before they left, they told us that someday they would come back, and that when they did, a game would be played. A game that would determine our future.

This is Endgame.

For 10,000 years the lines have existed in secret. The 12 original lines of humanity. Each has to have a Player prepared at all times. A Player becomes eligible at 13 and ages out at 19. Each bloodline has its own measure of who is worthy to be chosen. Who is worthy of saving their people. They have trained generation after generation after generation in weapons, languages, history, tactics, disguise, assassination. Together the Players are everything: strong, kind, ruthless, loyal, smart, stupid, ugly, lustful, mean, fickle, beautiful, calculating, lazy, exuberant, weak. They are good and evil. Like you. Like all.

This is Endgame.

When the game starts, the Players will have to find three keys. The keys are somewhere on Earth. The only rule of Endgame is that there are no rules. Whoever finds the keys first wins the game.

These are the stories of the Players before they were chosen—of how they shed their normal lives and transformed into the Players they were meant to be.

These are the Training Diaries.

OLMEC

JAGO

Jago falls in love with her at first sight. It’s like some cheesy movie cliché—it’s like every cheesy movie cliché. Their eyes meet across a crowded room. His heart skips a beat. Fireworks explode. The earth shakes. He hears music, smells flowers, sizzles with a lightning bolt of love.

The girl is lithe and lovely, whirling to the techno salsa beat as if her body is made of music. Hair like blond silk whips through the air; slender arms twirl overhead. A radiant smile lights up the room, and Jago’s heart.

Then the strobe lights flash and go dark, the song changes, dancers flood the club floor, and she disappears behind a sea of bodies.

Jago forgets her in a heartbeat.

It’s like that for him: love, girls, beauty. He loves to love, falls hard and fast, gets distracted just as quickly. Sometimes it takes a month, sometimes a week, sometimes, like tonight, only a few minutes. Nothing pleases him more than parading through the streets of Juliaca with a beautiful girl on his arm, lying beside a warm body on the shores of Lago Titicaca, stroking an exquisite face in the moonlight. And because he is Jago Tlaloc, every girl in the city is happy to be loved by him—because to be loved by Jago is to be showered with expensive gifts, to be admired and envied, to be on the arm of the scion of the most powerful organized-crime syndicate in Peru. He knows they love him only for his money and power, and he forgives it. To be loved by Jago is to be forgiven all sins.

To be loved by Jago is to be left by Jago, but ask any girl in Juliaca and she’ll tell you: it’s worth it.

He hasn’t come to the club tonight looking for love. He came to dance, to sweat away the week, to forget himself in a storm of noise and motion. To lose himself in a crowd. Thrashing at the heart of the dance floor, pressed body to body with the crush of strangers, this is the only way Jago can be anonymous, a stranger to himself. He’s spent the last several days doing odd jobs for his family, paying visits to those who thought to cross the mighty Tlalocs . . . and making them understand the consequences of their poor choices. Reminding them where their loyalties should lie.

The Tlaloc syndicate, of course, employs plenty of muscle—but some acts demand stronger reminders. Some unfortunate souls demand a visit from Jago himself, heir to the family business, Player of the Olmec line. Not everyone knows he’s the Player, of course, like so many eldest Tlaloc sons and daughters before him, or that if Endgame ever comes, he will bear the weight of all their lives. They don’t know they should be grateful to him.

But they know to fear him—and that’s enough.

Jago does what he has to do, hurts who he has to hurt. But sometimes, after, he needs to drink and dance and forget.

So he’s not looking for love, any more than he’s looking for trouble.

Both find him.

Her scream is nearly inaudible over the music and the noise of the crowd, but he’s spent years honing his senses.

There are three of them, muscled thugs in their midtwenties. They have the girl pinned in a dark corner, are laughing at her obvious fear. One of them pokes at her shoulder. Another threads his fingers through her blond hair, smoothing it over her face.

This is when Jago inserts himself into the situation. Three of them, one of him, and he is only 16.

But he is a Tlaloc—and a Player.

He is built like a mountain and could kill all three of them without breaking a sweat.

Instead he says, from behind them, “I think you’d all prefer to find a different club tonight, wouldn’t you?”

The men whirl about, ready to laugh, ready to fight—then they see his face.

They see the scar that cuts from his left eye down to his neck, souvenir of a childhood knife fight. He pulls back his lips in the gruesome imitation of a smile, and they see his teeth, gold-capped incisors studded with diamonds.

“Feo,” the biggest of the men breathes, and when he speaks Jago’s nickname, there’s terror on his tongue.

They know that scar; they know that smile; they know to back away quickly, with shallow bows of respect and apology, to leave this club and never be seen here again.

Jago waves them off with satisfaction, and only then does he turn to the girl.

She’s not hiding behind her curtain of hair or blinking back tears, not pressing herself into the shadows to make herself invisible, not shaken or stirred. She watches him intently, with fierce curiosity, and there’s something strange about her expression, something compelling, and it takes him a moment to understand what it is. Then it hits him.

She doesn’t know who he is.

She doesn’t know anything.

Jago closes his lips over his teeth; he claps a hand over his scar, and hopes the club is dark enough to smooth his pockmarked face. He wants to hide everything ugly about himself.

Something is happening to him.

Something he can’t name.

Not love, it can’t be that, he thinks, because he’s felt love, knows it well, in all its fleeting and shallow glory.

“Those men were afraid of you,” she says in English, her voice full of wonder.

He nods.

“Should I be afraid of you?” It comes out like a dare.

“Probably.” He wants to smile. He wants to laugh. But he doesn’t want to frighten her. For the first time in a long time, he doesn’t want to look like Jago Tlaloc. Maybe he doesn’t want to be Jago Tlaloc, not with this girl, not tonight.

“Good thing this is my summer of bad decisions,” she says, and laughs. “Dance with me?”

He takes her hand, and for a moment he can’t breathe.

“What’s your name?” she asks him, as they step onto the dance floor.

He touches his hand to his ear, cocks his head, as if to say, Too loud, can’t hear you. Then he leads her into the dancing throng. Tomorrow he will be Jago Tlaloc, scion, monster, savior. Tonight he will be just another body in the dark.

“You’re really not going to tell me your name?” she says as he walks her back to her dorm. She’s a British high school girl, on a summer study-abroad program in Peru, though she knows no Spanish. She’s from a place called Cornwall, and is a ballet dancer, or was, she says; she’s not sure which one. She’s been all over the world, she says, but has never seen anything, and though that doesn’t make any sense, Jago almost understands it.

He’s been everywhere too, traveled to every continent, sometimes on family business, sometimes for Player training, always for something ugly and brutal, always for a purpose, never simply to see.

She tells him many things, as they walk hand in hand through the empty Juliaca night, not about her life but about her dreams of a new one, how she wants passion and poetry and awe, she wants new experiences and wild adventures and terrifying risks and world-conquering triumphs.

“And love,” she adds, looking at him steadily. Her grip on his hand is warm and firm, unashamed. “I want earth-shattering, fireworks-exploding, heartbreaking love. Have you ever had that?”

Jago shrugs. “I’ve had girlfriends, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, I don’t mean ‘girlfriends.’” She imitates not just his accent, but the deliberately casual way he tossed off the word. “I mean a soul mate, a person who feels like your other half. A love that changes your life—that swallows it. A Pablo Neruda kind of love.”

“So you loved a man named Pablo?” he asks, confused.

She laughs gently, and links her arm through his. “I see we have some work to do.”

“I don’t know if I believe in that kind of love. A kind that could swallow my life, as you say.” He doesn’t know why he’s admitting this to her. Everything he knows about girls tells him this is the precise wrong thing to say. But there’s something about this one that makes him want to be honest. “My life is too crowded for such a love, I think.”

“Crowded with what?”

“Duty, for one,” he says. “Family.” He can’t tell her that he’s sworn his life to a single, all-important goal. That as long as Endgame looms on the horizon, he can never love anything as much as he loves the Olmec people. Even if it weren’t unthinkable, it would be forbidden.

“Duty?” She laughs again, a familiar song he wishes would go on forever. “You talk like you’re ancient.” Then she shakes her head. “Not me. I wasted too long on duty. I know what’s out there. What’s possible. And I’m going to have it.”

She sounds so much younger than him, but also, somehow, older—because she talks as if time is running out, as if she wants all these things now, here, in this summer, in this city. Tonight.

She stops abruptly beneath a streetlight and takes both of his hands in hers. “Do you want to know a secret?”

He nods.

“This is it. This summer. Everything changes. Everything I used to be, that’s over. I’m breaking free.”

“Of what?”

“Everything holding me back. All the people telling me what I have to do, who I have to be. All the obligations. All that duty. Haven’t you ever wanted to do that? Just shake it all off? Run for the hills? Scream into the night?”

“I—”

She tips back her head and hollers, “Freeeeeee!” The streetlight gives her a glow, like an aura, and Jago is almost afraid to blink—as if he’s imagined her, as if she might disappear.

Everything changes, she said, and he feels it, a buzz in the air, his skin bristling with electric charge. Everything changes tonight.

Tonight, for the first time, he can imagine wanting what she says. Freedom. Escape. Wild adventure with this strange, wild girl, the two of them flinging themselves into a great unknown.

She won’t tell him her name until he offers his.

Even after they kiss under the streetlight beside her dorm, even after she presses her body to his and lets him feel her heat, her need.

“Who are you?” he says in wonder, when they break, and he means, What are you? What kind of strange, enchanting, beautiful creature could make him feel this way, like she’s the first girl he’s ever touched, the first girl he’s ever wanted?

“You first,” she says.

He doesn’t want to offer his real name—this is the twenty-first century; the first thing she’ll do when she goes inside is Google him and his family, and she’ll discover all the things he doesn’t want her to know, the rumors and allegations that inevitably swirl around a crime syndicate even when the government declines to prosecute, or care.

“Most people call me Feo,” he says, offering his nickname instead. It has always felt right to him, as if naming his secret, fundamental truth.

“Feo?” She wrinkles her nose. “Does that mean something?”

Jago laughs. “You really don’t know any Spanish at all, do you?”

“Tell me what it means.”

Her combination of stubborn ferocity with wide-eyed innocence is addictive and irresistible. He can see it in her eyes: this girl is fearless.

“Guess.”

She appraises him carefully, narrows her eyes, smiles. “Mountain.”

He shakes his head.

She presses a finger to his lips, slips it through, taps one of his capped incisors. “Golden boy,” she guesses. “Diamond head.”

“Not even close.”

“Tell me,” she says, and kisses his neck.

“No.”

“Tell me.” She kisses the tip of his nose.

“No . . .”

“Tell me.” She kisses his palm, the inside of his wrist, works her way up his forearm, and he knows this girl will be trouble—this girl will take whatever she wants from him, and he has much to lose.

“Feo,” he says, giving in. “‘Ugly.’”

She flinches. “Who would call you that?”

He shrugs, smiles to show he doesn’t care, that it’s all a good joke to him. “Who wouldn’t?”

She grazes her fingertips down the length of his scar. “I wouldn’t,” she says softly.

He’s embarrassed, suddenly, not of the nickname, but of the fact that he allows it, and for an impossible moment feels a flicker of rage toward this girl, that she can make him burn with shame. One moment, one spark of anger; then it’s gone as if it never existed.

“Your name is so much better, I suppose?”

“It’s Alicia.” She rises up on her toes, gives him a quick peck on the lips, suddenly demure. “Think you can remember that for next time?”

“Next time?”

She retreats, carefully eases open the door to her girls’ dorm—it’s hours beyond her curfew, but she seems unconcerned, says she’s snuck out before, and anyway, what can they do to her, these overcautious nursemaids? He loves the way she talks.

“You know where to find me,” she says, before she disappears into the citadel. “Just make sure you’ve come up with a better name by the time you come back.”

The following night, Jago takes her to dinner at Los Gatos, an exclusive bastion of candlelit elegance where the waiters keep a bottle of their finest champagne on ice for him, just in case he happens by.

He orders every appetizer on the menu and four entrées, so they can have a taste of everything, and once they’ve sipped their champagne, he summons the waiter and requests a bottle of their most expensive wine.

As they drink the rich red, Jago puts a small velvet box on the white tablecloth. Alicia opens it up to find a small sapphire dangling from a delicate gold chain.

“Oh,” she says, then closes the box and digs into her meal.

It’s not exactly the reaction he was hoping for.

“You don’t like it? I thought it would bring out your eyes.”

“It’s gorgeous,” she says. “But, it’s so . . .”

“What?”

“Well, it looks crazy expensive, and we just met, so that’s kind of weird, don’t you think?”

“I think it’s beautiful, and you’re beautiful, so it seems like a perfect match.”

She shakes her head. “Well, um, okay. But I don’t really wear much jewelry. It would be wasted on me. So . . .”

It’s not like it was at the nightclub, or in the moonlight. It’s not easy between them, and he doesn’t know why. He excuses himself to the bathroom, and on his way slips some money into the palm of the maître d’ and makes a whispered request.

When he returns to the table, a violinist comes over to join them and begins a mournful rendition of a childhood lullaby. Jago waves over an old woman shuffling past the tables with an armful of roses, and buys a dozen, gives her a tip ten times their value. He offers them to Alicia—she takes them but doesn’t smile.

“I’m sorry, but . . .” She stops, turns to the violinist, and says, “That’s lovely, but I’ve got a bit of a headache, so . . .”

The violinist looks to Jago, who nods his assent, and the musician backs away, looking abashed, surely afraid he’s displeased the monster of Juliaca.

“I’m sorry,” Jago says quickly. He can feel the night slipping away from him, and if he doesn’t understand what he’s done, how is he supposed to fix it? He speaks eleven languages fluently, knows nineteen ways to kill a man with his bare hands, holds this city in the palm of his hands . . . yet somehow, he’s powerless to make this one girl smile. “I didn’t realize you had a headache.”

“I don’t, I just . . .”

“Is it a law, in England, not to finish your sentences?” he snaps—then instantly regrets the flare of temper. He’s simply not used to this kind of frustration.

She grins. “Aha! There you are.”

“What? Of course here I am.”

“No, I mean, you. Like, the real you, not this cheesy romance bullshit. The you from last night.”

“Excuse me, cheesy romance bullshit?”

“Flowers, candlelight, champagne, violin music? A necklace, for a girl you’ve just met? I don’t know what kind of girls you usually date, but . . .”

He dates girls who like “cheesy romance bullshit” and the rewards that come with it. These are the kinds of girls who want to date a Tlaloc—at least a Tlaloc who looks like him. These are the girls who won’t ask hard questions or make demands he prefers not to fulfill.

“And what kind of girl are you, Alicia? What would you prefer to do?”

“How about talk?” she says. “You could tell me about yourself.”

He shrugs. “There’s nothing to tell.”

“You go to school?”

“Sure,” he lies. “Who doesn’t? Junior year’s a bitch.”

“SATs, picking colleges, all that, right?” she says.

He nods like he knows what she’s talking about. Jago’s life doesn’t resemble that of the teenagers he sees on TV. He’s been homeschooled for his entire life, taught by tutors and physical trainers behind the walls of his family’s gated estate, trained not for a life of college and banal employment but for duty, sacrifice, courage, and, eventually, rule.

“I’m thinking about, uh, law school,” he says, wondering if that will impress her.

“Bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

She stands up. “Do you think I haven’t figured out who you are, Feo? You must think I’m pretty stupid. And I don’t date people who think I’m stupid.”

“Wait! Please!”

Jago stops. Composes himself. All over the restaurant, heads are turning. He can’t afford to be seen like this, begging. Tlalocs do not beg. When he speaks again, it’s with imperious scorn. “What is it you think you know about me?”

“I know you’re Jago Tlaloc, that you’re part of some kind of mob family, and you’re the heir to it all. I know this whole city’s scared of you.” Her voice softens, almost imperceptibly. “And I know you’re a terrible dancer.” She shrugs. “That’s about it. I came here tonight because I wanted to know more—not because I want expensive champagne and jewelry. You can’t buy me, Jago. Not with a fancy dinner, and definitely not with a bunch of crap lies about your life. That’s not who I am. I didn’t think that was who you were.”

“It’s not,” he protests.

“Then prove it,” she says. “Show me who Jago Tlaloc is. The real one. The one I fell for the first time I saw him.”

“You . . . you did?” He doesn’t understand. No one could fall for him, just from looking at him. His face is not designed to melt hearts; it’s designed to freeze them.

“Of course I did,” she says. “I told you: I’m not stupid.”

They ditch the restaurant. Jago takes Alicia to his favorite street vendor, an old man who grills up anticuchos and picarones just north of the city center. She tries a bite of everything, and the way her eyes light up at her first taste of choclo con queso makes the whole night worthwhile. They sit on the edge of a crumbling brick wall overlooking a vacant lot and stuff themselves, licking the grease off their fingers and kissing it off each other’s lips, passing back and forth a frothing bottle of Pilsen Callao, and all the while, they talk.

Jago tells Alicia about his life, his real life. He doesn’t speak of being the Olmec Player, of course—that secret is as sacred as the oath he swore to protect and serve his line. But he tells her what it’s like to be a Tlaloc, to grow up in privilege surrounded by poverty. To be loved and loathed in equal measure, to never know whether the people around you are freely giving of themselves or obeying out of fear. Jago has his parents and his siblings; he has José, Tiempo, and Chango, three boys he grew up with who he can trust to the ends of the earth. But beyond that, he has minions, underlings, hangers-on, colleagues, enemies.

Sometimes, Jago admits, his enemies feel like the truest thing in his life. At least he always knows where they stand; at least he knows the passion they feel for him is real.

Jago tells Alicia about working his way up, learning the ropes of the family business when he was just a child. Going out on protection runs, defending territory . . . He lets her believe that he would wait in the car, because to explain that he was a black belt in several martial arts by the time he was eight and spent far more childhood hours with guns, knives, and bombs than he did with cartoons and teddy bears—that would raise questions he can’t answer.

But he doesn’t lie to her.

When she asks if he’s broken the law, he says yes.

When she asks if he’s hurt someone, even killed someone, he hesitates . . . then says yes.

She doesn’t run away.

He tells her he doesn’t like it, hurting people—that he does it because it’s necessary. And she touches his scar again with those soft, careful fingers and says, “I believe you.”

When she asks if he’s ever imagined a different life for himself, turning away from what his family wants for him, choosing his own path, he doesn’t hesitate. “That’s not an option for me,” he says. Being a Tlaloc, being a criminal, being the Player, these things are inextricable for him, and none are choices, any more than breathing, or living. It’s a joy for him, serving his family and his people, living up to their expectations. To be the Olmec Player, to be the Tlaloc heir, these things define him, no matter how ugly or difficult they may sometimes be. “And even if it were . . . it’s not all pain and crime. My family does good things for Juliaca. We’ve built hospitals; we have several charity foundations. We make sure none of our people starve. We give to the poor. We only steal from—”

“The rich?” She laughs. “Okay, Robin Hood. You’re a hero of the people. I get it.”

If you only knew, he thinks, wishing that he could tell her the whole story, explain that he’s sworn to protect his people against an attack from the sky, against the end of the world, that he would sacrifice himself for the survival of the Olmec line—that he has already sacrificed so much.

And then he remembers that she is not Olmec. That if Endgame comes, he will not be fighting for her.

“I am who I am,” he says quietly. “Who my people, my family, need me to be. That’s all I can be. You wouldn’t understand.” He watches TV, he knows what life is like for people like her, who live sequestered from their own poor, who have infinite choices and no greater worries than alarm clocks and acne.

She threads her fingers through his, holds tight. “You’d be surprised.”

She tells him that she’s been taking ballet lessons since she learned how to walk—that her mother is a former prima ballerina who had to retire when she got pregnant, and who has never quite forgiven Alicia for ending her career. “She’s never forgiven me for being more talented than her either,” Alicia says, without modesty or bitterness, and Jago likes her all the more for it.

For thirteen years, Alicia has done almost nothing but dance. “Morning, afternoon, night,” she says. “I was homeschooled for a while; then I got into the academy, where classes are a joke—everyone knows nothing matters but dancing.”

“I bet you’re a beautiful ballerina,” he says.

“I was,” she says, again without modesty. He notes the tense.

It’s hard not to stare at the unfathomably long line of her neck, the graceful way her arms arc and wave as she makes her point. Every move is graceful, efficient, almost as if she were a fighter, like him. And maybe they’re not so different after all. The hard work, the oppressive training schedule, the tunnel vision for a life oriented around a single goal . . . he recognizes all of them, and wonders whether this is the magnetic field that draws them together, this singularity of purpose.

“I’ve been to Paris, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Cape Town—name a city, and I’ve danced there,” she says. “Danced, and nothing else. No sights, no culture, certainly no local foods. Nothing that would get in the way of the training regimen. No distractions whatsoever.” She peers at him through lowered lashes. “Definitely no boys.”

“It can’t be as bad as all that,” he says. “You’re here.”

“Exactly. Because I quit.”

“What? You said dancing was your life.”

“It was my life, and what kind of life is that?” She steals the rest of his anticuchos, gulping them down with relish. “I couldn’t handle it anymore. I just did one plié too many, you know?”

He shakes his head. Tries to imagine walking away from his life, from any of it. Declaring independence from everything he’s ever known. There’s such a thing as too much freedom, he thinks. Freedom from everything can leave you with nothing.

“My father was cool about it, but my mother?” She shakes her head. “Freaked. Out. I finally convinced them to send me down here for six weeks, kind of a trial separation from ballet, you know? I’m supposed to be ‘thinking about my options.’” She curls her fingers around the words, and it’s clear that she hopes to do very little thinking while in Peru. “I’ve basically missed out on the first sixteen years of life, Jago. I plan to make up for it, starting now.”

“That’s a lot to catch up on in six weeks.”

“I’m very efficient,” she says. “It only took me four days to find you, didn’t it? And about ten minutes to catch you?”

She’s so sure of herself—so sure of the two of them, even though they’ve spent less than a few hours in each other’s presence. “You think you caught me, huh?” he teases her. “I may be more slippery than you expect.”

She puts her arms around him, pulls herself onto his lap. “Just try to get away,” she whispers in his ear. “I dare you.”

Summer school isn’t like real school, especially in Juliaca. Alicia has plenty of friends to cover for her, and the teachers and guardians at the study-abroad program don’t require much covering. There’s no one to care if she spends all her time with Jago.

So she does.

It’s different than it’s been with other girls: she doesn’t want him to buy her anything; she doesn’t care about his power, or the things he can make people do. She likes to hear the details; she finds it fascinating, the contours of power, the things he knows, the strings he can pull. She likes to hear about corrupt officials—who gets paid off and how much—about how you can learn to attune yourself to the smell of weakness and cowardice, about how to sniff out an Achilles’ heel, and exploit it.

She likes it, but he doesn’t like telling her, because he can see the judgment in her eyes, hear it in her voice. She’s fascinated . . . but she’s also repulsed. “I just think there’s something better out there for you,” she says, whenever he talks about his family and what they do, or what they expect of him. Or, sometimes, “The police really just look the other way? No matter how many laws get broken? How many people get hurt?”

She always phrases it that way. Not “when you break the law.” Not “when you hurt people.” She thinks he’s different from the rest of his family, different from this entire city, perhaps, and he knows he should resent that.

She makes him ashamed of the things he’s always been most proud of, and he should probably resent that too.

But it’s not resentment, the thing that burns in him when he looks in her eyes, when he speaks her name.

It’s a thing that has no name, that’s too big and powerful for words.

But if he had to pick a word, it would be love.

He likes her because she doesn’t want anything from him, because she doesn’t want him for his power or his money or his family name. But the bigger feeling, the one that wakes him up in the middle of the night, sweating and gasping from a nightmare in which he’s lost her—the all-consuming feeling that, as she once put it, has swallowed his life—that’s not because of what she wants. It’s because of what she sees.

She looks at him and sees a person he didn’t know he could be. Not Feo, not the Player, not the heir to the Tlaloc fortune. She sees Jago, the boy she loves, and this boy feels both like a stranger and like the truest version of himself he has ever known. He loves her because she sees not simply what is, but what is possible.

She asks to hear the stories of his scars. She wants to know who’s hurt him, she says.

“You should see the other guy,” he said the first time she asked, but she didn’t laugh, and he knows she understands the meaning behind his words.

“It’s not like I enjoy it,” he added quickly. “I don’t hurt people for fun.”

“I would never think that. It’s just . . .” She kissed the scar on his face. “I don’t care what you’ve done in the past, Jago. What you’ve done doesn’t have to define you. What your parents want doesn’t have to define you. Who are you now? Who do you want to be?”

“You say that like I get to pick.”

“You think this ugly life is all you can have, Jago, but you’re wrong.”

He wishes he could tell her the truth. That his aunts and uncles train him for more than the family business. That the reason he spends so many hours in the gym or at the firing range, the reason he speaks so many languages and knows how to make a computer do whatever he asks of it, isn’t simply for commerce and brute force. For all his life, being a Tlaloc and being the Player have seemed two parts of the same whole. Yes, he divides his time between training for Endgame and helping the syndicate. Yes, sometimes he wields his weapons in defense of the Olmec people and sometimes to preserve his family’s turf. But he’s been taught that these are the same: that Playing is a sacred family duty. That in return for their centuries of Playing, for the sons and daughters they’ve sacrificed to the cause, the Tlaloc family deserves compensation—they deserve respect and power.

But now, he wonders.

Perhaps he’s mistaken two duties for one. His family, his business, his bloodline . . . is it possible these are extricable after all, that commitment to one doesn’t necessitate commitment to all?

Alicia doesn’t like what she knows of his duty, because she thinks it’s about intimidation and corruption, greed and crime.

If she knew who he was beneath that, the solemn oath he’s sworn, the harsh gods he serves, she might think differently.

Or, he considers, she might not. Endgame is still about violence—war and blood. Alicia has no love for such things, and doesn’t want them for him, in any form. She wants to make his life beautiful.

She introduces him to Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev and Stravinsky, to the love poems of Pablo Neruda and the folktales of nineteenth-century Russia, all beautiful things she’s learned to love through ballet. He asks her, “How can you say ballet has blinded you to the world when you’ve seen so much?” and she says, “I want more.”

He plays Mudra for her, and Almas Inmortales and Sanguinaria and Hand of Doom, all his favorite metal bands.

“Ugly,” she pronounces the music, her word for anything she doesn’t like.

But for love of him she listens, watches carefully the look on his face as he turns up the volume and thrashes to the beat of the noise. It is ugly, and full of rage, and this is what he likes about it. This is the music that plays in his head and heart; this is the sound of his life.

“There’s no room for bullshit in this music,” she muses. “Nowhere to hide.”

“Exactly.”

She gets it; she kisses him, and though he is supposed to have left for the gym twenty minutes ago, though he’s already missed his last three weight-training sessions, he kisses her back, and knows he’s not going anywhere, not anytime soon.

So what if he’s neglecting some of his duties? Alicia’s only in Peru until the end of the summer. Everything else can wait for three more weeks.

Even Endgame. He hopes.

No one approves.

“Look who’s coming—it’s the invisible man!” Tiempo crows, as Jago joins his friends for a game of dudo, which he hasn’t done since he met Alicia. She’s taking an exam in her Spanish class—he spent all night helping her study, but still, he misses her for the two hours she’s not at his side.

“We thought you disappeared on us, Feo,” Chango says, shaking his cup of dice. Everyone in Juliaca plays dudo, from the little kids on the street to Jago’s great-grandmother. Jago has been playing it with his buddies ever since they were young enough to be betting with chocolate coins. Now they use real ones, and Jago almost always cleans up.

Once in a while, he suspects his friends of letting him win. They’ve known each other for more than a decade, yes, but he’s still a Tlaloc; their parents work for his. He tries not to think about it.

“Finally ditch la gringa?” José teases.

Jago scowls at them. “Don’t call her that.”

José holds out a cup of dice for Jago. “You blind? That’s what she is, Feo.”

“She’s Alicia,” Jago says. “And I’m not ditching her.”

“She probably ditched him,” Chango says. “Or she’s getting ready to.”

Jago has been looking forward to this afternoon, imagining that he would tell his friends how everything looks different now, how the world has changed—but now that the moment is here, he doesn’t know what he was thinking.

Chango, Tiempo, and José have fought with him—they would die for him—but they’re not interested in hearing about his feelings.

“How come you never bring her around, Jago? She embarrass you?” José asks.

Chango elbows him. “We embarrass him.” Chango has always been the smartest of the three.

“No way is that true,” Tiempo says. He, on the other hand, has always been the most loyal. “Tell him that’s not true, Feo.”

“That’s not true, Chango.”

“So you’re keeping her your dirty little secret because . . . ?”

“If you ever found a girl who could stand your ugly face, you’d know why Feo wants to keep her to herself,” Tiempo says. “See, little boy, when a man and a woman really like each other—”

Chango rears back. “Shut your mouth, cojudo, or I’ll ram these dice down your throat.”

Tiempo only laughs. This is how they talk to one another, this is how they have always talked to one another, and Jago never saw anything wrong with it, until now.

Or, not wrong, perhaps; just less than. They know one another so well, love one another so much—why can they only communicate in jokes and insults?

“So what does Mama Tlaloc think of your gringa—sorry, Alicia?” José asks.

Jago shifts uncomfortably. “She doesn’t know about her.”

Now they’re all laughing. “Your mother knows everything, amigo,” Tiempo reminds him. “She just takes her time. Remember when we broke her bathroom window and blamed it on the gardener? And she pretended to buy our story?”

Jago doesn’t like to think about that. What his friends don’t know is that before his mother fired the gardener, she had him beaten bloody. His pain is on your shoulders, she told Jago. This is what happens when you’re too cowardly to tell the truth.

“She bided her time,” José remembers, shaking his head in admiration. “Waits six months, then—”

Chango slaps his hand against the pavement. “Bam. The Tlaloc hammer comes down. At the worst possible moment. She makes us all cry in front of the Laredo sisters.”

José smiles, sighs. “Ah, the Laredo sisters . . .” He tuts his finger at Jago. “What I remember most about the Laredo sisters is that you kept both for yourself. Always so greedy, Feo.”

“My point,” Tiempo says loudly, “is that you can bet everything that your mama already knows about your gringa, and you might want to deal with it before she does.”

“Or get rid of the problem,” Chango says, with what could almost be genuine concern. “You know how these tourists work, Feo. You’ve dated enough of them.”

“You’ve dumped enough of them,” José puts in, laughing.

“She’s slumming it,” Tiempo insists. “This is her vacation, but it’s your life. Don’t be so blind you do something you’ll regret.”

The only thing Jago regrets is joining his friends today, imagining that they could be happy for him, that they could accept that he’s no longer the person he used to be. He’s different now.

Or at least he wants to be.

He takes her to the desert.

He takes her to see the Nazca lines, those ancient glyphs that, for more than a thousand years, have spoken their ancient truth to the sky. He shows her the lines from above, hovering in a Tlaloc helicopter that he pilots himself; then they land and hike to the lines themselves, so she can feel the ancient dirt beneath her feet.

He doesn’t tell her that the lines scraped into the earth are messages from the Sky, that they symbolize an oath between an ancient people and their gods.

He doesn’t tell her that he once stood on this sacred ground and pledged his life to his line, and to a game that might end the world. That he slipped a knife across his palm, let the blood drip into the ancient lines, became one with his past and his future.

These things are forbidden.

Bringing her here now, when the tourists have faded away and they can breathe in the silence of a starry night, is the closest he can come to revealing his secret. He says it without words: This place is my heart. This ground beneath us, this sky above us, these messages from the dead—this place is my soul.

They lie on a blanket side by side, their hands linked, their eyes on the stars.

“Do you think there’s anyone up there?” she asks him.

“Do you?”

“Are we talking about God or little green men?”

“It was your question,” he points out.

She sighs. “I think . . . all those millions of stars, all those planets, we probably can’t be alone. But I kind of hope we are.”

This isn’t the answer he expected. “Why?”

She turns onto her side to face him, and he rolls toward her.

“I don’t like the idea of someone up there watching,” she says. “Judging, or whatever. I like the idea that we get to choose for ourselves what it all means. Who we’re going to be. And I guess . . .”

“What?”

“I . . . I don’t really know how to say it. I never talk like this. Or I never did before.” She touches his face, so gently. “You turn me into someone new, Jago. Every day, you make me a stranger to myself.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good thing.”

“It’s the best thing,” she tells him, and then, for a time, there’s silence, as her lips meet his and they find a wordless way to speak.

It’s not until they’re nodding off to sleep beneath the stars, her delicate body folded into his sturdy arms, that she finishes her earlier thought. “I guess I don’t want to believe in UFOs or in, you know, some kind of higher power, because I think it’s beautiful that we’re the only ones. Billions of stars, and only us to see them. Like a single spark in the darkness, you know?”

He squeezes her, gently but tightly, to say, yes, he does know. And he wishes she were right.

“You never answered. What do you think?” she asks. Her breath is warm on his neck. Her head lies on his chest, and he wonders if she can hear his heart beat.

It’s strange—this is the place where he became the Player. It’s saturated with memories and blood. But he’s never felt less like Jago Tlaloc, Player of the Olmec line. He feels like just a boy, lying beside a girl. He feels like nothing matters here but the two of them, their even breathing, their beating hearts, their warm bodies, their dreams, and their love.

She asks him questions no one has ever bothered to ask.

She trusts him to be gentle, to be kind, to be so many things he never knew he could be.

She thinks him beautiful, and here in the dark, he can almost believe it’s possible.

“I don’t know if we really are alone,” he lies. Then he says something true, the kind of thing Jago Tlaloc, Player of the Olmec, would never admit. “But that’s how being with you makes me feel. Alone in the universe. Only the two of us.”

“A spark in the night,” she whispers.

“A bonfire.”

Jago takes his friends’ advice about one thing: He tells his mother about Alicia. She pretends to be surprised.

“Invite the girl over for dinner,” she says, and it is not a request.

He obeys.

He always obeys his mother.

Jago picks her up in one of the family’s bulletproof Blazers. Alicia draws in a sharp breath as they approach the first of the guard towers, then seems to hold it for the entire long, winding drive up to the hacienda. He tries to see it through her eyes, this castle on a hill, and wonders if she’s judging him for living like a king despite the teeming swarm of poverty below. The Tlalocs do a great deal for the poor of Juliaca, but they could do more—they could always do more.

“This is amazing,” Alicia breathes, as they pull up in front of the beautifully manicured grounds and he opens her door. There’s something new in her eyes when she looks at him, and he realizes she never thought of him growing up in a place like this. He’s told her so much about the Tlaloc power—less so about the money that enables and derives from it. Other than that disastrous first date, he’s refrained from giving her lavish gifts or taking her out for expensive meals. Alicia isn’t that kind of girl.

But there’s a radiant smile on her face that he hasn’t seen before. “What?” he asks.

She shakes her head. “I just . . . I didn’t know.”

Dinner is exactly the disaster he expects it to be, although Alicia has no idea. Jago’s mother, Hayu Marca, is expert at appearing sweet and nurturing—but beneath these layers of maternal fluff is impenetrable steel. This is what strangers never seem to see.

Alicia is intimidated by his father, Guitarrero Tlaloc, who she assumes is the head of the family. Jago’s mother, on the other hand, greets her at the edge of the property and immediately envelops her in a warm hug, and afterward Alicia whispers to Jago, “I don’t know what you were so worried about; she’s lovely.”

Jago murmurs a noncommittal response.

The kitchen staff has gone all out, preparing an opulent spread of lomo saltado, aji de gallina, pollo a la brasa—the best Peru has to offer. Alicia eats heartily, and doesn’t bat an eye at the roasted guinea pig served whole, on a spit. She takes a small bite and pronounces it “interesting.” This is her highest compliment.

“Jago says you’re a dancer.” His mother’s English is flawless. Like Alicia, she refuses to call him Feo, but not because she thinks the nickname doesn’t fit. Naming a son is a mother’s prerogative, she always says. She’s not about to abdicate that responsibility to the streets.

“Was a dancer,” Alicia corrects her.

Jago’s father raises an eyebrow. “You quit?”

“I think there might be something better out there for me. Or at least, I just want the chance to find out.”

“And what do your parents think of all this?” Jago’s mother asks pointedly.

Alicia shrugs. “They’re parents. They like what they know. You know?”

“Mmm.” Jago’s mother frowns.

“But in the end, they want me to be happy,” Alicia adds, perhaps sensing things are going awry. “I mean, isn’t that what you want for Jago? For him to find whatever makes him happy?”

“What makes Jago happy is fulfilling his duties,” Jago’s father says.

“There’s got to be more than that,” Alicia argues. “I know you have a lot of family traditions here, but don’t you want him to find his own way?”

Jago takes her hand under the table and squeezes gently, hoping she will understand the message: Stop, please.

She does, and the subject abruptly shifts to the movies, and the difference between Hollywood and South American heartthrobs, something Jago’s younger sister and mother can both discuss at length, and Alicia does an excellent job pretending to care.

He knows it’s too late; the damage has been done. He waits through dessert, through after-dinner drinks, through his mother’s extended good-bye rituals, the compliments and hair stroking and promises traded, to keep in touch, to be family, to love each other because they both love Jago. He can tell from Alicia’s radiant smile that she thinks she’s aced her test, and she kisses him good night in full view of both his parents, promising to meet him for breakfast first thing in the morning. Then she climbs into the bulletproof car with the red talon slashing across its shiny black paint. Jago’s men will see her safely home.

They’ve already arranged to meet long before breakfast—Jago will slip out later and rescue her from her dorm, “like my very own Prince Charming rescuing me from a tower,” she likes to say.

But for now, she leaves—and leaves him alone with his parents.

“No,” his mother says, reclining into her favorite leather armchair. “I don’t like this one.” This house is several generations old, but when his parents got married, his mother redecorated it from floor to ceiling. She chose furnishings and tapestries that would look ancient, as if they’d always been there—as if this were her ancestral home. The bloodred eagle claw that serves as a family crest is emblazoned on the archway over the door, and etched into each of the stone tiles beneath her feet. This estate is her domain, now. She may have married into the family, but sometimes Jago thinks his mother is more of a Tlaloc than any of them.

“I like her, Mamá. That seems somewhat more relevant.”

His father, as usual, remains silent on questions of love.

“She’s going to put ideas in your head,” his mother says.

“How do you know I’m not going to put ideas in her head?”

“Oh, Jago.” His mother leans forward and clasps his hands. “You think you’re such a strong man, but you’re still a soft boy. You’re weak, here.” She taps his chest. “You always have been.”

“What are you worried about, Mamá? That I’ll be happy?”

“This is a girl who doesn’t understand anything about your life or your responsibilities, Jago. If it were simply a distraction, if you were merely slacking off . . .” She stops him before he can object. “Yes, I know all about the training you’ve missed, and I don’t care. Boys will be boys, and all that. I want you to have your fun, Jago. But you can’t go thinking it’s anything more. This girl, she doesn’t fit into your life—not now, not ever. And you can’t afford to start thinking that the two of you are the same. What you do . . . you can’t just quit because you get bored.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” he snaps.

He’s thought about it plenty, what it would take to walk away, how much he would have to want it and how much he would be giving up.

“Watch your tone, Jago.”

“Alicia isn’t just some girl, Mother. She’s not a distraction, but she’s also not a bad influence. She’s . . . Alicia. She’s amazing. And you would see that, if you weren’t so judgmental.”

He’s the only person who dares talk to her this way, and often she likes it. Not tonight.

“I could forbid you from seeing her,” his mother muses, as if weighing the idea.

“Don’t do that,” he warns her. “Don’t make me choose.”

Her eyebrows shoot sky-high. “Oh?”

He can’t look at her.

“I see,” she says. “Then I suppose I’ll simply have to live with it, won’t I?”

She stands up with great dignity, turns her back on him, and strides out of the room. He’s won, he thinks. But he doesn’t feel that way. Maybe because she’s right about one thing. Alicia has put ideas in his head, made him wonder whether violence and duty are his destiny, or only one choice among many.

He could be the Player without being a criminal, he thinks. He could choose a different life without renouncing his obligations. Isn’t that possible? He could walk away from the family business, be a poet or a musician or some anonymous man selling fried meat in an alleyway . . . couldn’t he? The Tlaloc family’s rule over Puno has been inextricably linked with Endgame and the Players for as long as any of the Olmec can remember, but just because something once was, must it always be?

He could even walk away from Endgame altogether, renounce his status as the Player, hand the sacred duty over to someone else. He could be free of all the training, of having the fate of his line rest on every choice he makes.

Jago remembers the first time he truly felt like the Player. He was 13 years old, just months past swearing the oath, binding himself to this life and this duty. He had been on training missions before, of course, but this one was different. This wasn’t simply some exercise put to him by his uncles, an attempt to hone his skills. This was real. Meaningful.

He had scaled a skyscraper in Buenos Aires, disabled an alarm system, slipped past a security force armed with machine guns, cracked a safe owned by the richest man in Argentina, and taken an ancient Olmec knife that this man’s ancestors had stolen from Jago’s people long ago.

There have been so many missions since then that Jago barely remembers this one. He left some bodies behind, he remembers that. There was a bit of a mess on the way out—an alarm, an explosion, a hasty escape down the Rio de la Plata—but mostly, it’s a blur.

What he has never forgotten, what he will never forget, is how it felt to arrive home with the ceremonial knife in hand. How his uncle, a former Player himself, kissed his forehead, and said, “You have done well for your people.”

Jago had won victories for his family before; he had been fighting for Tlaloc honor in the streets since he was six years old. But this was different. This wasn’t for the Tlalocs; this was for the Olmec. This was noble; this was right.

That day, Jago didn’t feel like the monster of Juliaca, the ugly, scarred Feo who takes whatever he wants, whose face makes his people cower in fear.

Jago felt like a hero.

He could never give that up. Without Endgame, he’s nothing. He’s nobody.

But maybe he wouldn’t have to give it up. Maybe he could have Alicia, and the beautiful life she wants for both of them, and still be a hero.

Even thinking this way, even imagining, is a betrayal. That’s how his mother would see it, at least, and she would never let him speak to Alicia again. His mother loves him; he knows that. But her love is the opposite of Alicia’s: It comes with conditions. It comes with expectations. She loves her son, who is the heir to the family business, who is the Player, who is strong and ruthless and powerful. She couldn’t fathom the idea of a son who was none of those things, who was simply Jago, her boy. For his mother, love and power are inextricable. If he ever gave up the one, he would lose the other. He knows that.

But it doesn’t matter, he reminds himself. These are just idle thoughts, not acts, and thoughts are safe. No one can peer inside his head.

His mother will never have to know.

But thoughts do have consequences.

Even the act of thinking can have consequences.

This is one of the first lessons Jago learned as a child, as he mastered rudimentary hand-to-hand combat. Instinct is always faster than conscious thought, and in a combat situation almost always more accurate. When thinking drowns out instinct, when it makes you second-guess yourself or hesitate to do what must be done, that’s when it can be most deadly.

Jago should have known that; he should have known better.

But on that Friday afternoon, one week before Alicia is due to leave him behind, as he tracks his prey to a flophouse on the edge of the city and corners them in a seedy room rented by the hour, he’s not thinking about his childhood lessons.

He’s thinking about what Alicia said to him that morning: “Let’s run away together, just the two of us. Let’s see the world.”

Does she mean it?

Would she do it?

Would he?

He’s been tasked with hunting down two men, former employees foolish enough to steal from the Tlalocs and think they could get away with it. This is a crime that comes with a standard punishment: death.

He doesn’t want to be here, in this dark, crumbling motel with its fetid stink and suspicious stains. He doesn’t want to be creeping through a rat-infested hallway, locking the silencer onto his gun, preparing to assassinate two men who have stolen from a family so wealthy it barely noticed the loss—two men whose greatest crime is stupidity. Tiempo and Chango wanted to come along, but Jago insisted on going alone.

It’s one against two, maybe. But the one is a Player.

The two don’t know it yet, but they’re doomed.

Jago creeps up to the door. The manager, after a small bribe made its way into his pocket, gave him the room number and a tip: the lock is broken. There’s nothing standing in Jago’s way.

You think this ugly life is all you can have, but you’re wrong, he can almost hear Alicia saying as he eases open the door.

One of the men, Julio, is sprawled on the bed facedown, snoring. Alejandro is shaving, with his back to the door. Two bullets, one in each head, easy in, easy out—that’s what he’s been trained to do.

What you’ve done doesn’t have to define you. What your parents want doesn’t have to define you. She’s said it so many times. She wants so much for him.

Jago takes aim. Alejandro first, because at the sound of the shot it will take Julio a second to shake off sleep and get his bearings, and by the time he does, he’ll be dead.

I don’t care what you’ve done in the past. Who are you now? Who do you want to be?

His finger tightens on the trigger, as it has many times before. This is a simple calculation; these men are enemies of the family, of the line.

You can choose.

For the first time in his life, Jago hesitates.

Then fires.

Alejandro screams as the bullet blows off his ear. Jago has perfect aim. He knows how to kill—or how to wound. As Julio leaps out of bed, Jago pulls the trigger again, firing a second shot through Alejandro’s other ear, another through his hand, a third and fourth through each of his feet. A final shot to his gut, an inch above the intestines. By the time Julio has reached his weapon, Alejandro is writhing on the floor, screaming and bleeding, and Jago’s gun is aimed at Julio’s forehead.

Julio drops his weapon, raises his hands in the air.

“Take your friend, leave this city, and never return,” Jago says. “And tell everyone that the punishment for crossing the Tlalocs is swift and painful.”

Julio nods quickly, repeatedly, murmuring, “Sí, sí, whatever you say, Feo, anything, please,” and—with Jago’s permission—kneels at Alejandro’s side, trying his best to staunch the bleeding.

Jago wonders whether Julio will get the wounded man help, or simply abandon him. If the latter, it will be a very painful death. But it will not be on Jago’s shoulders.

This is what mercy looks like, he thinks, backing away from the men and out the door, down the hall, home to Alicia’s embrace. This is what mercy feels like.

He won’t tell Alicia.

It’s not good enough for her.

Not yet.

On the day everything changes, Alicia’s last day in the country, Jago thinks he has never been so miserable and so happy at the same time.

They have driven to the eastern beach to watch the sun set over Lake Titicaca. “Nice metaphor for our relationship,” Alicia says, with something adjacent to bitterness. She still wants him to run away with her. He says, day after day, he can’t . . . he might . . . he shouldn’t . . . he doesn’t know . . . he needs more time.

They’re running out of time.

She could go back home; they could email and text and do whatever it is normal teenagers do when an ocean gets in between them, but nothing about them is normal, and Jago fears that once she leaves, he’ll never see her again. She’ll run away without him—or she’ll go home, return to the dance studio and the life her parents want for her, forget she ever flirted with being a different kind of girl. They have this one last day together, and then either he leaves behind everything he’s ever known and loved, betrays his duty and generations upon generations of Tlaloc Players, shames his family, breaks his sacred oath, gives up all the certainties of his life and steps into the unknown—or he loses the only girl he’s ever loved, and all hope of a beautiful life.

Leaving is impossible. But so is the thought of losing her.

She hopes against hope he’ll change his mind and go with her; he hopes against hope she’ll decide to stay.

In the meantime, they try not to think of the future; he holds her hand, and, quietly, they watch the sun sink in the sky. Waves lap at the shore. The sky is streaked with gold. Clouds glow an angry pink. “It’s like fire,” Alicia murmurs. “Like the sky is on fire.”

Jago looks beyond her, to the east, where the sky is a flat, peaceful blue, cool and calm. This is what loving Alicia feels like: firestorm and tranquillity, all at once. He feels wild when he’s with her, his skin sparking, his brain spinning, his heart leaping with possibility—but at his center is something so quiet and sure. A peace he’s never known without her, and fears he will never know again.

They’re both looking at the sky, not at the waves, not at the sand, not at each other, and certainly not at the empty road that winds along the strip of beach. Not even when an engine roars in the distance and a car approaches do they turn; Jago is determined that this moment be perfect, that for once they be alone in their pocket universe, no obligations to anyone but each other. His heart is beating so loud it drowns out his instincts.

And so he doesn’t see the car slow, the window roll down, the tip of a Kalashnikov poke through. He doesn’t, until it’s too late, see Julio’s face at the wheel, the face of the man he spared.

When he does see it, he throws himself at Alicia, but even the speed of the Player is no match for a bullet, and the bullet has already been fired, and Alicia is already screaming, already falling; Alicia is in his arms, bleeding and pale and fading away.

Julio guns the engine and speeds off.

This is what mercy looks like.

This is what mercy looks like: a pool of blood, seeping into sand. Pale skin, limp body, tearstained cheeks. A balled-up T-shirt pressed to the wound, bleeding through.

“Please,” Jago says, and he’s talking to the man on the other end of the phone, a man who works for his family, who fixes problems, whatever they may be—and he’s talking to Alicia, who won’t stop bleeding.

Jago knows first aid, he knows how to dress a wound, how to triage, how to think clearly in a crisis—and also knows how little he can do, alone on this strip of sand. Maybe he should put her in the car, drive to a hospital himself, but the car is nearly a mile walk down the beach, and he doesn’t want to move her unless he has to. Help will come, he tells himself. Help will come in time.

He lays her on her back, lets her weight seal the makeshift bandage to the wound, holds her hand, hopes.

“Jago,” she whispers. “I can’t.”

“Tough luck,” he says. “You have to. Hang on. Someone’s coming.”

“No, I can’t . . .” She draws in a rasping breath.

“You don’t have to talk,” he says. For her, he tries to keep his voice steady, fearless. He is Jago Tlaloc—he’s supposed to be immune to fear.

She coughs blood. He wipes it away, gently as he can. Her skin is hot to the touch.

“Who were they?” she asks him. “Why did they?”

“I don’t know,” he lies again.

But she’s always able to see through his bullshit. Even now. “It’s because of you,” she says. There’s more strength in her voice now. There’s fire. “This is because of you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he assures her, and that’s the worst lie of all, because what could matter more?

“Someone shot me,” she says in wonder. “I got shot. What the hell?”

She’s laughing, suddenly, and he worries that this is delirium, that this is the beginning of the end, and the road is still empty; help is nowhere in sight.

“I’ll kill him for you,” Jago promises. “I’ll track him down, I’ll take him apart, piece by piece. I’ll make him hurt.”

“Oh God,” she gasps. “You.”

“What?”

“You . . . are just like them. Fucking monsters.”

He thought it couldn’t hurt any more than it already does. But this is worse. “No, Alicia—”

“You kill him, and then what? His family kills you? Is that where it stops? Does it ever stop? Or does it just keep going, pain and blood and blood and pain and pain and pain . . .”

She’s so pale. Her voice is thin and thready, the words floating away from her, like they belong to someone else. He tells himself that she’s feverish, in shock, that she doesn’t mean what she’s saying, that it doesn’t matter what she says, as long as she’s all right.

“Shhh. I know it hurts,” he whispers. “I know.”

“But it doesn’t.” She looks at him in childlike wonder, then coughs up another soft spray of blood. “It doesn’t hurt, Jago. I can’t . . . I can’t feel it. My legs. I can’t feel anything. . . .”

He stops breathing.

“Jago?”

Steady, he reminds himself. Calm. “That’s normal,” he lies. “Don’t worry.” He brushes her hair back from her sweaty face.

“Normal? This is normal?” She’s laughing again, laughing and crying and shaking, shuddering, her hand squeezing his as if of its own accord, all of her trembling. Except her legs—those are still. “What if I can’t dance again? What if I can’t . . . No. No. You. Get away from me.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Alicia.”

“You destroy everything. You make everything ugly, like you. I wish I never—”

“Don’t say that, Alicia.” She’s always seen the truth in him, the possibility. If all she sees is a monster . . . “Please.” If he were the monster she says he is, wouldn’t her words anger him? Wouldn’t he push her aside, tell her that she entered freely into this life, fooled herself into believing it couldn’t touch her, fooled him into believing that he had a choice?

He isn’t angry; he doesn’t push her aside. He wants to hold on to her forever, if she will only let him. “Please, Alicia, tell me you know I love you. That I will never let anyone hurt you again. That I can fix this. Please.”

She doesn’t say it.

She doesn’t say anything.

“Alicia?”

Her eyes are closed. Her face is as gray as the sunless sky. Sirens blare in the distance, so slow, so useless. Jago holds on to her, willing her to wake up, even if she wants to call him a monster, yell at him to let go. He never will.

She survives.

He knows this because he bribes a doctor to tell him.

She’ll recover; she’ll walk. It’s a medical miracle, the doctor says, and nothing more than that.

No one wants to tell him anything, not officially, because he’s not family.

And she won’t tell him herself, because when she wakes up, she refuses to see him. He could insist, of course. No one, certainly not the doctors working in the hospital’s brand-new state-of-the-art Tlaloc Memorial Wing, would dare tell Jago Tlaloc where he can and cannot go.

But he won’t violate her wishes, and she wishes to never see him again.

That’s what the kind nurse says, after he’s spent three days in a row in the waiting room, hoping she’ll change her mind.

“Go home,” the nurse suggests. “Get some rest. Get a hug from your mama. The girl will come around.”

Jago does go home; Alicia doesn’t come around.

Instead, she sends a letter.

Dear Feo, she writes, and that’s when he knows what kind of letter this will be. He’s Feo to her now. An ugly beast, and this is no fairy tale. There will be no third-act transformation. He is the monster, and she’s lucky to have escaped with her life.

The doctors say I’ll make a full recovery. Please don’t blame yourself. This isn’t your fault; it’s mine. You are who you are; your life is what it is. I never should have tried to turn you into someone else. I never should have let you believe this was anything more than a vacation for me—I guess I let myself believe it too. But when this happened . . . I know what I want now. Who I am. I’ve given my entire life to dancing, and I’m not going to turn my back on that. It’s my dream. My destiny, I guess you’d say. It took almost losing it to figure that out. I went a little crazy for a while, thinking it was so easy to just wish yourself into a different life. I’m going home, Feo. Thank you for helping me understand that I belong there. Just like you belong here. I’m sorry for ever suggesting otherwise.

Best wishes,

Alicia

Jago doesn’t understand. Has he done this to her? Broken her, convinced her to give up her dreams?

He’s the one who put her in harm’s way, by failing to live up to his responsibilities. If he’d only done his job, killed Alejandro and Julio, not fallen prey to this stupid delusion of kindness and mercy, then Alicia would have been safe.

His job, his entire life, is to protect his people. Maybe this is his punishment for imagining he could escape that, or want to.

Or maybe she means it, and this was, as she said, simply a vacation for her, a break from her cozy life.

Either way, this was inevitable. His mother was right: They’re too different. They’re too dangerous for each other. Alicia made him soft . . . and the consequences of that have made her heartbreakingly hard.

You are who you are, she wrote.

Best wishes, she wrote.

He doesn’t know which one hurts more.

Jago locks himself in his room for two days and two nights. He gives himself over completely to his anguish, letting it sweep over him, wash him out to sea; he drowns in it, drowns in memories of her. Jago has been taught how to withstand pain, how to retreat to a place in his mind where he doesn’t feel it, but he lets himself feel all of this: pain, guilt, betrayal, fury. He lets the fire rage inside of him, lets it burn everything away—and then, when he’s hollow and clean, burn itself out.

When he’s ready, when it’s done, he sets fire to the letter, drops it into the trash bin, and watches the flames consume what’s left of her.

He emerges from his room a different man.

A man who’s learned his lesson. Not to dream, not to wonder, not to love. Not to think he deserves anything more than what he has—not to think he’s anything but a monster. Feo, outside and in.

This is good. This is as it should be.

He will not forget himself again. He will not be tempted by mercy or beauty. He will not show weakness. He will find Julio, and punish him, as he will punish all enemies of the Tlaloc and the Olmec. But he won’t do it for Alicia, who ran away from him. He vows he will never again put some girl, some stranger from a foreign line, ahead of his own friends and family. He will never stop loving her; he will never forget her. But she is his past, and his past doesn’t have to define him. She taught him that.

A new future starts today. And from today on, he will act only for his line. He will care only for his own. They’re the only ones who can understand what he is, and love it.

They’re the only ones he can trust.

Hayu Marca Tlaloc steps out of the SUV and ventures into the abandoned alley, her high heels clicking against the cobblestones. She looks down in disgust, carefully stepping over a pile of drying dog shit. She’ll have to throw the shoes out when she gets home.

A small sacrifice to the cause.

At her side, she carries a small briefcase, filled with US$100,000.

Julio’s eyes light up when he sees it.

“You did a good job,” she tells him.

He bows his head. “Gracias, Señora Tlaloc.”

“But I’m surprised you’re not halfway to Brazil by now—my son’s sure to come looking for you, and I promise, he’s not very happy.”

He doesn’t dare meet her eyes. “I came for my payment.”

“Ah, yes. Your payment. Well worth it, I have to say.”

Her plan has worked out better than she could have imagined. Poor Jago will be heartbroken for a bit, she knows, but he’ll get over it. Every man needs a few dents in his heart—it’s how he learns to be hard. He’ll blame himself, of course, but he’ll forgive himself too. Men always do. It will be easier for him, believing that the girl made a full recovery, and Hayu has paid the doctors and nursing staff enough to ensure no one will ever say anything different.

As long as he never sees la gringa again, all will be well.

And la gringa has been taken care of.

“If you ever try to contact my son again, I will kill you,” Hayu told her in the hospital room. “Do you understand me?”

“I love him,” the girl said, as if that were allowed, and Hayu nearly smothered her with a pillow. “I said all these hateful things to him, and I have to tell him—”

“You will never speak to him. I don’t like to repeat myself, so I don’t want to have to say this again. Are we clear?”

The girl nodded.

“I’m sending you back home, but be sure: even there, I’ll have people watching you. For the rest of your life, I’ll be watching. I have that much power. And as for mercy . . . I’m expending all of it right here. This is the only chance you’ll have. Do you believe me?”

The girl nodded again, tears streaming down her face.

She was alone in a foreign country with a flimsy grasp of the native language and a bullet hole in her spine. She’d just been told she would never walk again. She’d lost all will to fight.

Once reality sank in, she would blame Jago. Hayu may have forged the letter to Jago, but she truly believes it’s what la gringa will want to say to him, once she understands the cold facts of her new life. The brilliant dancer, confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her days, and all because she made the mistake of loving the wrong boy. She will most certainly come to hate Jago, Hayu thinks. Almost as much as she’ll hate herself.

Maybe that’s why Hayu takes the risk of letting her live.

Transgressions like hers must be punished.

“Of course, my son can never know about this,” she tells Julio now. “Understood?”

He nods. “Claro, señora. Of course.”

“You know I don’t like to take risks of any kind.”

“I have heard that about you, sí.”

“So you’ll understand, then, why I have to do this.” Hayu slides a very small revolver from her purse and shoots him in the head.

Julio drops to the ground, a neat hole at the center of his forehead. Someone will find the body in a day or two, but the police won’t investigate very hard—not a man like that, in a neighborhood like this.

Not that it matters. The police are in her pocket. All of Juliaca is in her pocket. And now her son is there again too, right where he belongs.

She slips the gun back into her purse and clacks her way back to the SUV, noting with displeasure that the pigeons have crapped all over the windshield. Hayu shakes her head. She abhors coming down into this part of the city, almost as much as she abhors the violence that inevitably comes with it.

The things we do for love, she thinks ironically, then sighs and starts the long drive back to the hacienda. She’s eager to get home. Her son is the Player. He is the most powerful man in Juliaca. And he needs her. He will always need her.

Whether he knows it or not.

SHANG

AN

When the air horn blasts in his ear at dawn, An Liu is already awake. He has been awake since four a.m., waiting for the day to start.

He has been waiting for this day for six long years.

“Happy birthday, An Liu,” his father says, as An springs out of bed and speeds through his waking rituals, the cleansing and tidying demanded of him by his father. If his bed is left rumpled, if his ears are left clogged with wax or his cowlick is left sticking up, there will be consequences. His father believes all messes should be punished.

An hasn’t made a mess in years. He no longer remembers how.

“Have you chosen?” his father asks.

An nods yes.

He will not speak until necessary.

His father believes in efficiency. Sloppiness of all kinds will be punished, and this includes excess words.

“What will it be?” his father asks.

An’s birthday is the one day of the year when he gets to choose. On his fifth birthday, he chose knives, and the blade carved five sharp lines of blood into his back. For his sixth birthday, six lashes with the whip; for his seventh, a blowtorch applied to seven points along his arms and legs.

Every year, he chooses carefully, picking the worst pain he can think of. His father has taught him that this is how to be a man. A man wants to be tested; a man wants to be hurt. The body is molten steel; pain hardens it into place.

Six years have passed since his training began. Today he is 10 years old; today he is steel, he is ready.

“I choose the brand.”

His father smiles: He has chosen well. “Good.”

The kitchen smells of persimmon, and his stomach is stuffed full of his mother’s shì zi bng. The little sweet buns stuffed with black sesame paste are his favorite, and for his fourth birthday, he is allowed to eat as many as he wants.

“Anything for my little Liu on his big birthday,” his mother says, squeezing him into a hug so tight it makes his full belly hurt, but he says nothing, because he likes it too much, hiding in her embrace. It is safe here, behind her sturdy arms, pressed against her soft chest. An is afraid of so much: thunderstorms, large birds, small spaces, dark shadows, even butterflies. He is even afraid of his uncles, who tease him in their booming voices and say that he will never make his way in the world if he insists on being such a little worm. But in his mother’s arms, he is not afraid. She will always protect him.

This is what he believes, as he believes the world is bounded by the park at one end of his street and the bridge at the other, as he believes the only people who matter are his uncles and his mother. His uncles are stern but fair; his mother is everything. He believes the world is full of justice and generosity, because that is all he has been allowed to see.

He believes that he is special, because that is what his mother tells him.

He believes that his father is dead, because his mother tells him that too. “His brothers wanted to help raise you, because they are good men,” she tells him.

They are good men, and he thinks his father must have been too. Maybe the best of men.

But after lunch, the door opens, and a tall shadow falls across the floor. A booming voice shouts his mother’s name. An runs into the living room and hides under a table.

He is also afraid of strangers.

In the kitchen, there are raised voices, the sounds of adults arguing. An curls into a ball. The stranger calls his name, but he doesn’t move.

“What’s wrong with him?” the man says.

“Nothing,” his mother says. “Liu, come here; there’s someone who wants to meet you.” She doesn’t sound quite right, not like his mother, strong and fierce. He wishes his uncles were home. They are big, scary men and would send the stranger away, make everything right again.

“Is he stupid?” the man asks.

“Of course not.”

“Then why can’t he obey a simple order?”

“He’s not used to—”

“An Liu!” the man barks, and then a hand closes around his arm and drags him out from his hiding place, onto his feet. The hand lets him go, and An Liu is relieved for a moment—then the hand rears back and cracks him hard across the face.

He bursts into tears.

“Mother?” he whimpers, and holds his arms out to her, because he is hurt and scared and it is her job to protect him. But his mother stands beside the mean man, her eyes on the carpet. She doesn’t move.

“You will look at me,” the man says.

An blinks back tears, takes a hesitant step toward his mother.

The man slaps him again, so hard it makes his vision go blurry. There’s a soft, insistent buzzing in his ears.

“I said, look at me. Not her. Me. And stop crying, if you know what’s good for you.”

An looks at him. The man is built like a tree, tall and thick, his face craggy, his eyes a beady black.

“Do you know who I am?”

An shakes his head, trying very hard to hold back his tears. He’s afraid of what will happen if he can’t stop them from streaming down his face.

“I’m your father,” the man says. “You may rejoice, because I’ve come home to make a man of you. And I see I’m just in time.”

An sits on the edge of the bench, his posture rigid. His gaze is fixed on the long branding iron. Its tip, carved into the shape of the Chinese character for strength, glows orange as his father turns it slowly over the flame, heating it to 400 degrees Celsius.

The color changes with the heat; his father has taught him that. A black iron will singe; a red iron will destroy. His father pulls the long rod off the flame, waits for the bright orange to fade to the color of ash, the proper color for a permanent mark.

An prepares himself. He breathes slowly, turns inward. Pain is an old friend, its habits familiar and well-worn.

“Turn,” his father said.

An bares his naked back to the iron. His father presses it to the soft skin at the base of An’s neck.

The iron sizzles.

The noxious smell of burning flesh fills the air.

Inside his head, silent and safe from his father’s scorn, An screams and screams.

Three seconds.

Two seconds.

Pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain.

One second.

Release.

“That’s one,” his father says, then returns the branding iron to the fire to heat it back to the proper temperature. Soon they will begin again.

An Liu is supposed to have longevity noodles and cake for his birthday dinner.

He gets no dinner at all.

Instead, the man who calls himself An’s father takes him down to the basement. An is afraid of the basement and the things that might live in its musty dark: spiders, rats, roaches, monsters. He kicks and screams and cries, until the man picks him up and hurls him down the stairs.

In a tangled heap, in the dark, dazed and in pain, An finally falls silent. The man, the father, clomps down the stairs and towers over him.

“I’m going to give you the facts of life,” he says to An, and then tells him a series of amazing things.

That An’s people are descendants of an ancient civilization, once ruled by strange gods from above. That when these gods returned to their home in the sky, they promised they would someday come back to end the world, sparing only that bloodline most worthy of survival. That every generation, one Player is chosen, and that that Player must be special and strong, for if the gods return, that Player will Play for the Shang, and all hope will rest on his shoulders.

That the oracle bones have just been cast, and of all the Shang boys in all the world, they named An Liu. When he turns 13, he will be his generation’s Player.

An understands little of this. The words flutter past him like moths, flitting away as he reaches for one after another.

“I made a mistake. I’m not too proud to admit that. I assumed you would be as worthless as your mother. I should have known my blood would breed true. Now that I know what you are, what you’re fated to become, I will repair what’s been broken in my absence. I will make you strong. The Shang have tasked me with this.”

The father unbuckles his heavy leather belt and takes it into his hands.

“Why?” An cries, as the man starts whipping him with the belt.

“Pain is its own answer,” the man says, as the belt rises and falls, and the pain overtakes An, and finally, mercifully, the world goes black.

When he wakes, he is in a narrow, hard cot. The walls around him are bare, and too close. He recognizes the space: the basement closet, rarely used, smelling of mold. His sheets are stiff with dried blood.

“This is where you will sleep now,” his father tells him.

An hurts all over.

“Mother?” he says.

“Your mother is gone.”

This doesn’t make any sense to An Liu. He’s never spent a day or night without his mother. How could she be gone, when they are a part of each other?

“She’s disgusted by you,” his father says. “She sees how soft you are, how weak, and she left you to me. If you do as I say and learn to make yourself hard and strong, then perhaps she will come back.”

“When?”

“Not for a very long time,” his father says.

“But when?” An says, and flinches, thinking his father will strike him for asking the question again, but he must know.

“When you’re older. When you’re a man.”

“When I’m ten?” An asks, grasping for an unfathomably old age. This is what a very long time means to him. By then he will be all grown up.

“If I say yes, will you stop asking about her?”

An nods yes.

“Then yes, when you are ten. If you do as you’re told; if you’re good enough.”

An swears he will be good enough.

When the pain fades so that he can creep out of bed, he tiptoes up the stairs to his mother’s room. It is totally bare. Her belongings are gone. All that remains of her are the blue scraps of the last dress she sewed herself. An scoops up a handful of the sky-blue cloth and buries his nose in it.

It smells like her.

He tucks the fabric into his shirt. If this is all he has left of her, he will treasure it.

“An Liu!” his father shouts.

An scurries toward the sound of his father’s voice. He will do whatever he’s told, obey any command he’s given. He will find a way to please this man, and when he finally does, he will have his mother back.

After his flesh has stopped sizzling and he’s able to slip a light shirt over his bandaged skin, An Liu’s day proceeds as usual.

He stays in the basement, his home within the home, and works his body, training with all the traditional Shang weapons that he wields like an expert: spears, poleaxes, dagger-axes. Then he works his mind, studying the engineering blueprints and circuit diagrams that, once committed to memory, will allow him to disable any security system and dismantle any explosive the world has been able to invent.

It’s not that he likes it down here—like is one of the words that has lost all meaning for An Liu, along with choose and pleasure and happy. But he feels comfortable in this dank place. The scratching of insect legs against the stone wall makes him feel he is surrounded by friends.

He takes his dinner at the table beside his father and his uncles. They chat politely with one another, but no one speaks to him, as is his father’s decree. They feast on bowls of yáng ròu pào mó, shredding the tender bread into strips that will absorb the soup, slurping until their bowls are clean. An Liu eats his customary rice and broth.

No one says anything about his mother.

True to his word, he has not asked about her in six years. But he has not forgotten.

He knows that an answer given to a child is not a promise—and that the only promise his father ever made him was that there would be pain and, beyond that, more pain. But there is a part of him that chooses to believe that today is the day. That the moment he has been waiting for is real, that he has proven his worth and his strength, and so his mother will finally return.

Except that the day passes, and then the evening, and soon An has completed his nighttime rituals and received his daily dose of pain—easily accomplished, tonight, with a hand pressed to the fresh brand marks.

His father is not a man inclined to explanations. But gradually, over the years, An Liu has come to understand the man’s philosophy of strength and weakness.

Weakness derives from fear, and all fear is fear of pain.

Thus it is only the man with no fear of pain who has no weakness; as An Liu learns to inure himself to pain, he will relinquish all fear, and he will grow strong. The theory has borne out. The body and its tortures hold no secrets for An Liu. There is nothing he will not risk, for there is nothing he cannot endure. As for that other kind of pain, the pain of losing that which he loves the most? An Liu’s father has taken care of that too. He’s stripped An Liu’s life of everything and everyone that could be loved. There is nothing left to lose but his life, and that would be a mercy. There is nothing left to fear.

This, his father says, is how the Shang mold a Player true of spirit, capable of victory. This is his father’s claim, but An Liu has come to understand many things over the years: he has learned to read his father’s expressions, and he can see the joy on the man’s face when skin tears and burns.

Other men may fear pain; An Liu’s father feeds on it.

Perhaps this is why he says nothing about An Liu’s mother—perhaps he can see the desire burning in his son’s eyes, and enjoys watching as the hours pass and the fire burns itself out.

“Bed,” his father commands, as he does every night at precisely 10 p.m.

This time, the first time since the day his father arrived, An does not obey. He stands up and faces his father, who is the only thing left in the world that can frighten him. An is no longer the boy he once was, no longer the soft and weak worm that his father first met. He is still a boy, yes. Still smaller than average for his age and thin as a reed, with soft features that offer the illusion of innocence. But his arms are muscled, his legs powerful; his mind is sharp, his will unbreakable.

“Where is my mother?” he says.

“Excuse me?” His father looks surprised. It has been a long time since An has spoken anything but the direct response to a question.

“You said she would return when I was ten years old, and today I am ten. Where is she?”

For the first time in An Liu’s memory, his father starts to laugh. “Did I tell you that? When could I possibly have told you that?”

An’s hands are curling into fists. He doesn’t like to be laughed at. Especially in front of his uncles, who watch from the kitchen with avid interest. An Liu is surprising them tonight; he’s surprising himself.

“The day she left,” An reminds him. “You told me if I worked very hard and made a man of myself, she would come back. When I turned ten.”

“You? A man?” His father snorts. “You, little worm? I suppose you think you’re worthy to be the Player now too?”

“Yes, Father. I do.” An Liu has three more years before he will be old enough to take on the mantle officially, but he feels ready right now, to fight for the life of his people as he’s been groomed to do.

“Then you’re dumber than you look.”

This is An’s cue: to scurry away before he earns a punishment. Always before, he has done this. But always before, he had a purpose. He had this day to look forward to; he had hope.

Now he has nothing.

“I want you to bring my mother back,” An says. He’s older and wiser now than he once was; he understood long ago that his mother wouldn’t have left voluntarily. Her absence or presence is under his father’s control, just like everything else. In this home, his father is the only god. “It’s time.”

“Are you suggesting that your life is missing something? That this life your uncles and I have given you isn’t good enough?”

An summons all the courage he has. “Yes.”

“Then I suppose I’ve failed, and you’re just as disgustingly weak as you ever were,” his father says. “We’ll have to redouble our efforts.” He turns to An’s uncles. “Brothers, join me in giving An Liu his final birthday gift.”

An Liu knows the uncles will do as he says—they always do. Unlike his father, they take no joy in cruelty, but they believe in doing what needs to be done. When he was younger, he struggled to understand them, how they could have allowed his father into their lives, how they could have turned on the boy they once claimed to love. Before that, they had not been gentle, but neither had they been cruel. Once, An Liu cared about this change, wondered whether, secretly, they hated his father as much as he did, whether they were equally afraid.

But An Liu has learned how to stop caring. He sees his uncles clearly now, not for what they once were, but what they now are: the enemy.

The men form a ring around An and raise their fists. Now it’s An who laughs. He will not cower away from them; he will not hide or fear what is to come.

He will fight like a man.

He will fight like a man with nothing left to lose.

“You’ve taught me well, Father,” he says, raising his own fists. “I have no fear left.”

He doesn’t wait for them to make the first move. Instead he swings a punch at his father, and the crunch of his father’s nose against his knuckles is the sweetest sound he’s ever heard.

His father shrieks with rage. As An fights his uncles, whirling and ducking and holding his own, one well-trained 10-year-old against four grown men, his father takes up the branding iron from its home by the fireplace. He slashes it through the air and strikes An solidly across the chest, knocking him to the floor. His head smacks hard against the concrete. Thunder and lightning explode at once, and he is consumed by the noise and the light and the pain.

Then all is still.

An Liu is somewhere else.

Far away, in the black.

Untouchable. Untouched.

He feels nothing, sees nothing, cannot know that even after his eyes close and he goes limp, his father continues to beat him, teaching him a lesson he will never learn, because he is gone.

His uncles are tasked with curing him of his fears.

When he is five years old, the uncle who was once his favorite nails him into a coffin and buries him in the ground.

An screams in the dark. He kicks at the pine walls closing him in, tries to catch his breath, feels like he will lose his mind if he doesn’t get space get air get free get out get out get out.

He does not get out.

His voice goes hoarse; his mind goes blank.

He lies still, in the dark, whimpers, waits.

Somewhere above, up in the light, he hears his uncles’ voices raised in argument. He clings to the sound, evidence that a world still exists.

“This is not right, Hua. You know that. He’s only a boy.”

“A boy who will be the Player someday, and you know that makes all the difference.”

“The things we’re teaching him . . . what kind of Player will he be?”

“To harden a Player’s spirit, to teach him the shape of pain, you know this is the Shang way. He learns pain now, or he learns death later. This is how we help him survive.”

“No, Hua. Not like this. Pain tempered with love, with mercy, with wisdom. That is the Shang way. This is . . . I don’t know what this is.”

“This is how our brother sees fit to train his son, Chen. It’s a father’s right to train his Player. This is also the Shang way. And if things go too far, at least we will be here.”

“Too far? He’s got the boy in a coffin—”

“Keep talking like this, it might be you in a coffin. You know that best of all.”

The argument ends there.

Endless time passes. An Liu cries.

“Peace, Little Liu.” His uncle Chen, from above, pain in his voice. “Patience.”

He cries out for Uncle Chen, who once fed him sweets when his mother wasn’t looking and told him stories about dragon slayers and princesses when he had trouble falling asleep. He says, “Uncle, don’t you love me anymore?”

There is a silence, and then a low voice. “This is love.”

And so An Liu learns: Pain is love. Fear is love. Violence is love.

Life is love, so An Liu learns to hate it.

He learns other things too: how to shoot all manner of guns, how to speak the languages of the modern world and those long dead, how to use a computer to explore and dominate, how to manipulate code and circuitry to make machines do exactly as he wishes, and this is his favorite language to speak, because the machines are the only things that obey him. Inside the computer, he has ultimate control; inside the computer, he is God, and his father doesn’t exist.

Xi’an, China, is filled with wonders. It was an imperial capital for 1,000 years, the seat of 13 dynasties, ruled over by 73 emperors. It is surrounded by the world’s largest city wall and home to remnants of glorious civilizations past: the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, the army of terra-cotta warriors, the sacred mountain Huàshān—An Liu sees none of it, knows none of it.

He is not allowed out of the house. He is rarely, and only with supervision, allowed out of the basement.

An Liu’s world is dark and small, peopled only by his father and his uncles.

His time is structured and scheduled. Like everything else in his life, it is not his own.

It belongs to the Shang, his father tells him. His life belongs to the Shang.

“You will Play and you will win,” his father often shouts, when whipping An for minor failures. It becomes a mantra, drilled into An’s subconscious, something he knows about himself as surely as he knows his name.

He will Play.

He will win.

He will be the savior of the Shang people, rescue them from extinction when Endgame comes. He knows this; he simply doesn’t know why he should have to do such a thing, why the Shang would ask it of him.

He doesn’t understand how he can be the only one who dreams of escape from this life. Who are these fools, that they would choose to survive?

For fifteen days, An Liu is unconscious, drowning in the black.

His body lies in a hospital bed, strung with wires and tubes. Monitors beep irregularly as his pulse bounces, his heart soldiers on. One tube delivers fluids; another carries them away. A machine breathes for him. His head is shaved, wrapped in bandages. Skull fragments have been carefully extracted from his brain. Gray matter has been pared away, damaged bits sliced off and dropped into a metal bin. Pieces of An Liu, of who he used to be, now medical waste, put out with the trash. A steel plate replaces the chunk of skull that was lost. The brain swells against its casing, the coma persists, and the doctors have little left to do but wait.

He will wake, or he will not.

He will be the same, or he will not.

Time will tell.

These are hard truths the doctors are prepared to tell his loved ones—but An Liu is alone in the secure private facility, abandoned to expert care. The doctors receive their payment, and know who to contact when the time comes, when there is an answer, one way or another.

In the meantime, no one sits by An’s side. No one holds his limp hand. The nurses gossip over his still head, about their bosses and their love lives, and sometimes one will put a soft hand on his forehead and wish him well.

He is just a child, they say to each other. Broken, probably beyond repair. He shouldn’t be alone.

His eyes twitch behind his lids, and they wonder if, in his state, he can dream.

He dreams of a different life.

He dreams of a different An Liu, one who has a mother, not a father. He dreams of a 10th birthday full of cake and presents and love, a mother’s radiant face and gentle kiss. He dreams that he goes to school, has friends, sleeps in a room with a window and posters on the wall.

He dreams of warmth and joy and human touch.

He dreams himself into a fantasy world, and when the images dissolve in a shower of blinding light, when he blinks himself back to reality, a stranger aiming a flashlight at his pupils, a voice asking if he knows who he is or where, a stabbing pain in his head unlike anything he’s ever known, he wishes only to return to the dream or, even better, to the mercy of death that lay just beyond it.

After, things are blinkblink different.

An Liu is shiver-SHIVER different.

The world jumps and jitters, will not blink-shiver-blink sit still. His tongue is clumsy in his mouth; his limbs are numb blocks of wood. And when he blink tries shiver to blink focus, to shivershiver stand, to BLINKblink read, his mind jitters, his body rebels; he tics and shudders and eventually blinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkBLINK loses himself to frustrated rage.

Anger makes it worse.

Everything makes it worse.

An has spent six years learning to control his body and mind—the only two things in his life he has any control over at all—and just like that, it’s all gone. He’s been a prisoner in his father’s house, but now he will be a prisoner in SHIVER his own body.

His doctors tell him to be patient.

His father, who visits only once, tells him to be a man.

The blinkblinkSHIVER tics are blink much SHIVERshivershiverBLINK worse when his father is there.

“D-d-d-d-d-d-id y-y-ou you you dooooooo this-s-s-s-s t-t-t-to m-m-me? ME ME ME?” An asks, cursing his halting and stuttering tongue.

Losing patience, his father walks out before An manages to finish the sentence. Maybe this is for the best, but An blinkblink doesn’t care. He’s not afraid of SHIVER his father anymore.

He’s not afraid of anything. Except living blinkblink like this.

For three blinkblink months he lives in a secure private rehab facility. He SHIVER learns to walk again, one jerking step at a time. He practices with a speech pathologist until blink-shiver-blink he can force his tongue to make the right letters again. He retrains SHIVERblink his brain to retrieve the words he needs to express his anger.

It’s blink-blink-blink slow.

Thoughts flutter away from him; words escape him.

An Liu could once shiverBLINK multiply matrices and solve quantum wave functions in his head. Now his blink studies blink are blink simpler.

He looks at pictures, tries to remember the words that go with them.

This is a clock.

This is a dog.

This is a . . .

“A-a-a-a-a-a-apple!” he finally screams, and throws the fruit across the room in frustration. It goes only a couple feet.

His body is as weak as his mind.

What they did to him, what they took from him: it is irreplaceable.

What is left behind: a steel plate, a Swiss-cheese brain. A fragmented memory of his father’s angry shouts and a rod slamming down, again and again. Pain, in his body, in his head, throbbing pains, stabbing pains, aching pains—and the perpetual fog in his brain from the medicines intended to take it away. And, shiver forever blink with shiver him, tics and stutters, stutters and tics.

“K-k-k-k-ill memememe,” he asks his physical therapists. “P-p-p-l-l-l-ease.”

He hates them for refusing, as he hates his body for rebelling, as he hates his uncles and his father for leaving him in this state.

Hate. That’s another thing he’s been left with.

His hate is the purest thing he’s ever felt, untempered by fear or hope.

Someday, maybe, he will be blinkblinkblinkblink strong enough to use it.

An’s mind heals faster than his body, but he begins to return to himself. He is slower and weaker than before, but he gets stronger every day. The tics and stutters shiver remain.

They will, the doctors say, likely always BLINK remain.

He shiverSHIVERshiver will never be what he was. Never as strong, never as coordinated. Nothing will ever be blinkblinkblink so easy for him again.

An Liu laughs bitterly when the doctors tell him that.

As if blinkBLINKshiver his life has ever been easy.

He goes home.

If he were of another line, if he were not blinkblinkblink Shang, then perhaps his people would SHIVER choose a different champion. They would deem him BLINK unworthy. Choose someone new to be their Player. Someone SHIVERblinkSHIVERblink whole. They would BLINK set BLINK An BLINK free.

Not the Shang.

The Shang believe in the oracle bones. The oracle bones were cast years ago, and they name An Liu as BLINK the next Player.

There is no question.

There is no escape.

If An Liu is blinkBLINK damaged, then it was meant to be. If An Liu’s father deemed it blinkblink necessary to damage him, then it was SHIVERblink meant to be.

He will Play however he is able to Play.

He will Play no matter what.

He will not be given a choice.

He’s not ready yet to resume his physical training. So his father and his uncles leave him alone to his basement and his computers. Maybe they think he’s shiverBLINK no use to them in this state.

Maybe they blink-blink-shiver see something new in him, and they are afraid.

An doesn’t care, as long as they leave him alone.

Hour after hour, he sits in the dark, in front of his computer, fingers shiverBLINK flying across the keyboard. On screen, in the bits and bytes, there are no tics. No stuttering. He calls himself LaMort377. La mort, French for “death”—he likes it because, out loud, it sounds the same as the French word for “love.” There’s nothing to tie the username to him except the number: the Shang people are the 377th bloodline. But no one would be able to piece that together, trace it back to him. This is a secret he shares only with himself.

Online, An can be whoever he wants to be. Do whatever he wants to do.

He wants to destroy, and when the impulse seizes him, he does.

He hacks electricity grids. Banks. Air-traffic-control systems. He makes mischief of any kind that suits him. Some days he crashes stocks, other days blinkBLINK planes.

Every day, he searches for his mother.

Government databases. Social networks. Corporate mailing lists. Media archives. Anywhere and everywhere, he looks for evidence of his mother, something to lead him to her. Something, even, to prove she ever existed.

There is nothing.

There are no walls in An Liu’s cyberspace. No locks he can’t blinkSHIVERblink crack at will. No shred of information hidden from him—but his mother is a ghost.

He learns plenty about this father, answers to questions he never before thought to ask. An Bai grew up in Beijing, child of wealthy banker parents. His name, Bai, means “person of purity,” and An Liu thinks this is well chosen. His father is impossibly pure, untainted by mercy, doubt, or love. When he was 16 years old, his parents died in a fire, leaving him everything: their penthouse in Beijing, the family estate in Xi’an, and four brothers who depended on him for everything. He controlled the money, and so he controlled them.

As he blinkblink continues to control them.

The more An Liu learns about humans, the more he comes to despise the human race.

Machines are better. Machines are rational, trustworthy, easily controlled. Everything in cyberspace is smooth and comprehensible—everything except for the fact that An Liu’s mother is invisible, unfindable, even by someone with An Liu’s unlimited powers.

This, An Liu cannot comprehend.

And there’s something else: someone is blinkSHIVERblink watching him. There’s no concrete evidence at first, just a sense he has, that someone is tracking his digital footprint. It should be impossible; he moves untraceably through the cyber world. He’s a ghost in the machine, and yet . . .

And yet there are traces of another. Tiny bread crumbs left behind, almost as if this shadow wants An to notice him, as if the predator yearns to become the prey.

Then, one day, the impossible happens: despite the security protocols on An Liu’s system, despite layers and layers of unbreakable firewalls, despite some of the best encryption in the world, the stranger breaks through, and a message in English pops up on An’s screen, uninvited, unwelcome.

It blinks red, waiting for a response.

12GOLDENGATE12: GREETINGS AND SALUTATIONS, FRIEND. WANT TO PLAY?

An doesn’t want to blinkSHIVER “play,” whatever that means. He doesn’t blinkblink want to be noticed, or watched, or tracked. He certainly shiverBLINK doesn’t want a friend.

But 12goldengate12 is persistent.

12GOLDENGATE12: I’M NOT YOUR ENEMY.

An ignores him that day and the next.

12GOLDENGATE12: I CAN BE YOUR ENEMY, IF YOU’D RATHER.

He tries to trace his IP, find this annoying bug and squash it, but 12goldengate12 is the best he’s ever seen, as good, almost, as An himself. The signal is bounced across 12 satellites, ping-ponging back and forth across the world—An is, finally, able trace its origin to the west coast of North America, but that tells him nothing he couldn’t have guessed from the username itself.

It doesn’t tell him how to find and eliminate this pest.

Or what the pest might want from him.

And blinkblinkblink as the days pass, An finds himself getting curious. His uncles and his father haven’t spoken to him in weeks. They deliver his food to him in silence. It’s a relief, this temporary respite from pain and torture—but it’s a strange silence to live in. Sometimes An wonders if he’s gone invisible. If he blink died blink after all, and is shiver doomed BLINK to haunt his father for all his days.

It’s easy to imagine he doesn’t exist—except that 12goldengate12 knows An Liu is there, and wants an answer.

After one week, An finally gives it to him.

LAMORT377: WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT DO YOU WANT?

12GOLDENGATE12: A FRIEND

12GOLDENGATE12: I COULD BE A FRIEND, AT LEAST

12GOLDENGATE12: DO YOU WANT A FRIEND?

This is a question An Liu has never asked himself.

LAMORT377: WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO BE MY FRIEND?

12GOLDENGATE12: DUDE I’VE BEEN WATCHING YOUR WORK. IT’S SOME NEXT LEVEL SHIT. NOT MANY PEOPLE OUT THERE CAN KEEP UP WITH ME. BUT YOU’RE ALMOST THERE. I CAN TELL YOU’RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE, THOUGHT YOU MIGHT WANT SOME HELP.

It disconcerts An to think that the stranger has traced his steps well enough to figure out that he’s searching for someone. What else does this interloper know? And how dangerous is it to have him out there, knowing it?

On the other hand, he appreciates that the stranger is impressed with him. Even if he’s clearly not impressed enough.

LAMORT377: YOU’RE SUGGESTING YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME? THAT I COULD LEARN FROM YOU?

12GOLDENGATE12: FOR A GENIUS YOU’RE KIND OF SLOW. YEAH, DUDE, I’M SUGGESTING THAT. I’M THE BEST. SO I MUST BE BETTER THAN YOU. THAT’S JUST LOGIC

LAMORT377: PROVE IT

With that, An Liu shuts down his system. The stranger is galling, enraging—but blinkblinkSHIVER this is the first shiver tic-blink-free conversation he’s had with someone since he woke up from the coma.

The stranger has shivershiver no idea who An Liu is or that he is blinkblinkblinkblinkblink damaged. An Liu’s father would certainly disapprove of An making contact with anyone, much less continuing it. He would shiver likely forbid it, if he shiverBLINK could—but An Liu surpassed his father’s computing skills years ago. In this digital space, An Liu is free to do as he pleases. And perhaps the stranger simply wants to play. So An will give him a game.

Surely there’s no harm in that.

They do battle. An Liu builds up his defenses, and again and again 12goldengate12 hacks his way through. When they get bored of this back-and-forth, they move on to other targets, racing to see who can be the first to burrow into the UN’s mainframe or tamper with Interpol’s digital archives.

12goldengate12 prefers stealing information to abusing it; he calls himself a force for good, and An Liu overlooks the priggishness because, for the first time in memory, he’s having fun. An Liu is good, but he blink has to shiverblink admit that, every once in a while, 12goldengate12 is better.

Somehow, without realizing it, they slide from war into collaboration. Though they know nothing about each other, they understand each other—the hacker’s language is universal, and their minds share the same contours, leap to the same wild conclusions. There’s relief in finding another so like him, devoted to such a singular purpose. Sometimes, hours passing without his notice, hunched over his keyboard in the dark as, somewhere beyond the basement, the sun rises and sets and rises again, he feels joy. They swap chunks of poached code and share security keys to some of the world’s most secure systems. Together, they tackle Mossad, which neither has ever managed to crack on his own—working together, it’s a breeze.

12GOLDENGATE12: NOTHING CAN STAND IN OUR WAY! LET THE WORLD BOW BEFORE US

An Liu has never BLINKBLINKBLINK been an us before.

In the world beyond the basement, An’s father and his uncles wait for him to recover enough to resume his training. They blink-shiver grow impatient. Every week, An’s father descends the stairs and gives his son a blinkblinkblinkblinkblink test. Sometimes this means hand-to-hand combat. Sometimes it is a pain challenge, hot coals or a nail driven into flesh, to help An’s inner resilience return. The more disgusted An Liu’s father grows, the more tics An SHIVERblink gets, and the more tics An BLINKshiver gets, the more disgusted his father becomes. Soon there are no tests at all, simply blink-shiver-blinkBLINK punishments.

An Liu endures.

12GOLDENGATE12: WHERE YOU BEEN?

LAMORT377: BUSY

12GOLDENGATE12: DAD AGAIN, YEAH? PARENTS SUCK, MAN

An Liu has told the stranger that his father is a blinkBLINK disciplinarian, that sometimes it’s difficult to live up to expectations. Nothing more than that.

LAMORT377: WHAT DO YOU KNOW?

12GOLDENGATE12: I KNOW I DON’T LET ANYONE BOSS ME AROUND

12GOLDENGATE12: NOT ANYMORE

LAMORT377: WHAT’D YOU DO, KILL MOM AND DAD?

12GOLDENGATE12: HAHAHAHA

LAMORT377: ☜

12GOLDENGATE12: YOU DON’T KNOW HOW BAD IT CAN GET. I HAD TO GET OUT OF THERE, YOU KNOW? NOT SO GREAT ON THE STREET EITHER, THOUGH. NO COMPUTERS ON THE STREET. LUCKY I FOUND THIS PLACE

LAMORT377: WHAT PLACE?

12GOLDENGATE12: BUNCH OF KIDS LIKE US, SORT OF A COMMUNE THING, WITHOUT ANY OF THE HIPPY DIPPY SHIT. JUST HACKING, YOU KNOW? YOU SHOULD COME, YOU’D LOVE IT

LAMORT377: HOW DO YOU KNOW I’M A KID?

12GOLDENGATE12: COME ON, NO ONE OVER THE AGE OF 20 CAN DO WHAT WE DO

An Liu indulges the fantasy for the moment. Securing himself a plane ticket to California would be as easy as breathing. He could sneak out of the house while his father and his uncles slept, flee this place and this life. No more Playing, no more tests, no more blinkblink punishments.

But then what?

Maybe, if this were blink-shiver before.

If he were the SHIVERshiver boy he was.

Not now. Not when he’s like this, with no blinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblink control. He blink spasms; he blink hurts.

It’s safer here, in his BLINKshiver basement, in the dark where no one can shivershivershiver see him. His damage. Now that An has a friend, he can’t afford to lose him.

LAMORT377: A BUNCH OF GUYS ALL LIVING IN SOME SHACK TOGETHER? DOESN’T SOUND LIKE MY THING

12GOLDENGATE12: WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I’M A GUY?

That stops him cold. It’s never occurred to him that he could be talking to a girl. An Liu’s hands freeze over the keyboard. He hasn’t talked to a girl since . . .

He’s never talked to a girl.

Never talked to any female, except for his mother.

And it’s been so long.

12GOLDENGATE12: OH, DON’T FREAK OUT, DUDE. WHAT IS IT WITH NERDS, IT’S LIKE XX IS KRYPTONITE

LAMORT377: WHAT’S KRYPTONITE?

12GOLDENGATE12: LOL

12GOLDENGATE12: WE STILL FRIENDS?

LAMORT377: YOU KNOW IT

12GOLDENGATE12: PROVE IT.

LAMORT377: HOW?

12GOLDENGATE12: I TOLD YOU SOMETHING ABOUT ME. YOU TELL ME SOMETHING ABOUT YOU. SOMETHING TRUE

An Liu hesitates, but only for a moment. Then he takes a blinkSHIVERblink deep breath.

LAMORT377: I’M LOOKING FOR MY MOTHER

12GOLDENGATE12: HUH

12GOLDENGATE12: YOU FOUND HER YET?

He regrets it already. His father has blinkblinkblink taught him that weaknesses exist for exploitation. And now 12goldengate12 knows An’s greatest weakness of all. What was he blinkSHIVER thinking?

12GOLDENGATE12: MAYBE I CAN HELP

12GOLDENGATE12: TELL ME HER NAME

12GOLDENGATE12: COME ON, YOU CHICKEN?

12GOLDENGATE12: YOU SHOW ME YOURS, I’LL SHOW YOU MINE . . .

12GOLDENGATE12: HELLO?

12GOLDENGATE12: SHIT, COME ON

12GOLDENGATE12: DID I LOSE YOU? DON’T BE LIKE THAT

12GOLDENGATE12: PLEASE?

LAMORT377: DON’T ASK ME ABOUT THIS AGAIN

They don’t talk about it again. 12goldengate12 doesn’t risk asking any more questions about An and his life. Instead, she tells An about herself. About how much she hates her parents and what it was like to walk away from them. About how she was convinced she deserved better for herself, and finally ventured to find it.

An is blinkblinkblink stunned by all of it.

To BLINK want better.

To imagine deserving better.

These are things that have never occurred to him.

Life is what life is; that’s what he’s always SHIVERblink assumed. That’s what he’s been taught.

Sometimes life is hard.

Always life is pain.

Never is it happy, and how could happy be something one is blink-shiver entitled to ask for?

An Liu has blinkSHIVER asked for only one thing in his life, and the consequences will blinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblink be with him forever.

He certainly didn’t ask for 12goldengate12’s help, and has no intention of doing so.

But 12goldengate12 doesn’t wait to be asked.

12GOLDENGATE12: I HAVE SOMETHING TO CONFESS

12GOLDENGATE12: I FIGURED OUT WHO YOU ARE. YOUR NAME. AND I DID SOME DIGGING. I THINK I FOUND YOUR MOTHER FOR YOU. SENDING YOU THE FILES NOW

12GOLDENGATE12: I’M SORRY

The files are a collection of photographs, videos, and police files that, pieced together, tell a clear story:

An anonymous corpse on a morgue slab.

A coroner’s report of a bullet wound in the forehead.

A ballistics report tracing ownership of the gun back to a prominent and apparently well-connected Xi’an businessman who has his name blacked out in all files.

A pauper’s grave.

An Liu blink understands; he realizes now he should have understood long ago.

Of course his mother is dead.

Of course his father killed her.

Of course.

blinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkSHIVERblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblink

The first time his father locks him in the box of rats, An is five years old and thinks he will die.

He wants to die.

Death would be better than this oppressive darkness, the scritch-scratch of tiny claws against his skin, the whisper-soft brush of fur, the screech and squeal of the rodents as they scamper up and down his body, biting and biting and biting, and An screams himself hoarse and prays to lose his mind and still the rats run and scratch and nuzzle and bite.

He lies very still.

In his hand, he clutches a scrap of his mother’s dress. He takes it with him everywhere, sleeps with it under his pillow at night, breathes it in when he wakes, though it no longer smells like her.

He holds tight to it now, holds tight to her, imagines her here with him in the dark, smoothing his hair, whispering in his ear, promising him that she will save him, she will love him, she will come back for him.

He just needs to be patient.

He just needs to hold on.

When he comes back to himself, he knows what he has to do.

First, he finds a needle. He drains a pen of its red ink. Then slowly, painstakingly, working around his blink-shiver tics, he tattoos a bloodred tear beneath his left eye. So he will always remember this day, always remember what has been taken from him.

Then he kills the messenger.

It’s unacceptable that there be someone out there who knows who he is and what he has lost. That cannot blinkSHIVER stand. It was his mistake, exposing shiver-shiver-blink his weakness. But 12goldengate12 is the one who will bear the consequences.

An knows enough about her to find her. A commune of hackers at the heart of San Francisco—that level of computing puts out a signal as bright as the sun. He doesn’t need to know her name to destroy her.

He just needs to know her geographical coordinates the next time she’s online.

12GOLDENGATE12: HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO SAY SORRY.

12GOLDENGATE12: I THOUGHT I WAS HELPING

LAMORT377: IT’S OKAY

12GOLDENGATE12: THERE YOU ARE! THOUGHT I LOST YOU. SRSLY, DUDE, DIDN’T MEAN TO OVERSTEP

LAMORT377: YOU’LL MAKE IT UP TO ME

12GOLDENGATE12: HOW?

An needs only to blink hack into the nearest shiver drone and blinkblinkblinkblink command it to drop its blink-shiver-blink payload.

It’s that easy.

Shiver.

12goldengate12 was a friend, and so An Liu gifted her with a merciful death.

The others will not be so lucky.

His father has taught him pain; his uncles have taught him patience. He has watched them BLINK play their parts, pretend respect, obey orders, bide their time.

Now An Liu does the same.

He takes his time; he wants to do this right.

There are shiver-blink things he needs to know. Things about the Shang, about Endgame, about being the Player that he has SHIVER never bothered to ask. The Shang elders believe in the ancient ways—but they live in the modern world. They cannot hide from An Liu’s cyber-reach.

He learns of the council, how it blinkblink leaves Player training in the hands of family. How the father of a Player has SHIVER-blink ultimate control.

It has always been the way.

His 11th birthday passes without note. An feels as if a century has passed since the last one. That boy from a year ago was whole; that boy thought he could take on his father in a fair fight.

The boy An has become knows better.

He won’t make the same mistake again.

He won’t make any mistakes again. He proceeds carefully. He studies the lives of Players past. No Player has ever been stripped of his title—no matter his crime.

Once the oracle bones speak, fate cannot be changed.

An Liu will be the Shang Player.

No matter what he SHIVERblinkSHIVER does.

He learns that pain is, indeed, the Shang way, but not his father’s kind of pain. This is blink new. The elders would, perhaps, not approve. But neither will they shiver-blink interfere.

That makes them guilty, An Liu thinks. As guilty as anyone.

But he will deal with that later. He will deal with all of them. He has nothing but time.

Time and fury.

Upstairs, his father and his uncles sleep peacefully through one night after another, dreaming, perhaps, of new torments to impose on their Player, the boy they’ve turned into a monster. They think he still needs to be trained; they don’t know that he’s blinkblink learned his final lesson.

He’s learned that there is no hope. No escape. No return to a happier past, no flight into a better future.

There is only blinkSHIVER destruction and pain.

Only SHIVERSHIVERSHIVERblink the thing he’s become.

The thing they made him.

La Mort 377.

Walking death. He will bring it to his father and his uncles—and when the time comes, he will bring it to his entire line. His entire species. Someday, finally, an end to misery and the delusions of life.

An end to everything.

There are many ways to kill. An considers a bullet, since this is what took his mother away. But bullets are too fast, too merciful.

An wants it to blinkblinkblink hurt.

He considers his bare hands, but this is too risky. To win a fight to the death, you must have the will to live.

Does he have that? Truly?

An no longer knows.

blink

He has the urge to kill. This is good enough.

He considers sparing his uncles.

He remembers whispers overheard, snatches of conversation, evidence, perhaps, that they SHIVER are not bad men. That blinkblink they think they have no choice. His father is a killer; he knows that now. His uncles shiverBLINK have always known.

Maybe they were afraid for their lives.

So they sacrificed his.

This, perhaps, An Liu could have forgiven.

His mother’s sacrifice? He cannot.

He comes to a decision. He makes a plan. He waits one week, then another, until he is blink-shiver sure. Until he is ready.

At night, he turns his face to the sky. “I-i-i-i-i-s thiiiis r-r-r-ight?” he asks his mother, because he does this for her. “I-i-i-i-is thiiiis what y-y-y-you w-w-want?” BLINK

His mother never answers, because, of course, they’ve taken her away from him.

In the end, that’s answer enough.

An slips into the kitchen and crumbles a bottle of sleeping pills into a bottle of rice whiskey. He knows his father and uncles drink heartily from it every night.

A day passes. He waits. As dinner comes, he listens at the door, hears their merriment, the clink of glasses, the yawns and the thumps as they stumble off dazedly to bed. Then An creeps up his stairs and enters the first bedroom he comes to, where his youngest uncle, the one who used to be his favorite, snores loudly. An douses him with the whiskey—and lights a match.

He slips out of the room as the fire catches, is already halfway to the next bedroom before his uncle begins to scream.

One by one, he lights his uncles on fire, until the house fills with agonized cries and the smell of burning flesh.

His father slumbers on.

An pours the whiskey.

Whispers a silent prayer to his mother.

Lights the match.

This time, he doesn’t leave the room, not yet. This time, he watches the flesh singe and burn. He waits for the pain to cut through the drugs and rouse his father from sleep; he listens, joy in his heart, to his father’s screams. Their eyes meet, and in those fathomless black pools, An Liu sees pure terror, and An smiles.

His heart pings with something familiar, something he hasn’t felt for a very long time. This, he finally understands, is how it feels to be happy.

“Y-y-y-you—” An stops. Blinks. The moment is too much for his clumsy tongue.

So he says what he needs to say in the silence of his mind.

You have reaped what you have sown.

He smiles, heart bursting with joy, watching his father burn and burn, until the flames leap from bed to floor to walls, and An Liu knows that if he lingers any longer, the fire will consume him along with his family.

He escapes the inferno, leaves his father and his uncles to their flaming death, watches the house burn to the ground, then slips away into the night.

Not because he craves any more time in this blinkSHIVER hell called life.

But because he blink has blink more to blink do.

He will go to the blinkBLINK Shang elders and tell them of this SHIVERblink tragedy. Perhaps they will suspect the truth.

But they will do nothing about it.

An Liu is blinkSHIVER fated to be their Player. With his father BLINKBLINKBLINK dead, he is in control. His blinkblink training is SHIVER complete. He is blinkblink soon to ascend. They will SHIVERblink leave him alone, as they have before.

This is the Shang way. All they care is that he Play, and he will not blink let them down.

He’s been given a sacred duty, and he shiverBLINK will stay alive until he can complete it.

Until blinkblinkblink Endgame comes, and he can offer his gift to the Shang and all the bloodlines of earth.

He will blinkSHIVERblink bring them death, as he’s brought his father death, as his father brought his mother death.

He will bring an end to everything.

And then, when the earth is dark and cold and empty, when all is burned to ash, he will blinkblinkblinkblinkblink finally be at peace.

His mother wakes him with a soft kiss on the forehead.

“Happy birthday, Little Liu,” she says, tickling his feet until he laughs himself fully out of sleep. “Do you remember how old you are today?”

An holds up four fingers.

“That’s my little man!”

“Am I a big man today, Mother?”

“Not yet, sweet,” she says. “Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up. You have plenty of time.”

“What will happen then?” An asks.

“When?”

“When I grow up. When I am a big man.”

“Oh.” She smiles, sits down on the bed, and pulls him onto her lap. “I’m going to tell you a secret, Little Liu. Are you ready?”

An nods eagerly. He loves secrets.

“When you grow up?” She tickles him again, and he tries to wiggle away, but she’s holding on too tight. He hopes she will never let go. “Little An Liu, when you grow up, you’re going to change the world.”

AKSUMITE

HILAL

Hilal is searching for peace.

He sifts through the dark recesses of his mind, seeking an oasis of calm.

The effort is in vain.

He longs for the still inner quiet that has sustained him for so many years. In times of chaos, pain, fear, he has always had this escape: to a silence deep inside. A placid water, smooth as glass.

But today, as yesterday, as the day before, he is troubled. Chased by memories.

He sits on the concrete floor of his hut, back pressed to the wall. Sunbeams filter through the thatched roof, painting prisms of light across his ebony skin. The hut hums with electricity, it contains half the computing power in Ethiopia, but today Hilal has no interest in the bits of data whirring through its veins.

This small compound in the Kingdom of Aksum is Hilal’s home, and has been since he was six years old. But it doesn’t feel much like home anymore.

One year ago, he was sent away from this place by his spiritual master. Eben ibn Mohammed al-Julan had sent Hilal out into the world many times before, for purposes of training or education. Sometimes, there is no clear mission, simply the instructions: Watch. Listen. Learn. The true Player must be a citizen of the world, Eben likes to say, and so Hilal has sampled cultures across the globe.

But this trip was different, for it was meant to last a year.

“How can I leave for so long?” Hilal said. “These are my people. And I am their Player. If Endgame begins—”

“If Endgame begins, I will summon you home. There are things you must learn that I cannot teach you, Hilal.”

This seemed impossible to Hilal; surely, if it was worth knowing, his master could teach it.

“It will be good for you to live among people for a time,” Master Eben said. “And it will be good for them, to live with a man such as you.” He smiled gently. “We can’t simply wait around for Endgame to arrive, can we?”

“We must spend each day saving the world as best we can,” Hilal said dutifully. This was one of the first lessons his master ever taught him.

And so he traveled halfway across the continent and took up residence in a village of strangers. He traded in days of study and weapons training for long hours of educating children, tending to the sick, cooking for the elderly, helping with the construction of a new sewage system. They knew nothing of him when he arrived. Hilal ibn Isa al-Salt was a mystery to them, and not a particularly interesting one. They didn’t know or care that he was the great-grandson of Ezana or the grandson of Gebre Mesquel Lalibela, nor that he was the Aksumite Player, sworn to save his bloodline when Endgame comes, nor that he was in lifelong pursuit of a being called Ea, the soulless leader of the Brotherhood of the Snake. They didn’t know about Endgame itself. They knew only that he was a stranger in their homeland, that he came bearing food and medicine and an ancient truth. And, gradually, they came to trust him, even love him, as he began to love them in return. He taught them what he could about the workings of the human soul—and learned, in turn, what it meant to be part of village life. Celebrating its small triumphs and mourning its losses, trading cheerful gossip and mediating petty grudges—Hilal became one of them. Or, at least, so it seemed.

They came to trust him, and when disease swept through the village like a firestorm, leaping from family to family and leaving only corpses behind, they thought Hilal might save them.

Instead, he abandoned them.

“Remember,” his master told him, when he reported the situation, “your life is more precious than they know. Guard it well. Come home.”

The village was full of brave men and women risking infection and death to take care of the ones they loved—but Hilal, who’d been raised to have no fear for his own life, to devote himself to the good of others, behaved like a coward. Snuck away in the dark of night. He was forbidden from risking himself; he was meant to believe that his life was more important than theirs.

So he fled from infection, from tainted blood and stacked corpses; he fled home.

That was two weeks ago. Fourteen days readjusting to the rhythms and comforts of home.

Trying to forget the village he left behind. The faces of mothers clutching babies to their chests, of children kicking soccer balls across barren fields, of strong men bearing heavy loads, providing for their families. So many people, and Hilal loved them all, and now he can only wonder what has become of them.

Whether any of them are left.

As a Player, he has pledged himself to saving the souls of all men, but saving individual men and women, and their children? That is beyond his parameters.

Still, he would have liked to try.

Every night, in his dreams, he tries again.

The door creaks open.

Hilal flies to his feet, takes a defensive stance, battle ready.

But it is no enemy. Hilal’s face relaxes into a smile. He has been meditating in isolation for two weeks, and if his solitude is to be broken, this is the man to break it. “Greetings, Master,” he says in eager welcome.

“You are the Player now,” Eben ibn Mohammed al-Julan corrects him. “I am the master no more.”

Hilal bows his head to acknowledge the claim, but will never agree to it. Eben has been his master and spiritual guide since he was a very small child—it was Eben who selected him, of all the children scrambling through the fields of his village, to train for this sacred role. Eben, a former Player, saw something shining from Hilal, knew somehow, even then, that Hilal had been anointed by the Lord. Master Eben took Hilal into his own home, taught him how to speak, how to think, how to fight, and, most importantly, how to follow a righteous path, how to serve and spread the ancient truth.

Someday, Hilal assumes, he will be the one to venture across the countryside, searching children’s faces for the spark of the divine. This is how it has always been done: the Players of the past choosing those of the future. He has asked Eben many times what it was that the master saw—how he is meant to recognize the sign of a future Player, how he will know he has chosen wisely. Eben will only ever say, When the time comes, you will know. The future Player will make himself known to you, as you made yourself known to me.

Hilal wonders whether he will ever have Master Eben’s wisdom—whether he will be able to train a new generation of Players as Eben trained him. It seems to him that Eben will forever be the master, Hilal the willing student.

“You seem troubled,” Eben says, always able to read the truth in Hilal’s face.

“I am having difficulty putting my memories of the year to rest,” Hilal admits. “I feel like a traitor to all the people I’ve left behind.”

“Those are not your people,” Eben reminds him, “any more or less than all men of Earth are your people. Their mission is not your mission.”

Hilal reminds himself that Eben knows best, and that Hilal’s responsibilities to the Aksumite line and its future take precedence above all else. A hundred miles from here, a child is training with a master of his own, preparing to take on the role of Player when Hilal ages out, but he is not old enough yet—not ready. Were Hilal to die, the Aksumites would be left without a champion, and that cannot be. He had no choice but to save himself. He knows that.

Still.

Not since childhood has Hilal spent so much time amongst humanity, and though he did his best to remain removed—to remember that he was there to serve the villagers, not to become one of them—he was not entirely able to succeed.

Eben discourages personal relationships, individual bonds, anything that might distract Hilal from his commitment to the Aksumites as a whole.

God loves all his children equally, Eben likes to say, and so must we.

Hilal tries.

“I have come with a new task for you.” Eben smiles gently, as if he has guessed at everything Hilal works so hard to hide. “Perhaps it will help you turn your attention away from the past.”

“Anything, Master.”

“We have located the Book of Ouazebas.”

Hilal’s eyes widen. “But I thought that was lost in the destruction of the Bayt al-Hikma?”

Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom, once a crown jewel of the Islamic Empire and the largest library in the world, has been in ruins for nearly 800 years. Hilal believed the majority of its works—among them a sacred Aksumite manuscript from the 4th century AD—were lost forever. According to legend, the Book of Ouazebas tells the story of an early Aksumite king’s battle with the Brotherhood of the Snake. Some say it contains the secret of finding and defeating the brotherhood’s ancient evil leader, Ea, once and for all. Few have harbored hope of finding the manuscript intact.

“The book has resurfaced in Egypt,” Eben says. “It was found in an archaeological dig several months ago and has since found its way to the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo. As you can imagine, we’ve done our best to negotiate for its return to its native land, but the Egyptian authorities refuse.”

“You want me to retrieve it for you,” Hilal guesses.

“For all of us,” Eben says. “This could be what we’ve been waiting for. The answer to centuries of fruitless searching, the weapon we need in our final war. You, Hilal, could save us.”

Hilal sloughs off the guilt and regret that has been weighing him down for the last two weeks. He stands tall and proud. “I am ready, Master. Tell me what you need me to do.”

All things being equal, Hilal prefers walking to any other form of transportation. He prefers to wear loose, flowing robes that conform to the motion of his body and flap in the breeze; he prefers sandals with a single strip that expose his feet to the sand and the elements. He likes to feel the ground beneath him and the people around him, to move through the world as the ancients did, at one with the Earth and its creatures.

But walking to Cairo would take more than a month, and his master doesn’t want to wait.

So Hilal takes a truck across the Sudanese border, then hops a rickety charter plane to Cairo, and does it all in the constrictive costume of a modern-day teenager. He wears jeans and closed-toe black sneakers and a garish T-shirt emblazoned with some nonsensical Japanese.

“You need to fit in,” Eben told him.

“They will stare anyway,” Hilal pointed out. “They always do.”

He says it not with arrogance or false modesty, but as a simple truth. Hilal, with his dark skin smooth and fathomless as marble, his azure eyes, his high cheekbones and ivory smile, is beautiful—almost inhumanly so. He knows this because he’s been told, many a time, and because of the way strangers stare at him, sometimes with awe, sometimes with desire. It’s not a thing to be vain about or ashamed of, simply a quality he’s been endowed with, and he would be a fool to take exceptional pride in it. But he would be a bigger fool not to use it, when it can be used.

Fortunately, the men on this plane—businessmen, from the look of it, convinced of the great import of their petty deals—have better things to do than wonder about the tall, almost regal seventeen-year-old sharing their airspace. Hilal dons headphones for the duration of the voyage and bounces along to an imaginary beat, pretending to be lost in his own head.

Humans, he’s noticed, are all too willing to believe that they’re invisible. And it’s only when they think no one is looking that they reveal their true selves. So Hilal sees the nervous primping of the elderly man in the bow tie and understands that he’s on his way to a romantic rendezvous, while the furtive young man with the mustache and the briefcase he never lets out of his grip makes all too obvious his criminal intent. He sees that two other men are both employer and employee and father and son, that the father loathes and distrusts his offspring, while the son hopes and perhaps plots to soon have his father out of the way. He sees which of the men is a secret smoker, which is an alcoholic, which is satisfied with his life, and which hopes soon to end it.

They don’t bother to see him at all.

The plane touches down in Cairo as the sun is setting, and his taxi battles brutal rush-hour traffic as it inches toward the museum. Hilal shifts impatiently on the leather seat—of course, if the museum is closed by the time he gets there, it won’t be a problem; he’ll find his own way inside. But he prefers to walk in through the front door: it’s more dignified.

The setting sun glints off skyscrapers; overhead, the sky burns, and Hilal draws his patience from the moon, which bides its time, waiting for night’s canopy to descend and the stars to show their faces.

The taxi screeches to a stop, and Hilal gives the driver twice the requested fare.

Here is the Museum of Antiquities, its white archway blazing bright against an orange facade, its classical Western architecture giving all the appearances of a European museum—belied only by the towering palm trees bracketing it on either side and the Egyptian flag flapping at its entrance.

The museum, Hilal knows, has been instrumental in the cause of returning stolen artifacts to their land of origin, chasing Egyptian antiquities halfway across the world, statues and jewels from tombs excavated centuries before, bought and sold and hoarded in private collections—bringing them back home.

Were he quicker to anger, Hilal might be enraged by the hypocrisy of it, the nerve of these curators and government officials who stake their own national claim while dismissing the Aksumites out of hand. But Hilal only smiles gently at the irony. It is another thing he’s noticed about people, including his own: they have one set of rules for themselves, another for the rest of the world. And all rules are allowed to be broken, for convenience’s sake.

In the new era, the era Hilal dreams of and works toward, there will be only one rule for the whole of mankind: the golden rule, and this is what Hilal tries to live by.

This is all that binds him, which is why it bothers him not at all to break Egyptian law and smuggle a priceless artifact out of the country. Laws like those are, literally, made to be broken.

Hilal purchases an entry to the museum and lets himself be absorbed by the crowds. He ignores the exhibits and instead surveys security measures, the cameras lodged in corners, the alarm system trip wires snaking along the wall, the glass cabinets with their feeble locks protecting the most valuable of valuables. So many blind spots, beyond the reach of both human and mechanical eyes. The museum’s security is riddled with gaps he can exploit. It’s almost as if they want their goods stolen. Even the Aksumite manuscript, worth more than all the other artifacts in this building put together, is housed in a room protected only by a flimsy alarm system and a glass case. As the clock ticks toward closing time, Hilal drifts through the crowd ogling the Aksumite exhibit, noting both the foolish security measures and the bored expressions on the tourists’ faces. They have come to Cairo to see elaborate statues and golden tombs, not some musty old manuscript in a language no one can understand. They don’t know the value of what they’re looking at, and they don’t deserve to see it—as the museum doesn’t deserve to hoard it. Hilal sees that the liberation of this manuscript is a righteous act.

And he sees that it will be child’s play.

Hilal melts into the shadows, slips past a yellow rope into a corridor meant only for museum personnel—a corridor without any cameras. As if employees are to be trusted more than strangers; the assumption is kind, if foolish. The door to the basement is sealed with a padlock—not a problem. Hilal’s backpack has several hidden compartments, packed with tools for any eventuality. He sprays the lock with compressed difluoroethane, which freezes the steel in seconds and turns it brittle enough to shatter under the pressure of a small hammer. He lets himself into the service stairwell and descends into the basement, where he waits out the time until closing.

Above him, somewhere, the sounds of tourists oohing and aahing, children whining, parents snapping, guards patrolling, and then, slowly, all noise fades away, the lights dim, and the museum goes still.

Hilal ventures out of his hiding hole. He slides through the shadows and the security blind spots and makes his way toward the special exhibit area, where the Aksumite manuscript awaits him under glass. He has spent years honing his senses and his instincts, and has developed an animal’s sixth sense of danger—he can feel the presence of the security guards in his bones. One pads across the floor above him; one snores in the corridor to his east. They should be easy enough to avoid—and, if not avoided, dispensed with.

All things being equal, he prefers not to hurt anyone.

But he will do what he has to do.

The overhead lights are off, but the displays remain illuminated. Hilal passes marble statues and golden busts, ancient weapons and divine engravings. He tiptoes through rooms crowded with stucco scribes and wooden priests. So many of the faces he recognizes from his studies—there is Akhenaton; there is Queen Nefertiti; there is the gold mask of Tutankhamen; there is the head of Hathor as a cow. Then, finally, in a small room of its own at the far end of the western wing, is the Book of Ouazebas, lit from below, seeming to glow in its glass case. The book looks different, now that it’s alone—almost as if it were waiting for the tourists to leave before it came to life. The lock is alarmed, but this doesn’t concern Hilal: he has no intention of breaking the lock.

Instead he pulls a slim blade from his pack, sharp enough to cut glass, and slices a square in the case just big enough for the manuscript to fit through. He reaches in and takes hold of the book of his people.

He imagines it warming in his grip, as if it knows him, knows he will be its vehicle, the one to carry it home.

Very carefully, Hilal wraps the book in a soft, holy cloth he’s brought with him, then tucks the sacred package into his bag. He slings the pack over his shoulder and makes his way toward the front door. One pair of wire clippers, one swift snip of the trip wire is all it takes to disable the alarm on the entrance and push the door open—it’s not even locked from the inside.

Hilal knows it’s a little foolish, almost arrogant, perhaps, leaving like this, in full view of anyone who might be watching. But he’s laid claim to what rightfully belongs to his people; he doesn’t want to slither away like a snake. He is arrogant, or at least proud, and he chooses to stride through the front entrance, leaving as he came in, without fear or shame.

As he is pushing through the door, a guard catches sight of him, shouts for him to halt. Hilal could slip away—no doubt he is faster than this burly man armed only with an ancient walkie-talkie. Instead he does as he is told, and stops in place.

“What are you doing here?” the man barks angrily. “The museum is closed.”

Hilal offers the guard a peaceable smile, his grip on his backpack tightening imperceptibly. “Boring class field trip, you know?” he says in flawless Arabic. “I decided to take a nap on one of those fancy pharaoh beds you’ve got here, and when I woke up, the place was all dark. Spooky, right?”

The security guard peers suspiciously at him, but Hilal only blinks sleepily, affecting the apathy and ignorance of a schoolboy. The guard sees only what Hilal wants him to see: a bored teenager, delinquent in his studies, uninterested in anything but his music and his T-shirt collection.

The guard laughs. “Can’t say I blame you, kid. Done it myself, on occasion. But don’t let it happen again, you hear?”

“I have no plans of ever coming back,” Hilal says honestly.

“Can’t say I blame you for that either,” the guard says again, and shakes Hilal’s hand before sending him on his way.

That easily, the mission is accomplished: Hilal carries the priceless manuscript down the stairs, off the museum grounds, and into the Cairo night.

He’s in the mood to walk, and he gives in to temptation, strolling down the palm-lined street, inhaling the smells and sounds of city life, even at this hour, a teeming chaos he so rarely has a chance to experience. He walks down Meret Basha, thinking he will pick up some falafel for himself in Tahrir Square and then get a taxi to the airport.

This is his first mistake.

Hilal has spent his life in cloistered study. He knows innumerable languages of man and machine; he has memorized his own Bible and several others; with the machetes he carries in his pack, he could slice up a battalion of men without breaking a sweat. In so many ways, he is wise beyond his years. But when it comes to the rhythm of city life, he is a child, innocent and easily distracted, led astray by bright colors and the wild music of humanity en masse, a stranger in a very strange land.

He assumes the noise and vibrancy he sees around him are normal; he assumes the shouts and cheers he hears in the distance are simply the heartbeat of Cairo, the everyday thunder and lightning of urban life.

It’s only when he approaches the square, discovers the pulsing horde of protesters, waving flags, thrusting handmade posters in the air, chanting slogans, that he realizes what he’s stumbled into—and by the time he does, the amoeba-like crowd has absorbed him.

The poster-board signs allege government offenses, call for resignations; fists punch at the sky, voices call out for justice, for power, for freedom. The protesters are young and old, men and women, some in full hijab, some in modern gear, all of them vibrating with ecstatic rage. The square is lit with army spotlights, and men in uniform push through the mass of bodies, trying to restrain and subdue the protesters. Clouds of tear gas bloom over the crowd.

Hilal has to get out of here.

He can’t afford to tangle with the authorities, not with the precious, illicit cargo he carries. He threads through the crowd, aiming for the eastern edge of the square, trying to avoid contact or notice, and is almost through, when he sees her.

A girl about his age, in nearly identical uniform, except that her black T-shirt reads, in English, Live free or die. She is smiling radiantly—even as the soldier looms over her and slams his elbow into her face. Even as she staggers backward, blood spattering from her nose.

“Stop that!” Hilal shouts, before he thinks better of it.

The soldier is raising a nightstick overhead, is slamming it down toward the girl, but before he can hit her again, Hilal has plucked the weapon from the man’s hand, has wrapped it around his neck, squeezing just tight enough to cut off his airflow.

The soldier drops to the ground beside the girl, and a ripple runs through the crowd. Beneath the noise of protest, Hilal hears the drumbeat of boot steps making its way toward him. More soldiers, more trouble.

Exactly what he can’t afford.

He scoops up the girl, who weighs almost nothing in his strong arms.

There’s a whisper at his ear. “Bring her this way. Hurry!”

He turns, and two slim figures, one in a hoodie, the other in full veil, beckon. The boy in the hoodie rushes to the girl’s side, staunches her bloody nose. The veiled protester starts clearing a pathway through the crowd. Hilal is no fool, and knows better than to trust a stranger’s urgent entreaty. But as a clear corridor melts open before them, he decides his best course of action is to carry the girl’s limp body through. He’s more than capable of handling whatever lies in store for him on the other side, and he’s not about to leave the girl behind, easy prey for the soldiers or the angry crowd.

“Hurry,” the boy urges again, and Hilal follows them through the protest, cradling the girl in his arms like a small child.

“I’ll take her now,” the boy says, as the protest fades away behind them and they emerge onto a quiet street. He holds out his arms, but Hilal shakes his head. He’s taken responsibility for this girl; he will let her go only when he’s certain she’s safe.

“I will see her safely home,” he tells the two strangers.

“Safe?” the girl snorts behind her veil. “What country are you living in? And you really think we’re going to tell you where we live?”

“Be nice, Dalila,” the boy says. “He helped us out back there. We can trust him.”

“He helped himself out with that soldier, then helped himself to Rabiah. Use your head, Akil. You want to trust him just because he’s pretty?”

“You seem to be assuming I want your trust,” Hilal says. “Or that I would be so foolish as to trust you. I simply want to see the girl to safety and be on my way.”

“What do you care about her?” Dalila asks gruffly.

“I care about the safety of all people,” Hilal says. “Hers happens to be the one I can most immediately safeguard.”

“Forget what country are you from; what planet are you from?” Dalila says, and Hilal doesn’t need to see her face to know her eyes are rolling.

“I don’t care if he’s from Jupiter,” Akil snaps. “I care about getting us off the streets and making sure Rabiah’s okay. You want to keep her safe?” he asks Hilal. “Then you follow us. Now.”

Hilal tells himself that a momentary delay is actually a good thing—it will be better to stay off the streets tonight, find his way across the border come morning, once the protests have died down and he can carefully navigate their aftermath. Tonight there will be soldiers patrolling the streets and the borders; the nation will be on high alert, and Hilal can’t afford to be noticed.

Better, for the mission, to wait.

He’s not about to let himself be distracted, or allow these strangers or their cause to interfere with his own.

The girl, warm and stirring in his arms, is no one special; he will simply help her as he would help any living creature in pain or need, and then he will go home.

The strangers turn down one dark alley after another, carving an impossibly labyrinthine path through the Cairo night.

Hilal follows.

There are seven of them, all students at the university, all members of a liberal political group recently outlawed by the government. They use this place, a filthy apartment in a building on the edge of the slums, a building that looks abandoned and condemned, as their planning headquarters and safe house. It stinks of coriander and sweat.

Rabiah is their leader—and a prime instigator of the night’s protest. She lies now on a threadbare couch, a hot towel on her forehead, barking orders at the others; the night’s protest hasn’t yet ended, and already they’re making plans for another.

They’ve offered Hilal a bed—really, a spot on the floor and a thin blanket—for the night. In gratitude, Rabiah says, for helping the cause.

That’s how she phrases it. Not “helping me,” but “helping the cause.” As if they are the same.

“And what is your cause?” Hilal asks. He lets just enough of an accent slip into his voice to let them assume he is from elsewhere.

Conversation ceases, and they look at him like he’s a fool.

“Don’t you read the newspaper?” Akil asks. He doesn’t stray far from Rabiah’s side, and from the way he looks at her, brushes against her every chance he gets, Hilal can tell the boy is in love. From the way Rabiah looks at him—or, rather, looks through him—Hilal can tell she has no idea. And perhaps wouldn’t care if she did.

“Don’t you live?” Rabiah asks. “Don’t you breathe?”

Hilal lives and breathes in cloistered isolation: even his missionary time has been intensely focused on the local, not the global. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the ancient world, the strengths and frailties of the human body, the detailed myths and traditions of divinity across the globe, and those international events that might signify Endgame-related action: conflict between the bloodlines or a message from the stars. His knowledge of petty national politics is somewhat . . . lacking.

“Today is the anniversary of the revolution,” Dalila explains. She has removed her veil, revealing a soft, rounded face and large, friendly brown eyes that belie the edge in her voice. “One year passes, and another, and nothing changes.”

“Nothing will ever change, unless enough of us raise our voices to insist on it,” Rabiah says. She’s lying down, an ugly purple bruise blooming across her face, yet somehow she still radiates strength.

The others join in, spilling out their grudges against the government, their dreams of a new Egypt, a true democracy governed by rule of law. An end to oppression, an end to corruption, Rabiah tells him, eyes blazing. Freedom of speech. Fair wages. Antidiscrimination laws.

“Equality for women,” Dalila says.

“Equality for everyone,” adds Farid, a boy with a sharp gaze and a neatly trimmed beard. He slips an arm around the waist of the young man next to him, and they smile at each other.

“And you believe you can accomplish all these things with a night of protests?” Hilal asks. He realizes he has little grasp of politics, but this seems far-fetched.

“One night?” Rabiah laughs. “This is only the beginning, my naïve friend. This isn’t a night; this is a movement. And we will move mountains.”

“It sounds like a noble effort,” Hilal says. “I wish you good fortune.”

“It’s not about luck,” Rabiah says. “It’s about hard work. So how about it?”

“Excuse me?”

“How about joining us?” she says. “You know how to fight, that’s obvious, and you’re no coward. You’re well-spoken, you’re attractive—”

Dalila coughs. “Understatement of the year.”

The others laugh, but not Rabiah. “Exactly. You’re ridiculously handsome, Hilal, and people are shallow. They respond to that. We could use you. We’re having a rally tomorrow afternoon outside the university; you could—”

“No, thank you.” Hilal tucks his bag into his chest, reassuring himself that the manuscript is still safe inside. He has to get the book back to Ethiopia, back to Eben. Right now, that can be his only priority. “I wish you luck with your fight, but I must return home to mine.”

“You have something more important to do than change the world?”

“I prefer to effect change without fighting,” Hilal says.

“No such thing.”

“I disagree.” Hilal is polite but firm. There is obfuscation here, because of course he is a fighter; he trains and prepares for the ultimate fight. But that is a higher battle, a battle for humanity rather than amongst it. He believes in the spirit of what he’s saying—it is the spirit that has animated his life of service. “Choosing sides, waging a battle, these can be distractions. Who is helped, today, by your shaking fists and shouted slogans? While you demand justice for the poor, who will feed and clothe them?”

Rabiah snorts. “Ah . . . you’re one of those.”

“Give him a break,” Akil urges her.

“No, I won’t give him a break. He’s everything that’s wrong with this world.” Rabiah looks Hilal up and down. “Let me guess, you’re some kind of religious do-gooder.”

“I do attempt to do good,” Hilal allows.

“Missionary?” she guesses. “Think you can bring the Lord to a bunch of heathens?”

“I don’t think in categories like that,” Hilal protests. “I share the ancient truth, as I see it, yes. And I also share food and clothing and medicine. I help people.”

“You help yourself feel better,” Rabiah says. “That’s it. If you really wanted to help people, you’d change the system that deprives them of food and clothing and medicine. You’d take a stand, fight for something. Instead of feeding the poor, you’d work to end hunger.”

“You make complicated things sound simple,” Hilal says, “but that doesn’t make them so.”

“Okay, then you tell me,” Rabiah challenges him. “All those people you’ve supposedly helped, are they any better off now than they were before? You gave them a few meals, some medicine, but structurally? Politically? Is anything different? Did you change anything, or just say a few prayers and go on your way?”

Hilal doesn’t want to argue with her anymore.

Hilal can’t argue with her.

This girl is infuriating, but he respects her passion and admires her certainty. He feels a kinship with her, senses that, beneath the surface, they are more similar than she knows, both committed to saving their people, to creating a new world. He almost envies her, despite the apparent futility of her fight, because her battle is now. We must spend each day saving the world, Eben always says, but he also says, You must save yourself for the final battle, and these two directives are, for Hilal, increasingly difficult to reconcile.

Sometimes he tires of waiting.

“You’re hearing me, aren’t you?” Rabiah says, with the smile of someone who knows exactly how good she is at making people listen. “I’m getting through.”

“Thank you for your hospitality,” he tells her. She will think he’s afraid to listen to any more of her talk, that he doubts his commitment to his own argument. Perhaps she will be right. “I must sleep now, in preparation for my journey. As I say, I wish you good fortune in your endeavors.”

Despite her goading, he will say no more, and finally Rabiah gives up. Akil shows him a back room where he can stretch out and get some sleep. He uses his bag as a pillow.

“Don’t mind her,” Akil says. “She’s on fire with this stuff. She can’t see anything but the cause. She can’t see that other people might . . . care about more than just one thing. That sometimes people are as important as systems.” He frowns, casting his gaze into the distance, as if watching something approach that gives him great sorrow. “Sometimes I don’t think she understands people at all.”

“She sees the bigger picture,” Hilal says. “Sometimes that’s necessary.”

Akil leaves him to sleep, but when Hilal closes his eyes, sleep won’t come. He thinks about his own bigger picture, about Endgame and the Makers and the oath sworn by generations of Aksumites before him, that they will defend the ancient truth and protect their line at all costs.

He thinks about the village he’s left behind, and the people there he was unable to help. How, even had he offered them a cure for their plague, it would not have rescued them from poverty; it would not have changed their system, or their futures. He thinks about how he has recused himself from intervening in the petty human squabbles of politics and governance, and that perhaps Rabiah is right, that this is naïve.

That this is wrong.

He listens to the soft murmur of voices from just beyond the door, these powerless students plotting to take on a nation—not sitting around, waiting for the war to come to them, waiting for their destiny to arrive at their doorstep, but making their own moment in history. Choosing now.

Hilal serves a higher cause, he reminds himself, and should be grateful for that.

But this night, in this restless darkness, he envies Rabiah and her friends and their hopeless fight.

He’s almost sorry that, come the dawn, he will have to leave.

When the screaming begins, Hilal thinks he’s dreaming it.

His dreams these days are full of horrors, screaming and gunfire and flames.

But this is no dream. This is the safe house filled with danger, soldiers knocking down doorways and guns drawn and these fierce protesters cowering in closets and beneath furniture. These are fighters with no idea how to fight.

Before he’s fully shaken off sleep, Hilal is on his feet, a machete in each hand. They are his favorite weapons, deadly blades that feel like extensions of his limbs—of his very soul. The word hate is inscribed along the blade in his left hand. On the other, the word love.

Hilal detests violence.

But he is very, very good at it.

He streaks into the common room, where four soldiers have cuffed the students and are pushing them into a line against the wall. Akil stands beside the soldiers, free. Abashed. Hilal, who sees into people so easily and sometimes too well, understands the situation immediately. Akil has betrayed them.

“I’ll ask you once to set down your arms,” Hilal tells the soldiers, politely but firmly. “I invite you to leave this place. Now.” The soldiers whirl on him, but Hilal is already in motion, machetes slashing through the air. Gunfire echoes through the apartment, tears holes through the cheap plaster, but Hilal dances away from the bullets, ducks and spins and cuts down one soldier, slicing him from shoulder to hip. As he lashes a foot into the soft gut of a second, he slashes a bloody wound into the shoulder of the third, then spins, leaps over both of them, and lands hard on the fourth, knocking him to the floor.

He doesn’t want to kill these men, but he will if he has to.

“Retreat!” they’re crying to one another, as Hilal knocks one weapon after another out of their hands, kicking the guns across the room, disarming and disabling all but the first soldier, the one with the gaping wound in his chest.

Hilal thinks him too bloody and beaten to be a threat, and so makes his mistake: he turns his back on the man.

Doesn’t see him stagger to his feet, grab Rabiah around the neck, and put his gun to her head.

“Drop the knives, or she dies.”

“You think we’re scared of you, pig?” Rabiah struggles in his grasp, undaunted by the steel muzzle against her temple. “You think you can stop us? There are too many of us to stop.”

“You said you wouldn’t hurt her,” Akil bleats.

“Shut up.” The soldier is backing away with Rabiah. Hilal calculates the variables: the distance to the closest gun, the distance between his machetes and the soldier, the distance between the muzzle of the gun and Rabiah’s temple.

He sets the machetes by his feet.

He will not risk her life.

“This one’s under arrest,” the soldier says, as his fellows join him in the doorway and back out of the apartment. “We’ll be back for the rest of you.”

“You did this.” Dalila is pointing at Akil. “You turned on us, didn’t you? Told them what we were up to, where to find us?”

Akil is crumpled on the floor, broken. “They threatened me. My family. You don’t understand.”

“Bullshit,” snaps Farid, the one with the beard. “She didn’t want you, so you decided to punish her. And all of us. Simple as that.”

Akil rises to his feet. “You’re all fools if you think you can win this. We’re not talking David and Goliath. This isn’t some storybook with a happy ending. This is the government. The army. And us—a bunch of kids who don’t even know how to fire a gun. You stay here and fight your stupid fight to the death, if that’s what you want to do. What I want to do is stay alive.”

Hilal watches Akil walk out. No one stops him.

Now Dalila turns to Hilal. “You—how did you do that?” she demands. “Take out all those soldiers?”

“I think what she means is thank you,” Farid says.

“No, I mean who the hell are you?”

Hilal bows his head. “I am no one.”

“I think you should go,” Dalila says.

Farid whirls on her. “Are you kidding me? This guy is some kind of one-man army, and you want to throw him out? Hilal, tell us you’ve changed your mind, that you’ll join us.”

“I—”

“Are you mad?” Dalila shouts. “Now is not the time to be trusting strangers! After Akil?”

“Akil is a worm,” Farid says. “This boy is . . . who knows what this boy is, but he’s obviously on our side.”

Soon the room is filled with the noise of bickering, all of them seized with an opinion about what to do next, how to root out other potential traitors, whether to give in or fight harder, shout louder, press on.

Hilal sees how essential Rabiah is to this movement, how her sure vision gave them cohesion; how they are lost without her.

“What will happen to Rabiah?” he asks, his voice slicing through the clamor.

They fall silent.

“They’ll take her away to prison,” Dalila says softly. “There will be no trial. Or, if there is, it will be only for show. And once they’ve got her locked away, the things they’ll do to her—”

“We won’t let that happen,” Farid says, resolutely. “We’ll get her out. We need her.”

Their will is evident; Hilal believes they want to save their leader. He believes, even, that they will attempt it.

And no doubt get themselves killed in the process.

Hilal has already saved Rabiah’s life once: by Aksumite tradition, this makes her his responsibility—spiritually, she is now of his line.

By dallying in Cairo another day, ascertaining where a certain political prisoner might be held, he’s only doing what he must. So he tells himself.

He tells his master only that there have been unforeseen complications, and that he will return home, soon. As they speak on an unsecured line, Eben asks no follow-up questions. Perhaps this is for the best.

He pinpoints Rabiah’s location with ease, bribing two soldiers with the American dollars he’s brought with him for emergencies. From there, Hilal stakes out the prison complex. Tora Prison is in South Cairo. It is divided into seven blocks, and holds activists and murderers alike. It costs him another handful of dollars to determine that Rabiah has been thrown in with a group of long-term inmates, all protesters against the government, some of whom have languished behind bars for years. He learns that Rabiah is guilty, as all the protesters are guilty, of violating a law forbidding groups larger than 10 from gathering in public spaces—and that it’s likely she will be made an example of. Her capture is a coup.

He learns that the prison is guarded by tanks and machine-gun outposts and electrified barbed-wire gates and is thought to be impenetrable. It’s everything the antiquities museum wasn’t—but he’s come to this country with the tools and skills to break into any facility, no matter how secure. He’s prepared.

Still . . . Hilal considers leaving the manuscript somewhere safe, beyond the prison grounds, just in case something unexpected happens, something beyond his control.

He considers forgetting this plan entirely and returning home.

This is surely what his master would want, and what Hilal has always been taught to do. Think of the big picture. Safeguard the whole of humanity. Stay out of other people’s fights; save himself for the final war.

This is prudent; this is the Aksumite way.

Rabiah may be his moral obligation, but she is also a stranger to him, one who knew the potential consequences of her actions when she took them, one with a devoted legion of followers who have far more reason than Hilal to risk themselves for her safety.

But whenever Hilal thinks about leaving Cairo, he remembers the pain of leaving people behind. Of valuing his own life over the lives of others. He remembers the faces of his villagers, looking at him for succor, trusting him to be their champion.

Eben would say that he has his own battle to fight, but who’s to say that this hypothetical future battle is any more important than Rabiah’s, which is real, which is now?

You are, Eben would say, and maybe he would be right, because the misery of these people pales in comparison to the potential extermination of billions.

Hilal can’t argue with the phantom voice of his master.

But he can silence it.

He can promise himself that this risk is low, that this cause is just, that he can assist Rabiah’s cause without endangering his own.

That perhaps he can redeem the betrayals of his past by giving Rabiah and her people a future.

He tucks the ancient book safely into his pack—logically, it might be safer left behind, but he can’t stand to let it out of his sight. The book calls to him, wants to be in his possession. And so it shall be. He tugs the pack onto his shoulders, and, when nightfall comes, circles the prison, finds the hole in its defenses, a shadowed sliver in sight of neither camera nor guard, and, applying adhesives to his hands and sneakers, scales the outer wall in 90 seconds flat.

On the other side of the wall, he pulls out his hand-carved wooden blowgun, peers through its laser sight, and fires a dart into the man’s neck. The blow is nonlethal; Hilal prefers not to kill unless he has to. Within seconds, the neurotoxin has infiltrated the bloodstream, and the guard drops noiselessly to the ground. He will wake in a few hours with a blinding headache but no long-term ill effects, and no idea how close he’s come to death.

Hilal proceeds.

He fires darts at several more guards, taking them out efficiently, one by one. For the two security cameras he’s unable to avoid, he chooses a more low-tech solution, cracking the lenses with two well-aimed pebbles. He scales another wall, and disables the engine of a tank while the driver is distracted by her cell phone, yelling at her boyfriend about standing her up the night before. He makes his way deeper and deeper into the prison complex, aware with every step that he’s putting more distance—more walls, more bullets—between himself and safety.

When he reaches the block where, according to his sources, Rabiah is being held, he surveys the two guards at the entrance, gauging his options. After a few minutes, one of them descends his guard tower and retreats into the shadows, unzipping his pants and relieving himself.

Hilal sneaks up behind him and wraps an arm around his throat, squeezing like a vise. Thirty seconds later the man is unconscious, and in thirty more seconds Hilal has zipped himself into the ill-fitting uniform and looped the man’s pass card around his neck.

He drags the body farther into the shadows, tucking it behind a Dumpster, but its absence will surely be noticed, sooner rather than later. Time is of the essence. To buy himself more of it, Hilal deploys a small electromagnetic dampening device that will disrupt any electrical or wireless signals in the immediate vicinity, so that even if the remaining guards do notice something awry, it will take a little extra effort for them to sound the alarm. He designed the device himself—sometimes, he told his master, a man needs more than pebbles.

Keeping his head down, Hilal enters the prison block, using the pass card to unlock one bolted door after another. He encounters only a few guards along his way, and none of them take much note of the tall young man on a mission. From behind some of the cell doors, he hears screams of pain, pleas to stop, wordless howls that say the same thing, so many souls here needing rescue, but Hilal forces himself to keep going. He’s been taught to choose his battles.

Rabiah’s cell is exactly where it’s supposed to be.

She’s slumped on the filthy floor, head pressed to her knees, and doesn’t bother to look up when he lets himself in. “I told you, I don’t care what you do to me; I’m not turning on my people.”

“I would never ask you to do that,” Hilal says gently.

Rabiah looks up—and treats him to the most radiant smile Hilal has ever seen. It seems to warm the dingy cell, light the cold stone with a holy glow. This smile embodies the ancient truth that Hilal has struggled all his life to understand and share: that every human bears the touch of the divine.

“How are you here?” Rabiah says in wonder. “How is this possible?”

“I came for you,” Hilal says simply. “Anything is possible, if desired strongly enough.”

“That’s not exactly an answer. But fine, forget the how—why are you here?” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “Are you crazy? What if they catch you?”

“Indeed,” Hilal says. “So we must do this quickly.”

“Great, give it to me.”

“Give you what?”

“The message,” Rabiah says. “Didn’t they send along a message?”

“They who?” Hilal asks, now thoroughly confused.

“My people,” she says. “Or is it that they want information? There’s already a lot I can give you—the layout of the prison, the timing of the guard shifts, the names of the other prisoners, I’ve been keeping track of it all, I knew they’d find a way to make contact, I just didn’t think it would be—”

Hilal holds up his hands to stop the flow of words. They’re gushing out of her like water from a burst pipe, and he tries to imagine what it must have been like for her here, hour after hour, forcing her words down and her lips shut, staying silent in the face of all inducement to talk. “No one sent a message. No one sent me,” he explains. “I’ve come on my own, to get you out of here. But we must go quickly!”

“You’ve come to rescue me? You don’t even know me.”

“I know enough,” Hilal says, because there’s no time to explain his tangle of motivations, the awe he feels for her and her commitment to her cause, the layers of guilt that have nothing to do with her, the responsibility he’s decided to take for her life, the concept of spiritual bloodlines, the war between his common sense and his need to stop standing on the sidelines and act, the way she is simultaneously alien to Hilal and utterly familiar. He too is a warrior; he too has devoted his life to a single cause with monastic intensity—but he has also trained himself in tolerance and equability, in holding fast to his inner peace when all about him is chaos, in keeping the world and its mess at a distance. Rabiah wallows in the mess, hungers for it, and, stranger though she is, Hilal reveres her a little for it.

Rabiah shakes her head. “No. If you knew the first thing about me, you’d know I won’t go anywhere with you. I don’t need to be rescued. I don’t want to be rescued.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Clearly.” The smile is long gone, but if anything, she’s glowing even more brightly, lit from within by her own certainty. “I’ve done nothing wrong, and I won’t be a fugitive from my own home. I won’t live in exile, or in hiding. I can make a difference here. People will know my story. Even if I can’t speak, they will hear my voice.”

“This makes no sense to me,” Hilal says. He’s learned things in his efforts to gain access to the prison; he’s heard rumors of the things that are done here, in the name of justice. He’s heard of people lost in this darkness who never find their way back to the light. He’s heard their screams.

“Your people need you. What will they be without your leadership? How will your cause triumph without you there to fight for it?”

“I’ll be fighting for it here, Hilal. And my people will continue on without me. The movement is bigger than any one voice. You haven’t been with us long enough to see that, but stick around and you will, I promise.”

“And while they fight on, what will you do? There’s less dignity in martyrdom than you think. And more pain.”

“Is that what your God would say?”

Hilal knows the power of a story—the power of a sacrifice. It can echo down through the ages; it can change the world. But it can also be senseless. Purposeless. No story is worth this girl’s life.

Rabiah lurches to her feet and crosses the distance between them. She takes his hands in her own. Hilal’s hands are his only pride—they’re beautiful. Flawless. He massages them daily with oils and tinctures, files each nail down to a smooth crescent moon, protects them from scars and calluses. The pristine stretch of soft skin is broken only by a small cross branded into the heel of his right hand. Rabiah rubs her thumb over its sharp lines and meets his eyes.

“I have no intention of being a martyr, Hilal,” she says. They are strangers, but in this moment he feels as if he’s known her forever. As if, in some impossible way, they are one. “I intend to continue my fight. To make noise. Let them make an example of me—I intend to make an example of myself. I don’t intend to die, but . . . Is there nothing you would risk everything for, Hilal? Is there nothing you would die for, if it came to that?”

It comes to Hilal as an epiphany, in the truest meaning of the word, comprehension blooming over him like a mushroom cloud.

This fight is her Endgame.

He has no choice but to let her Play.

Hilal was six years old when he said good-bye to his parents and his brothers and sisters and began his new life: Scholarship. Training. Devotion to the ancient truth. Everything else, everything lesser, pared away.

He was six years old when his master sat him down and told him the story of the Makers, who came from above to imbue humanity with a divine spark—and departed just as mysteriously and abruptly, leaving only a solemn promise to someday return.

He was too young then to understand what he was agreeing to, but old enough to know what a promise meant—other than leaving behind everything he knew and loved. A Player was not meant to have personal connections. The Aksumite Player, Master Eben said, must belong to all, and to none.

He must love humanity, but also be free of it.

Every year, on his birthday, his master once again told him the story of the Makers from above, and again asked him, “Do you pledge your life to this cause? To fighting for the survival of the Aksumite line when Endgame comes? To fighting, every day, for the soul of humanity?”

Every year, Hilal understood a little more, knew better what he was promising and what he was sacrificing, and every year, he bowed his head before his master and gave his solemn oath.

Every year, until his 13th year, when his master asked him the question for the last time. This was the year that Hilal came of age—he was no longer a child. This was the year he became a man and a Player, and his oath would bind him for the rest of his days.

They stood alone in the Church of the Covenant, and Hilal could feel the power of that most sacred object buried deep in the earth beneath them, the Ark of the Covenant, protected by the Aksumites for countless generations. To make a promise in the presence of the ark was to bind himself to divinity; this was a promise that would not, could not be broken.

Hilal had spent seven years preparing for that day. Studying and training, learning fully what it meant to be the Aksumite Player—he had endured great pain, and inflicted it on others. He knew that if Endgame came during his tenure, there would likely be pain beyond his wildest imaginings. There would be danger; there could be death.

And yet he did not hesitate.

“I swear,” he said, in the shadow of the cross, in the aura of the covenant. He felt no fear, only the ecstatic joy of giving himself up to a higher power. Giving himself to the ultimate. “I pledge myself to this fight. To Endgame.”

Because he promised on that day, he will now return home to Ethiopia and to his master; he will complete his mission. Because Rabiah has made the same promise to her own people and her own fight, he must leave her behind to her fate, whatever it might be.

And so he sneaks out of the prison as stealthily as he snuck in. No alarm is raised; no more harm comes to anyone.

Hilal walks away from Tora, and simply keeps walking. He walks through the night, one kilometer after another, and though the city lights block out the stars, he can sense their watchful presence. He breathes in the night air, feels the earth beneath him, and tries to focus his mind on the future rather than the past. When dawn breaks, he takes the last of his American dollars and offers them to the driver of the first Jeep he comes across.

The offer is accepted.

Hilal takes the wheel and drives south. Day and night, he drives, crossing the Sudanese border by ferry to Wadi Halfa, charming his way through immigration with his fake passport and a gentle smile, pressing farther south, through Dongola and Al Dabbah and Khartoum, across Dinder National Park, the tires swallowing broken pavement, the hum of engine and roar of wind driving all thoughts from his mind, the landscape gradually resolving itself into the familiar contours of home, until, finally, nearly four days and nights later, he reaches the Church of the Covenant, where his master waits.

“I was beginning to worry for you,” Eben tells him, cradling the Book of Ouazebas as if it is a living creature, precious and fragile. “Did you meet unexpected troubles?”

“Life is made up of the unexpected,” Hilal says, repeating one of his master’s favorite sayings. “This is its greatest gift.”

Eben smiles. “Indeed. You have done well for us, my Player. And the journey seems to have done well for you. You seem more settled than you have been. I sense your heart is no longer elsewhere.”

“My heart is here,” Hilal agrees, feeling the truth of his master’s words, and his own. “My life is here.”

Hilal rededicates himself to his ancient texts and his modern weapons, his scholarship and his training; in Cairo, the protests continue. As she expected, Rabiah’s people continue on in her absence, carrying out her plans. As he expected, they have no luck breaking her free, or perhaps they had as much luck as he did, and once again she refused rescue.

Martial law is declared; soldiers patrol the streets; university students and businessmen and religious leaders and families mass in Tahrir Square, night after night, raising their signs and their voices to the sky. The international community raises its own voice in support of the protest and its leaders, and Rabiah’s name circles the globe, a symbol of oppression—and hope.

Hilal watches it all on TV.

Hilal watches a lot of things on TV now: news broadcasts from around the world, news of local political squabbles, of oppression and poverty and disease and war. These updates are irrelevant to Endgame, and to his ultimate goals, yet still he watches. He is attuned, suddenly, to a world beyond the world he has always known. He’s spent a lifetime focusing on the ancient past and the imagined future; now Hilal pays new attention to the present. He sees the effects of environmental degradation, the tsunamis and earthquakes and agricultural plagues. He sees children forced into sweatshop labor and children forced into battle. He sees villages burned, tribes exterminated; he sees dissent silenced, leaders of opposition parties hauled off to prison or gunned down in the streets. He sees the world ending, not in a single apocalyptic blow from above, but gradually, incrementally, in a thousand ways at once.

He hears the voices crying in protest.

He doesn’t allow himself to wish he could join them. He doesn’t let himself wonder what he could contribute to these fights, if he didn’t have one of his own. If anything, he is more committed than ever to Endgame, to his master, to the ancient truth. In that sense, nothing has changed.

But in another sense, everything has.

Hilal has never given much thought to his life after his Playing days are done. If anything, he has imagined he will follow in his master’s footsteps. Eben was a Player, once, and now he helps others do the same. He lives alone; he meditates; he prays; he holds himself separate from humanity; he loves all equally and none particularly. It is a noble life, and it is enough for him, as it has been enough for Aksumite Players through the ages.

Hilal needs more.

He will Play. He will give this life everything he has. He will fulfill his promise to his higher purpose—until he comes of age and his Playing time is past. Then he will be free to choose for himself again, and now he makes a new promise: that when the time comes, he will choose the mess, the chaos, of life. He will stop watching from the sidelines, and will instead choose a side, choose a people, perhaps even choose a person: he will love and fight; he will risk himself for what he believes is right. He will turn his gaze from the promised perfected future to the flawed present.

He will always keep fighting for humanity—and someday, finally, he will join it.

CAHOKIAN

SARAH

For as long as she lives, Sarah Alopay will never forget the sound of her brother’s screams.

They are muffled by the steel walls that close him in, but she can still hear them. Sarah stands on the other side of a six-inch steel-reinforced door, her palms pressed against the cold metal, tears streaking down her face. Samuel Orozco, her brother’s pain trainer, sits rigidly in a folding chair beside her, eyes fixed on his stopwatch.

Samuel does not approve of 14-year-old Sarah’s presence here, but she insisted, and her parents agreed, and so Samuel had no choice but to allow it.

So much of Tate’s training is a mystery to her.

She knows about Endgame, knows that her big brother is the Player, the fate of their Cahokian line resting on his shoulders. She knows that he goes off to mysterious places for days or weeks on end, returning with bruises and scars—and, no matter what, a tacky souvenir for his little sister. She knows Tate is strong and brave, and proud to serve his people, no matter what it takes.

She knows he has no fear of pain.

So Sarah fears for him.

When he disappears on his training missions, she lies awake at night, praying that he will return safe and whole. So when she learned of this mission—a journey no farther than the reinforced shed in their Omaha backyard, a journey deep into the self, to a dark, tranquil meditative corner of the mind that pain cannot touch—she wanted to be there with him, as close as she could get.

“It’s just a few hundred bee stings,” Tate said cheerfully, before Samuel locked him in with the angry hive. He tweaked her nose. “How bad can it be?”

Sarah knows that Tate has been taught to withstand pain. She’s seen him carve a blade across his skin without flinching; she’s seen him walk across hot coals and press an iron brand to his own flesh, searing a Cahokian bird sign into his bicep. All of that without a whimper.

So she is not expecting the screams.

“It’s normal,” Samuel murmurs, finally acknowledging her presence. “To be expected.”

Samuel is one of 10 trainers who serve her brother, turning him into the best Player he can be. Samuel is neither the strongest nor the strangest, but he is by far the most terrifying. His eyes never quite focus, and his face is unnaturally still. He’s a master of inner retreat, of ignoring pain, but Sarah suspects there’s a part of him in constant agony. All that pain must go somewhere. Maybe that’s why he seems to so delight in inflicting pain on her brother.

He looks at her like he wants to experiment on her, like he’s curious to see how much she can withstand, and this frightens her most of all.

Which is why she can’t find the nerve to argue with him.

Why she doesn’t say, No, stop, please.

Something’s gone wrong.

Let my brother out.

Seconds pass. Minutes pass. Tate screams and screams. And when the buzzer finally sounds and the door swings open, when Samuel has gassed the bees into submission and Tate emerges, Sarah understands what she’s done.

What she’s let happen by letting her fear rule her.

The creature that stumbles out looks nothing like her brother. He is a swollen monster, every inch of exposed skin inflamed by angry red stings, his face unrecognizable, his screams choked off as he struggles to breathe.

“Tate!” Sarah cries, and the creature that is her brother seems to hear her, turns his face toward her, peers through eyes swollen nearly shut—then drops to the ground, breath rasping, limbs shuddering and thrashing. Samuel has his phone out, is saying something about an error, an emergency, crucial speed and windows closing, but Sarah isn’t listening; she’s kneeling by her brother’s side; she’s weeping; she’s saying, “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry”; she’s saying, “Tate, please.” She’s shaking him, begging him, but Tate doesn’t move, doesn’t wake.

He only lies there, swollen and limp.

Still.

Tate isn’t dead.

This is what Sarah reminds herself, in all those excruciating hours in hospital waiting rooms that follow. She sits on uncomfortable orange chairs, flanked by her parents, waiting to hear how badly Tate is hurt, whether he can be fixed, whether he can be made whole again, waiting through the epi push and the morphine haze and the induced coma and the raging infection and the first surgery and the second, all the time reminding herself, whatever happens next: Tate isn’t dead.

As she waits, Sarah clutches Babar Jr., the gray stuffed elephant her brother once brought her back from Kenya. It was four years ago, one of his first solo missions as the Player, and she had begged him not to leave. He was 14, then, and had been training for most of his life. He was big and strong and brave, but she didn’t want him to go—not across the seas all by himself, not to a strange land where terrible things might happen, not anywhere. Please stay, she told him, crying even though she was 10 years old, too big to cry. She meant, Please live. But Tate had just tweaked her nose and promised to bring her back an elephant. She’d half thought he meant a real one.

He was, after all, her big brother; he was capable of miracles.

Now she’s 14 herself, but she’s not strong or brave. She is too big for crying and too big for stuffed animals. Still, she hunches forward in the waiting room seats and lets her tears spatter on Babar Jr.’s matted fur.

She thinks about Tate, how he always snatches the last slice of pizza and the last piece of cake, because, he likes to say, “It’s the least you can do for the guy who’s going to save the world.”

How her friends’ favorite new game is to hide in the bushes and watch Tate lifting weights, how they giggle and say things like, “Your brother is so handsome” and “Someday I’m going to grow up and marry him,” and Sarah says, “Gross, shut up,” but secretly, she is so proud.

She tries to ignore her parents’ whispers, something about the Cahokian Council of Elders and what to tell them, what to do if Tate can’t . . . if Tate doesn’t . . . These are things nobody should be saying, least of all her parents.

Tate will.

Tate is.

Tate is alive and will stay that way, the doctors told them, that first day.

There was damage, permanent damage, how much they didn’t know, but he would survive.

The trial of the bees is a Cahokian tradition. No one could have known that Tate would have a near-fatal allergic reaction, or that the infection from the stings on his eye would rage through his system, that the only safe treatment would be cutting it off at the root. Removing the eye.

Tate is unconscious for all of it, and Sarah uses this time to try to get comfortable with this new version of her brother, weakened and scarred, a sunken hollow where his left eye used to be. She wants to be able to look at him without flinching when he finally wakes. She wants to be able to smile and promise him it’s not so bad.

The day they pull him out of the coma, her parents go in first. Sarah waits just outside the door.

Sometimes it feels like she’s spent her whole life waiting on the wrong side of a door.

She can hear her parents’ soft murmurs, and the angry cadence of Tate’s voice as he tries to piece together what’s happened to him.

He hurts, he says, and it’s like a moan.

She’s never before heard him admit to pain. Not her strong brother, who’s not just her hero but the hero of her people.

His voice is too quiet for her to make out the words, but she can tell he’s asked a question, and when her parents don’t answer, he asks it again. Sarah creeps closer to the doorway, hears her father’s response.

“I’m sorry, but the council voted. With only one eye—”

Tate chokes out a response.

Her father shakes his head. “I know. I tried to convince them. But they were adamant. They’ve already chosen someone to take your place.”

Sarah gasps. This is the first she’s hearing of a vote. Of a decision. It’s unthinkable, that the council would take this away from her brother. Being the Player is all he’s ever wanted.

Her father rests a hand on Tate’s shoulder, then pulls it back quickly, remembering how every touch must burn. “I’m sorry, son. I’m—”

Tate shouts, and this time, Sarah understands loud and clear. “Get out!” He yells it again, louder, and again and again until his parents follow his command and back away. A nurse rushes past Sarah, flying toward Tate to calm him down before his blood pressure goes too high. She injects something into his IV, and he goes quiet and still again.

The next time he wakes up, he refuses to see them. He refuses to see anybody.

He tells his doctors he doesn’t want to live.

That there’s no point.

He’s not dead, Sarah tells herself, over and over again. Even if he’s no longer going to be the Player, he will still be Tate. He will find a way to be himself again. He will let her see him, let her love him. At least, she thinks, the worst is behind them. He’ll have to understand that, eventually—that it’s better for all of them that Endgame is gone from their lives, that they can just be a family again, two parents and two kids, happy and normal.

That night, Sarah’s parents come to her room, saying they have something to tell her. Their faces are grave; her heart seizes. “Is it Tate?” she asks. “Did something else happen?”

“It’s not Tate,” her mother says. “It’s you.”

“What about me?”

“The council voted,” her father says. “They’ve chosen their next Player.”

“So what?” Sarah spits out. She hates the council, hates the next Player, whoever it will be, hates everything involving Endgame and the trainers and the creatures from the sky, all of whom have conspired to steal her brother away. She wants nothing to do with any of it, ever again. “What do I care who it is?”

Her mother fights her way to a sad smile. “Sarah, it’s you.”

Sarah can’t remember a time in her life when she didn’t know about the end of the world. The council selected Tate when he was four years old. No one knows why; the workings of the council are a privileged secret. Only the six Cahokian elders with the key to the council’s underground bunker know what transpires in the meetings, and that knowledge is taken to the grave. They arrived on Simon and Olowa’s doorstep, told them their son had a special destiny, and Simon and Olowa agreed on the four-year-old’s behalf. There is no punishment for saying no to such an offer, but in the long history of the Cahokian people, only a handful ever have. To serve Endgame is the greatest of privileges.

Tate began his training immediately. He has always dreamed of saving the world.

Sarah was born less than one month later.

She wonders, lately, about the timing of that. Did they worry even then that Playing might rob them of their precious son, whether Endgame came soon or not? Did they want a backup?

That’s how she thinks of herself now: a backup.

Several nights after the council makes its decision, when Sarah is still trying to decide whether to accept, she creeps down the hallway and stops in front of Tate’s bedroom door. It’s his first night home, and he went to bed without dinner. His eye, or the thing that used to be his eye, hurt, he said. Everything hurt.

Sarah knocks softly.

“Go away, little sis.”

He’s only started calling her that since the bees. She can hear the sneer in it.

“Can I come in?” she asks. “I have to talk to you.”

“You can talk from there. In here you’d have to look at me. I’ll spare you that nightmare, little sis.”

Tate was always handsome, never vain. Girls have been throwing themselves at him since he was 12 years old. The doctors say that once the swelling goes down and the scars fade, his face will be almost like it once was. The doctors say that once they can fit him with a fake eye, most people won’t even notice. They can forget any of this ever happened. Tate doesn’t believe them. Sarah doesn’t either.

“The council wants—”

“I know what the council wants,” he growls. “Why haven’t you given them an answer yet?”

“I . . .” Sarah swallows back a sob. Players shouldn’t cry. They should be strong. She wonders, if she says yes, whether someone will teach her how to do that. “You’re supposed to be the Player, Tate. It’s supposed to be you.”

“No duh.”

It’s something he used to say to her when she was little and she had excitedly reported some obvious fact of life to him that was news to her. He never used to say it so meanly.

“Will you hate me, if I do it?” Sarah asks.

“Probably,” he says.

Only when he says it, when she feels her heart drop, does she realize how much she wants this. That maybe she wasn’t supposed to be the Player, maybe she’s just the backup choice—but maybe that doesn’t matter. The council picked her, Sarah Alopay. Little sis saves the world. She likes the sound of it. More than she thought she would.

“Oh,” Sarah says.

There’s a long silence between them. She presses her palm to the door, and wonders if she should tell him—that if she’d spoken up sooner, yelled and screamed until the trainer let him out, maybe none of this would be happening. That she’s a coward, and he’s paid the price.

“But I’ll hate you even more if you don’t do it,” Tate says. “It’s your call.”

Last month, for French homework, Sarah had to make a list of the things she liked best. She was bored by the assignment, bored by the class, which like all her subjects, comes easily to her. And she certainly wasn’t going to reveal her true personal preferences to her French teacher, who has a unibrow and smells like foot. So she dashed off a list that was a lie, filled with whatever French words popped most quickly into her head: le gâteau and les chiens and ma famille.

But that night, in her journal, she made a list for herself.

Things I Like:

my BFF
my brother
my parents, sometimes, when they’re not being JERKS
soccer
algebra
being smart

Saturday afternoons
scary movies

Christopher

Christopher

CHRISTOPHER

Christopher is her boyfriend, and has been for nearly one year. He is handsome and funny and acts like a boyfriend out of a romantic movie, the kind who brings you flowers and candy and tugs at the corners of your lips when you think you’re too sad to smile. Sarah is only 14, which she knows is probably too young to love anyone, except that Romeo and Juliet were also 14, and that makes her think that maybe there’s no such thing as too young and maybe she and Christopher are forever—and that night she got so distracted thinking about her boyfriend and the way his eyes squint when he laughs and the way her heart thumps when he puts his arm around her and slips it into the pocket of her jeans that she forgot all about her list.

In the middle of the night, she woke up from a nightmare slick with sweat. She couldn’t remember anything about the dream, but she couldn’t fall back asleep. So she turned on the light and pulled out her journal again, and added one more thing to the list, something she would never have confessed to her French teacher or Christopher or anyone else, especially not Tate, who wanted to save the world.

Things I Like:

being normal

“But why me?” she asks again, as the car speeds toward the Mississippi River. In three more hours, they will reach the most sacred spot of the Cahokian people, and Sarah will swear herself to her new fate. Three more hours—then there’s no turning back. “I still don’t understand why they would pick me.”

Her mother doesn’t talk while she’s driving: she prefers to focus all her attention on the road. So it falls to Sarah’s father to turn around and reassure his daughter. “Because you’re brilliant and kind and wonderful,” he says, and she can tell from the set of his face how much he hates this, and how much he’s trying to hide it.

Tate refused to come.

“None of that crap is my problem anymore,” he said through the closed door of his room. He doesn’t leave his room unless he has to, nor will he let anyone in. “Have fun, little sis.”

Sarah’s phone buzzes for the third time in an hour. It’s her best friend, Reena, wanting to know how her big date night went. Last night was the one-year anniversary of the first time Sarah kissed Christopher Vanderkamp. Christopher planned a romantic dinner for them, and Reena will want every detail.

Yesterday afternoon, Reena came over to help her choose an outfit for the date. “Not that one,” she sniffed at the ruffled black dress Sarah pulled out first. “You want him thinking make-out sessions, not funerals.”

Sarah put the dress back on its hanger and held up a lime-green skirt for Reena’s inspection. She knew Reena liked this one—Reena was the one who had picked it out.

But her best friend wrinkled her nose. “It just doesn’t look like you.”

“You told me that was a good thing!” Sarah reminded her, laughing. “You said that’s why I had to get it, so I could transform myself into a ‘sexy beast.’”

Then they were both giggling.

“I have most certainly never uttered those words in my whole life,” Reena said, with as much dignity as she could muster while snorting with laughter.

“Did so.”

“Well . . .” Reena shrugged. “Who told you to listen to everything I say?”

“Pretty sure you did,” Sarah said. “You tell me that basically every day.”

“Then listen to me now.” Reena climbed off Sarah’s bed and rifled through her closet, pulling out a pair of worn purple corduroys and a long black shirt. It was Sarah’s favorite outfit. “Wear this.”

“You always tell me that makes me look boring,” Sarah reminded her. Reena prefers bright colors, wild patterns. All year, she’s been begging her mother for permission to dye her hair blue. Anything to make her stand out.

Reena grinned. “Apparently, Christopher Vanderkamp likes boring.”

Sarah elbowed her best friend; Reena whacked her gently with a pillow. “Christopher likes you,” Reena reminded her. “It’s been a year—you don’t have to pretend to be someone else for him. He just wants you. Smart, wonderful, dependable, maybe ever-so-slightly boring Sarah Alopay.”

“You think?” Sarah asked. After all this time, she still couldn’t quite believe that someone like Christopher wanted someone like her. “It’s just . . . he’s so amazing.”

“Yeah, and fortunately, he’s smart enough to realize you’re amazing,” Reena pointed out. “It’s what makes you perfect for each other.”

Sarah agreed to wear the purple cords; she promised to call Reena in the morning and tell her everything.

And when she said it, she really believed she would. Even though she and her parents were supposed to leave the next day for the sacred ceremony. Even though her stomach was churning, thinking about how much everything in her life was about to change—and how she couldn’t tell Reena or Christopher about any of it.

She put on the cords. She put on the black shirt. She brushed a light layer of silver shadow across her eyelids and put on the pink lip gloss Christopher liked, the kind that tasted like bubble gum.

Then she rushed to the bathroom, bent over the toilet, and threw up.

She couldn’t do it.

She couldn’t face him across the table, smile, tell him how happy he made her, pretend that everything was fine. She couldn’t lie to him like that.

So she lied to him another way.

“I am so sorry,” she told him on the phone. “I was feeling fine a couple hours ago, but now my stomach is just, like, Nope, don’t think so.”

It wasn’t quite a lie, because every time she thought about the future, her stomach flipped somersaults all over again.

“Is this . . .” He hesitated. He’d been doing that a lot, lately. Ever since Tate got hurt, ever since she’d gotten the offer from the elders, there were so many things she couldn’t say to him. He could tell she was holding something back—so he started holding back too. “Is this about your brother? Because if you’re not in the mood for a whole big thing, I could come over, we could watch one of those terrible movies you insist on loving—”

“They’re not terrible!”

“I love you, but anything called SlasherFest Summertime Fun, Part Three is a terrible movie.”

“It’s Slasher Summer Camp Fun, Part Four,” she corrected him, thinking, He loves me, he loves me, he loves me. “And it’s awesome.”

“I’m just saying, we don’t have to do this whole dinner thing. I just want to see you. Cheer you up.”

Sarah sighed. “Look, I know I’ve been kind of weird, lately—”

“Dude, he’s your brother. I get it.”

Christopher thinks that all her bad moods, all the new distance between them, are about Tate’s injury. And she lets him think it. Which isn’t fair to anyone.

But it’s easier.

“I want to see you too,” she said, thinking, I love you too, but she couldn’t say that, not with what she was about to do. How could she promise herself to him when she was about to promise herself to the Cahokian line? “But I’m really just sick, I swear. Unless you want me puking all over your precious Converse—”

“Enough said.”

Sarah smiled. Nothing was more important to Christopher than his sneaker collection.

“Rain check?” she asked.

“Just try to get out of it. I dare you.”

She hung up the phone, wondering if she’d made a mistake. Maybe she could have just told him the truth. But how, exactly, would that work? Christopher was cute and rich and the star quarterback on the JV football team; he was sweet and funny and endlessly understanding. But no way would he understand if she told him she was a descendant of an ancient civilization and she was about to devote the next six years of her life to training for Endgame, just in case the Sky People returned and decided it was time for the end of the world.

No, even Christopher wouldn’t understand that, and she couldn’t expect him to.

He sent her a sweet text this morning, with a GIF of a dancing gorilla to make her smile. He’s been trying to so hard lately to make her smile. She hates disappointing him.

Sarah puts the phone away. She doesn’t want to lie to her best friend any more than she wanted to lie to Christopher. It’s easier just to ignore her for the day. Once she gets back home, once she’s officially sworn in as the Player and starting on her new life, then she’ll decide how to deal with her old one. She slips in her earbuds and turns the music up as loud as she can stand it: Arcade Fire, Christopher’s favorite band. Sarah closes her eyes and tries to lose herself.

It’s a six-hour drive from Omaha to Collinsville, Illinois. They make it in eight—Sarah’s mother is a very careful driver.

It’s midnight, and the historic site is closed to tourists. The council, of course, has a man on the inside, and so everything is prepared for them. Sarah and her parents rush through the gate, though Sarah’s father laughs and says there’s no point in hurrying.

“After all, they can’t start without you,” he says, and Sarah tries to laugh too.

Her parents are doing the best they can to pretend that this is an occasion for pride and joy—and that they’re not remembering the last time they were here, hand in hand with their precocious preschooler, Tate stumbling over the oath that would indebt him to his people for life.

One thousand years ago, these acres were home to the continent’s first and greatest civilization. For more than half a millennium, the Cahokian people ruled over their teeming metropolis—and then, mysteriously, vanished. Nothing was left of the city but three square miles of grass and soil mounds, the largest of them 10 stories tall. Nothing was left of the civilization or its people but a handful of survivors, and a story handed down through hundreds of generations.

A story of a bargain made with the Sky People. The Cahokians would receive power and technology, enough to rule over the young nation for centuries. In return, when the Sky People asked, the Cahokians would hand over a precious resource: 1,000 of their children.

The Cahokians ruled, as planned. After 500 years, the Sky People came back, as promised. They demanded payment—and the Cahokians refused.

For the first time in 10,000 years, a human civilization waged war against the creatures from the sky. They fought bravely—and died horribly, all of them, the civilization annihilated with a single blast, only a handful of survivors left to tell the tale.

These survivors, travelers who returned home to find everything they knew and love destroyed, were sentenced to a humiliating punishment of their own: the Sky People reached into their minds and obliterated the true name of their people.

Hundreds of years later, Europeans conquered the continent and assigned a new name to the vanished people: Cahokia. The New World has no idea there are survivors of the ancient civilization, that the Cahokians lived, haunted by its past glories and defeats.

The Cahokians had been forced to forget their name, but they remembered their history, and they struggled on in secret, determined that their bloodline should survive.

By now, most North Americans have Cahokian blood running through their veins; their survival now depends on Sarah’s willingness to fight.

It is said that across the world, the sacred sites of the other 11 ancient lines have been preserved: underground temples, secret caverns, hidden passageways that the land developers and tourists know nothing about.

Not here.

The European invaders proved nearly as skilled as the Sky People at obliteration. There are no hidden passageways running beneath the Cahokian mounds. There are only millions of cubic feet of soil raising the earth to the sky, and postholes showing where the ancient people once erected Woodhenge—an arrangement of wooden posts that symbolized the Earth and the four cardinal directions, used to communicate with the gods.

Sarah’s people have erected new posts for the night, and now she stands at their center.

The eldest of the elders is before her, a 6,000-year-old stone in his hand.

Sarah recognizes the stone; she’s seen it every day of her life, hanging from Tate’s neck. It belongs to the Player, and always has.

If she goes through with this tonight, it will belong to her.

She won’t be the normal one anymore, the one who takes shortcuts on her homework and scarfs pizzas with her best friend and has nothing more important to think about than whether Christopher will ask her to the school formal. She won’t be a backup anymore. She’ll be the Player, and the lives of her people will rest on her shoulders.

If she goes through with this, she’ll claim what was once her big brother’s future—a future that scares her, of violence and danger and pain, all the things she never wanted for him and wants even less for herself.

And he might never forgive her for it.

Sarah’s phone buzzes in her back pocket. The elder looks at her, pointedly, and Sarah wonders whether the old man has ever even seen a cell phone. She wonders what he would say if she asked him to pause the ceremony for a moment while she texts Reena back. Hey, it wasn’t my idea that the Player should be a teenager, she would like to tell him. What did you expect?

But of course she can’t do that.

Add it to the list of things she can’t do, now.

Sarah is suddenly having trouble breathing. A hot flush rises in her cheeks. Somewhere, far away, Reena is hungry for gossip; somewhere, far away, Christopher is worrying about his girlfriend’s supposed food poisoning. She wants to run away from this, run home to them, maybe just run, and keep running until she leaves everything and everyone behind, until there are no more hard decisions to make, only the sound of wind in her ears and the thump of ground beneath her feet.

She doesn’t run.

“Put out your hand,” the leader of the Cahokian elders commands her.

Sarah does, and he lays the ancient stone on her open palm. It feels warm to the touch, and almost seems to pulse with her heartbeat, but she tells herself that must be her imagination.

The old man says several words in the ancient language of the Cahokian people. “Do you forswear all else?” he asks her then, in English. The same question has been asked of every Player for a thousand years.

There are countless reasons to say no to this question. There is Christopher; there is Tate. There is everything she wants for herself, and everything she’s afraid of. Countless reasons to say no, and only one reason to say yes.

But that one reason trumps all the others.

Her family; her people. All the Cahokian lives that have been lost, and all those hundreds of thousands more that could be, when Endgame comes. They need a champion.

Sarah came to this place still unsure how she would answer the ancient question. Half expecting she would lose her nerve, back out at the last moment. She has always trusted logic, and her logic tells her that this is a foolish choice.

But there’s something in her, something deeper and wiser than logic, something reaching for her destiny.

The elders chose her for a reason. She doesn’t understand what it could possibly be. But some part of her—that sure, steady part beneath rational thought—feels certain that they were right. That this is the right choice for her, and for her line. The Cahokian people need a champion, and that champion should be, must be, Sarah Alopay.

The stone burns her palm; she grips it tight, feeling suddenly connected to all those generations of Players long dead, woven into the fabric of Cahokian history. She can feel them out there, the Players of the past, dead and alive. They’re watching her, waiting for her to join them. All except Tate. She can’t feel him at all. “Do you pledge yourself to the survival of our people, and to the ancient oath?”

Sarah’s parents have warned her not to swear unless she’s completely sure. That there’s no going back.

They don’t spell out what the punishment would be for breaking her oath, but Sarah is Cahokian, and every Cahokian knows that promises made to the Sky People are not to be lightly broken.

Too much is at stake.

Too many have already died.

She closes her eyes, breathing in the soil and the sky. She hears the echo of Tate’s screams and can almost feel the touch of Christopher’s fingers grazing her lips, asking permission to kiss her for the first time. She feels something else, an insistent vibration in her hand, and for a moment she thinks it’s the phone again, Reena breaking in at the most inopportune moment.

But it’s the stone, waiting for her answer.

“Yes,” Sarah says, because her people have summoned her to duty, and she’s been raised to believe that this is a call that demands an answer. She repeats the words that she’s carefully memorized. “Yes, I swear. I swear to take your lives onto my shoulders. I swear to serve the Cahokian people to the best of my abilities and beyond. I swear to Play.”

Players are supposed to have time to learn their craft. Time for training in weapons, meditation, languages, code cracking, pain tolerance, physics and computers and bomb making. Time to understand their responsibilities, then find a way to make their Playing their own.

Sarah has no time.

No one knows when Endgame will come: it could start tomorrow.

She’s not ready.

As days of grueling training turn into weeks, she’s unsure she’ll ever be ready.

So are her trainers.

At Sarah’s school, there’s a student trying to become a professional gymnast. She hits the gym for long hours before and after school, stays up all night trying to get her homework done, never has a free second for extracurricular activities, or friends and family, or any kind of life. Though she seems happy enough with her back handsprings and her array of trophies. Sarah has always pitied her—she doesn’t know what she’s missing.

Sarah does know. Her new schedule demands she wake before dawn for a 10-mile run and calisthenics, then cram in as much of that week’s subject—ancient Greek, hydrodynamics, explosives defusing—as possible before school. She sleepwalks through the day, stealing every free period and lunch hour she can to zip through the homework she no longer has time for at home. Then, after school, it’s straight to the training center for martial arts and firearms, a brief meal with her family or, if she’s lucky, Christopher and Reena, then more studying, then merciful, if brief, sleep.

Those are the easy days.

Some days she spends in seclusion, learning to withstand the burn of hot coals on her soft flesh, or trekking through wilderness with neither food nor water, depending on her wits and the bounty of nature to keep herself alive and find her way home.

She’s starting to feel like she lives at the training facility, a nondescript building only 10 minutes from her house, its lease owned by the Cahokian elders, its interior filled with workout equipment and weapons stores. She spends more time with the experts employed by the council, steely-eyed trainers who treat her like a machine, than she does with the people she loves.

More weeks pass, and her reflexes sharpen; her muscles harden; her skin grows insensitive to touch, her system inured to pain. Sometimes she feels like she’s turning to stone.

The new skills come easily to her, as everything always has, but the trainers are unsatisfied.

They’re always telling her how much harder her brother worked, how much more he wanted it, how they can tell her mind is somewhere else.

They’re right.

“What happened?” Christopher asks in alarm the morning she comes to school with a black eye. He raises a finger to the purpling bruise, but she ducks his touch.

“I walked into a door,” she mumbles.

The lies are getting lamer.

Eventually, he’s going to get tired of this and break up with her. Or she’ll do it first and put them both out of their misery.

That’s probably the right thing to do, but she can’t bring herself to consider it. She’s not that strong.

“Sarah . . .” He puts his arms around her, and she almost loses it. For two months, she’s stayed steady, she’s made herself hard; she’s lied to Christopher and Reena so she can steal time for her training; sometimes she’s even lied to her trainers so she can steal time for Christopher and Reena. She’s told herself that this isn’t so bad, that she can do it, that any day now things will get easier, life will get calmer, Tate will start speaking to her again, everything will start to seem normal again, even though it never can be. She’s told herself that being the Player is no different from being a starting forward on the soccer team or being president of the honor society—just a few more things on her to-do list, no biggie. She’s walled up the truth, locked it away, but now, in Christopher’s arms, she feels the walls crumbling. A crowd swirls around them, students grabbing things from their lockers, hurrying off to class, chattering and buzzing about all the important problems of junior high life. Sarah feels a sudden surge of hate for them, how easy they have it, how little they understand. She breathes deep, breathes in the smell of Christopher’s soap, tries her best to block them all out. Pretend that she and Chris are the only two people that matter. The only two that exist. He whispers in her ear. “Sarah, if something was going on with you, something at home, or wherever . . . you’d tell me, right?”

She feels the sting of tears, knows that if she holds on to him much longer, she’ll lose it completely. She’s so tired—of lying to him and to herself that she can do it all. But if she lets herself collapse, if she lets him be the strong one and hold her up while she cries, there will only be more questions, and more lies.

“I told you, everything’s fine.” It comes out more harshly than she intends, and Christopher recoils. She angles her face away so he can’t see the sheen of tears in her eyes. She spots Reena picking her way through the crowd, waving eagerly as she approaches. The open, trusting look on her face makes Sarah’s heart clench. “I’m late for homeroom,” she says brusquely, and before Christopher can stop her, she rushes away.

She gets better at making up excuses.

Intensive French lessons in preparation for an imaginary summer abroad, a nonexistent international math competition to study for, a doctor’s appointment for Tate, a surgery for Tate, rehab and therapy for Tate—it’s easy, at least, to make up Tate-related excuses, because Reena and Christopher know how angry and miserable and damaged he is, if not why. They are endlessly kind and understanding, and Sarah hates herself for lying to them.

And even then, even after all she’s given up and all the energy she’s thrown into her new mission, it’s still not enough.

“Honey, your trainer’s a bit concerned about something,” Sarah’s father says, as the four of them dig into his Sunday special: spaghetti and meatballs. It used to be Sarah’s favorite part of the week, but now she’s usually too busy for Sunday family dinners, and Tate almost always eats in his room.

“Which trainer?” Sarah asks, mouth full of pasta. She has a different trainer for each specialty—which means that even after nearly six months, they still feel like strangers.

Her parents exchange a glance. “Well . . . all of them,” her father admits.

“Oh.”

“They think you’re too distracted,” her mother says. “That you’re not focused enough on your training.”

“Are you kidding me?” Sarah feels like she’s going to explode. “I’m giving everything to this! What more do they want from me?”

“Last weekend you went to the mall with Reena when you could have been working on your Chinese,” her mother points out gently. “And I know you’ve been staying up late talking to Christopher on the phone when you need your sleep”—she held up a hand before Sarah could interrupt—“and I understand: you’re juggling a lot; you’re doing the best you can. But your trainers have suggested we make a few changes. Maybe it’s time to rethink the question of school—”

“No,” Sarah snaps. “No way. I’m not dropping out of school.”

“It would just be for a year or so, until you get your feet under you,” her father says. “And it’s not exactly dropping out. You already know everything they’re teaching you anyway. Your lessons here would—”

“No!” Sarah feels like a child having a temper tantrum, and wishes she knew how to let herself go that way, wishes she could have a temper tantrum, fists pounding, tears streaming. Then they would know how she feels, and they would stop this. “I’m giving everything I can to Playing, but I can’t give up my whole life. Tell them, Tate.”

Tate flinches, like he’s surprised they know he’s there. Like he was hoping he’d turned invisible.

“No comment,” he mumbles, and fidgets with his eye patch. The doctors say he’s ready to be fitted for a fake eye, but Tate refuses. He doesn’t want to pretend everything’s normal, he says. And he doesn’t want to give his family, or anyone else, the luxury of pretending either.

Sarah presses on. “You didn’t have to drop out of school. You graduated.”

He shrugs. “Lot of good it did me.”

He’s 18 now, and was expecting to spend the next couple of years focused solely on Playing. Sarah knows he never looked any further than that. Certainly not toward college, or a career. Tate has only ever wanted to Play. Now he lies in bed, listens to music, and promises his parents he’ll figure out what to do with his life. Someday.

“You’re not your brother, honey,” her mother says.

Tate snorts into his spaghetti. “That’s for sure.”

Sarah doesn’t know whether she wants to cry or use her new krav maga prowess to flip over the table and jam a fork into his neck. But either way, she’s lost her appetite. She pushes back from the table and rises to her feet. “Thanks for dinner,” she tells her father, in a tone that says, Thanks for nothing. “But apparently, I’ve got work to do.”

She’s standing by her locker when a shadow falls over her. Strong arms scoop her up and two hands press over her eyes, shutting her into darkness.

She flinches.

“Guess who.”

She recognizes Christopher’s warm voice just in time—she was about to flip him over her shoulder and slam him to the floor. She’s tensed for violence all the time now; her trainers have taught her to always be searching the shadows for enemies, to always be on alert for those who want to destroy her.

They have nothing to say on the subject of those who only want to love her.

She wants to warn Christopher not to sneak up on her again—that she’s more dangerous than he knows, that she’s forgotten how to play games that don’t end in death. Instead she says, “Hey, stranger,” then fakes a smile and twists around so they’re face-to-face.

He kisses her.

A year and a half ago, Christopher was just the surprisingly hot rising star on the football team who’d sprouted up six inches over the summer and was the first boy in their class to sport actual muscles. Sarah had gone to school with him since she was little, but she barely knew him. She and Reena spent hours on the phone, giggling about the cute tufts of hair that curled over his ears, the cute way his shirt was always rumpled and his socks never matched, the cute sparkle in his emerald-green eyes, the crooked front tooth that made his smile extra cute . . .

Then he asked Sarah out for pizza, and they held hands under the table, and he walked her home and, just before sending her inside, asked if he could kiss her. After that, he wasn’t Christopher-the-cute-guy-in-math, anymore. He was Christopher, the guy she could tell anything to, the guy who could always cheer her up when she was sad, the guy with the bottomless eyes and the soft lips and the Christopher smile, who she could keep kissing for the rest of her life.

She intends to.

Behind them, Reena clears her throat. Loudly. “Get a room, guys.”

Christopher grins. “If only.”

Sarah blushes. They haven’t done much more than kiss yet, but when he looks at her, when he touches her . . . she’s thought about it. A lot.

The bell rings for first period, saving her from further teasing.

“You still up for Sam and Louie’s after school?” Christopher asks, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. It’s their favorite pizza place, and the three of them used to go there a few times a week . . . before.

“Oh, crap.”

“You forgot,” Reena says accusingly.

“I . . .”

“We haven’t gone for pizza together in forever,” Reena complains.

“Okay, drama queen. It’s been like a week,” Sarah says.

Christopher squeezes her hand. “It’s been like three weeks,” he corrects her. “You promised.”

She did promise . . . but she also promised her firearms trainer that she would double her training time this week.

“I can’t, guys. I’m so sorry. Tate has an appointment with this eye specialist and I promised I’d go with him to the appointment. You know how it is.”

Reena and Christopher exchange a look. Sarah pretends not to see it.

“Yeah,” Reena says. “We know how it is.”

“I’ll text you when I get home?” Sarah says. “Both of you. Okay? Promise.”

“Yeah. Promise. Whatever.” Reena walks off to class without another word. Sarah searches Christopher’s face, trying to figure out if he’s mad at her.

“I would if I could,” she tells him. “You know that, right?”

He kisses her again, soft and sweet, and she closes her eyes and lets herself fall into his embrace. It’s so warm, so comforting, that it’s not until she’s seated in English class pretending to listen to the teacher drone that she realizes: he never answered her question.

“No!” Shelly shouts, as Sarah again tries to reassemble the AR-15 assault rifle in under 60 seconds and fails. “Again, and do it right this time!”

“Sorry, sir.” Sarah sighs, taking the weapon apart and laying each piece neatly on the table.

Shelly is a short, stout Cahokian and retired marine who’s in charge of making sure Sarah knows everything there is to know about guns and can hit a bull’s-eye with her eyes closed. She prefers shouting to talking and makes Sarah call her “sir.”

She thinks Sarah doesn’t have what it takes to be the Player.

Sarah knows this because Shelly says so, constantly.

Sarah stares at the pieces of the gun, trying to piece them together in her mind so her nervous fingers will know what to do.

“You waiting for an engraved invitation?” Shelly asks, and clicks the stopwatch. Sarah scrambles for the barrel jacket, fumbles the magazine, and drops it on the floor with a loud clatter, and Shelly slams her hand against the table. “Forget it! This is a waste of time if you’re not even going to try.”

“I am trying, sir,” Sarah says in a small voice. She’s been screwing up all afternoon, firing shots several inches from the bull’s-eye, forgetting her safety goggles, trying to load the sniper rifle with the wrong kind of bullets.

“You say that, but your mind is somewhere else,” Shelly accuses her.

It’s true. Her mind is at Sam and Louie’s, with Christopher, biting into a steaming slice of mushroom pepperoni and groaning at one of his terrible jokes.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“If you want me to tell your parents you can’t handle this . . .”

In the silence left behind the trainer’s threat, Sarah feels a glimmer of hope. What if she can’t measure up? What if the council deems her unworthy, and replaces her with someone else?

What if she simply stopped trying, and let it go?

But something in her—the same impulse that made her agree to Play in the first place—rebels against the idea.

“I said, I’m sorry,” she says forcefully, and, without waiting for permission, begins piecing the gun together again.

This time, she gets it right.

She assembles and disassembles the weapon 10 more times, her movements nimble and machinelike; then, after a quick break for food, she spends an extra three hours in the gym, working the punching bag and practicing her tae kwon do. Even when her martial arts trainer goes home for the night, Sarah keeps at it, only giving up when her muscles are screaming so loudly she can’t bear to aim another kick.

Well past midnight, she stumbles into bed, thinking, See? I can handle this, and it’s not until morning that she checks her phone and sees the flood of text messages from Christopher and Reena.

She forgot them, again.

Christopher doesn’t text her back. Reena doesn’t text her back. And when she sees them at school, they won’t talk to her.

Sarah finally pins Reena down in the girls’ bathroom. “What’s going on?” she asks. “Are you seriously this mad I forgot to text you last night? I’m sorry, okay? I went to bed really early.”

“Oh, yeah?” Reena’s washing her hands. She watches Sarah in the mirror. “Long, hard doctor’s appointment with Tate, yeah?”

“Well . . .” Sarah hates using her brother as an excuse like this. “Yeah, actually.”

Her best friend whirls to face her. “You know, if you’re cheating on Christopher or something, that’s an asshole move, but you could at least trust me enough to tell me about it. I’m supposed to be your best friend.”

“Wait—what? Why would you think I could ever cheat on Christopher?”

“I don’t know, how about because you’re constantly sneaking off and lying about it?”

“I told you, I was—”

“At a doctor’s appointment. With Tate. I know. Except for how we saw Tate at Sam and Louie’s, drunk off his ass in the middle of the afternoon and chowing down on a whole pizza all by himself.”

Sarah doesn’t know what to say. Her mind is too crowded with confusing, disturbing facts.

Reena and Christopher went for pizza without her? Like, on a date?

Tate’s getting drunk? In the middle of the afternoon?

They know she was lying? They think she’s been lying this whole time?

“Don’t bother,” Reena snaps.

“What?”

“I know you’re just trying to come up with another lie.”

“Am not.”

“Sarah, we’ve been friends since we were eight years old. I know you. And I know when you’re trying to lie to me. Not that you used to do that.”

“Fine,” Sarah says. “No more lies.”

There’s a silence between them.

Because what’s she supposed to say now? The truth?

“I’m not cheating on Christopher,” Sarah says. “I wouldn’t do that. If you know me as well as you say you do, then you should know that.”

Reena sighs. “Yeah. Of course I know that. But then what . . . ?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Are you freaking kidding me?”

“You don’t want me to lie to you, fine. But I can’t tell you. It’s complicated and . . . can you just trust me for now?”

Unexpectedly, Reena pulls Sarah into a hug. “I wish you could just tell me what’s going on with you.”

Sarah buries her face in her friend’s shoulder and blinks back tears. “Yeah. Me too.”

Reena steps back, all business again. “Whatever it is, you better not dump Christopher before the formal. I’ve spent way too long planning this double date.”

“The . . . formal?”

Reena rolls her eyes. “The spring formal? Only the most important event of the year? The dance we bought dresses for six months ago? The dance that’s this Friday? Even you couldn’t forget—”

“No,” Sarah says quickly. “Of course not.” She doesn’t like that: Even you. As if Reena’s expectations have sunk so low. And maybe they should have, because of course she’s right.

Sarah did forget.

“It’s going to be an amazing night,” she promises her best friend. “I swear.”

Reena talks to Christopher for her, and whatever she says works. He agrees to cut class and meet her under the bleachers that afternoon.

Neither of them has ever cut class before. They’re good kids; they follow the rules.

Sarah is so tired of rules.

“I’m sorry,” she tells him again, curled up in his arms on the dewy grass. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

“You said that already,” he says. “And I said I forgive you. And I trust you. Can we get back to the kissing now?”

“And I’m going to make it up to you—”

“On Friday, at the formal. I know. You said that too. Multiple times.”

“I just want to make sure you know that I would never . . .”

“Sarah.” He cups her chin in his warm hands. Their eyes meet. “I do know. Sometimes I just feel like . . .”

“What?”

“Like you’re so far away. Like even when you’re here with me, you’re really somewhere else. Or you wish you were.”

He’s partly right—she is somewhere else. These days she’s always somewhere else. When she’s with Christopher, she’s thinking about fighting moves or ancient Cahokian mythology; when she’s with her trainers, she’s thinking about Christopher.

“I don’t wish I were anywhere else but here with you,” she tells him, and it’s the truest thing she’s said in a long time.

When she gets home that afternoon, her parents are both in the kitchen, waiting for her. They have an elderly woman with them, her weathered face covered in scars. Sarah recognizes her as one of the council elders: Juliana, a former Player herself.

Sarah wonders at the scars, where they came from, and whether when she grows up her face will bear similar marks. She’s never thought of herself as a superficial person, but she doesn’t like the idea that her Playing will permanently mark her for all the world to see.

She’s already had to explain away bruises and sprains—more lies for Christopher—but at least those heal and fade.

Every time she looks at Tate, she’s reminded that some wounds don’t.

She can’t remember the last time a council member visited their home. Whatever this is about, it can’t be good.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

“Sit down, honey,” her father says.

She shakes her head. “Tell me what’s going on first.”

Juliana points to a chair and says, with the imperious confidence of someone who’s used to having her commands followed, “Sit.”

She sits.

“This is the situation,” Juliana says. “We’ve received troubling reports of your progress, or lack thereof. We wish you to withdraw from school and focus solely on your training. You will come with me back to Illinois and we will provide a suitable—”

“What? No!” Sarah cries. She looks at her parents. “Are you just going to sit there? You think that’s a good idea?”

“Sarah, your training is important. The stronger you get, the more likely you are to . . .”

Sarah knows how to fill in that blank.

The more likely you are to survive.

She tries not to think about Endgame, and what it would mean. She doesn’t even like to think about the trials of pain and strength and endurance that she knows to be in her future, as every Player must meet them. It was a pain trial that destroyed Tate, and he was so much stronger than she is, than she could ever be.

“I won’t do it,” Sarah says.

Juliana looks untroubled by the argument. “But you must.”

She doesn’t make an ultimatum. She doesn’t say, If you want to Play, because they both know there is no if. Sarah swore the ancient oath. She agreed to do this, and that means doing whatever the council deems right. No matter how wrong they might be.

“There must be something else I can do,” Sarah insists. “Something to prove I don’t need to throw away my entire life and go with you.”

Training in Illinois, away from her family, away from her friends, away from Christopher. No school, no future, no love. Just fighting and working and Playing.

She doesn’t think she could survive it.

“There is perhaps one thing,” Juliana says, and something about the way she says it makes Sarah wonder whether this hasn’t been the point of the visit all along. “Your first trial. The trial of the wolves. I understand you’ve been putting it off.”

“She’s not ready,” her mother says loyally.

“There’s no hurry,” her father says.

The trial of the wolves is, traditionally, the first of the many trials the Cahokian Player must undergo. The Player spends the night alone in the woods, at the heart of a wolf pack’s territory—and either survives or doesn’t. Tate did it when he was nine. He needed 102 stitches when it was over, a fact that he never got tired of bragging about.

Sarah doesn’t want to do it.

Sarah is afraid.

“You’ll do it Friday,” Juliana says.

“But—”

She can’t do it, and she certainly can’t do it on Friday. She can’t miss the formal, not after everything she’s screwed up. But she also can’t exactly tell Juliana that a junior high school dance is more important than the council’s wishes.

“You’ll do it in three days’ time, and prove to me that you’re committed to this task, this life. Or you will fail to do so, and you will come away with me.”

“You’re telling me those are my only two options?” Sarah says.

“I am.”

But there is only one option. She can’t leave Christopher. She can’t leave her family, or school, or her life.

Sarah takes a deep breath. “Then I’ll do it. Whatever I have to do.”

Upstairs, safe in her room, she cries.

She can’t seem to stop crying.

She doesn’t know whether she’s more afraid that her friends will be mad or that the wolves will tear her to shreds; maybe she’s just afraid that she can’t do this, have everything she wants and needs. She’s terrified that she’s going to have to choose.

“Would you stop being such a damn baby?” Tate throws her door open, then slams it shut behind him. It’s the first time he’s come to her room since the day of the bees. It’s the one time she doesn’t want him there. But still, for just a moment, her heart leaps at the sight of him. She keeps forgetting that he’s not the old Tate anymore, the one she could always count on.

“You don’t understand,” she says, wiping at her dripping nose. “The council says—”

“I know what the council says, and it’s your job to do whatever it is, don’t you think? Isn’t that what being the Player is all about?” His lips twist cruelly, and she knows what he’s thinking. That the council said he couldn’t be the Player anymore, and like a good Player, he obeyed.

“You have nothing to cry about,” he snaps. “You have no idea. And if you can’t hack this, you should admit it now, and save everyone a lot of trouble.”

“Do you think I can’t hack it? That I’m not as good as you? As strong?” She knows what he thinks, but she wants to hear him say it out loud, to her face.

“They picked me, not you. That’s all I’m saying.”

“They picked both of us.”

“Yeah, well, they make mistakes. And if you think your sad little ‘relationship’ is more important than the fate of the world, maybe they did.”

“Screw you, Tate.” It pops out before she can stop herself. He looks as surprised as she is. For so long, everyone in the family has been tiptoeing around him, trying to be kind, give him time and space, let him bite their heads off. But she can’t handle it anymore.

“Why did you even say yes, anyway?” he asks. “You act like you don’t have a choice. I’m the one who has no choice.”

“Maybe that’s why I said yes.”

“For me?” he sneers. “What, to carry on the family legacy? Don’t do me any favors.”

“No.” She wishes that were why. It would make sense, then; it would be easier. She loves Tate, would do anything for him, and if she thought Playing would fix him, would make him happy again, then she would Play forever. But it’s not fixing him. Sometimes it seems like nothing will fix him. And what she can’t admit, what maybe neither of them can admit, is that her Endgame has nothing to do with him anymore.

“What, then? You just want to prove that you’re better than big brother? Got sick of me getting all the attention?”

“No!” she cries. “Stop it!”

“You don’t even know why you’re doing it, do you?” He shakes his head. “Bad move, little sister. You can’t Play without a reason to Play. That’s a good way to end up dead.”

“How can you . . .” She’s crying again now, too hard to talk. How can he say it like he doesn’t care?

“Stop crying!” he shouts.

She does, abruptly, not because he told her to, but because she’s suddenly angry. Too angry to cry—too angry to not finally say exactly what she thinks. “You’re not the only person allowed to have emotions, Tate. You’re not the only one in the world with problems.”

“No, but I’m the only person in this room with problems,” he says. “One of us has an amazing chance to be the savior of her people, to pledge her life to the survival of the Cahokians, to be a hero—and is throwing a sulk because it might mean missing a stupid school dance? The other of us has nothing, do you get that?” He’s shouting now, angrier than she’s ever seen him. “Nothing.”

“That’s your choice,” Sarah says, not sure whether her heart is breaking for him or for herself. If he won’t leave her room, then she’ll leave, and leave him here alone, which is what he deserves. “You choose to have nothing. I hope you enjoy it.”

Tate’s right about one thing. She doesn’t know why she agreed to Play.

But she did agree. That’s what matters now . . . isn’t it?

Her relationship isn’t more important than saving the world. She can’t let it be. If it’s true that she can’t have both, that she has to choose one life or another, it’s no choice at all.

She texts Reena and Christopher, tells them both that she’s sick and can’t go to the formal after all. Then she takes a hammer to her phone and throws the pieces in the trash.

She doesn’t go to school the next day, or the one after that. She doesn’t talk to Tate. She doesn’t think about Christopher.

She trains.

She meditates.

She studies the wolves.

And when Friday comes and the sun dips below the horizon, and all her friends are squeezing themselves into fancy dresses and straightening their hair, Sarah Alopay ventures into the woods.

Into the woods: There are no trails, no campgrounds, no safe havens for sweet young girls. There is only darkness, the whisper of wind through the leaves, the rustle of footsteps, the eyes blinking from the shadows.

Sarah builds a fire, as she’s been taught to do. She could spear a squirrel, roast it on a spit, tear its meat off its bones; she knows how to survive. But this is one night, and hunger is no concern. This night isn’t about survival skills, about lean-tos and water filtration or navigation by the stars.

This night is about the wolves.

The wolves, it is said, are a friend to the Cahokians.

The wolves, it is said, are drawn to the Player, by her power and her need. They know a test is in order, and so they offer it, a challenge red in tooth and claw.

Sarah doesn’t believe in such things.

At least, she doesn’t think she believes in such things.

But here’s what she knows: for generations, every Player has ventured into these woods for a night, and every time, the Player has met the wolves.

She knows there are creatures lurking in the shadows, watching her. She knows they will come for her, and she knows they will be hungry.

One hour passes, and another. Sarah stares into the fire, imagining the faces of the people she loves dancing in its flames. Imagining that her world is burning, will burn, unless she can stop it. She loses herself to the vision, can see the skies set aflame, buildings blazing, bodies falling. She can see Reena, older and even prettier, Reena in a graduation cap, Reena with cartoon shock on her face and her arm torn away above the elbow. She can see the dirt explode beneath Tate, crushing him against earth and stone. She can see Christopher’s body, lifeless and cold, blood pouring from a neat hole at the center of his forehead.

You don’t even know why you’re doing it, Tate accused her, and it was true. She’d agreed to be the Player because an inner voice had told her it was the right thing to do; she’d listened, she’d obeyed, but she hadn’t understood.

Now she does.

She can, in those endless moments of flickering fire, see Endgame, and she knows it is coming for her. Knows these things she sees are promises of what may come, if she can’t find the strength to stop it from happening.

She is the only one who can stop it from happening.

She has to Play, not just for her line, not just for her promise, but for the people she loves the most. She thought Playing was tearing her away from them, but now she sees that Playing will be the only thing that keeps them alive.

She knows, now, what is to come.

She knows she can never give up. That as much as she loves her friends and family, that’s how hard she will work to save them.

She knows this as well as she’s known anything, and then the certainty slips away as quickly as it came, as she blinks herself back to these woods, this night, and sees the wolves.

Five of them have come for her, surrounded her. Gray fur, black eyes, white fangs.

She feels like they’re judging her. Weighing whether or not she’s worthy.

“I don’t care what you think,” Sarah says. The wolves growl, and inch closer. “I don’t care what anyone thinks. I can do this. I will do this.” As she says it, she finally knows it to be true.

As she says it, the largest wolf leaps on her.

They drop to the ground together, a snarling tangle of slashing claws and wild limbs. Sarah slams her skull into the wolf’s nose, and as it howls in pain, she shoves her fist down its throat as far as she can, far enough that the wolf struggles to breathe. Fangs tear at her skin, and somewhere, deep in the back of her mind, there is pain. But she thinks only of the wolf, its gaze fixed on hers, its lungs heaving as it struggles to free itself of her fist, and as she ducks and dances past its lashing paws, Sarah curls her own fingers into claws, strikes at the wolf’s face, and rips its eyeball out of its socket.

A howl of pain and rage shakes the night, and Sarah howls along with it, all her pain and fear and fury unleashed into the dark, and with a mighty heave she flings the wolf’s shuddering, spasming body toward its pack.

“Go ahead,” she dares them. “Come at me.”

But the wolves whimper and lower their front legs, touch their noses to the ground in submission, then back away into the woods.

She’s covered in the beast’s blood as well as her own, she’s sliced and scratched and shivering with aftershock, but she’s smiling. Then, alone in the woods, wolves circling, blood dripping from a hundred painful wounds, she’s laughing.

She won.

Sarah sleeps soundly, flanked by three wolves, who guard her against the night. She can feel it, their desire to protect: they’ve judged her, and found her worthy.

She’s judged herself, and concluded the same.

When she hikes out to the rendezvous point, she expects Juliana to collect her, or maybe her parents. But instead, it’s Tate behind the wheel of his rusted Pontiac. He hasn’t driven since he lost his eye—she’s not even sure he should be driving. But she gets in without a word.

“Are you okay?” he asks, and she knows from the concern in his voice that she must look worse than she feels.

“Most of it’s not my blood,” she says, and they drive.

Tate concentrates on the road. “I’m glad you’re okay,” he says, without looking at her.

“Could’ve fooled me,” she mumbles.

“That council lady’s gone, in case you were wondering. She had some kind of dream, then said something about not wanting to argue with the wolves. You get to stay. That’s good news, right?”

“Just because I’m bleeding, you don’t have to pretend to care.”

“Sarah . . .”

He stops for a long time. Sarah fingers the stone pendant hanging from her neck. As always, it warms to her touch. The stone knew before she did. It belongs to her. Whether or not this is how it was supposed to be, this is how it is. What was Tate’s is now hers, and maybe neither of them likes it, but there’s no way back.

She can’t tell him that, though. He’s her big brother; he should be able to figure it out.

“I was jealous. Before. When I yelled at you. That’s why. I wasn’t mad. Just . . . jealous.” It’s like every word hurts him more.

She wants to tell him it doesn’t matter, that she loves him, that she forgives him, that he can do anything he wants if it will make him hurt less.

But she can’t let him hurt her so that he can hurt less. That’s something else she understands now.

“It wasn’t fair,” she says. “I didn’t want this, any more than you did.”

He’s still fixed on the road. “I know.”

They drive the rest of the way home in silence, and when they arrive, he pulls the car around back.

“Why are we going in this way?” she asks, as they slip through the kitchen door.

“You’re a complete mess,” Tate says. “You don’t want them seeing you like this.”

Sarah figures that “them” must be their parents, and maybe Tate’s right; maybe they’ve spent enough time worrying about their child. So she lets him lead her upstairs, and after she showers off all the blood, she sits on the edge of his bed while he disinfects and bandages her wounds. He’s very gentle, and it’s clear he knows what he’s doing.

She realizes now how little she knew about his training—she never asked him the hard questions, like how much it hurt, or whether he was afraid. Whether he ever regretted a choice he’d made when he was too young to know better.

They’re questions she can’t ask him anymore, even though the answers matter more than ever.

But there’s something she can say. She’s done with being afraid.

“It’s my fault, what happened to you,” she blurts.

He freezes. “What?”

“Not my fault, I mean, but I knew something was wrong, I knew it. And I didn’t stop him. Samuel. I could have made him stop the trial, if I’d had the nerve. I could have saved you.”

Tate sits down beside her on the bed. He takes her hand.

“You can’t be afraid to say what you think, to speak up for what’s right. Not anymore. You know that, right?”

Sarah nods. She’s never felt so small.

“But Sarah, you have to know it’s not your fault. I chose to put myself in that room.”

“Yeah, when you were four years old,” she says. “What did you know?”

“Then, and every day after that,” Tate says. “Being the Player, it’s not just like you sign your name on the dotted line and then you belong to your destiny. You make your destiny. Every minute, every choice, you build the life you want. The kind of Player you want to be. What happened in that shed, it’s no one’s fault. It just happened. And it happened because of what I chose. Do you get that?”

She thinks about the woods and the wolves, about how she had no other option but to face them—but that facing them was still her choice. Playing was the choice she wanted to make. The only choice love will let her make.

“I do,” she told Tate.

“Good. Now brush your hair, put on something that looks nice, and go downstairs.”

“Why?”

“There’s a surprise for you down there. To prove it—that you get to choose. I was wrong before, when I made it sound like you had to choose one or the other, your old life or your new one. You don’t have to Play like I did, Sarah. Or like anyone did. This is yours now.”

“Do you really believe that?” she asks, so desperately wanting it to be true.

Tate nods.

“But what does that have to do with whatever’s downstairs?”

He gives her a mysterious smile, and even with the pirate patch, he looks like the old Tate again. “Oh, did I tell you? I figured out what I’m going to do next.”

“As in tonight?”

“As in for the foreseeable future,” he says.

This is more than she hoped for. Maybe he finally filled out some of those college applications their mother has been stacking on his nightstand. Or even got a job. Anything would be better than wallowing.

“What is it?” she says, hoping he can’t read the eagerness in her voice.

Now the smile widens into a grin she hasn’t seen from Tate in months, mischievous and sparking with joy. “I’m going to help you, little sis. Help you Play. Not that you’ll ever Play as well as me . . .” He says it teasingly, without any of the bitterness of the last months, and she feels free to tease him back.

“Not as well as. Better.”

Tate nods, and presses his fingers to her forehead. It feels like a benediction. “Better.”

Sarah puts on a dark green dress that sets off her auburn hair, layers foundation on her face to disguise the worst of the scratches, and goes downstairs. She stops cold at the bottom of the stairwell, and gasps.

The living room is festooned with streamers, the stereo is playing her favorite song, and standing in the center of the room, his arms wide as if waiting for her to step into them, is Christopher. He’s always looked especially good in a suit.

“What are you—”

“Questions later,” he says. “First . . .”

Then she’s in his arms, swaying to the music, drowning in his kiss.

“You’re not mad? About the formal?” she says, once she’s able to pull her lips from his.

“I was,” he admits. “And Reena . . . she was about ready to march over here and burn your house down, I think.”

“Oh God, Reena.” She’s forced herself not to think about any of it, but now it all comes rushing back to her in a tidal wave of guilt and panic. Has she lost her best friend?

Christopher sees it in her eyes, and kisses her once on the forehead, then once on each eyelid. As he does, she can breathe again. “Don’t worry,” he says. “Tate explained it to her just like he did to me. Oh, and when we’re done here, she says you better text her back or she’ll kill you.”

Sarah grinned, thinking that would be slightly difficult, given the state her cell phone was in. Then the full meaning of Christopher’s words sank in. “Wait, so, Tate . . . explained it to you? Explained what, exactly?”

“You know, about the tryouts for the national soccer squad—how you’ve been training like a maniac, but you didn’t want to tell us about it until you knew if you made it, because you didn’t want to let us down if you failed. Which is insane, by the way, because you could never let me down even if you didn’t make it. But of course you made it!” He wrapped her in a hug so tight she could barely breathe. “I’m so proud of you, do you know that? Proud of me, too.” He laughs. “I can’t believe I’m dating one of the ten best soccer players in the country.”

“Tate told you that too?” she whispered.

“Yeah, he said they had some last-minute tie-breaker tryouts last night. That that’s why you missed the formal. And you made it.” He looks radiant, and she loves him for being so happy for her, and tries not to hate herself for the lies. “Promise me you won’t forget me, now that you’re such a big deal,” he says. “I know a lot’s going to change now, with all the extra training and traveling, but promise me we’ll find a way to make this work.”

“I promise,” she says, leaning her head against her shoulder, and she’s not talking to him. She’s talking to herself—swearing to herself that she’ll lie to him only as much as she needs to, and only to spare him the terrors and sorrows he can’t handle. She promises herself that she will give everything she can to her line—but not everything she has, not everything she is. She will choose the life she wants, which means choosing both lives, both halves of herself. The part of her that cares about school, that wants to be a good friend to Reena, that wants to lose herself in Christopher’s arms, that’s the part that will sustain her through what is to come. That’s the part that will give her strength, and she won’t give it up. She promises herself, and Christopher, that she won’t have to.

“Was this your idea?” she says. “The streamers, the suit—like a formal of our own, right?”

He pulls her closer in. She loves the way she fits so perfectly against his chest, the way his arms make her feel so safe. “Right. Wish I could take the credit, but it was Tate’s idea.”

It was the only answer that could have made her even happier than she already is.

“Can we dance again?” she asks.

Christopher restarts her favorite song and then wraps her again in his embrace, singing along softly in her ear. He has a terrible, off-key voice, and it makes her love him even more. Six years, she tells herself. Six years to survive, to fight, to work, to Play, to find a way to hold on to this—to him—no matter what. Six years of sacrifice that will all be worth it, if it means saving him and Reena and Tate from those horrors she saw in the fire. The specifics of the vision have already faded, but the message of the vision is still clear: Play the game, or you will lose everything and everyone you love.

Six years of Playing, and then they can begin the rest of their lives together. It doesn’t matter what destiny wants for her. It doesn’t matter what she saw in the flames last night: so much blood, so much death.

Life is choice, and Sarah chooses to have it all.

Excerpt from ENDGAME: THE CALLING

ENDGAME IS HERE. ENDGAME IS NOW.

KEEP READING TO SEE HOW ENDGAME BEGINS IN:

MARCUS LOXIAS MEGALOS

Hafz Alipaa Sk, Aziz Mahmut Hüdayi Mh, Istanbul, Turkey

Marcus Loxias Megalos is bored. He cannot remember a time before the boredom. School is boring. Girls are boring. Football is boring. Especially when his team, his favorite team, Fenerbahçe, is losing, as they are now, to Manisaspor.

Marcus sneers at the TV in his small, undecorated room. He is slouched in a plush black leather chair that sticks to his skin whenever he sits up. It is night, but Marcus keeps the lights in his room off. The window is open. Heat passes through it like an oppressive ghost as the sounds of the Bosporus—the long, low calls of ships, the bells of buoys—groan and tinkle over Istanbul.

Marcus wears baggy black gym shorts and is shirtless. His 24 ribs show through his tanned skin. His arms are sinewy and hard. His breathing is easy. His stomach is taut and his hair is close-cropped and black and his eyes are green. A bead of sweat rolls down the tip of his nose. All of Istanbul simmers on this night, and Marcus is no different.

A book lies open in his lap, ancient and leather-bound. The words on its pages are Greek. Marcus has handwritten something in English on a scrap of paper that lies across the open page: From broad Crete I declare that I am come by lineage, the son of a wealthy man. He has read the old book over and over. It’s a tale of war, exploration, betrayal, love, and death. It always makes him smile.

What Marcus wouldn’t give to take a journey of his own, to escape the oppressive heat of this dull city. He imagines an endless sea spread out before him, the wind cool against his skin, adventures and enemies arrayed on the horizon.

Marcus sighs and touches the scrap of paper. In his other hand he holds a 9,000-year-old knife, made of a single piece of bronze forged in the fires of Knossos. He brings the blade across his body and lets its edge rest against his right forearm. He pushes it into the skin, but not all the way. He knows the limits of this blade. He has trained with it since he could hold it. He has slept with it under his pillow since he was six. He has killed chickens, rats, dogs, cats, pigs, horses, hawks, and lambs with it. He has killed 11 people with it.

He is 16, in his prime for Playing. If he turns 20, he will be ineligible. He wants to Play. He would rather die than be ineligible.

The odds are almost nil that he will get his chance, though, and he knows it. Unlike Odysseus, war will never find Marcus. There will be no grand journey.

His line has been waiting for 9,000 years. Since the day the knife was forged. For all Marcus knows, his line will wait for another 9,000 years, long after Marcus is gone and the pages of his book have disintegrated.

So Marcus is bored.

The crowd on the TV cheers, and Marcus looks up from the knife. The Fenerbahçe goalie has cleared a rainbow up the right sideline, the ball finding the head of a burly midfielder. The ball bounces forward, over a line of defenders, near the last two men before the Manisaspor keeper. The players rush for the ball, and the forward comes away with it, 20 meters from the goal, free and clear of the defender. The keeper gets ready.

Marcus leans forward. Match time is 83:34. Fenerbahçe has yet to score, and doing so in such a dramatic way would save some face. The old book slides to the floor. The scrap of paper drifts free of the page and slips through the air like a falling leaf. The crowd begins to rise. The sky suddenly brightens, as if the gods, the Gods of the Sky themselves, are coming down to offer help. The keeper backpedals. The forward collects himself and takes the shot, and the ball blasts off.

As it punches the back of the net, the stadium lights up and the crowd screams, first in exaltation for the goal, but immediately afterward in terror and confusion—deep, true, and profound terror and confusion. A massive fireball, a giant burning meteor, explodes above the crowd and tears across the field, obliterating the Fenerbahçe defense and blasting a hole through the end of the stadium grandstand.

Marcus’s eyes widen. He is looking at total carnage. It is butchery on the scale of those American disaster movies. Half the stadium, tens of thousands of people dead, burning, lit up, on fire.

It is the most beautiful thing Marcus has ever seen.

He breathes hard. Sweat pours off his brow. People outside are yelling, screaming. A woman wails from the café below. Sirens ring out across the ancient city on the Bosporus, between the Marmara and the Black.

On TV, the stadium is awash in flames. Players, police, spectators, coaches run around, burning like crazed matchsticks. The commentators cry for help, for God, because they don’t understand. Those not dead or on their way to being dead trample one another as they try to escape. There’s another explosion and the screen goes black.

Marcus’s heart wants out of his chest. Marcus’s brain is as hot as the football pitch. Marcus’s stomach is full of rocks and acid. His palms feel hot and sticky. He looks down and sees that he has dug the ancient blade into his forearm, and a rivulet of blood is trickling off his hand, onto the chair, onto his book. The book is ruined, but it doesn’t matter; he won’t need it anymore. Because now, Marcus will have his Odyssey.

Marcus looks back to the darkened TV. He knows there’s something waiting for him there amidst the wreckage. He must find it.

A single piece.

For himself, for his line.

He smiles. Marcus has trained all of his life for this moment. When he wasn’t training, he was dreaming of the Calling. All the visions of destruction that his teenage mind concocted could not touch what Marcus has witnessed tonight. A meteor destroying a football stadium and killing 38,676 people. The legends said it would be a grand announcement. For once, the legends have become a beautiful reality.

Marcus has wanted, waited, and prepared for Endgame his entire life. He is no longer bored, and he won’t be again until he either wins or dies.

This is it.

He knows it.

This is it.

CHIYOKO TAKEDA

22B Hateshinai Tri, Naha, Okinawa, Japan

Three chimes of a small pewter bell awake Chiyoko Takeda. Her head lolls to the side. The time on her digital clock: 5:24. She makes a note of it. These are heavy numbers now. Significant. She imagines it is the same for those who ascribe meaning to numbers like 11:03 or 9:11 or 7:07. For the rest of her life she will see these numbers, 5:24, and for the rest of her life they will carry weight, meaning, significance.

Chiyoko turns from the clock on her side table and stares into the darkness. She lies naked on top of the sheets. She licks her full lips. She scrutinizes the shadows on her ceiling as if some message will appear there.

The bell should not have rung. Not for her.

All her life she has been told of Endgame and her peculiar and fantastical ancestry. Before the bell rang, she was 17 years old, a homeschooled outcast, a master sailor and navigator, an able gardener, a limber climber. Skilled at symbols, languages, and words. An interpreter of signs. An assassin able to wield the wakizashi, the hojo, and the shuriken. Now that the bell has rung, she feels 100. She feels 1,000. She feels 10,000, and getting older by the second. The heavy burden of the centuries presses down upon her.

Chiyoko closes her eyes. Darkness returns. She wants to be somewhere else. A cave. Underwater. In the oldest forest on Earth. But she is here, and she must get used to it. Darkness will be everywhere soon, and everyone will know it. She must master it. Befriend it. Love it. She has prepared for 17 years and she’s ready, even if she never wanted it or expected it. The darkness. It will be like a loving silence, which for Chiyoko is easy. The silence is part of who she is.

For she can hear, but she has never spoken.

She looks out her open window, breathes. It rained during the night, and she can feel the humidity in her nose and throat and chest. The air smells good.

There is a gentle rapping on the sliding door leading to her room. Chiyoko sits in her Western-style bed, her slight back facing the door. She stamps her foot twice. Twice means Come in.

The sound of wood sliding across wood. The quiet of the screen stopping. The faint shuffle of feet.

“I rang the bell,” her uncle says, his head bowed low to the ground, according the young Player the highest level of respect, as is the custom, the rule. “I had to,” he says. “They’re coming. All of them.”

Chiyoko nods.

He keeps his gaze lowered. “I am sorry,” he says. “It is time.”

Chiyoko stamps five arrhythmic times with her foot. Okay. Glass of water.

“Yes, of course.” Her uncle backs out of the doorway and quietly moves away.

Chiyoko stands, smells the air again, and moves to the window. The faint glow from the city’s lights blankets her pale skin. She looks out over Naha. There is the park. The hospital. The harbor. There is the sea, black, broad, and calm. There is the soft breeze. The palm trees below her window whisper. The low gray clouds begin to light up, as if a spaceship is coming to visit. Old people must be awake, Chiyoko thinks. Old people get up early. They are having tea and rice and radish pickles. Eggs and fish and warm milk. Some will remember the war. The fire from the sky that destroyed and decimated everything. And allowed for a rebirth. What is about to happen will remind them of those days. But a rebirth? Their survival and their future depend entirely on Chiyoko.

A dog begins to bark frantically.

Birds trill.

A car alarm goes off.

The sky gets very bright, and the clouds break downward as a massive fireball bursts over the edge of town. It screams, burns, and crashes into the marina. A great explosion and a billow of scalding steam illuminate the early morning. Rain made of dust and rock and plastic and metal hurls upward over Naha. Trees die. Fish die. Children, dreams, and fortunes die. The lucky ones are snuffed out in their slumber. The unlucky are burned or maimed.

Initially it will be mistaken for an earthquake.

But they will see.

It is just the beginning.

The debris falls all over town. Chiyoko senses her piece coming for her. She takes a large step away from her window, and a bright ember shaped like a mackerel falls onto her floor, burning a hole in the tatami mat.

Her uncle knocks on the door again. Chiyoko stomps her foot twice. Come in. The door is still open. Her uncle keeps his gaze lowered as he stops at her side and hands her first a simple blue silk kimono, which she steps into, and, after she’s in the kimono, a glass of very cold water.

She pours the water over the ember. It sizzles, spurts, and steams, the water immediately boiling. What is left is a shiny, black, jagged rock.

She looks at her uncle. He looks back at her, sadness in his eyes. It is the sadness of many centuries, of lifetimes coming to an end. She gives him a slight bow of thanks. He tries to smile. He used to be like her, waiting for Endgame to begin, but it passed him over, like it did countless others, for thousands and thousands of years.

Not so for Chiyoko.

“I am sorry,” he says. “For you, for all of us. What will be will be.”

Excerpt from ENDGAME: THE TRAINING DIARIES VOLUME 2: DESCENDANT

KEEP READING FOR A SNEAK PEEK AT THE LIVES OF THE PLAYERS BEFORE THE CALLING IN:

LA TÈNE

AISLING

This is the story Aisling Kopp, Player of the 3rd line, does not know.

This is the story Aisling Kopp will never know, because the only one who could tell it is dead.

This is the story of her life and her line—the story of how she began and how the world will end.

This is the story of a hero and a traitor, neither of them certain which is which.

This is the story before the story.

Before Aisling.

The end:

Declan Kopp stands at the mouth of the cave, a 2,500-year-old sword in his hand. The heft of it calms him. The familiar grip reminds him of a time when the Falcata was rightfully his to wield, a simpler time, when he could lay its blade against flesh and enjoy the kill.

A time before Aisling was alive, a time before Lorelei was dead, a time when he was young and foolish and the sword was a symbol of all things just and good.

Now it’s nothing but a symbol of the lines he’s crossed.

The people he’s betrayed.

The home he’s left behind and the family to which he can never return.

The ancient sword, like the polished stone in his pocket, like the baby whimpering in the dark depths of the cave, is a precious stolen good.

Not his to take—but taken nonetheless.

That’s what they would say, at least.

They: the High Council. The La Tène Player. His father.

Everyone who matters to him, or once did.

Once, he had so much in his life. Family, love, hope—the belief that his life’s mission was just and his future was fated. Once, he had certainty.

Now he has only his stolen child, and her birthright.

He has the Falcata, whose razor-sharp blade has taken 3,890 lives and awaits its next kill.

And he has a few precious hours, or maybe minutes, before they come for him and try to reclaim what he’s stolen—before he and the sword make their last stand.

The child’s cries echo through the dark.

“Peace, Aisling,” he calls to her. “Daddy’s here. Daddy will protect you, I promise.”

She’s too young to understand—and too young to recognize the lie. He can’t promise to protect her. Only to try.

He’s given up everything, trying to save his daughter from her fate—but still it’s not enough. The cave is surrounded. There’s no way out. No way down the mountain, not for him. The final battle is coming, and he will not survive it. He knows that.

He’s lured them here, knowing that.

They will pursue him wherever he goes. He finally understands: There is no safe place for him and his daughter, not in this world. He fought; he lost. Letting them follow him here is his last, final, desperate effort to make them see the truth.

If they see it—if he can make them see it—everything he’s given up will be worth it. Even his life.

The child cries and cries.

Declan can’t stand the sound of it.

He turns his back to the cave opening, even though he knows never to turn your back on the enemy.

He retreats into the dark, following the sound of his daughter’s cries, and lifts the squirming child into his arms.

At his touch, she quiets. He kisses her forehead, makes soothing noises, inhales the scent of her soft red hair, wonders if she will remember him.

If she will ever know how she came to be here on this lonely mountain, or why.

If she will ever forgive him for what he’s done, and the things he has wrought.

Aisling is still in his arms when they come for him.

Two of them, their headlamps sweeping across the dank cave walls. He could hide in the shadows, for just a little longer, but there’s no point. He’s come here to face them.

To try, one last time, to show them the truth.

“We know you’re in here, Declan.” It’s a young woman’s voice—Molly, his niece, who he’s known since she was born. The La Tène Player. He knows exactly how deadly she is; he trained her himself. “Show yourself.”

Declan does as he’s told, steps into the beam of light. Aisling squints and, recognizing Molly and the gray-haired man by her side, giggles and waves.

“We don’t want to hurt you,” Declan’s father says, lifting a rifle to his shoulder. “Just give us the child.”

The beginning:

Sometimes, Declan thinks, it began the day his inbox pinged with the strange anonymous message. You’ve been lied to, it said, no more than that, and he felt only a mild twinge of curiosity before sending it to the trash. Thinking spammers got more inventive every day. Thinking he was too clever to believe anyone’s lies.

Maybe it began the day his curiosity got the better of him, and he finally responded to one of the strange messages.

Or the day he stood in dark woods, met the eyes of a cloaked stranger who told him everything he’d ever believed in was a lie. Don’t you ever want to know why you fight, what you fight for? the woman asked, before melting back into the shadows, and for the first time, Declan did.

Maybe, he sometimes thinks, it began long before, on the day he first took his father’s rifle into his scrawny young arms, aimed at a paper target, pulled the trigger. “You will make a fine Player,” his father said, ruffling the fire-red hair that marked him as a Kopp. “You’ll make me proud.”

But maybe it didn’t really begin until he was a father himself. Until he understood what it meant to love unconditionally, with his whole self, to know he would give his life for his daughter. Until the High Council decreed that his infant daughter would be the Player once she came of age. Then he knew the time for waiting, for questioning, was over.

It was the time to act.

He managed to keep it together until the end of the High Council’s meeting, knowing there was no point in arguing. He’s aware of what they think of him: that he’s bitter and washed up, that he was warped by his tenure as a Player, by the fact that Endgame never happened. Some of them—his father among them—think he’s mad. So he smiled and nodded as if he were happy they wanted to turn his daughter into their puppet, an agent of needless death.

Then he hailed a taxi he couldn’t afford and held his breath as it sped down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, until the towers of Downtown Brooklyn came into sight and with them the dingy brownstone where his wife was waiting.

Now here he is, standing before the door of his apartment, taking a deep breath and preparing to change their lives forever. Thinking, How did I get here?

But he knows exactly how he got here.

And he knows what has to happen next.

Declan bursts into the apartment and finally lets his panic off the leash. “Pack everything!” he booms, into the tiny bedroom, where his money and passports are stashed, and his wife and little Aisling are sound asleep.

“Declan?” Lorelei blinks groggily on the bed, baby napping on her chest. She sleeps whenever the baby sleeps, which is never enough for either of them. “Quiet, hon. You’ll wake her.”

“We’ve got to go,” Declan says, in a quieter voice. He’s ripping through their tiny closet, throwing shirts and dresses haphazardly into a suitcase. “Now.”

“Go? Go where? It’s nearly midnight.” Gently, Lorelei settles Aisling into her crib. She goes to her husband, stands behind him, and wraps her arms around his waist, lets him feel her slow, steady breathing, the rhythm of her heartbeat. “Take a breath, Declan.”

Declan breathes.

“Now, tell me what happened.”

Declan turns to face Lorelei, the love of his life, the outsider who, for love of him, adopted his traditions and his people as her own. She did it because he asked her to—and now, because of that, because of him, their daughter is in danger.

This is all his fault, he thinks, panic blooming again.

“Declan.” She can always tell when he’s spinning out of control.

She’s always been the only one who can stop him.

She fixes her gaze on him, and, for just a moment, he lets himself get lost in her sea-gray eyes.

“It’s going to be okay,” she says, in soft, measured tones.

He knows he’s no longer the man she fell in love with, the man she married.

That man was full of righteous conviction, strong and proud; that man had been raised to believe he could save the world.

“Whatever it is this time, we can handle it,” she says, pressing a smooth palm to his stubbled cheek.

She married that Declan—and got saddled with this one instead, till death do they part. Erratic, paranoid, afraid of shadows, consumed by guilt. Shamed. Obsessed. Broken.

“Now, tell me what happened,” she says, once his breathing finally draws even with hers and his panic temporarily abates.

When he met her, he thought Lorelei was the miracle of his life.

Now he knows that the true miracle is that she still loves him, even now. But that might change when he answers her question. When she understands what loving him means for Aisling.

“The High Council has named the next generation’s Player,” Declan says. He takes his wife’s hand in his own, holds tight. “They’ve named our Aisling.”

She doesn’t gasp.

She doesn’t scream.

She doesn’t yank her hand away and castigate him for drawing her into his nightmare.

She only nods and says, “Okay. So what does that mean?”

“What does it mean?” He’s raging again. He needs to make her understand. “It means we have to get out of here, now. Disappear—go somewhere they can never find us.”

“Isn’t that a little dramatic, Declan?”

“Lor, are you hearing me? They want her to be the Player. They want to turn her into a soldier, brainwash her into this Endgame madness, just as they did me.”

“I’m not saying I want that either,” she says. “But can’t we just say no?”

Declan sighs. Were it only that easy. “It’s not like this is a game of tag and they decided she’s it,” he says. “This isn’t a game you can just decide not to play.”

The High Council doesn’t ask; the High Council commands.

Declan knew it was a possibility, of course. The Player has always been a Kopp, for as long as anyone can remember. But there are so many of them now, little Kopp children running around Queens, so many cousins he can’t remember all their names. What were the odds they would choose Aisling? They thought Declan an apostate, a madman—what were the odds they would name his daughter the Player?

“We don’t like it any more than you do,” the High Council’s leader told him at the meeting. “But the stones have spoken.”

“Screw the stones!” he shouted.

The High Council looked scandalized, all of them but his father, who simply looked tired. Pop was the first to give up on him, the first to accept that Declan had turned his back on his people. Or at least that was how Pop saw it. The move to Brooklyn from Queens, the railing against Endgame, the marriage to an outsider, the trips all over the world in search of answers to questions he wasn’t supposed to ask—Pop thinks Declan has rejected his family, his line, his sacred duties. Pop doesn’t understand, none of them do, that Declan loves his family and his people fiercely. He’s too old to be their Player, but he still sees himself as their warrior, charged with their protection. That’s why he fights them so hard: not because he’s a traitor, but because he’s loyal.

“The High Council has made its decision,” Pop said. “We journeyed to Stonehenge and asked our question. The stones gave us their answer, and the answer is Aisling.”

A gaggle of old men measuring angles of light and lengths of shadow, their protractors consigning Declan’s daughter to a useless life of blood. He wanted to scream, to overturn the table, to seize the Falcata from its place of honor on the council wall and slash off their heads—but none of that would help Aisling. So instead he pretended to accept it, and came home to do what needed to be done.

“If they want her to Play, she’ll Play,” Declan tells Lorelei. “Whatever we want, whatever she wants, they won’t care. They’ll turn her into a killer. They’ll make her help the gods with their genocide. And if she dies, they’ll shrug and pretend to care, and then they’ll throw another poor child to the wolves.”

What he doesn’t tell Lorelei, has never told Lorelei, is what being the Player really means: how much blood has been spilled, even without Endgame. So much death, all of it justified as “necessary to protect the line,” necessary to prepare for Endgame. Declan has killed 23 people, and he remembers every single one of their faces. Just as vividly, he remembers the face of the current Player when Declan helped her make her first kill—the face of a 13-year-old who has learned what she’s capable of, who’s drawn blood and murdered her childhood and is equal parts terrified and proud. These are the faces he sees in his dreams every night; this is the fate—guilt, sorrow, regret, obsession—he wants to spare his daughter. Terrible to imagine that she too will someday be tortured by the faces of those she’s killed.

Even worse to imagine that she won’t be.

“Declan, that’s your family you’re talking about,” Lorelei says. She loves his family, always has; she has none of her own. “Surely, if we just tell them how we feel, they’ll understand—”

He shakes his head.

He met Lorelei when they were both 22 years old. She was freshly out of college; he was adjusting to post-Player life, trying to decide what to do with himself for the next 50 years. He told her stories of his life before they met, but he spared her most of the gory details. He didn’t want her to see that side of him, the soldier who would do whatever was necessary to survive. He regrets that now.

“Fine, Declan,” she says. “If you say that this is a problem, then I trust you—but why is it a problem we need to solve now? Aisling is still a baby—that gives us more than twelve years to figure this out.”

“No. No!” As soon as the stones choose their Player, the training begins. Everything begins. They’ll mold Aisling into what they want her to be—and they will always be watching.

“We can’t risk waiting,” he says. “We’ve got a small window of opportunity here, maybe. They won’t expect us to make a move this quickly. That’s our only chance.”

“So what are we supposed to do, Declan?” She’s starting to sound irritated. “You want me to quit my job, abandon our family, take off with you for god-knows-where? Where will we go? How will we support ourselves? How long do we have to stay away? Have you thought any of this through?”

“We’ll figure it out as we go,” he says. Another thing Lorelei doesn’t know: he has plenty of money, enough to support them for the rest of their lives. When he disavowed Endgame, he also disavowed the money he’d been gifted for serving his line all those years as the Player. Blood money, he thought. He and Lorelei have been raising their daughter in near poverty, but that was by choice, not necessity. Declan’s choice, one of many he made without telling his wife. He regrets that now. He regrets so much. “We always figure it out.”

She shakes her head. “Pop was right,” she says. “I’ve let this all go too far. I’ve let you get carried away.”

“You talked to Pop about me? About this?”

“He’s worried about you, Declan. He thought maybe you needed some time away, a rest—”

“I know what he thinks,” Declan snaps. His father wants to send him back to the old country, for what he calls rehabilitation. But Declan has heard stories of the isolated camp in the Alps where faithless members of the line are sent. None of them ever come back. “He thinks I’ve lost my mind.”

“You’re not exactly sounding like a beacon of sanity right now, honey.”

“Endgame is a lie, Lorelei. You know that.”

“I know you believe that.”

With those words, he knows he’s lost her.

“Can we take a little time?” she asks. “Sleep on it, maybe talk more in the morning?”

Declan gazes at her, this woman to whom he’s sworn his lifelong love. The woman he fell in love with the first time he saw her, hunched over a book in an uptown branch of the New York Public Library, strands of hair curling over her face. “Of course we can,” he tells her. “We can talk about it as much as you want. You’re right, we shouldn’t make a rash decision. We won’t do anything until we both agree it’s the right thing to do.”

“You promise?”

He kisses her, takes her in his arms, and holds on like she’s a buoy in rough seas, the only thing that can keep him from drowning. “I promise,” he tells her.

Then he waits for her to fall back asleep, and kidnaps their daughter.

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About the Author

JAMES FREY is originally from Cleveland. All four of his books, A Million Little Pieces, My Friend Leonard, Bright Shiny Morning, and The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, were international bestsellers.

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Books in the Endgame Series

Novels:

The Calling

Sky Key

Digital Novellas:

Endgame: The Training Diaries Volume 1: Origins

Endgame: The Training Diaries Volume 2: Descendant

Endgame: The Training Diaries Volume 3: Existence

Copyright

ENDGAME: THE TRAINING DIARIES VOLUME 3: EXISTENCE. Copyright © 2015 by Third Floor Fun, LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

ISBN: 978-0-06-233269-1

EPub Edition © May 2015 ISBN 9780062332691

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FIRST EDITION

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