This book is a puzzle.

Decipher, decode, and interpret.

Search and seek.

If you’re worthy, you will find.

Copyright

First published in hardback in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2015

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Sky Key: An Endgame Novel © 2015 by Third Floor Fun, LLC.

Puzzle hunt experience by Futuruption LLC.

Additional character icon design by John Taylor Dismukes Assoc.,

a Division of Capstone Studios, Inc.

Cover design and logo by Rodrigo Corral Design

Additional logo and icon design by John Dismukes

Map art © 2015 GettyImages/chkkicx

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Source ISBN: 9780007585229

Ebook Edition ISBN: 9780007585243

Version: 2015-09-24

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Little Alice Chopra

Sarah Alopay, Jago Tlaloc

Hilal Ibn Isa Al-Salt, Eben Ibn Mohammed Al-Jukan

Alice Ulapala

An Liu

Maccabee Adlai, Baitsakhan

Aisling Kopp

Jago Tlaloc, Sarah Alopay

Alice Ulapala

Shari Chopra and the Leaders of the Harappan Line

An Liu

Hilal Ibn Isa Al-Salt, Eben Ibn Mohammed Al-Julan

An Liu

Sarah Alopay, Jago Tlaloc

Aisling Kopp

Maccabee Adlai, Ekaterina Adlai

Sarah Alopay

Alice Ulapala

Aisling Kopp

Hilal Ibn Isa Al-Salt

All Players

Alice Ulapala, Maccabee Adlai, Ekaterina Adlai

Baitsakhan

Shari Chopra

An Liu

Jago Tlaloc, Sarah Alopay, Renzo

Aisling Kopp, Greg Jordan, Bridget McCloskey, Pop Kopp

Hilal Ibn Isa Al-Salt

Maccabee Adlai, Baitsakhan

Jago Tlaloc, Sarah Alopay

Hilal Ibn Isa Al-Salt, Stella Vyctory

An Liu

Greg Jordan

Hilal Ibn Isa Al-Salt

Aisling Kopp, Pop Kopp, Greg Jordan, Bridget McCloskey, Griffin Marrs

Hilal Ibn Isa Al-Salt

Aisling Kopp, An Liu, Kilo Foxtrot Echo

Sarah Alopay

Jago Tlaloc

Hilal Ibn Isa Al-Salt

Maccabee Adlai, Baitsakhan

Aisling Kopp, Pop Kopp, Greg Jordan, Bridget McCloskey, Griffin Marrs

An Liu

Hilal Ibn Isa Al-Salt

An Liu

Aisling Kopp, Pop Kopp, Greg Jordan, Bridget McCloskey, Griffin Marrs

Jago Tlaloc

Maccabee Adlai, Baitsakhan

Shari Chopra and the Leaders of the Harappan Line

Sarah Alopay

Baitsakhan, Maccabee Adlai

Hilal Ibn Isa Al-Salt

Aisling Kopp, Pop Kopp, Greg Jordan, Bridget McCloskey, Griffin Marrs

Sarah Alopay, Jago Tlaloc, Renzo, Maccabee Adlai, Baitsakhan

An Liu

Aisling Kopp, Pop Kopp, Greg Jordan, Bridget McCloskey, Griffin Marrs

Maccabee Adlai, Baitsakhan, Sarah Alopay, Jago Tlaloc, Renzo

Aisling Kopp

Shari Chopra, Jamal Chopra, Jovinderpihainu Jha, Paru Jha

Sarah Alopay, Jago Tlaloc, Renzo

Little Alice Chopra, Jamal Chopra

Sarah Alopay, Maccabee Adlai, Jago Tlaloc, Renzo, Baitsakhan

All Players

Little Bertha

Aisling Kopp, Pop Kopp, Greg Jordan, Bridget McCloskey, Griffin Marrs

Shari Chopra

Baitsakhan, Maccabee Adlai, Sarah Alopay, Renzo, Jago Tlaloc

Shari Chopra, Little Alice Chopra, Jamal Chopra

Aisling Kopp, Pop Kopp, Greg Jordan, Griffin Marrs

Sarah Alopay, Jago Tlaloc

Little Alice Chopra

Shari Chopra

Baitsakhan

Maccabee Adlai

Sarah Alopay, Jago Tlaloc, Maccabee Adlai

Little Alice Chopra

Aisling Kopp, Pop Kopp, Greg Jordan, Griffin Marrs

Jago Tlaloc, Maccabee Adlai, Sarah Alopay, Aisling Kopp, Little Alice Chopra

Little Alice Chopra

Hilal Ibn Isa Al-Salt

Endnotes

Endgame Series

About the Publisher

i

90 days.

“Tarki, Tarki, Tarki …”

Clouds drift over the Himalayas, sun reflecting off their snowy slopes. Kanchenjunga, the world’s 3rd highest peak, looms over Gangtok. The city’s residents go about their day—working, shopping, eating, drinking, teaching, learning, laughing, smiling. One hundred thousand peaceful, unknowing souls.

Little Alice struts across her back lawn, blades of grass tickling her toes, the smell of a brushfire rising from the valley. Her fists are at her hips and her elbows jut behind her like wings. Her knees are bent, her head forward. She moves her elbows together, apart, together, apart, clacking and cawing like a peacock. She calls, “Tarki, Tarki, Tarki,” which is what they call the old peacock that’s lived with her family for the last 13 years. Tarki eyes the girl and does a half turn and ruffles his bright neck feathers and clacks back. His tail fans, and Little Alice dances with glee. She runs to Tarki. He takes off, Little Alice chasing.

The hard lines of Kanchenjunga are in the distance, hiding the Valley of Eternal Life below its frozen slopes.

Little Alice knows nothing of this valley, but Shari knows it intimately.

Little Alice follows Tarki to a rhododendron bush. She is less than a meter from the brilliant bird when he bows his head and blinks his eyes and scratches at something under the bush. The bird pushes into the leaves. Little Alice leans closer.

“What is it, Tarki?”

The bird pecks the dirt.

“What is it?”

The bird freezes like a statue, its head low but cocked, stares at the ground with one wide eye. Little Alice cranes forward. Something is there. Something small and round and dark.

The bird makes a horrible sound—Creeeeaaaaaak—and bolts toward the house. Little Alice is startled but doesn’t follow. She holds out her hands and pushes the waxy leaves aside and wriggles into the bush, puts her hands on the ground, finds.

A dark marble, half-buried. Perfectly round. Carved with strange markings. She touches it and it’s as cold as the void of space. She digs around it with her fingers, makes a small pile of dirt, pries the sphere free. She picks it up, turns it around and around, frowns. It is painfully cold. The light from the sky filters, changes, is suddenly bright bright beyond bright. Within seconds everything is white and the ground is shaking and a giant crash explodes over the hillsides, rattling the cliffs and the mountains, shaking the trees, the grass, the pebbles in the streams. The sound fills everything.

Little Alice wants to run, but can’t. It’s as if the little marble has frozen her to the spot. Through the light and the sound and the fury, she sees a figure drifting toward her. A woman, maybe. Young. Petite.

The figure draws closer. Its flesh is pale green and its eyes sunken, its lips curled. An undead corpse. Little Alice drops the marble but nothing changes. The ghost gets close enough so that Little Alice can smell its breath, which is excrement, burning rubber and sulfur. The air grows hot and the creature reaches for Little Alice. She wants to scream for her mama who can save her, for help, for safety, for salvation, but no sound comes, no sound comes.

Her eyes shoot open, and she is screaming. Awake now. Drenched in sweat, a two-year-old girl, and her mama is there, holding her, rocking her, saying, “It’s okay, meri jaan, it’s okay. It was just the dream. It was just the dream again.”

The dream that Little Alice has been having over and over every night since Earth Key was found.

Little Alice cries, and Shari wraps her in her arms and lifts her from her bedcovers.

“It’s okay, sweetheart. No one is going to hurt you. I will never let anyone hurt you.” And though she says it every time Little Alice has the dream, Shari doesn’t know if it’s actually true. “Nobody, sweet girl. Not now, not ever.”

ii

“How did you get it?” Sarah asks, running her finger over Jago’s jagged facial scar.

“Training,” Jago says, staring at her, watching for signs that she’s coming back to him.

It’s been four days since Sarah retrieved Earth Key from Stonehenge. Four days since Chiyoko died. Four days since Sarah shot An Liu in the head. Four days since the thing underneath the ancient stone monument sprang to life and revealed itself.

Four days since she, Sarah, killed Christopher Vanderkamp. Pulled the trigger and put a bullet in his head.

She has not been able to say his name since. Won’t even try. And no matter how many times she kisses Jago or wraps her legs around him, showers or cries or holds Earth Key in her hands, replays the message that kepler 22b broadcast over the television for the world to see, no matter how many times, Sarah can’t stop thinking of Christopher’s face. His blond hair, his beautiful green eyes, and the spark that was in them. The spark she took when she killed him.

Sarah has only spoken 27 words since Stonehenge, including these. Jago is worried about her. At the same time, he is encouraged by her.

“How exactly, Feo?” she asks, hoping that it’s a long story. Hoping that it will hold her attention, that Jago’s words will be as good a distraction as his body.

She needs to think of anything but what happened, anything but the bullet she put through his skull.

Jago obliges. “It was my third real knife fight. I was twelve, cocky. I’d won the other two easily. The first against a twenty-five-year-old ex-Player who’d lost a step, the second against one of Papi’s up-and-coming bag carriers, a giant nineteen-year-old we called Ladrillo.”

Sarah brushes her finger over the harsh rise of the scar where it dives under his jawline. “Ladrillo.” She pronounces it slowly, enjoys saying it. “What’s that mean?”

“‘Brick,’ which was exactly what he was. Heavy and hard and dumb. I feinted once and he moved. By the time he was ready to move again, the fight was over.”

Sarah lets out a halfhearted chuckle. Her first laugh since Stonehenge, her first smile. Jago continues. “My third fight was against a kid a little older than me but smaller. I’d never met him before. He’d come up from Rio. Wasn’t Peruvian. Wasn’t Olmec either.”

Jago knows that talking about himself is good for Sarah right now. Anything to get her mind away from what she did: killed her boyfriend, found Earth Key, and triggered the Event, sealing the deaths of billions. Playing, fighting, running, shooting—those would probably be better. Talking about them will have to do in the interim.

“He was a favela kid, skinny, muscles like cords wrapped around bones. Fast as an eyeblink. Didn’t say anything other than ‘Hi’ and ‘Better luck next time.’ Smart, though. A prodigy. Of blades and angles of attack. He’d been taught, but most of what he knew he was born with.”

“Sounds like you.”

“He was like me.” Jago smiles. “It was like fighting my reflection. I’d stab and he’d stab back. I’d swipe and he’d swipe back. That was how he parried, by counterattacking. He wasn’t like anyone else I’d trained against—ex-Players, Papi, no one. It was a little like fighting an animal. Quick, impeccable instincts, not so much thinking. They just attack. You ever gone toe to toe with an animal?”

“Yeah. Wolves. Those were the worst.”

“A wolf or—”

“Wolves. Plural.”

“No guns?”

“No guns.”

“I’ve done dogs, never wolves. A mountain lion once.”

“I wish I could say I was impressed, Feo, but I’m not.”

“I already got in your pants, Alopay.” Jago tries some weak humor. “Don’t need to impress you.”

She smiles again and punches him under the sheet. Another good sign that maybe she’s coming around.

“Anyway, I couldn’t hit him. The rule was first blood and the fight’s over. See red and stop. Simple.”

“But the scar—that cut was deep.”

“Sí. I was stupid, stepped right into it. Honestly, I was lucky. If he hadn’t got me on the face like this—it nearly took my eye, you know—he probably would have killed me.”

Sarah nods. “So—blood, red, stop. He says ‘Better luck next time’ and leaves and that’s it?”

“I had to get stitched up, but yeah. And of course, since I was training, there was no anesthesia.”

“Ha. Anesthesia. What’s that?”

Jago smiles big this time. “Exactly. Fucking Endgame.”

“Fucking Endgame is right,” Sarah says, her face betraying no emotion. She rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling. “Was there a next time?”

Jago doesn’t speak for a few seconds. “Sí,” he says slowly, drawing it out. “Less than a year later. Only two days before my birthday, right before I became eligible.”

“And?”

“He was even faster. But I’d learned a lot, and I was faster too.”

“So you drew first blood?”

“No. We had blades, but after a couple minutes I punched him in the throat and collapsed his windpipe. When he went down I stepped on his neck. Didn’t spill a drop. And I can still see his eyes. Uncomprehending, confused, like when you shoot an animal. It doesn’t understand what you’ve done. It was outside the rules of his nature, this favela boy, best knife fighter I have ever seen. He did not understand that his rules did not apply to me.”

Sarah doesn’t say anything. She rolls onto her side, her back to Jago.

I’m in bed with a murderer, she thinks.

And immediately after, But I’m a murderer too.

“I’m sorry, Sarah. I didn’t mean to—”

“I did it.” She takes a deep breath. “His rules didn’t apply to me either. I chose to do it. I killed him. Killed … Christopher.”

There. She said it. Her body starts to shake, as if a switch has been thrown. She pulls her knees to her chest and shakes and sobs. Jago moves his hand over the skin of her bare back, but he knows it’s a small comfort. If it’s any comfort at all.

Jago never thought much of Christopher, but he knows that Sarah loved him. She loved him and she killed him. Jago isn’t sure he could have done what Sarah did. Could he shoot his best friend from back home? Could he kill José, Tiempo, or Chango? Could he put a bullet in his father, or, even worse, his mother? He’s not sure.

“You had to do it, Sarah.” He’s said this 17 times since they checked into the hotel, mostly unprompted, just to fill the air.

Every time it has rung hollow. Maybe this time more than ever.

“He told you to do it. He understood in that moment that Endgame would kill him, and he knew the only way to die was in the service of helping you. He helped you, Sarah, sacrificed himself for your line. You had his blessing. If you’d done what An wanted, Chiyoko would be the one with Earth Key, she would be the one on her way to winni—”

“GOOD!” Sarah screams. She isn’t sure what’s worse—having killed the boy she grew up loving or having caught Earth Key as it popped out of Stonehenge. “Chiyoko shouldn’t have died,” she whispers. “Not like that. She was too good a Player, too strong. And I … I shouldn’t have shot him.” She takes a deep breath. “Jago … everyone—everyone—is going to die because of me.”

Sarah curls into a tighter ball. Jago bumps his fingers along her vertebrae.

“You didn’t know that,” Jago says. “None of us did. You were just doing what kepler 22b said. You were just Playing.”

“Yeah, Playing,” she says sarcastically. “I think Aisling might have known … Christ. Why couldn’t she have been a better shot? Why couldn’t she have shot us or taken out our plane when she had the chance?”

Jago has wondered the same about Aisling—not about taking down the Bush Hawk, but definitely about what she was trying to tell them. “If she had shot us down, then Christopher would still be dead,” Jago points out. “And you and I would be too.”

“Yeah, well …” Sarah says, as if that would be preferable to everything that’s happened since Italy.

“You were just Playing,” he says again.

No words for several minutes. Sarah resumes crying, Jago continues to caress her back. It’s one in the morning, drizzling outside, the sounds of cars and trucks on the wet street below. An airplane now and then, Heathrow-bound. A far-off whistle, like a boat’s. A police siren. The faint sound of a woman laughing drunkenly.

“Fuck kepler 22b and fuck Endgame and fuck Playing,” Sarah says into the silence.

She stops crying. Jago lets his hand fall into the sheets. Sarah’s breathing deepens and slows, and after several minutes she’s asleep.

Jago slides out of bed. He gets in the shower, lets the water run over him. He thinks about the knife fighter’s eyes, about how they looked as life abandoned him. About how Jago felt, watching, knowing he’d taken that life. He gets out and towels off, dresses silently, eases out of the hotel room, the door closing silently behind him. Sarah doesn’t stir.

“Hola, Sheila,” Jago says to the clerk when he reaches the lobby.

Jago has memorized the names of everyone who works at the hotel and in the restaurant. Aside from Sheila there are Pradeet, Irina, Paul, Dmitri, Carol, Charles, Dimple, and 17 others.

They’re all doomed.

Because of Sarah. Because of him. Because of Chiyoko and An and all the Players.

Because of Endgame.

He exits onto Cromwell Road and pulls his hood over his head. Cromwell, Jago thinks. The hated puritanical lord protector of the English Commonwealth, the terror of the interregnum. A man so loathed and reviled that King Charles II had his body exhumed so it could be killed all over again. The body was beheaded and the head placed on a pole outside Westminster Hall, where it stayed for years, getting picked at and spat on and cursed until there was nothing but a skull. That head rotted away not more than a couple kilometers from where Jago walks on this night. On this road named after the usurper.

This is what they’re fighting for. To keep devils like Cromwell and libertine kings like Charles II and hate and power and politics alive and well on Earth.

He’s begun to wonder if it’s even worth it.

But he can’t wonder. Not allowed to. “Jugadores no se preguntan,” Papi would say if he could hear Jago’s thoughts. “Jugadores juegan.”

Sí.

Jugadores juegan.

Jago sticks his hands in his pockets and walks toward Gloucester Road. A man 15 centimeters taller and 20 kilograms heavier than him wheels around the corner and slams into Jago’s shoulder. Jago does a half spin, keeps his hands in his pockets, barely looks up.

“Oi, watch it!” the man says. He smells like beer and anger. He’s having a bad night and looking for a fight.

“Sorry, mate,” Jago replies, imitating the South London accent, moving on.

“You havin’ a laugh?” the man asks. “Tryna be hard?”

Without warning, the man swings a fist the size of a toaster at Jago’s face. Jago leans backward, the fist breezes past his nose. The man swings again, but Jago sidesteps.

“A right fast little twat,” the man blurts. “Take your hands out your pockets, mate. Stop fuckin’ about.”

Jago smiles, flashes his diamond-studded teeth instead. “Don’t need to.”

The man steps forward and Jago dances toward him, slamming his heel onto one of the man’s feet. The man cries out and tries to grab him, but Jago kicks the man’s stomach. The man doubles over. Jago’s hands are still in his pockets. He turns to walk away, toward the all-night Burger King down the street, to get a couple of bacon cheeseburgers. Players need to eat. Even if one of them claims to be done with Playing. Jago hears the man quickly pull something out of his pocket. Without turning to look Jago says, “You should put that knife away.”

The man freezes. “How’d ya know I got a knife?”

“Heard it. Smelled it.”

“Bollocks,” the man whispers, surging forward.

Jago still doesn’t bother to take his hands out of his pockets. The silver metal flashes in the lamplight. Jago lifts a leg and kicks straight back, hitting the man in the ribs. The knife misses Jago as he folds forward and lifts his foot and cracks the man in the chin. Then Jago brings his foot down on the man’s knife hand. His wrist slams into the ground, the instep of Jago’s shoe on top of it. The knife comes free. Jago flicks it away with the toe of his shoe. It falls over the edge of the curb and clatters down a drain. The man moans. This skinny shit beat him without even taking his hands out of his pockets.

Jago smiles, spins, crosses the street.

Burger King.

Sí.

Jugadores juegan.

But they also need to eat.

Odem Pit’dah Bareket

Nofekh Sapir Yahalom

Leshem Shevo Ahlamah

Tarshish Shoham Yashfeh

Hilal moans while he sleeps. Whimpers and shakes. His head, face, right shoulder, and arm are burned from the incendiary grenade the Nabataean lobbed at him as he retreated underground.

Eben pulled him to safety. Threw blankets on him, snuffed out the flames, tried to calm him, injected him with morphine.

Hilal stopped screaming.

The power was out when the attack came, despite the backup systems. Eben called Nabril in Addis on a hand-crank radio, and Nabril said the power failure was the result of a solar flare. A huge one. One like he’d never seen before. The strange thing was that it was concentrated there, on Aksum, just at the moment that Hilal was writing his message to the other Players. Just as the Donghu and the Nabataean knocked on the hut’s door. All of which was impossible. Solar flares disrupt wide areas, entire continents. They don’t have pinpoint accuracy. They aren’t aimed.

Impossible.

Impossible, except for the Makers.

Eben considered this in the immediate aftermath of the ambush as he attended Hilal by lamplight. Eben had two Nethinim assistants, both mutes. They placed Hilal on a stretcher, hooked him up to an IV, took him seven levels beneath the surface of the ancient church. Eben and the Nethinim bathed Hilal in goat’s milk. The white liquid turned pink. Charred flecks of skin floated to the surface.

They prayed silently as they worked. As they tended. As they saved. Bubbling skin. The crisp, sulfuric smell of disintegrated hair. The creamy waft of the milk-and-blood mixture underneath.

Eben cried quietly. Hilal had been the most beautiful of any Aksumite Player in 1,000 years, since the legendary female Player Elin Bakhara-al-Poru. Hilal had the blue eyes, the perfect, smooth complexion, the straight white teeth, the high cheekbones, the flat nose and perfectly round nostrils, the square chin, and the tightly curled hair that framed his smooth boyish face. He looked like a god. All gone now. Burned away. Hilal ibn Isa al-Salt would never be beautiful again.

Eben sent for a surgeon from Cairo to perform three skin grafts. An eye doctor came from Tunis to try to save Hilal’s right eye. The grafts were successful from a medical standpoint, but Hilal will always be gruesome. A patchwork of the formerly beautiful boy. The right eye was saved, but his vision will surely be affected. And it is no longer blue. Now it is red. All of it save the pupil, which is milky white.

“It will never go back,” the eye doctor said.

He was so beautiful. A king for angels. But now. Now he appears to be half a devil.

Eben thinks: But he is our devil.

It’s been nearly a week since the attack. Eben kneels next to Hilal in a plain stone bedchamber. A small wooden cross over the bed frame. A white porcelain sink against one wall. Some pegs for robes. A small chest containing fresh sheets and bandages. A hook on the headboard for the IV. There is a small cart with a heart rate monitor, wire leads, and electrodes. The Nethinim—both of them tall and strong, one a man, one a woman—stand attendant, silent, armed, just outside the door.

Hilal has slept the entire time. He occasionally moans, whimpers, shakes. He is still on morphine, but Eben is already weaning him. Hilal has learned to live with pain, and while this pain will be more intense and permanent than what has come before, if Hilal is to continue with Endgame, then he is going to have to acclimate.

To more pain. To disfigurement. To his new body.

If he is not going to continue, then Eben needs to know. And for that, Hilal needs his mind to be clear.

So he is being weaned.

While Hilal has slept, Eben has prayed. Meditated. Remembered Hilal’s words: I could be wrong, Hilal said before the morphine took him. The Event could be inevitable.

Eben knows this is not the case. Not after what the being said on the television. Not after the solar flare that pinpointed Aksum. The Makers are intervening. The only other possibility is that the Corrupted One somehow did it. The being that the Aksumites have been searching for all these centuries. Searching for in vain. The one called Ea.

But even the Corrupted One does not have the power to control the sun.

So Eben knows: it was the Makers.

And Eben knows that this is savagery. They brought humans to life and they are supposed to oversee our near extinction, to reset the Earth life-clock and let the planet recover from the damage done, but They are not supposed to interfere with the Playing of Endgame. They made these rules, and now They break them.

Which means that perhaps it is time.

Time to see what’s inside the legendary, but very real, container.

It’s been waiting since Uncle Moses faked its destruction and secreted it away and told the sons of Aaron to protect it at all costs. And never to look upon it or open it. And he commanded: Only break the seal on the Day of Judgment.

That day is near.

This is the end of an age.

Soon the mighty Aksumites will take their charge and see what power rests between the gilded wings of the cherubim of glory. Soon Eben ibn Mohammed al-Julan will risk destruction for the sake of Endgame.

Once Hilal returns to consciousness and clarity Eben will break the covenant with the Makers and see if the line of Aksum can give them a taste of their own medicine.

FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE, MAY 1981

In March 1967, an intercept technician with the USAF Security Service intercepted a communication between the pilot of a Russian-made Cuban MIG-21 and his command concerning a UFO encounter. The technician has since stated that when the pilot attempted to fire at the object, the MIG and its pilot were destroyed by the UFO. Furthermore, the technician alleges that all reports, tapes, log entries, and notes on the incident were forwarded to the National Security Agency at its request. Not surprisingly, several months later the agency drafted a report entitled UFO Hypothesis and Survival Question. Released in October 1979 under the US Freedom of Information Act, the report states that “the leisurely scientific approach has too often taken precedence in dealing with the UFO question.” The agency concluded that no matter what UFO hypothesis is considered, “all of them have serious survival implications.”

There is Alice and there is Shari and there is a little girl wedged between them, frightened and whimpering. Shari and Alice stand back to back, crouched in fighting stances, Alice with her knife and a boomerang, Shari with a long metal rod tipped with a tangle of nails. Circling them are the others, also armed, cooing clucking snarling threatening. Beyond them is a pack of dogs with red eyes and men dressed in black and armed with rifles and scythes and billy clubs. Above them is a scrim of stars and the keplers’ faces and their seven-fingered hands reaching, their razor-thin bodies still, their mocking laughter ringing. In their midst there is a distortion in space like a hole in the stars. And before Alice can consider all this, the others move at once and the little girl screams and Alice throws her boomerang and pushes her knife into the chest of the short tanned boy, who spits in her face as he bleeds, and the little girl screams and screams and screams and screams.

Alice shoots up in her hammock, her fists gripping the edge so she doesn’t tumble out, her hair a wild dark explosion, moonlight reflecting off its curls in white turns.

She takes a breath, slaps her face, checks her boomerangs. Checks her knife. Still there, embedded in the wooden column above the eyelet holding up one end of her hammock.

She is on the porch of her little shack near the lagoon. Alone. Beyond the lagoon is the Timor Sea. Behind her, on the other side of the shack, is the scrub and bush of the vast Northern Territory. Alice’s backyard.

She has been at home meditating, listening to the dreamtime and tracing the songlines with her memory. Thinking of the ancestors, the sea and sky and earth. She has been there since the kepler broadcast his “Play on” message and since she received another clue in her sleep. This one not a puzzle, but explicit and direct, if not exactly fixed.

She wonders if other Players got new clues. If one of the others has already figured out where she is. If one of them is drawing a bead on her right now with a sniper rifle, in the distance, silent and deadly.

“Bugger you!” she yells into the darkness, her voice spreading over the dry land. She flips out of the hammock and stomps to the edge of the porch, wiggles her toes, lets her arms out wide. “Here I am, you hoons—take me!”

But no shot comes.

Alice snickers and spits. She scratches her ass. She watches the bright light of her clue, a mental beacon in her mind’s eye. She knows exactly what it is: the location of Baitsakhan, the Donghu, the terrifying toddler, the person who wants to kill Shari and maybe this girl Alice has seen in her dreams over and over. Alice guesses that this girl is Shari’s Little Alice, but why the Donghu, or anyone, would want her killed isn’t clear. Why Little Alice is important—if she’s important—remains shrouded.

Regardless, Big Alice is going to find Baitsakhan and kill him. That is how she will Play. If this leads her closer to one of the three keys of Endgame, so be it. If it doesn’t, so be it.

“What’ll be’ll be,” she huffs.

A shooting star cruises the firmament and fades in the western sky.

She spins, walks inside her shack, snatches her knife from the wooden post. She picks up the receiver of an old push-button phone, curly cord and all. She punches in a number, puts the receiver to her ear.

“Oi, Tim. Yeah, it’s Alice. Look, I’m on a freighter tomorrow predawn, and I need you to use your unmatched skills to locate a certain someone for me, yeah? Might’ve mentioned her. The Harappan. Yeah, that’s the one. Chopra. Indian. Yeah, yeah, I know there must be a hundred million Chopras in that country, but listen. She’s between seventeen and twenty, probably on the older end of that spectrum. And she has a kid. Maybe two or three years old. Here’s the kicker, though. The girl’s name’s Alice. That oughta narrow it a little. Yeah, you call me on this number when you get it. I’ll be checking the messages. All right, Tim. Good on ya.”

She hangs up and stares at the backpack on her bed. The black canvas roll covered with weapons.

She has to get ready.

And she told her Students, her Acolytes:

You can feel it.

Everything that is good is a facade.

Nothing worthwhile lasts.

If you are hungry, you eat, and you are full, but that fullness just reminds you that you will be hungry again in the future. If you are cold, you make a fire, but that fire will die, and then the coldness creeps back in. If you are lonely, you find someone, but then they get tired of you or you get tired of them and, eventually, there you are—alone again.

Happiness, satisfaction, contentment, all of these create a veil spread thinly but convincingly over suffering. The pain awaits, always, underneath.

Everything the children perceive themselves to be and all that they devote themselves to—food, sex, entertainment, drink, money, adventure, games—exist to insulate them from fear.

Fear is the only constant, which is precisely why we should listen to it.

Embrace it. Keep it. Love it.

Greatness comes from fear, Students. Using it is how we will fight.

Using it is how we will win.

—S

Beep.

SHIVER.

Beep-beep.

SHIVER.

Beep-beep.

SHIVERBLINKSHIVERBLINK.

“CHIYOKO!”

An Liu tries to sit, but he is restrained. At the wrists and the ankles and across SHIVERblinkblink the chest. He glances left and right and left and right. His head is killing him.

Killing.

The pain radiates over his right eye and around his temple and to the back of his skull and down his neck. He can’t remember how he got here. He’s on a gurney. Sees an IV stand, a rolling cart with a heart and respiratory monitor. BLINKshiverblink. White walls. Low gray ceiling. A bright fluorescent light overhead. A framed picture of Queen Elizabeth. An oval door with an iron wheel in the middle. A black four stenciled above it.

He can feel the room shift and hear it blinkblink hear it creak.

A wheel on the door.

The room shifts and creaks in the other direction.

He’s on a boat.

“Ch-Ch-Ch-Chiyoko …” he stammers quietly.

“That’s her name, eh? The one who got flattened?”

A man’s voice. SHIVERblinkSHIVERblinkblinkblink. It comes from above his head, out of eyeshot. An lifts his chin, strains at the straps. Rolls his eyes up until the pain in his head becomes almost unbearable. He still can’t SHIVER he still can’t see the man.

“Chiyoko. I was wondering.” He hears the scratch of a pen on paper. “Thanks for finally telling me. Poor girl just got flattened like a pancake.”

Flattened? What’s SHIVERSHIVER what’s he blinkblinkblink what’s he talking about?

“D-d-d-don’t say—”

“S’matter? Something in your mouth?”

“D-d-d-don’t say her n-n-n-name!”

The man sighs, steps forward a little. An can just make out the top of his head. He is a white man with tan skin and a mop of brown hair, straight thin eyebrows, and deep lines in his forehead. The lines are not from old age but from frowning. From yelling. From squinting. From being British and way too serious.

An already shiverBLINK already knows: British Special Forces.

“W-w-w-where—”SHIVERSHIVERSHIVERblinkSHIVER. It hasn’t SHIVER hasn’t been this bad SHIVERSHIVERSHIVER …

The tremors haven’t been this bad since Chiyoko left him in bed that night. His head whips back and forth and his legs shake and shake.

SHIVERblinkSHIVERblink. He needs to blinkblinkblinkblinkblink to see her. That will calm him down.

“Twitchy lad,” the man says, stepping around to the side of the gurney. “You wanna know where your girlfriend is, that it?”

“Y-y-y-y-y—”

An is stuck on the sound. He keeps saying it, his mind and mouth on a loop.

“Y-y-y-y-y-y-y—”

The man places a hand on An’s arm. The hand is warm. The man is skinnier than An expected. His hands are too big for his body.

“I have questions too. But we can’t talk until you’ve gotten ahold of yourself.” The man turns away. He picks up a syringe from a nearby tray. An catches a glimpse of the label: serum #591566. “Try to breathe easy, lad.” The man pulls up An’s sleeve on his left arm. “It’s just a pinch.”

No!

SHIVERblinkblinkblinkSHIVERSHIVER.

No!

“Breathe easy now.”

An convulses. He feels whatever he’s being injected with move through his arm, into his heart, his neck, his head. The pain disappears. Cool darkness washes into An’s brain, like the waves outside, gently rocking the ship back and forth, back and forth. An feels the drug pull him beneath the surface, down into the dark ocean. He’s suspended. Weightless. He doesn’t shiver. His eyes don’t BLINK. All is quiet and all is dark. Calm. Easy.

“Can you speak?” The man’s voice echoes as if it is in An’s mind.

“Y-yes,” An says without much effort.

“Good. You can call me Charlie. What’s your name, lad?”

An opens his eyes. His sight is fuzzy around the edges, but his senses are strangely acute. He can feel every centimeter of his body. “My name is An Liang,” he says.

“No, it’s not. What’s your name?”

An tries to turn his head but can’t. He’s been restrained further. A strap across his forehead? Or is this the drug?

“Chang Liu,” he tries again.

“No, it’s not. One more lie and I won’t tell you anything about Chiyoko. That’s a promise.”

An begins to speak but the man claps one of his big hands over An’s mouth. “I mean it. Lie to me one more time and we’re done. No more Chiyoko, no more you. Do you understand?”

Since An can’t move his head at all, can’t nod, he widens his eyes. Yes, he understands.

“Good lad. Now, what’s your name?”

“An Liu.”

“Better. How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“Where are you from?”

“China.”

“No shit. Where in China?”

“Many places. Xi’an was last home.”

“Why were you at Stonehenge?”

An feels a tickle in his ear. A scratching noise close by.

“To help Chiyoko,” he says.

“Tell me about Chiyoko. What was her last name?”

“Takeda. She was the Mu.”

A pause. “The Mu?”

“Yes.”

“What is a Mu?”

“Not sure. Old people. Older than old.”

An hears the scritch-scratch noise again. He places the sound. A polygraph. “He’s not lying,” the man says. “Don’t know what he’s talking about, but he’s not lying.”

An hears a tinny voice over an earpiece. Someone else is watching and listening. Giving Charlie with the big hands and wrinkled forehead instructions.

“What you inject in me?” An asks.

“Top-secret serum, lad. I tell you more than that and I have to kill you. It’s not your turn to ask questions yet. I’ll let you ask yours after you answer a few more of mine, deal?”

“Yes.”

“What were you helping Chiyoko with at Stonehenge?”

“Get Earth Key.”

“What’s Earth Key?”

“Piece of puzzle.”

“What kind of puzzle?”

“Endgame puzzle.”

“What’s Endgame?”

“A game for end of time.”

“And you’re playing it?”

“Yes.”

“Chiyoko was too?”

“Yes.”

“She was Mu?”

“Yes.”

“What are you?”

“Shang.”

“What is Shang?”

“Shang was father of my people. Shang are my people. Shang is me. I am Shang. I hate Shang.”

Charlie pauses, writes something on a pad that An can’t see. “What does Earth Key do?”

“Not sure. Maybe nothing.”

“Are there other keys?”

“Yes. It is one of three.”

“Earth Key was at Stonehenge?”

“I think yes. Not sure.”

“Where are the other two keys?”

“Don’t know. That is part of the game.”

“Endgame.”

“Yes.”

“Who runs it?”

He cannot resist saying the words. “Them. The Makers. The Gods. They have many names. One called kepler 22b told us of Endgame.” The serum they put in him tickles the synapses in his frontal cortex. It is a good drug, whatever it is.

Charlie holds a picture over An’s face. It’s of the man from the announcement that was made on every screen in the world—TV, mobile phone, tablet, computer—after Stonehenge changed, after that beam of light shot to the heavens. “Have you seen this person before?”

“No. Wait. Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Yes … yes I see it before. That is disguise. Could be kepler 22b. Could not be him—her—it. Not a person.”

Charlie takes the picture away. Replaces it with a picture of Stonehenge. Not as it was, quaint and ancient and mysterious, but as it is now. Revealed and altered. An unearthly tower of stone and glass and metal rising 100 feet in the air, the age-old stones that marked it jumbled around the tower’s base like a child’s discarded blocks.

“Tell me about this.”

An’s eyes widen. His memory of Stonehenge stops before anything like that appeared. “I do not know about that. Can I ask question?”

“You just did, but yes.”

“That is Stonehenge?”

“Yes. How did this happen?”

“Not sure. Can’t remember.”

Charlie leans back. “I guess you wouldn’t. You were shot, you remember that?”

“No.”

“In the head. You concussed pretty badly. Lucky for you, you’ve got a metal plate in there. A metal plate coated in Kevlar. Some bloody foresight, that.”

“Yes. Lucky. Another question?”

“Sure.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

Charlie pauses, listens to the little voice in his earpiece.

“We don’t really know. You were shot, we know that. With a special kind of bullet that only a handful of people have ever seen. You were clutching the end of a rope that led to the body of a young man. Or what was left of his body. He was blown up above the chest. Only his lower torso and legs were left.”

An remembers. There was the boy he put the bomb leash around. There was the Olmec. There was the Cahokian.

“Your girlfriend, Chiyoko—”

“Not say her name. Her name is my name now.”

Charlie gives An a hard stare. His eyes are blue, then green, then red. It’s the drugs, An tells himself. The good drugs.

“Chiyoko,” Charlie says, emphasizing the name, savoring it in a way that stings An. “She was right next to you. One of the stones toppled onto her when this thing under Stonehenge came up. Crushed the lower two-thirds of her body. Killed her instantly. We had to scrape her up.”

“She next to me, though?” An asks. His eyelids flutter. “After I shot?”

“Yes. Was she the one who shot you?”

“No.”

“Who did?”

“Not sure. There were two others.”

“These two, they had the ceramic and polymer bullets?”

“Not sure. The guns were white, so maybe.”

“What are their names?”

“Sarah Alopay and Jago Tlaloc,” An says, struggling to pronounce these foreign names.

“They’re playing this game too?”

“Yes.”

“For who?”

An’s eyes flutter again. “F-f-f-or their l-l-l-lines. She is Cahokian. He is Olmec.” An’s head jerks. Fresh pain sizzles across his medulla oblongata. The good drugs are wearing off.

Charlie holds another sheet of paper over An’s face. Two security images. “These two?”

An squints. “Y-y-yes.”

SHIVER.

“Good.”

Charlie whispers something incomprehensible into a microphone.

Beep. Beep-beep. Beep. Beep-beep.

The heart-rate monitor. Other details in the room are coming back to An. The edges of his vision aren’t fuzzy anymore. He is resurfacing from the dark waters. The SHIVERS are back.

“Where is Ch-Chi-Chiyoko?”

“Can’t say, mate.”

“On this boat?”

“Can’t say.”

“C-c-c-can I see her?”

“No. You’ve only got me from now on. No one else. Just you and me.”

“Oh.”

An’s head jerks. His fingers dance.

“Are-are-are …” He trails off, gives up, whispers. “The game, you understand …”

“Understand what?”

“You all die.” An says it so quietly that Charlie can barely hear.

“What?” Charlie asks, turning an ear toward him.

“You all die,” An breathes, quieter still.

Charlie leans over. Their faces are less than half a meter apart. Charlie squints, his forehead wrinkles. An’s eyes are closed. His mouth is agape. Charlie says, “‘You all die’? Is that what you sai—”

An bites down hard. A plastic cracking noise comes from inside An’s mouth. This Charlie can hear very clearly. And then An exhales, blows out with a hiss like a punctured balloon, and an orange cloud of gas shoots from behind his teeth and right into Charlie’s face. Charlie’s eyes go wide and fill with tears and he can’t breathe. His face burns, his skin is on fire everywhere, his eyes feel like they’re melting, his lungs are shrinking. He falls forward onto An’s chest. It only takes 4.56 seconds, and after that An opens his eyes again.

“Yes,” An says. “Y-y-y-you all die.”

An spits the fake tooth from his mouth, the poison inside one that he spent years gaining an immunity to. The tooth clicks across the metal floor. The little voice in Charlie’s earpiece is screaming. Two seconds later an alarm sounds, reverberating through the metal hull of the boat. The lights go out. A red emergency light flips on.

The room shifts and creaks. Shifts and creaks.

I’m on a boat.

I’m on a boat and I have to get off.

The future is a game.

Time, one of the rules.

“It is I,” Maccabee Adlai, Player of the 8th line, says into an inconspicuous wireless microphone. He speaks a language only 10 people in the entire world understand. “Kalla bhajat niboot scree.”

These words have no translation. They are older than old, but the woman on the other end of the call understands.

“Kalla bhajat niboot scree,” she says in return. They have proven their identities to each other. “Is your phone secure?” the woman asks.

“I think. But who cares. The end is so close.”

“The others could find you.”

“Screw the others. Besides,” Maccabee says, wrapping his fingers around the glass orb in his pocket, “I would see them coming. Listen, Ekaterina.” Maccabee has always called his mother by her first name, even when he was a boy. “I need something.”

“Anything, my Player.”

“I need a hand. Mechanical. Titanium. Don’t care if it’s skinned.”

“Neurologically fused?”

“If you can do it quickly.”

“Depends on the wound. I’ll know when I see it.”

“Where? How soon?”

Ekaterina thinks. “Berlin. Two days. I’ll text an address tomorrow.”

“Good. Listen. The hand isn’t for me.”

“Okay.”

“It’s not for me, and I need you to put something in it. Something hidden.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll send you specs and code over encrypted botnet M-N-V-eight-nine.”

“Okay.”

“Repeat it,” Maccabee says to his mother.

“M-N-V-eight-nine.”

“It’ll arrive twenty seconds after this call ends. The name of the file is dogwood jeer.”

“Understood.”

“I’ll see you in Berlin.”

“Yes, my son, my Player. Kalla bhajat niboot scree.”

“Kalla bhajat niboot scree.”

Maccabee hangs up. He logs into a ghost app on his phone, launches it, and hits send. Dogwood jeer is off. He turns the phone over, removes the battery, and throws it into the waste bin next to the hotel’s front desk. He takes the phone in both hands and, as he crosses to the gift shop, cracks it down the middle. He goes to a refrigerator full of sodas and opens the door. The cold hits him in the face. He pulls the air into his lungs. It feels good.

He reaches into the back of the case for two Cokes, drops the phone. It clatters behind the racks.

He pays for the Cokes and heads back to the hotel room.

Baitsakhan is on the couch in the junior suite. He sits on the edge of the cushion, his back straight, his eyes closed. The gauze on his wrist stump is blotted by spots of dark blood. His remaining hand—his right hand—is in a fist.

Maccabee closes the door. “I got you a Coke.”

“I don’t like Coke.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“Jalair liked Coke.”

I wish I were Playing with him instead, Maccabee thinks. He twists open his soda, it makes a little hiss, he takes a sip. It tickles his tongue and throat. It’s delicious. “We’re going to Berlin, Baits.”

Baitsakhan opens his deep brown eyes and gazes at Maccabee. “The wind doesn’t blow me there, brother.”

“Yes, it does.”

“No. We have to kill the Aksumite.”

“No, we don’t.”

“Yes, we do.”

Maccabee pulls the orb out of his pocket. “There’s no point. Hilal is nearly dead. He isn’t going anywhere. Besides, his line would be guarding him. It would be suicide to go back there now. Better to wait it out. Maybe he dies anyway and spares us a trip.”

“Who then? The Harappan? To avenge Bat and Bold?”

Maccabee approaches Baitsakhan and lightly slaps his stump. Maccabee knows this hurts, but Baitsakhan only sucks his teeth. “She’s too far away. Others are much closer—others who have Earth Key. Others who are Playing by the rules. You remember what the orb showed us, don’t you?”

“Yes. That stone monument. That girl called Sarah getting the first Key. Yes … You’re right.”

Maccabee thinks, That’s the closest thing to an apology I’ve ever heard from him.

Baitsakhan nods. “We need to go for them.”

“I’m glad you agree. First things first. You need to get your arm fixed.”

“I don’t want it fixed. I don’t need it fixed.”

Maccabee shakes his head. “Don’t you want to shoot your bow again? Rein a horse and swing a sword at the same time? Wring the life from the Harappan with two hands instead of one?”

Baitsakhan tilts his head. “These things aren’t possible.”

“You ever heard of neurofusing? Intelligent prosthetics?”

Baitsakhan wrinkles his brow.

“I swear,” Maccabee says, “you and your line are from a different century. What I’m saying is that we’re going to lend you a hand, so to speak. A better hand than the one you had before.”

Baitsakhan holds up his stump. “Where does such magic happen?”

Maccabee snickers. “Berlin. In two days.”

“Fine. And then?”

“And then we use this,” Maccabee says, holding up the orb that Baitsakhan can’t touch, “to find the Cahokian and the Olmec and take Earth Key for ourselves.”

Baitsakhan closes his eyes again and takes a deep breath. “We hunt.”

“Yes, brother. We hunt.”

“Speculation remains rampant about what’s going on at Stonehenge in the south of England. It’s been nearly a week since locals reported seeing a predawn beam of light surge to the heavens, preceded by massive booming sounds that rang out only seconds before. Given the ancient monument’s mysterious history, people are saying that anything from aliens to secret government agencies to Morlocks, which are a kind of underground-dwelling troglodyte——yes, you heard correctly——are responsible for whatever is going on there. We go now to Fox News correspondent Mills Power, who’s been in nearby Amesbury since the reports started pouring in. Mills?”

“Hello, Stephanie.”

“Can you tell us anything about what’s going on?”

“It’s been very chaotic. This quaint village is overrun with people. Government trucks travel constantly to and from the site, and the air is thick with helicopters. I’ve even been told by an anonymous source that three high-altitude CIA or MI6 Predator drones are in the skies twenty-four hours a day keeping watch. The whole area’s been declared off-limits, and a mix of British, French, German, and American authorities have even covered the site with what is essentially a massive white circus tent.”

“So no one can actually see what caused this alleged beam of light?”

“That’s right, Stephanie. But the light isn’t alleged. Fox News has obtained four separate smartphone videos of the beam, as you can see in this footage.”

“Wow … this is the first time I’m seeing——”

“Yes. It’s shocking. You can see the beam shooting up in this one——apparently from an area of Stonehenge called the Heel Stone. But the really strange thing, Stephanie, is that all four phones stopped recording at the same moment, even though the people operating them tried to keep shooting.”

“Stonehenge is——was——a tourist attraction of sorts, Mills. Has anyone——besides the people who took those videos——has anyone come forward from the site itself? Any eyewitnesses?”

“As I said, things are very much under wraps here——literally. There are rumors of people being held by the authorities, and that some may be on HMS Dauntless, a Royal Navy destroyer currently in the English Channel. Of course, a military spokeswoman wouldn’t confirm or deny these rumors, based on the fact that this is an ongoing investigation. When pressed on exactly what they’re investigating, the standard response seems to be——quote——‘unexpected developments in and around Stonehenge.’ That’s it. All we know for certain is that, whatever has happened, they don’t want people to know what it is.”

“Yes, that is … that is obvious. Mills, thank you very much. Please keep us abreast of any new developments as they become available.”

“Will do, Stephanie.”

“Uh, next on Fox News, the ongoing crisis in Syria, plus a heartwarming story from the meteor impact site in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates …”

Aisling Kopp saw the impact site on the way in through one of the plane’s small oval windows. That black bowl-shaped scar in the city, 10 times more devastating than any of the pictures from 2001’s man-made terror attack.

But something about it had changed.

It wasn’t that it had been fixed up or cleaned away—that would take decades. What had changed was at the crater’s center, the very point of impact. Now, instead of ash and rubble, there was a clean white dot.

A tent. Just like the one that covered whatever had happened at Stonehenge. Whatever the Cahokian and the Olmec had done to the ancient Celtic ruin.

One of her line’s places. An ancient La Tène power center.

Used. Taken away. And covered up.

The white tents are like signals to Aisling. Governments are scared, ignorant, groping. If they can’t fix what’s happened—the meteors, Stonehenge—then they’ll shroud the damage until they figure it out.

They won’t figure it out, though.

A few minutes after the plane arced over Queens, she saw something else. Something she wanted to see. There, in Broad Channel, on the stretch of land bridging the Rockaway Peninsula to the Queens mainland. Pop’s house. The teal bungalow on West 10th Road, still standing after the meteor that hit several miles to the north, killing 4,416 souls and injuring twice as many more. It would’ve been so much worse if the meteor hadn’t landed in a cemetery. The already dead bore the brunt of its impact.

Aisling is still alive. And her house still stands.

For how much longer, Aisling doesn’t know. How much longer will JFK stand? Or the government’s white tents? Or anything at all?

The Event is coming. Aisling knows when but not where. If it’s centered on the Philippines or Siberia or Antarctica or Madagascar, then Pop’s wooden house will survive. New York will survive. JFK will survive.

But if the Event hits anywhere in the North Atlantic, towering waves will crash down on the coast, washing away miles and miles of houses. If the Event hits on land, if it hits the city, then her home will go up in flames in a matter of seconds.

She’s convinced that wherever the Event is concentrated, it will be an asteroid. It has to be. That’s what she saw in the ancient paintings above Lago Beluiso. Fire from above. Death from above, just like life and consciousness from above. A massive hunk of iron and nickel as old as the Milky Way that will crash into Earth and alter life here for millennia. A cosmic interloper of massive scale. A killer.

That’s what the keplers are. Killers.

That’s what I am too. In theory.

She moves forward in the long, slow immigration line.

Why didn’t she shoot the Cahokian and the Olmec when she had the chance? Maybe she could have stopped everything. Maybe, for that brief moment, she held the key to stopping Endgame.

Maybe.

She should have shot first and asked questions later.

She was weak.

You have to be strong in Endgame, Pop used to tell her. Even before she was eligible. Strong in every way.

I’ll have to be stronger to stop it, she thinks. I won’t be weak again.

“Next at thirty-one,” says an Indian woman in a maroon sport jacket, interrupting Aisling’s apocalyptic train of thought. The woman has smiling eyes and dark lips and jet-black hair.

“Thanks,” Aisling says. She smiles at the woman, looks at all the people in this vast room, people from every corner of the world, of every shape and size and color, rich and not-so-rich. She’s always loved JFK immigration for this reason. In most other countries you see a predominance of one type of person, but not here. It almost makes her sick, thinking that it will all be gone. That all these people from so many different walks of life will no longer smile, laugh, wait, breathe, or live.

When will they find out? she wonders. As it happens? In that split second before the end? Hours before? Weeks? Months? Tomorrow? Today?

Today. That would be interesting. Very interesting.

The government would need a lot more white tents.

Aisling arrives at desk 31. There is one person in line before her. An athletic African-American woman in a royal-blue jumpsuit with fashionable bug-eyed sunglasses.

“Next,” the immigration officer says. The woman crosses the red line to the desk. It takes her 78 seconds to clear.

“Next,” the officer repeats. Aisling approaches, her passport ready. The officer is in his 60s with square eyeglasses and a bald spot. He’s probably counting the days to his retirement. Aisling hands over her passport. It’s worn and has been stamped dozens of times, but as far as Aisling is concerned it’s brand-new. She picked it up at a dead drop in Milan on Via Fabriano only hours before going to Malpensa airport. Pop had sent it via courier 53 hours earlier. The name on it is Deandra Belafonte Cooper, a new alias. Deandra was born in Cleveland. She’s been to Turkey, Bermuda, Italy, France, Poland, the UK, Israel, Greece, and Lebanon. Pretty good for a young woman of 20 years.

Yes, 20 years. If the meteors had landed just a few weeks later, she would have aged out. But Aisling celebrated her birthday while she was holed up in that cave. Although “celebrated” is a pretty generous word for eating spit-roasted squirrel and drinking cold mountain spring water. She did enjoy a few sugar cubes after her meal, along with two small pulls off a flask of Kentucky bourbon. But it was no party.

“You’ve been around,” the agent says, leafing through the passport.

“Yeah, took a year off before college. Which turned into two,” Aisling says, shifting her weight from one leg to the other.

“Headed home?”

“Yep. Breezy Point.”

“Ah, local girl.”

“Yep.”

He slides the passport through the scanner. He puts down the little blue book. He types. He looks bored but happy—that retirement is looming—but then his hands pause for a split second over the keys. He squints very slightly and adjusts his posture.

He keeps typing.

She’s been standing there for 99 seconds when he says, “Miss Cooper, I’m going to have to ask you to step aside and see some of my colleagues over there.”

Aisling feigns concern. “Is there something wrong with my passport?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Can I have it then?”

“No, I’m afraid you can’t. Now please”—he holds up one hand and places the other on the butt of his holstered pistol—“over there.”

Aisling already sees them from the corner of her eye. Two men, both in fatigues and armed with M4s and Colt service pistols, one with a very large Alsatian panting happily on a leash.

“Am I being arrested?”

The officer snaps the strap off his pistol but doesn’t draw. Aisling wonders if this moment is the most exciting of his 20-odd years as an immigration officer. “Miss, I am not going to ask again. Please see my colleagues.”

Aisling holds up her hands and widens her eyes, makes them watery, like how Deandra Belafonte Cooper, the non-Player world traveler, would look in the situation. Scared and fragile.

She turns from the officer and walks haltingly toward the men. They don’t buy it. In fact, they take half a step back. The dog stands, as his handler whispers a command. His ears perk, his tail straightens, the hairs on his neck bristle. The man without the dog moves his rifle into the ready position and says, “That way. You first. No need for a scene, but we need to see your hands.”

Aisling dispenses with the act. She turns, puts her hands behind her back, just under her knapsack, and hooks her thumbs. “That all right?”

“Yes. Walk straight ahead. There’s a door at the end of the room marked E-one-one-seven. It will open when you get to it.”

“Can I ask a question?”

“No, miss, you cannot. Now walk.”

She walks.

And as she does, Aisling wonders if they are going to put her under a white tent too.

“Tango Whiskey X-ray, this is Hotel Lima, over?”

“Tango Whiskey X-ray, we read you.”

“Hotel Lima confirms idents of Nighthawks One and Two. Good night. Repeat, good night. Over.”

“Roger, Hotel Lima. Good night. Protocol?”

“Protocol is Ghost Takedown. Over.”

“Roger Ghost Takedown. Teams One, Two, and Three are in position. We have eyes?”

“Eyes are online. Op on oh-four-five-five Zulu.”

“Op on oh-four-five-five Zulu, copy. See you on the other side.”

“Roger that, Tango Whiskey X-ray. Hotel Lima out.”

The news is on all day in the background while Jago talks with Renzo to finalize their transportation. Sarah packs. Not that they have much to pack. When he’s done with Renzo, Jago goes over their emergency escape plan, should they need it. The one that winds through the nearby Tube tunnels and sewers. Sarah listens, but Jago sees that she’s not paying attention. They eat more Burger King—breakfast this time—savoring every greasy, salty bite. The Event is coming. The days are numbered for this kind of fast-food deliciousness.

Sarah meditates in the bathtub, tries not to cry about Christopher or triggering the end of the world, and miraculously succeeds. Jago exercises in the living room. Rips off three sets of 100 push-ups, three sets of 250 sit-ups, three sets of 500 jumping jacks. After her meditation, Sarah cleans their plastic-and-ceramic guns. She has no idea who made them, but each is identical to a Sig Pro 2022 in every way save material, color, weight, and magazine capacity. When she’s finished, she puts one by her bedside and one by Jago’s. His and hers. Nearly jokes that they should be mongrammed but doesn’t feel like joking. Each pistol has 16 rounds plus an extra 17-round magazine. Sarah fired one bullet at Stonehenge, killing Christopher and hitting An, probably killing him too. Jago fired one that grazed Chiyoko’s head. Other than their bodies, these are the only weapons they have.

Unless Earth Key counts as a weapon, which it very well might. It sits in the middle of the round coffee table. Small and seemingly innocent. The trigger for the end of the world.

The news on the TV is BBC. All day it’s the same. The meteors, the mystery at Stonehenge, the meteors, the mystery at Stonehenge, the meteors, the mystery at Stonehenge. Sprinkled here and there with some stuff from Syria and Congo and Latvia and Myanmar, plus the tanking world economy, reeling from a new kind of financial panic that, Sarah and Jago know, is the result of Endgame. The suits on Wall Street don’t know that, though. Not yet, anyway.

The meteors, and the mystery at Stonehenge. Wars, crashing markets.

The news.

“None of this will matter once it happens,” Sarah says in the early evening.

“You’re right. Nada.”

A commercial. A local ad for a car dealership. “I guess some of it I won’t miss,” Sarah says. Maybe she does feel like a joke.

Jago should be happy about this. But he just stares at the TV. “I don’t know. I think I’ll miss it all.”

Sarah glares at Earth Key. She was the one who unlocked … no. She has decided to stop blaming herself. She was only Playing. She didn’t make the rules. Sarah sits on the edge of the bed, her hands planted firmly on the mattress, her elbows locked. “What do you think it’ll be, Jago?”

“I don’t know. You remember what kepler 22b showed us. That image of Earth …”

“Burned. Dark. Gray and brown and red.”

“Sí.”

“Ugly …”

“Maybe it’ll be alien tech? One of kepler’s amigos pushes a button from their home planet and—poof!—Earth is screwed.”

“No. It’s got to be more terrifying than that. More … more of a show.”

Jago flicks the remote, the TV shuts off. “Whatever happens, I don’t want to think about it right now.”

She looks at him. Holds out a hand. Jago takes it and sits on the bed next to her and pushes his shoulder into hers.

“I don’t want to be alone, Jago.”

“You won’t be, Alopay.”

“Not after what happened at Stonehenge.”

“You won’t be.”

They flop onto their backs. “We’ll leave tomorrow, like we planned. We’re going to find Sky Key. We’re going to keep Playing.”

“Yeah,” she says unconvincingly. “Okay.”

Jago takes her head and turns it gently. He kisses her. “We can do this, Sarah. We can do it together.”

“Shut up.” She kisses him back. She feels the diamonds in his teeth, licks them, nibbles at his lower lip, smells his breath.

Anything to forget.

They fool around, and Sarah doesn’t say “Play” or “Earth Key” or “Sky Key” or “Endgame” or “Christopher” for the rest of the evening. She just holds Jago and smiles, touches him and smiles, feels him and smiles.

She falls asleep at 11:37 p.m.

Jago doesn’t sleep.

He is sitting in bed at 4:58 a.m. Stock-still. No lights. Two windows looking over a slender courtyard to the left of the bed. The blinds are open, ambient light suffuses the glass. Jago can see well enough. He’s already dressed. Sarah is too. He watches her sleep. Her breathing slow and steady.

The Cahokian.

He tries to remember a story his great-grandfather, Xehalór Tlaloc, told him about a legendary battle between humans and the Sky Gods that took place hundreds of years ago. A battle that the humans, who according to Xelahór didn’t even have guns at their disposal, somehow managed to win.

4:59.

If he and Sarah both want to survive, they will need to beat the Sky Gods a 2nd time. But how did the humans do it? How could humans with spears and bows and swords and knives defeat an army of Makers? How?

5:00.

How?

The air changes. The hair on Jago’s neck stands up. He whips his head to the door. The crack of light from the hall is unbroken. He stares at it for several seconds, and then it goes out.

He grabs his pistol from the side table. Pokes Sarah with a bony elbow. Her eyes pop open as Jago clasps a hand over her mouth. His eyes say, Someone’s coming.

Sarah slides to the floor. She grabs her pistol and quietly charges a round. She rolls under the bed. Jago slips to the floor and rolls under too.

“Player?” Sarah whispers.

“Don’t know.”

Then Jago remembers. He points his chin to the center of the room. Earth Key is still on the coffee table!

“Shit,” Sarah says.

Before Jago can stop her, Sarah slides out and gets to her knees, but then she freezes. Jago peers past her legs. There, just outside the windows, are two black tactical ropes, dancing back and forth.

“La joda!” Jago whispers.

And then the door bursts open. Four men in staggered single file push into the adjacent living room. All black, helmets, night vision, toting futuristic-looking FN F2000 assault rifles. At the same moment there’s a thud from outside, and the windows crack in every direction. Two men immediately rappel down the ropes and kick the glass. It shatters inward, shards raining onto the floor. The men swing in and land right in front of Sarah. She’s in a deep crouch, her gun leveled on the face of the lead soldier. She hesitates to shoot, and she hates herself for it.

But her senses are sharp, and she notices that the rifles have a strange attachment where the grenade launcher would normally be.

“Don’t move,” the lead soldier says with a British accent. “Except to lower your gun.”

“Where’s the other one?” asks the lead who came through the door.

One of the men behind him says, “Going thermal. There—”

Pop-pop!

Jago fires and rolls to his right, away from Sarah. Both shots hit the legs of the man who switched his goggles. This man’s shins are armored, but Jago guessed as much, and the bullets tear through the flesh and bone just above his feet. He falls to the floor, crying out. None of the other men move to help. Instead they begin firing.

But not bullets.

Sarah springs straight up from her crouch, pulls her knees to her chest, her head nearly touching the ceiling. Two darts sail beneath her. Thup-thup. They hit the wall.

Thup-thup-thup-thup-thup. Jago’s on his feet too. He yanks a metal lamp from the bedside table and dances forward, twirling and ducking and spinning. Four darts zip through his shirt, a 5th grazes his hair, but none hit flesh. A 6th clangs off the metal of the lamp.

“Net!” says the lead soldier that came through the window. The man behind him fires a weapon that looks like a small RPG.

A dark blob expands through the air, heading for Sarah. She fires twice, hitting two of the metal balls that give the net its weight and propel it forward, but it’s no use. The net is coming for her.

Jago underhands the lamp toward Sarah. The net hits the lamp and the mesh wraps around it like a closing fist. Sarah drops to the floor, deflecting the snarled lamp to the side. Both Players then surge forward, firing simultaneously, twisting their bodies as they move, making themselves harder to hit with the darts.

Impossible to hit.

Jago fires across the room at Sarah’s assailants, using the angle to blast the night-vision goggles off both their faces without actually killing them. Sarah fires across the room at the men facing Jago. She hits two of the dart-gun attachments mounted to the rifles, hits one of the men square in the middle of his bulletproof vest, and with her 5th shot shoots the TV on the far side of the room. It explodes in a shower of sparks, blue and orange and green. The men stand their ground. “Go lethal!” one shouts.

Jago drops to his knees as the first soldier live-fires. Half a dozen 5.56 × 45 millimeter rounds scream over Jago’s head as he brings the top of his pistol hard into the man’s groin. Jago fires twice at the men just behind the lead soldier, hitting one on the hand and the other on the shoulder. Jago then reaches up and pulls a grenade off the man’s vest. Just by the shape and weight he can tell that it’s a flashbang.

At the same time, Sarah moves toward her two men. One lets off a volley, which she evades by leaping out the broken window.

She grabs a rope and slides down the outside of the building six feet. She pops the pistol into her waistband with her other hand. While she’s sliding, she loops the free end of the rope over her foot. She reaches out and grabs the other rope and loops it around her other foot. Then she lets go with her hands and swings backward. She tucks her chin to her chest and pushes all the air out of her lungs as her back slams into the side of the building. She can feel the pistol come free. She is upside down, like a high-wire circus performer, the ropes and her flexed feet keeping her from falling headfirst down three stories. She hears her gun clatter to the ground in the courtyard below as she reaches behind her ankles and grabs each rope and pulls herself up so that her feet are only inches below the edge of the window.

Jago sees Sarah launch out the window, doesn’t worry about the lightning-quick Cahokian, closes his eyes, throws the flashbang against the far wall.

The room lights up, and a loud noise echoes over everything and out into the London night, bouncing off buildings and into the street and sky. Jago stands and pistol-whips the back of the lead officer’s neck. He goes down in a heap. Jago sees that the man he shot, still lying on the floor, is taking aim with his rifle. Jago pirouettes around the next stunned soldier, grabbing him by the shoulders, just as the prone soldier fires. Two quick bursts. But every slug sails into the Kevlar vest of the man between them. Jago jumps sideways, throwing the man forward onto the metal coffee table. He’s already unconscious from the impact of the slugs.

Earth Key rolls across the table and stops, teetering on the edge, as if it doesn’t want to fall.

Jago’s about to spin and help Sarah when a knife flashes out of the cloud of smoke. It slices Jago near his right hand, the one with the gun, and cuts deep across the wrist. The gun falls to the floor, bouncing off Jago’s foot. The knife slices upward, nearly catching Jago. He folds back to avoid it and bends so far that he has to plant his hands behind him to keep from tumbling over. One lands on the cold surface of the coffee table, the other on the muscly leg of the soldier who took a dozen point-blank slugs to the back. Jago feels a tactical knife strapped to this thigh. He draws it and wheels and gets his feet back under him. The soldier with the knife steps out of the smoke, ready to fight.

Jago sets his feet and covers his throat with his free hand. The man lunges from the smoke. Jago sidesteps, and the blade catches him fast along the left forearm, slicing his shirt open but not his skin.

The angle of attack allows Jago to push the man farther to the side. He drops his blade, steps forward, plants his left hand on the man’s arm just above his elbow, and grabs his wrist with his other hand. He pushes hard into the arm and yanks the wrist in the other direction, and the man’s arm snaps clean at the elbow. The man screams, and Jago feels the tendons release the knife. It falls, the heavy handle causing it to flip over. Jago kicks up his heel and hits the knife on the butt. It reverses course, sailing upward. Jago releases the man’s wrist and snatches the blade out of the air.

Just as he catches it, the man head-butts Jago across the forehead, which hurts, especially since he’s still wearing a helmet.

If pain mattered to Jago, this would have been a good move.

But pain doesn’t matter to Jago.

The Olmec cups his left hand over the back of the soldier’s neck and brings the blade up fast into his throat. Warm blood shoots over Jago’s hand. He steps away as the man gets busy dying.

While Jago fights, the two tasked with capturing Sarah recover from the flashbang. They look at each other and then out the window. They ready their rifles and step to the edge. The guns swing into the air, the men clear left and right and don’t see her. Then one clears up while the other clears down.

Sarah waits. Still hanging upside down, she crunches up and grabs the unsuspecting man by the cuff of his shirt. She pulls hard and falls back, and the man comes with her, arcing out of the window. He falls to the ground, yelling the whole way until there’s a sickening sound and silence. Sarah looks up, knowing the other soldier is still there. Their eyes meet. He pulls the trigger and fires wild.

Thk-thk-thk-thk-thk! A volley rings out, but because Sarah is still swinging, he misses, the bullets making high-pitched firecracker noises on the concrete and metal in the courtyard below. He aims again, and has her sighted this time. Sarah keeps her eyes open. Christopher had his eyes open. She will too.

But then the man slowly pitches forward and falls out of the building, a knife planted to the hilt in the back of his neck.

“You all right?” Jago calls from inside the room, his body still frozen in the throwing position.

“Yes!”

“There’s one more.”

Jago spins to the wounded man on the floor. The man says, “Rooster call! Repeat, rooster call!”

Jago drops instinctively as something zips into the room from outside and, unfortunately for the soldier, hits him dead in the face. His head explodes.

“Sniper!” Sarah yells from outside.

“Coming!” Jago shouts.

Sarah’s a sitting duck. She points her feet and drops, the rope running over her ankles and under her heels. Just before hitting the ground, she flexes her feet and extends her hands over her head. She slows. Her hands meet the ground. She kicks the ropes free of her ankles and folds out of a perfect handstand.

She’s safe from the sniper. In the room above, Jago sets off two more flashbangs. They’re loud, and he can’t hear a thing as he vaults forward, sliding over the coffee table, grabbing Earth Key. Three rounds explode in the floor just behind him. He scurries forward, only a few meters to go. The coffee table takes the next three sniper rounds. A meter. A round sings by, only centimeters from his head.

Screw this.

Jago stands, yells “Catch!” and throws Earth Key out the window. He dives out after it and snatches one of the ropes with both hands. Sniper rounds, coming from the north-northeast, ping off the building. His hands burn. His hands bleed. He twists, gets his feet on the exterior wall, comes to a stop. The sniper lost his angle and isn’t firing anymore. Jago loops the rope under his butt and rappels the last six meters to the ground.

“Catch yourself,” Sarah snips. Jago spins just in time to grab an F2000 that Sarah throws at him. It claps into Jago’s bleeding hands. He doesn’t care about the pain. He likes it.

He’s Playing.

Sarah bends to pick up the other rifle and the pistol that fell from her waistband. Jago pulls the knife out of the man’s neck. Sarah takes two flashbangs from one of the men. Jago pulls a spray canister off the hip of the same man, along with a satchel not much bigger than a baseball.

“What’s that?” Sarah asks, squinting at the canister.

“Aerated C4,” he says almost giddily.

“Whoa. Never messed with that. You?”

“Naturally.”

“That bag the blasting caps?”

He looks. “Sí.”

“Great. Now let’s get out of here.”

Jago nods. “You got Earth Key?”

Sarah pats a small lump in a zippered pocket. “Good throw.”

Without another word they take off at a dead sprint.

A few seconds later Jago points, and Sarah sees it. An exposed section of Tube tracks for London’s District and Circle lines. They make it in 15.8 seconds from the side of the hotel, and 7.3 seconds after that they are in the dark secluded safety of the tunnels. As they scramble into the shadows, the image of Christopher infiltrates Sarah’s mind, his head exploding, followed by his body. She tries to beat the image back, and she does. Moving, fighting, Playing are all at least good for one thing: forgetting.

iii

Alice doesn’t like beds as much as she does hammocks, especially on ships, so she’s slung her hammock across her small cabin. She lolls around, letting the motion of the sea swing her back and forth.

She tosses a knife end over end and catches it. Tosses and catches. Tosses and catches. One slipup and it could land in her eye, skewer her brain.

Alice doesn’t slip up.

She’s not thinking of much. Just the knife and of slaughtering Baitsakhan when she finds him.

And of the fear on Little Alice’s face. She has seen it in her dreams so many times that it’s burned into her consciousness.

Little Alice.

Screaming.

What is it about this girl she’s never met? Why does Alice care about her? Dream about her?

Shari’s a good nut, that’s why. I am too. The rest are bastards, so fuck ’em.

Her satellite phone rings. She picks it up, presses talk.

“Oi, that Tim? Yeah, yeah. Right. Good! And you spoke to Cousin Willey in KL, yeah? Great. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Naw, none of that. Just my blades. No, Tim, I mean it! I don’t need any guns, I’m telling ya. You know me. Purist and all. Oh, all right, fine. You make a good point. Every one of these Player bastards is probably armed to the teeth, true and true. Just keep ’em small, and only hollow tips. Yeah. Yeah. Listen, any news on the rock? Anyone figure out where it’s gonna hit? ’Cause when it does, your Alice doesn’t want to be nowhere near. You neither? ’Magine that.”

She flicks the knife into the air above her head. It turns nine times. She catches it between her index finger and her thumb. Tosses again.

“Any luck with Shari? Oh, really? When were you gonna tell me, ya wanker? I oughta come back there and carve your freckle out, Tim. Well, what is it, then?”

She catches the knife by the handle and leans so far out of the hammock that she thinks she’s going to flip out, but she doesn’t. She sticks a leg out the other side and is perfectly balanced. She scratches a number on the wall. 91-8166449301.

“Thanks, Tim. Don’t die until you get to see it all go down. Gonna be a sight. Yeah, later, mate.”

She presses talk again, settles into her hammock, calls Shari’s number.

Rings 12 times, no one answers.

She calls again.

Rings 12 times, no one answers.

She calls again.

Rings 12 times, no one answers.

She calls again and again and again and again, and she will keep calling until someone does answer.

Because she has something very important to tell the Harappan.

Something very important indeed.

They are all here.

Shari and Jamal, Paru and Ana, Char and Chalgundi, Sera and Pim, Pravheet and Una, Samuel and Yali, Peetee and Julu, Varj and Huma, Himat and Hail, Chipper and Ghala, Boort and Helena, Jovinderpihainu, Ghar, Viralla, Gup, Brundini, Chem, and even Quali, toting a three-week-old Jessica, who is wrapped in soft linen cloths of alizarin and turquoise.

The other children are here too, more than 50, too many to name, from two to 17, including Little Alice. They’re playing and caring for one another in the adjoining room and in the herb-and-rock garden beyond, leaving the grown-ups alone, as they have been instructed. Seventeen servants are there, all of whom double as guards, and there are 23 more who are only guards, armed discreetly, stationed all around the hall.

They have been meeting, eating, and drinking juice and chai and coffee and lassis—never alcohol for the Harappan—for over three hours. The smells of curry and coriander, lentils and bread, turmeric and cream and hot oil, lemon and garlic and onions, fill the air, along with the rich and heady odor of bodies and sweat and cinnamon and rosewater dabbed behind ears and along necklines.

All of them talking at once.

For three hours they were polite and respectful, catching up with one another, kindnesses exchanged, the familiarity of close relations.

But 16 minutes ago the arguing started.

“The Harappan cannot sit on the sidelines,” Peetee says. He is 44 and the tallest of their clan, a former trainer in cryptography. He has dark, deep-set eyes that tell of sadness, and henna-dyed hair that speaks to his vanity.

Gup, a 53-year-old ex-Player and bachelor who lives in Colombo and who fought against the Tamils just for the diversionary nature of violence, nods with him. “Especially now that Endgame is under way. What is the point of our Player retreating like this? We are teetering on the precipice of, of, of—well, if not our destruction then certainly a sea change for humanity. The Event will see to that.”

“The Player has her reasons,” says Julu, one of Shari’s aunts. She speaks without taking her eyes from her hands, which are habitually fingering a strand of crimson prayer beads.

“Reasons?” several of them blurt at once. “Reasons?”

“What reason could there possibly be?” a booming female voice asks from the far end of the table. “I demand to know. It looks to me as if she fled at the drawing of first blood.” The voice belongs to Helena, 66, a former Player, the 2nd-most esteemed of the last 208 years. She is squat and round and strong and still swift. “A finger? I would have given an eye and a lung and a leg before I came hopping home. I would have given an arm and my hearing and my tongue! No, I would have given all! I would not have come home for any reason but death!”

Boort, her husband of 46 years—they were married at the stroke of midnight on the day she lapsed—reaches out and pats her forearm. “Now, Helena.”

“Aand mat kha!” she exclaims, shucking off Boort’s hand so she can point at Shari. “That—that—that girl gave up! She gave up. She never even made a kill in all of her training! Takes some effort to wiggle out of that time-honored obligation. More effort than what she put into Playing. I had thirty kills before I lapsed. But her? No! She is too good for death. Imagine that! A Player of Endgame. A Player of Endgame who also happens to be a mother. Can you believe it? That is what we have pinned our hopes to. A spineless quitter.”

Now the room is quiet; Helena’s words are like a volley of gunshots, everyone taking cover, not yet ready to poke their heads back out. Shari, for her part, does not flinch at any of it. She sits straight-backed and listens. Her eyes have moved to each speaker, and so now she stares at Helena. Her stare is calm and confident. She loves Helena like family, in spite of her ire. Loves all of these people.

Helena bristles at Shari’s look, which she mistakes for insolence. “Do not glare at me like that, Player.”

Shari tilts her head to the side as if to apologize, but remains silent. Her eyes drift past Helena to the children’s room, where she picks out a flash of Little Alice’s bright-pink trousers among the wheeling limbs of children. Jamal squeezes her knee under the table, just as he would if they were alone in their yard, watching a sunset.

“Helena, you may be right, but it serves no purpose to compare Shari Chopra to you or any other Player.” This is Jovinderpihainu, a former Player and the elder of the Harappan line. He is 94, as sharp as he was when he was 44, even 24. He is small and shrunken in his orange robes, skin as wrinkled and creased as the fabric. “She chooses a different path. She always has. We mustn’t question it.”

“But I am questioning it, Jov!” Helena persists. This is what everyone calls him, except the children, who call him Happy. They love his smiles, practically toothless, his last shocks of silver hair always sticking out every which way. He doesn’t smile much anymore, not since Endgame began. The children wonder why.

Jov raises a hand, a familiar and crystal-clear indication that he has heard enough. “I will repeat, but not again: this is not about you, Helena.” Helena crosses her arms. Boort whispers some soothing words into her ear, but she gives every appearance of not listening to him.

“Perhaps we should ask Shari’s father, hm?” Jov says. “Paru? What have you to say? Your daughter has taken a strange route in the game. Have you any insight?”

Paru clears his throat. “It is true that my daughter is not a natural killer. I am not sure that, had I been chosen in the past, I would have been much different. But while Shari may not be the bloodthirstiest among us”—he is interrupted by scattered snickers—“I can say one thing with confidence. Shari is the most compassionate soul of everyone in this room, yourself included, Jov. With respect.”

Jov nods slowly.

Paru takes a deep breath, trying to meet every set of eyes upon him. “Compassion may not seem like much of a weapon for Endgame. It is not hard like a fist or sharp like a sword or fast like a bullet. It does not travel in straight lines delivering death. It is not final, but it can be fierce. This I know. If Shari can survive and somehow win, then we will be better for it. The new world of men will need compassion just as much as it will need resourcefulness and cunning. Maybe more, if this blessed Earth will be as broken as we believe it will be. Ask yourself, my family—if the Harappan are to inherit the aftermath, would you prefer our champion to be a ruthless killer, or one who has mastered her fear and found her heart? One who can teach her disciples the ways of compassion in lieu of the ways of the fist?”

“Thank you, Paru,” Jov says. “You speak wisely. I wonder, though—”

“But how”—a soft but clear voice interrupts—“will she win if she is here, and not out there pursuing Sky Key?”

This is Pravheet, a youthful 59, perhaps the most respected member of the Harappan line, even more than Jov. He was the Player during a false start of Endgame, one of only three false starts in history. The infamous Chasm-game perpetrated by the Zero line in 1972. The one that he alone exposed, but not before felling four Players of other lines. It was Pravheet who single-handedly obliterated the Zero line—that delusional band of outsiders—in the aftermath of the Chasm-game. Most importantly, Pravheet is the one who, after lapsing, swore never to kill again. He became an ascetic for 23 years before taking Una as his wife and making a family of his own. During his seclusion he studied the ways of the ancient seers, deciphering the secret texts of the Harappan and the Buddha that their line has protected for millennia.

“Pravheet is right to ask,” Jov says. “I think it is time we hear from the Player herself.” And now, all their eyes turn to Shari Chopra. Jamal takes her hand and straightens next to her, as if he’s readying for an onslaught.

“Elders,” Shari says, her voice serene. “We needn’t look for Sky Key.”

And sure enough the voices come fast and furious. Shari can make out only snatches of their confusion, their anger, their exasperation.

“But this is Endgame” … “What is this blasphemy” … “not look for Sky Key?” … “lose” … “We’ll lose” … “She dooms us all” … “All is lost and the dark is coming” … “What does she mean” … “Surely she’s loony” … “She is giving up” … “Maybe she knows” … “no no no” … “How can this child be a Player?”…

“ENOUGH!” Jov shouts. Even the cavorting children in the adjoining room stop playing. He holds out his hand, palm up, in Shari’s direction. “Please, my Player. Explain.”

“We needn’t look for Sky Key because we already have it.”

These words have the opposite effect on the assembly. Instead of vociferous objection, there is disbelieving silence.

Finally, Chipper says, “Already have it?”

Shari lowers her eyes. “Yes, Uncle.”

“Where? When did you go and get it? You can’t have gotten it before Earth Key,” Helena says, her voice accusatory.

“In a manner of speaking, Auntie, I did.”

“What are you saying, Player? Please, speak plainly.” It is Pravheet again.

“Sky Key is my Little Alice.”

All the adults go deathly quiet, save for Una and Ghala, who both gasp. Paru’s voice is quavering as he asks, “B-but how can y-you be sure?”

“It was my clue from the kepler. And it is what Little Alice has told me too, in her own way. She’s been having dreams. I’ve been having them as well.”

“But why would the Makers do this?” Chipper asks. “It is immoral to involve a child in this way.”

“The Makers are immoral, Uncle,” Shari says emphatically. “Endgame is immoral. Or rather … amoral.”

More gasps.

Over half the people in this hall truly believe that the keplers exist on a plane higher than the gods. The gods are Their children, after all, and humans are at another remove, the children of the gods. The keplers are the gods of the gods and, for many here, they are beyond reproach.

“I will not listen to this heresy!” Gup blurts. He stands quickly from his chair and stalks out of the room. Short-tempered and slow-witted Gup. No one follows him.

“I do not wish to cause dissension, elders, but I alone have met a kepler. After gaining some distance from it, and considering the clue it gave me, I have come to the conclusion that the one I met was … detached. At best. It came to announce the commencement of Endgame, and the coming of the Great Extinction, and all it really did was talk as if it were reciting some kind of history already passed. Don’t get me wrong—it was physically wondrous, unlike anything I have ever seen, and it had abilities that go far beyond anything we have learned. Yet for all this power, its message was thus: ‘Nearly every human and animal will die. You twelve will fight to figure out who doesn’t. Good luck.’ Like a child plucking wings off a butterfly. There is no nobility in that.”

Shari pauses. She expects another rush of questions. This time, the other Harappan stay silent. Shari continues.

“As for the other Players, they fall into two camps—those who should win, and those who shouldn’t. At least half were twisted monsters, poisoned by their vanity, by the knowledge that they are among the deadliest people on Earth. The others were different, more self-aware, perhaps capable of feelings beyond bloodlust. I would say that fewer than half deserve to win. In our brief meeting, only two distinguished themselves—and shamefully, I was not one. The first was the Aksumite, a dark-skinned and regal boy with the bluest of eyes, who begged us to pool our knowledge and work together in an effort to perhaps spare Earth from undue suffering. The other was the Koori, a wild woman of Australia, who saved my life in Chengdu. But mostly the Players were … just people. People driven by a purpose they don’t—we don’t—wholly understand.”

Another pause. Shari watches the children in the next room. Some of the older ones have stopped playing and instead stand in the doorway, listening.

She continues. “Helena—you said that I am not a natural killer, and I concede that I am not. But I have killed, and I will kill again if Endgame requires it. But I will not take pleasure in it. Do you understand?” Helena makes an audible huff. Shari ignores this. “I will not kill a person who is a true human being, do you see? The boy I killed was a monster. I broke a chair to pieces and drove a wooden stake through his heart.”

Shari stands and looks over the faces in the room, meeting the gaze of each of her elders with a sad smile on her lips. She can see that many do understand. Jov and Paru and Ana and Pravheet and Una and Chem especially. She finishes by turning to Jamal. He squeezes her hand tightly. As she speaks, she doesn’t take her eyes from Jamal. “I do not tell you of this murder of mine to boast,” she says quietly, “but to demonstrate that I will stand for my people. I have stood for my people, and chief among all of you, I will stand for Little Alice. She is Sky Key. I know it, and it is only a matter of time before the others do too. They will come for her. We, all of us, every initiated member of our line, must protect her.”

“You mean you must protect her,” Helena says, a desperate bitterness creeping into her voice.

Shari looks lovingly at Helena. “No, Auntie. I mean we. I mean you especially. With respect to all of you, please listen. I have thought long and hard on this. The kepler said explicitly that there are no rules in Endgame. I am the Player, and the Event is coming in fewer than ninety days—perhaps even sooner if the kepler wills it. We must prepare. If the keplers have the, the, the”—she searches for the words—“the immorality, the cynicism, to make a child, one of our own children, a piece of the Great Game, then I say we can do whatever we like. I propose that we go to the Valley of Eternal Life and take Sky Key with us. We take our people there. That ancient fortress is one of the most defensible keeps in the entire world. Let the others Play the way they want to—by hunting and killing and saying to themselves, ‘I am the best, I am the best, I am the best.’ We will wait. We will wait for them to bring Earth Key to us, and they will break hard on our walls, and we will take Earth Key. I will take it, and bring it together with my Sky Key for the last leg of the game. But I need you, and want you. We are the Harappan, and we are going to protect our own. We are going to save our line. We.”

She sits down. Everyone is still. The only sounds come from the very small children still playing in the next room. Shari watches as Little Alice pushes through the legs and arms of her cousins and says, “Did you say my name, Mama?”

Shari’s eyes well with tears. “Yes, meri jaan. Come sit with us.”

Little Alice, precocious and far more confident in her movements and speaking than an average two-year-old, prances across the hall to her mother and father. She is oblivious to all the eyes upon her. As she climbs onto Jamal’s lap, Jov says, “I will consider your words before deciding on a course of action, Shari. But I would like to talk more with you, along with Helena, Paru, Pravheet, and Jamal. I want some more assurance that what you say about Sky Key is true.”

Shari bows her head. “Yes, Jovinderpihainu.”

And as each individual in the room thinks about what Shari has just said, Shari’s maid steps into the hall, practically folded in half out of deference, and says with her voice shaking, “Madam Chopra, please forgive me but I have an extremely urgent message.”

Shari holds out her hand. “Come, Sara. Stand and don’t be afraid. What is it?”

Sara straightens and shuffles forward, the balls of her feet scuffing the floor, and hands Shari a piece of white paper.

Shari takes it and reads.

“It is a message from the Koori,” Shari says. “She found me. She found us.”

Shari pauses.

“What does it say?” Paru asks.

Shari shows it to Jamal, who stands and carries Little Alice in his arms back to the playroom, whispering silly things in her ear as they go, Little Alice giggling and nuzzling her father’s neck. The wall of teenagers parts for them, and they disappear into the next room. The teenagers come back together and stare at Shari.

When her husband and daughter are out of earshot, she says, “The note reads, ‘Stay sharp. Your Little Alice is in danger. Grave danger. The others will come for her. I don’t know why, but I have seen it. The Old People have shown me in my dreams. I will try to stop them. The keplers have given me a way to do this. Keep her safe. Keep yourself safe, until the end. May we be the last standing, and fight it out then. Two of the good ones. Yours, Big A.’”

Jov claps, and it is like a giant clapping away a covering of clouds.

No more confirmation is needed.

The 893rd meeting of the Harappan line is over.

They must move.

They must Play.

They are going to fight.

Together.

An’s interrogator—still slumped across An’s chest—is shut up and BLINK shut up BLINK shut up and quiet and dead. An needs to get out of shiverblinkblinkblink out of his restraints and blinkblink and move.

He closes his eyes blink closes his eyes and sees her. Remembers the smell of her shiver her hair and the taste of her breath, BLINK full and aromatic, like some kind of ceremonial blinkblinkblink some kind of ceremonial tea.

CHIYOKOCHIYOKOCHIYOKOCHIYOKOTAKEDA

CHIYOKOTAKEDA

CHIYOKO TAKEDA CHIYOKO TAKEDA CHIYOKO TAKEDA CHIYOKO TAKEDA CHIYOKO TAKEDA CHIYOKO TAKEDA

The tics subside just enough to shivershiver just enough to …

An wedges his left hand between his hip and blinkblink and the edge of the metal gurney. He twists so that the base of his thumb is pressed against the cold metal. Then An pushes all of his weight down, onto his thumb, until he hears blinkCHIYOKOblink until he hears the pop. His thumb dislocates, flops loose and rubbery against his palm. It is blink excruciating, but An doesn’t care. He pulls, squeezes his hand through the restraint and pushes his shoulder into Charlie. The interrogator slides to the floor with a thump. An unbuckles the strap on his right. When his other hand is free, he grips his dislocated thumb and shoves it back into place. It is sore, swollen, and bruised.

But it works.

A loud alarm wails outside the door. He works the restraint off his forehead and sits up. Pain surges through his head, front to back, like a sponge soaking up water. It throbs and fills his ears and pushes at his eyeballs.

The gunshot wound. Charlie said he was concussed.

An must ignore it.

An takes stock of himself. He is wearing a V-neck T-shirt and drawstring scrubs, scratchy fabric, dressed like a prisoner or a mental patient. He unfastens his blinkCHIYOKOTAKEDAblink unfastens the restraints from his ankles with both hands, climbs off the gurney, lands next to Charlie, kneels. He pats down blink the interrogator for anything useful. He finds a rolled-up sleeve that feels like it contains blinkblink contains syringes. This could be more of the wonder drug, the one that cleared his mind. It made An tell the truth too. So much truth. He hopes that the remnants of the drug still in his system keep his tics to a minimum.

So he can blinkblink so he can escape.

He rips off Charlie’s suitcoat and shrugs it on. He pats the man down a final time, finds a gun holstered under Charlie’s armpit. Glock 17. Stupid cocky military blink military types. Bringing a gun into a room with a blinkblinkSHIVER a Player of Endgame. Might as well shoot himself.

An unholsters it. Releases the safety. Closes his eyes tight. Fights back the pain blink and the pain SHIVER and the pain blink and the image of …

CHIYOKOCHIYOKOCHIYOKOTAKEDA

Flat and dead Chiyoko Takeda.

Her name is his now.

In him.

His.

An hears a creak. SHIVER. Not the ship shifting on the waves. Blink. He looks up.

The wheel on the steel door is turning.

“Chiyoko,” he says.

He breaths in and out, in and out.

“Chiyoko.”

The storm inside blinkblink calms some more.

Time to go.

An pushes up the sleeves of Charlie’s coat and gets ready. The wheel on the door stops turning and swings inward. Two men slide into the doorway, rifles ready.

Bang, bang. An fires the Glock from his hip, shoots both soldiers in the face, between the eyes. They fall to the floor, one on top of the other.

An moves. SHIVERblinkSHIVER. Moves quickly.

The alarm is louder with the door open. It echoes off the metal walls, down the corridors, in his ears, makes the pain worse, but whatever. An can deal with pain, perhaps better than any of the Players.

He steps toward the two men. SHIVERBLINK. He crouches, searches them. The rifles are wedged under their torsos. Voices come from the corridor. Men, angry, scared, excited. At least 10 meters off. Approaching cautiously. He feels the drone of the engines through his bare feet. Guesses which way is aft.

Left.

That’s where he’ll go. Get to the back of the ship.

The voices are closer.

CHIYOKOTAKEDA. He unclips two M67 grenades from one of the dead men. An desperately pats him down for more of these beautiful little bombs, but there aren’t SHIVER there aren’t any. An stuffs the Glock in the front of his pants and stands, a spherical grenade in each hand. He pulls the wire pin from each with his teeth. He positions himself on the uneven flesh of the men and waits.

CHIYOKOCHIYOKO.

You play for death, she said to him. I play for life.

SHIVERblinkblinkSHIVER

Why? An wonders desperately. Why did she have to be taken from me?

BLINKBLINKBLINKBLINKBLINK

He bites his lower lip so hard it bleeds.

“Chiyoko …” he says quietly.

The voices are closer. He can make out phrases. “Armed and dangerous.” “Fire when ready.” “Shoot to kill.”

An smiles. He hears the rubber soles of their boots squeaking in the corridor.

I play for death.

He lets the spoon pop on the first grenade. An knows exactly how BLINK how much time he has. Four seconds. Waits 1.2 before slinging it out the door.

An whips behind the wall, plugs his ears, the remaining grenade pressed up against his cheek, clenches his jaw, ignores the pain in his head.

He doesn’t close his eyes.

SHIVERSHIVER.

The 400-gram, 6-centimeter metal sphere arcs soundlessly through the air. Four men move into position as it comes down. They don’t even see it. As soon as it clanks to the floor, it explodes at their feet.

Pressure waves roll through the ship. The sound is deafening. An pulls his fingers from his ears. Transfers the other grenade to his left hand, draws the blinkSHIVERSHIVERblink draws the Glock. He hears new sounds.

A man screaming. Blink. A steam pipe hissing. Blink. The alarm, still going, but fainter since the blast temporarily took some of his hearing.

Blink.

An waves through the doorway, half expecting his hand to get shot off. It doesn’t. He peeks shiverBLINKshiver. Checks right, where the explosion was, then left blinkblink then right again. Sees two dead men and another under them, his arm gone, moving slightly and moaning. A steam pipe over them hisses, a white jet filling the air.

CHIYOKO.

An moves into the corridor, holds his right arm out straight, and shoots.

The man stops moaning.

A bit of violence always clears the head.

A bit of death.

He moves aft. The metal floor is cold. The ship tilts. The air is warm and getting warmer from the steam. The corridor goes straight for five meters, has closed doors on either side, turns right at the end. More sounds up ahead. Footfalls, clicks and clanks of metal things. Men, but no voices this time. The men at the forward end of the hall were amateurs. These aren’t.

These are blinkblink these are special forces.

An takes eight quick steps, his bare feet completely silent, and stops where the corridor turns right. BlinkCHIYOKOshiverBLINK. An guesses that the men have assembled around the corner, at the far end. They’re waiting for him.

BLINKSHIVER.

They kill the lights.

It is completely black. They killed the lights because they have night vision and he doesn’t. But no matter.

BLINKSHIVERBLINKBLINK

An releases the spoon of his last grenade. Counts one second and throws it, overhand and hard, so that it caroms off the wall and hits the floor, bouncing crazily out of sight toward the special-forces men.

“GRENADE!” and two quick shots, the slugs ricocheting off the metal with high-pitched zings. An throws himself back the way he came and plugs his ears before the 2nd blast.

This blast is even more deafening than the first. An unplugs his ears before the echoes are done reverberating. He has maybe three more minutes before he loses the element of surprise. After those three minutes they will stop trying to contain him and instead simply contain the ship, making it impossible blink impossible blink impossible for him to escape, even if it’s just to jump over the side and take his chances in the water, which would not be ideal to say the least.

BLINKshivershiverCHIYOKOblink.

Time to go.

He raises the Glock and slips around the corner, running quickly and blind-firing into the darkness.

Twelve rounds, and by the sound of them, three find flesh and bone. No return fire. He runs 5.4 meters and slides like a midfielder trying to steal the ball from a charging forward. He reaches out and feels in the darkness—a head. Just a head.

BLINKBLINKSHIVER

The darkness in front of him is more open, the smoke from the grenade rising and rising. An guesses that he has just entered the ship’s hangar.

More moaning. But also a scrambling sound.

An lifts up the head he slid into and blink and blink and blink and gets his fingers around a pair of night-vision goggles. He yanks them free. As An pulls the goggles over his face, he realizes for the first time that his head is blinkSHIVERblink is bandaged. He tightens the straps and they squeeze blinkblinkblink they squeeze blinkblinkblink they squeeze the swollen skin and pull at the fresh stitches across his forehead and his hairline. He winces and stifles the urge to cry out. The goggles are in place, but they aren’t working.

“Who has eyes?” a faraway voice whispers, the sound echoing through the hangar.

He’s not alone.

“Almost online,” a 2nd voice answers, this one closer. “Come ON!”

This voice is only feet away. SHIVERblinkSHIVER An sees the soft green glow as the goggles come to life. Only three meters away.

“I see him!” the man blurts.

But he doesn’t shoot. He must have lost his rifle in the explosion. The ghostly light frames the edge of his face, his scruffy beard, gnashing teeth. It all surges toward An, who flops to the floor, aims his pistol, and fires.

The man falls against him. Dead. A knife stabs the floor just next to An’s ear.

BLINKBLINKshiverBLINKshiver.

Close one.

An pushes the man off shiver and feels the goggles blink again and finds the switch.

The room turns green.

It is indeed the hangar.

A shot screams from the far side of the room and misses An by a less than a meter. He spots a large blinkblink a large man shouldering a rifle. No goggles. He’s guessing. Firing toward the commotion. An raises the Glock, takes his time, and fires a single round. It passes through the man’s front hand and enters his skull directly over his right eye. He falls.

An pries a knife from the dead man’s hand, inspects it. Blinkblink. It has a 30-centimeter straight blade with a single edge and no serrations. Shiver. It’s more like a small sword than a military tactical knife. Probably this man’s prize possession, his weapon of choice. His signature.

Not anymore.

BLINKBLINKSHIVERSHIVERBLINK

An slaps himself, runs across the hangar, whispering, “Chiyoko Takeda Chiyoko Takeda Chiyoko Takeda.” He bobs and weaves just in case, but no shots come. He finds it blinkblink finds it odd. This is a large ship, probably a Type 45 destroyer, and even a skeleton crew would require over 100 seamen. By his count, he’s only killed 17. That means more will be coming.

Or maybe it means the rest of the ship doesn’t know about An. They don’t know what’s happening below deck. Maybe An’s a secret.

He scurries around an amphibious vehicle and between two pallets stacked with cargo blinkshivershiverblinkblink with cargo wrapped in plastic and nylon webbing. Three meters away is an open doorway, a set of stairs inside, going up, up, up.

A Type 45 destroyer has a blink has a blink has a helipad. Maybe a Merlin Mk1or a Lynx Mk8.

An has logged 278 simulated hours on the Merlin and 944 on the Lynx, plus 28 hours in a real one.

An makes for the door.

blinkblinkblinkblinkblink

He hits the narrow stairs and goes up.

One deck.

Up.

Two.

Up.

Three.

The air cools and he smells the blinkblinkblink the salty sweetness of the sea and best of all SHIVER best of all SHIVER best of all he hears the whomp-whomp-whomp of a chopper’s rotors coming to speed.

Thank you, special forces.

BLINKBLINK.

An is a few steps below the door that leads to the helipad. It’s open. The ship’s engines throttle up, as if the hunk of metal and electronics and weaponry is nervous. He feels the first breeze of the rotor wash from the helicopter and pulls Charlie’s coat closed around him. He sees the sharp, full moon, the sky clear and the stars bright and the void limitless above.

BlinkSHIVERblink.

Chiyoko would have liked this night, An thinks. Would have seen the beauty where I can’t.

An rips off the goggles, the straps tearing his bandages and popping a couple of stitches.

He has to get to the chopper.

He peers over the last BLINK last step. A Lynx Mk8, just as he hoped. He’s lined up perfectly with the cockpit—beyond it is the stern of the ship, and then the blackness of open water. He spies twinkling lights along the horizon. A city in the distance. He glances at the sky. Sees Cassiopeia a few degrees above the Earth. Wonders if the SHIVERBLINKSHIVER the keplers are watching him right now, wonders whether they are cheering.

BLINKSHIVERBLINK.

He wants to kill them all for what they did to Chiyoko.

Snuff it all out everywhere for infinity in every direction for all time.

All of it.

blinkSHIVERblinkSHIVERSHIVERBLINK.

An moves to the doorway. The chopper’s lights are off. The pilot is going to take off blink take off blink take off dark.

Now or never.

There’s a 20-millimeter machine gun in the Lynx’s bay that’s aimed right at the empty expanse of deck that An has to cross. He hopes the airmen in the chopper won’t break every protocol in the book and open fire while still on the deck.

An bolts, firing the Glock at the cockpit, but the rounds bounce away, zinging into the rotors.

At two meters he stops firing, holding three rounds in reserve. The chopper rises off the deck slowly. An reaches blinkSHIVERblink the side door just as it’s sliding shut. An fires. The copilot falls into the cargo area, his helmet tearing away from his exploded head. An breathes out, leaps up, scrambles in. SHIVER. The pilot spins in his seat, his Browning perched on his shoulder, but An fires his last two rounds and the pilot falls to the side.

BLINKBLINK.

The Lynx lurches to port as the dead pilot pulls at the stick.

An drops the pistol and vaults over a long metal box in the cargo area, landing in the copilot’s seat.

He gets a strange feeling as he passes the box.

A feeling of calm and peace.

He flicks an array of switches, disabling the pilot’s controls, and takes the copilot’s stick. Floodlights from the boat illuminate the bridge.

BLINKSHIVERBLINKSHIVER.

“Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” An screams in an attempt to banish the tics.

He can barely hear himself through the cacophony of the helicopter.

A dozen sailors, all carrying small arms, spread out under the floodlights and open fire.

BLINKSHIVERBLINK.

Tracers light up the night in multicolored arcs. An smiles. They’re too late.

He brings the chopper up 10 meters and sticks back over the stern, flying precisely north-northeast in reverse, putting almost 87 meters between him and the boat in 2.2 seconds. He flicks the weapons on, prays that the Sea Skua missiles are armed, and presses fire.

Blinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblink—

The missiles scream forward and the ship’s bridge explodes in orange and black and white and An pulls back hard and spins 180 degrees and jams the stick forward and throttles up and hits 170 knots in 4.6 seconds and the ship is burning and exploding behind him and he is free, he is free. Until they scramble the fighter jets to shoot him down he is free.

Shiverblink.

He flies fast northwest, only meters from the surface of the water to avoid radar, and makes for the flickering lights.

Shiverblink.

He is free.

Blink.

Free.

And I will also declare unto you what is written concerning the pride of PHARAOH. MOSES did as God commanded him, and turned his rod into a serpent; and PHARAOH commanded the magicians, the sorcerers, to do the same with their rods. And they made their rods into three serpents which, by means of magic, wriggled before MOSES and AARON, and before PHARAOH and the nobles of EGYPT. And the rod of MOSES swallowed up the rods of the magicians, for these deceivers had worked magic for the sight of the eyes of men. Now that which happeneth through the word of God overcometh every magic that can be wrought. And no one can find him to be evil, for it is the Holy Spirit Who guideth and directeth him that believeth with an upright heart without negligence.

Many Ethiopians and Eritreans and Somalis and Djiboutis and Sudanese believe that the Ark of the Covenant is kept in a cube-shaped concrete building in the Ethiopian city of Aksum, close to the Eritrean border. The building, which is behind a high iron fence and has a small Islamic-style cupola, is called the Chapel of the Tablet at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion. A single ward attends it. It is in plain view for all to see, and everyone knows what is inside.

Everyone is wrong.

Eben ibn Mohammed al-Julan doesn’t even know what’s in the chapel. It’s not that he lacks the authority to find out—it’s simply that he doesn’t care.

Because he knows where the ark truly rests.

All the initiated members of the line of Aksum know, and have known for millennia.

They know because the Makers decreed them to be the Keepers of the Ark.

They have been its guardians since the fateful year of 597 BCE, when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, razing the Temple of Solomon. It was in the dead of night on 30 Shebat. Nebuchadnezzar II, who was an incarnation of Ea the Corrupted, and his invading horde was less than two miles from the temple. As they advanced, Ebenezer Abinadab and three other Keepers covered the ark in blue linen, took hold of its acacia poles, and lifted. It weighed 358.13 pounds, just as it always had, ever since Moses and Aaron finished building it and the Maker who had spoken to Moses on Mount Sinai had placed his covenant inside.

Ebenezer and the Keepers walked out of the temple, put the ark in a covered cart drawn by a jet-black ox with gilt horns, and drove east across the desert and over the Sinai to Raithu, where they slaughtered the ox and salted his flesh for food and carried the ark onto a small wooden galley to be sailed south on the Red Sea. They took it back on land at Ghalib. These four men, heads down, backs strong, hands never touching any part of the ark save the poles (instant death was the punishment for such a transgression), moved overland on foot for many miles and many weeks. They only moved at night, and avoided all contact with people.

They avoided people out of kindness and respect for life.

For any human—man or woman, babe or elder—who happened to see this sacred caravan of the world’s most esteemed travelers was stricken immediately blind and had his or her mind poisoned with raving, blabbering, slithering madness. Ebenezer saw this phenomenon seven times over the course of their 136-day voyage, recording each instance in his journal, and each was more horrifying than the last.

Eventually, Ebenezer and his companions reached their destination in what is now northern Ethiopia. They put the ark in a thick stand of cedar trees, erected the tabernacle around it, making it safe from wandering eyes, and convened with the esteemed members of the line. The Aksumite Uncorrupted Brotherhood. All the living ex-Players plus the current Player as well, a 14-year-old boy named Haba Shiloh Galead.

The underground temples had already been constructed, if not yet converted to churches—the Makers had seen to their creation when the Aksumite line had been chosen for Endgame thousands of years before—and the ark was taken nine levels down, to the deepest and most secure chamber.

This room is the Kodesh Hakodashim.

Once the ark was in place, the entrance to the Kodesh Hakodashim was backfilled by Haba himself with stone and dirt and glimmering rocks, so that for over 2,600 years the only way to reach it has been through a crawl space just big enough for a man to drag himself through on his elbows.

Which is precisely what Eben ibn Mohammad al-Julan is doing right now. Crawling along the well-worn tunnel on his calloused elbows toward the ark.

Crawling there to do something no person has ever done in the history of history.

He thinks of Hilal as he moves. The Player is weaned from morphine and walking and talking, although the latter causes him much pain. Eben left him in his room, sitting in a chair, staring into a mirror. Hilal’s injuries have afflicted him with a twisted form of vanity. This is new to Hilal. In spite of his previous and unequivocal beauty, he was never vain. But now he cannot stop looking at his face, and is especially smitten with his red eye and its white pupil.

“The world looks different through it,” Hilal said just before Eben left him. The Player’s voice was raspy, as if his throat were full of ash.

Eben asked, “How so?”

“It looks … darker.”

“It is darker, my Player.”

“Yes. You are right.” At last, Hilal looked away from his reflection, turning that red eye on Eben. “When can I Play again, Master?”

Eben has given up on telling Hilal not to call him “Master” anymore.

Old habits die hard.

“Soon. You were right about the Event. It could have been prevented. Furthermore, the keplers intervened.”

“They are not supposed to,” Hilal replied bitterly.

“No.”

“What are we going to do?”

“You are going to keep Playing, but I want to see if we can gain an advantage first. Perhaps you can push back at the keplers, as well as do something that will help you deal with the others.”

“You’re going to open the ark …”

“Yes, Player. I’ll be back. Rest. You’re going to need your energy soon.”

“Yes, Master.”

And Eben left.

That was 27 minutes ago.

He is five meters from the end of the tunnel.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

Knock-knock.

The leaden hatch swings into the room, and Eben pushes forward, tumbling into the chamber.

There is no graceful way to enter the Kodesh Hakodashim.

Like the ark it houses, the Kodesh Hakodashim is of specific dimensions. It is 30 feet long, 10 feet high, and 10 feet wide. Every angle in the room—where wall meets floor, wall meets wall, and wall meets ceiling—is a precise 90 degrees. The earthen walls are covered in thick panels of lead, and the lead is leafed in random-length strips of silver and gold. The chamber is lit by a self-powered and undying light of Maker origin, shaped like an inverted umbrella, that hangs from the center of the ceiling. The light gives off an even and pinkish glow with an unwavering 814 lumens.

Two-thirds down the long wall is a curtain of blue and red. In the 10' × 10' x 10' area this curtain creates sits the Ark of the Covenant with the Makers.

The hatch was opened by one of two Nethinim. The one who didn’t open the hatch offers a hand to help Eben stand.

“No thank you, brother,” he says, working his way to his feet. “Same-El, Ithamar,” Eben says. The two men are in their early 30s. Ithamar is an ex-Player, Same-El a trainer in industrial chemistry and Surma-style stick fighting.

“Master al-Julan,” they say in unison.

Eben holds up a hand and does something he has never done before—he closes the hatch and turns the bolt that seals the room.

He turns to the Nethinim.

“It is time?” Same-El asks, his voice shaking.

“Yes, brother. You two have the honor.”

Ithamar’s eyes widen; Same-El’s shoulders shudder. Both look as if they are about to buckle from fear.

But Eben knows better.

Opening the ark is an esteemed honor for the Keepers. The highest honor.

Ithamar breaks all protocol and grabs Eben’s hand and tugs it like a child.

“Can it really be that we are so lucky?” Same-El asks.

“Yes, brother.”

“We will see what Uncle Moses last saw?” Ithamar asks. “Touch what he alone was allowed to touch?”

“If the ark allows, yes. But you know the risks, brothers.”

Yes, the risks.

The Aksumites know all the tales and more. How the ark, if opened, will smite even the most ardent of adherents mercilessly and without fail. How it will unleash hellfire upon the Earth, and pestilence, and untold death. How it will run rivers of blood and scorch the sky and poison the very air, since opening it is not the will of the Makers.

The power inside is God’s and God’s alone.

Not anymore.

God be damned, Eben thinks.

“We are ready, Master,” Same-El says.

“Good, my brother. When the Aksumite line survives the end of ends, you will be remembered among our greatest heroes. Both of you.” He looks the men in the eyes, embraces them, kisses them, smiles with them, and then helps them prepare.

The Nethinim untie and remove their bejeweled breastplates. Ithamar hangs his on a peg and Eben takes Same-El’s and pulls it over his torso, a rectangle of 12 wooden blocks attached to one another with iron metal hoops, each set with a colorful and smooth oval stone, all of them different hues.

The Breastplate of Aaron.

Same-El ties it tight for Eben.

It—plus his faith—will be his only protection.

Ithamar pours holy water from a pitcher into a wooden bowl and kneels. Same-El kneels next to him. They take turns washing their hands and arms and faces, their dark, wet skin reflecting the pinkish light in swirling patterns. Eben’s head is already spinning.

He envies these two men, even if they do end up being sacrificed.

No, because they will end up being sacrificed.

They remove their robes and hang them on the wall and stand, naked, anticipating what is to come.

Eben hugs and kisses each of them one last time. The two men face each other and slap their own thighs until they are red. When they are finished, they slap their stomachs and their chests. They grab each other by the shoulders and yell at each other the names of their fathers and their fathers’ fathers and their fathers’ fathers’ fathers. They invoke Moses and Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and ask for forgiveness.

Eben asks the same for both blessed men.

Finally, without looking at Eben, Same-El and Ithamar smile and turn toward the curtain. Holding hands, they go forward. Eben turns away and walks to the hatch and presses his knees into it and closes his eyes and covers his ears and waits.

It takes one minute and 16 seconds for the screaming to commence.

It is not joyful or enlightened. It is terrifying. These are two strong men, some of the strongest in the entire line, and they are crying like babes being torn by wild beasts from their mothers’ breasts.

Seventeen seconds later the air at Eben’s back becomes hot, and he can hear the curtain whipping and snapping like an untethered sail in a tempest.

The screams continue, they are desperate, tearing, shrill, final.

Then the light comes, so bright the lids of his squinting eyes turn as orange as the sun, and Eben is slammed into the wall by a heavy wind and he cannot move. His nose is smashed against the wall, which heats up like a stovetop, and he smells his own flesh cooking and hears his own heart beating faster than it’s ever beaten, like it’s going to sing out of his chest, and he too is going to die.

And still the screams, weaving the horror together like a searing thread.

Then darkness, and the air sucks back like a vacuum and the curtain’s metal rings clatter and clank and Eben, eyes still closed, tears freezing in air suddenly turned frigid, has to step back with one foot and then the other to steady himself. His robes pull toward the ark so hard that he thinks they will be torn from his body, or will spread out around him like fabric wings and fly him backward into the howling void.

A full three minutes and 49 seconds after it began, there is silence.

Stillness.

Eben peels his hands from his ears. They are clammy, his fingers stiff, as if he has been gripping something with all his might for hours upon hours. He tries to open his eyes, but they’re crusted shut. He digs his fingers at them, wiping away crystals of ice and gobs of yellow, congealed tears.

He blinks. He can see.

He snaps his fingers. He can hear.

He stamps his feet. He can feel.

The pinkish light of the room is unchanged. He looks at the shiny wall, only centimeters from his face, striped with gold and silver. It is unchanged. He can see his splotchy, imperfect reflection there, just as before.

He breathes.

Breathes and breathes.

Holds his breath and turns.

The room is utterly undisturbed. The lamp hangs from the ceiling on its slender rod. The low gilt table, with the bowl and the pitcher, is on his right. The robes hang on the pegs on the wall. The jeweled breastplate from antiquity that Ithamar wore hangs there too.

The curtain is as before—straight and bright and clean.

“Same-El? Ithamar?” Eben asks.

No answer.

He steps forward.

He reaches the curtain.

He drags his fingertips across it.

He closes his eyes and pushes his hand through the parting and walks in.

He opens his eyes.

And there it is. The Ark of the Covenant, golden, two and one half cubits long, one and one half cubits high, one and one half cubits deep, the mercy seat lifted free and leaning against the wall, the cherubim on top facing each other in timeless reproach.

The only sign that Same-El and Ithamar ever existed are two fist-sized piles of gray ash on the floor, precisely two meters apart.

Eben stands on his tiptoes and tries to see past the leading edge of the ark and into the bottom.

But he cannot see.

He edges closer.

And there. Inside, a ceramic urn coiled in copper wire. A stone tablet without any markings. A wrinkle of black silk pushed into one corner.

And in the middle of the ark two black cobras, looped over each other in a figure eight, sleek and vigorous, chasing and nibbling at each other’s tails.

Eben reaches down and touches the edge of the ark. He is not smitten, not blinded, not driven mad.

He pushes his knees against it and leans forward and grabs a snake in each hand. As soon as his flesh touches theirs, they harden and straighten and transform into wooden rods, each a meter long, and each tipped with a metal snake head on one end and a golden spike on the other.

The Rod of Aaron.

The Rod of Moses.

He slips one under his sash.

He holds the other.

Eben kneels and reaches for the tablet and turns it over with a thump.

It is blank on both sides.

Eben huffs and his heart feels hollow. This is the covenant with the Makers.

A blank stone tablet.

Curse them.

He doesn’t dare open the urn, which is without doubt the manna machine. The Aksumites will guard it—having a machine that potentially makes food might come in handy after the Event, so long as they can figure out how to work it—but they don’t need it yet.

All that’s left is the crumpled pile of black silk.

Eben pushes the silk aside with the cane, and there—there it is.

He leans over and picks it up. Turns it over in his hand. Runs his fingers over it.

He shakes his head in disbelief.

Knock-knock.

Someone is at the hatch.

Eben spins and crosses the Kodesh Hakodashim. He opens the latch and lets the person on the other side push it inward.

Hilal pokes his disfigured head into the chamber. “Well, Master? I couldn’t just sit there and wait.”

“You won’t believe it.”

“Is it open?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Same-El and Ithamar.”

“Did they survive?”

“No.”

“God take them.”

“Yes, my Player. God take them.”

“And what was in it?”

“These,” Eben says, indicating the snakelike rods. “They are living weapons. The rods of Aaron and Moses, the consuming snakes, the prime creators, the ouroboros. Our symbols of uncorruption, the hunters of Ea. Even if our line never finds the Corrupted One, the canes will serve you well in Endgame.”

“And what else? What of the covenant?”

“There is no covenant, Player. The tablet was blank.”

Hilal looks to the side. Through clenched teeth he asks, “Was there more, Master?”

“Yes, Player. And that is what you won’t believe.”

Eben holds it out and Hilal looks.

It is a slender sheath of black metal the size of a large smartphone, curved slightly and etched in one corner with a glyph.

Eben hands it to Hilal, and as soon as the Player of the 144th line touches it, it glows to life.

Hilal looks at Eben.

Eben looks at Hilal.

“To Endgame, my Player.”

“To Endgame, Master.”

Shiver.

He is free.

But exactly where he is free he does not know.

He inspects the instrument panel of the Lynx, locates the navigation system and the autopilot. Punches a few buttons on the touch screen and sees the English Channel. The lights to the north are Dover. He does not want to return to England, not ever, not ever blinkSHIVERblink ever blinkSHIVER ever blinkblinkSHIVERBLINKBLINKBLINK not ever.

An punches himself in the cheek to knock away the tics.

It works. “Chiyoko Takeda,” he whispers. “Chiyoko Takeda.”

Blood drips from his nose.

Shiver.

He blows out his cheeks. The adrenaline from the escape dissipates. The pain soaked into every cubic centimeter of his head revs like an engine.

He grabs the stick and arcs the Lynx low over the water, until his heading is 202?13' 35". He passes the still-burning destroyer three kilometers to the east, and prays that they don’t see him and that their guns are disabled, or that they’re too distracted by the burning ship to even bother with the guns.

And that’s when he notices a section of the controls that he isn’t familiar with, and realizes why the chopper was taking off dark, and why he is not at the moment being shot out of the air by a pair of F/A-18s.

It took off dark because it could.

The strange controls are a stealth array, and they are already active.

An can use this bird to disappear.

Blink. Shiver.

Why would stealth be active in the first place? If he had been on the Lynx as their prisoner, that would have made sense—he is a Player of Endgame, one of the deadliest people on the planet—but it was scrambling to take off before he’d even reached the flight deck.

So why take off dark?

Blink. Shiver. Blink.

And then he lurches forward, as if someone hit him in the back of the neck.

The metal box in the cargo hold.

The metal box the size of a coffin.

CHIYOKO TAKEDA.

An brings the chopper up 50 meters to keep a safe distance from the water and activates the autopilot, punching in a new heading of 140° 22' 07".

He spins out of the copilot’s seat and lands right in front of the box.

Shiver.

He takes a step forward and places his hands on it.

He doesn’t have to open it to know.

He falls forward on top of the casket, his ear and jaw cold on the metal, his arms draped over the sides.

“Chiyoko Takeda.”

The tics have stopped.

He stands, the internal world of the helicopter loud and pressing in on all sides, pain drilling the wound on his head, and he gets his fingers under the lid. It comes up more easily than he expects. He flips it away and peers inside. In the faint light he can just make out the wavy reflections of a rubber body bag. Next to the body bag is a small stuff sack.

An snatches a flashlight from a charging dock by the door and flicks it on.

The body bag looks as if it contains a broad-shouldered child.

An grabs the stuff sack first. Works his fingers into the cinched opening and pulls it open. A black analog watch, a leather sleeve containing assorted shuriken, a small knife, a ball of black silk, an eyeglasses case, some inch-long paper tubes that look like straws, a small plastic container. A thumb drive. A pen. A thin leather billfold.

Chiyoko’s things.

He closes the sack and sets it next to his feet.

The body bag.

He takes a breath and hooks the metal hoop of the zipper with his finger and slides it down 43 centimeters. The flashlight tumbles into the casket. It shines hard on the face of Chiyoko Takeda. One of her eyes is open and lifeless, dry, the pupil large and black. He touches it with his fingers and closes it. Her skin is pale and tinged blue. Purple capillaries crack over her right cheek in a fractal of jagged lines. Her lips are the color of the sea. They’re parted slightly. An sees the dark within, and the thin line of her front incisors. Her hair, black and straight and unchanged, has been combed and pinned away from her face. He puts his hands on her cheeks. Runs his hands over her neck and her collarbones and over the balls of her shoulders, covered in a pale green cotton hospital gown.

An whimpers.

He collapses into the box and his face lands on hers and the moonlight streams through the windows of the darkened chopper churning south-southwest to Normandy and he is blinking back tears and he can see the black filigrees of his wet eyelashes like a shroud of lace that is draped over him, over her, over them.

He works his arms under the rubber bag and squeezes. Hugs her.

“Chiyoko,” he says.

A beeping sound from the nav computer.

An kisses Chiyoko’s blue lips, her eyes, the little saddle where her eyebrows and nose meet. He smells her hair—it smells alive, unlike the rest of her—and he pirouettes into the copilot’s chair. He takes the stick and throttles back, looks out the port window past the pilot’s slumped body.

There, 500 meters away, is France. The beach and land rising above it is dark, hardly populated. Not far away, he knows, is the town of Saint-Lô. And in Saint-Lô is a Shang resupply cache. The world is littered with them. He just happens to be near one.

He is lucky.

He brings the Lynx to a hover and punches a new course into the autopilot but doesn’t activate it. He pulls on a life vest but will wait until he’s in the water to inflate it. He grabs a dry bag. Throws in the stuff sack of Chiyoko’s things, four MREs, the pilot’s Browning Hi-Power Mark III, extra ammo, a field kit, a GPS, a headlamp. Takes the pilot’s knife. Grabs another life vest and a coil of rope. Cuts a long section and ties one end to a loop on the dry bag. Ties the middle to the 2nd vest, which he inflates. Ties the remaining end to his waist.

He doesn’t seal the dry bag, not yet. He has to put some more things in it first.

He hits a red button with the side of his fist, and the starboard door slides open. Air, cool and fresh and salty, rushes in.

Before jumping into the water, he kneels over Chiyoko, grabs a fistful of her hair, and holds up the knife.

“I am sorry, my love. But I know you understand.”

The tics are gone.

He brings the knife down and cuts. He starts with her hair.

iv

They’re running. Sarah is in the lead and Jago has made it a point of pride to catch her. He pushes himself, pumping his legs as fast they’ll go, and he still can’t touch the Cahokian.

No one has followed them.

Sarah’s elbows swing and her shoulders sway as she clutches the rifle in her hands. The only light in the tunnel comes from the train signals, red and green at intervals, and the headlamp strapped to Sarah’s forehead. It’s on the weakest setting, only 22 lumens, a red filter over the white plastic.

The red halo of light bounces along the walls. Jago finds it strangely mesmerizing.

“SAS, you think?” Sarah yells over her shoulder, not even out of breath.

“Sí. Or MI6.”

“Or both.”

“Four at the door, two at the window, sniper support.” Jago counts them off. “How many you think in the van out front? Or at HQ?”

“Three or four in a mobile unit. Twenty or thirty at ops.”

“Probably a drone too.”

“Probably. Which means—”

“They saw us come in here.”

“Yep.” Sarah skids to a halt. Water pools around the soles of her shoes. The tunnel forks. “Which way?”

Jago stops next to her, their shoulders touching. He memorized these tunnels as part of their escape plan. Went over it with Sarah back in the hotel. Maybe she wasn’t listening. Maybe her mind was elsewhere, like it’s been these last days.

“We talked about this, remember?” Jago says.

“Sorry.”

“North goes to the High Street Kensington station, which is basically outdoors. South is a service bypass,” he reminds her.

“Then south.”

“Quizás. But these tunnels will be crawling with agents soon. It’s only been”—he checks his watch—“four minutes and three seconds since we came underground. We might be able to make the station, get on the next train, and disappear.”

“We’d have to split up.”

“Sí. We’d meet at the rendezvous. You remember the rendezvous?”

“Yes, Feo.”

They both know this is imperative. Renzo, who’s unaware of this little hiccup, will be at the airstrip in the afternoon to pick them up. This was their plan. But now that Sarah and Jago have been made, they need to get out of the UK ASAFP. Every extra second they spend in the tunnels will be an extra second that the authorities can use to catch them.

Jago points to the rightmost tunnel. “If we go to the service bypass, it’ll take us longer.”

“Why?”

Jago sighs. He’s disturbed by how much she’s forgotten, or how much she didn’t listen to in the first place. Players don’t forget or miss things, especially things like escape routes.

“Because,” he says, “we’d have to use the—”

A slight breeze cuts off Jago.

“Train,” Sarah says casually.

Without another word, Sarah takes off into the north fork. Decision made. The wind picks up at her back, the tunnel begins to glow. She sees one of the cutouts used by workers to avoid moving trains. She dashes to it and slides in. It’s big enough only for her, but directly opposite is another. Jago fits into it just as the cacophony of the approaching train fills their ears.

The vacuum riding the front car takes Sarah’s breath and pulls her hair around her neck. Her eyes are level with those of the seated passengers on the Tube. Sarah picks out a few in the blur of glass and metal and light that passes less than a foot from her face. A dark-skinned woman with a red scarf, a sleeping elderly man with a bald spot, a young woman still dressed in last night’s party clothes.

Regular unsuspecting people.

The train is gone. Sarah gathers her hair together and remakes her ponytail.

“Let’s go.”

As they approach the station, the light in the tunnel brightens. She switches off her headlamp. The station comes into view. The train that just passed them pulls away from the platform. From their low angle they see the heads of a few people making for the exits.

They go to the short set of stairs that leads to the platform, being careful to stay in the shadows. Sarah raises her hand, points out the cameras closest to them, one of them hidden behind a grate.

“They’re going to see us once we’re on the platform.”

“Sí. We wait here for the next one.”

Jago unscrews the small bolt securing the scope to his rifle. He belly-crawls up the steps, as close to the platform as possible without appearing on camera, and peers through the scope.

Just the usual early morning scene. A few people waiting, swiping at smartphones, reading tabloids and books, staring at nothing. A businessman appears in the middle of the platform. Brimmed hat and dark shoes, a rolled newspaper tucked under his arm. He looks disappointed. He’s just missed his train.

“Coast looks clear.” Jago lowers the scope.

“We’ll have to leave the rifles.”

“You still got that pistol, though, right?”

“Yep.”

Jago rescans the platform. A young mother holding the hand of a three-year-old. A blue-collar worker in a jumpsuit. The businessman, who’s now reading his paper.

Jago squints, focuses the eyepiece.

The businessman is wearing what looks to be a very nice suit—and black tactical boots.

“Mierda.”

“What is it?”

“Hand me your rifle.”

Sarah does it without asking. Jago shoulders it, aims, pulls the secondary trigger that fires the undermounted dart gun.

The projectile puffs out of the chamber with a low whoosh and pop. The man is too far away and doesn’t hear it. The overhead digital sign several feet past him announces that a new Edgware Road–bound train will arrive in one minute. The man steps back at the last split second, and the dart just misses his neck, clanking into an advertising panel.

The man drops his paper and sets his feet wide, looks left and right. Holds a hand to his ear and says something. Jago pulls back from the top of the steps.

“No good. Gotta go back.”

“Someone see you?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Christ, Jago. You don’t think so?”

Maybe he’s getting sloppy too. Too much forgetting, too much Burger King, too much sex.

Sarah stands and looks, and there he is. Already 20 paces closer. The businessman sprinting, his hat fallen off, a pistol in his hand.

Jago brings the rifle up and without sighting pulls the secondary trigger again. Another dart. It hits the man in the cheek, just below his eye. He recoils and falls, slides along the concrete only 47 feet away. He comes to a stop. He rolls. Paws at his face, the bushy-tailed dart hanging out of it. He fights for consciousness, but it’s no use. He passes out.

The young mother screams.

The Players turn and run. The light from the station recedes. Sarah flicks on her headlamp. She’s several feet in front of Jago when they feel the air change, the light coming for them.

The Edgware Road train.

Sarah kicks it into high gear. She slams into the safety of one of the cutouts as the train comes into view, her shoulder crunching into the concrete wall.

But Jago’s not there. He couldn’t run as fast. He’s only 13 feet away, but it might as well be a mile. He looks at her. She can see his eyes, wide and white.

Sarah screams, “Down!” as the train barrels by, cutting off her view of Jago.

The train’s horn sounds. It doesn’t slow. A loud smack and sparks and a small explosion. The rifle being impacted by the front of the train. All she hears after that is the machine churning in front of her, the movable storm of wind, the Doppler effect of the blaring horn.

Again, Sarah looks into the blurred interior passing just in front of her, this time through glassy eyes. And this time there are no people on it. None. Until the last car, which is full of men dressed in all black.

Men with lots and lots of weapons.

The train didn’t slow because they saw him. They saw him and they wanted him dead.

The train finally brakes as it disappears around the corner and pulls into the station. She has maybe one minute to get to the other tunnel. She glances into the well between the tracks. Doesn’t see any sign of him. Squints. Raises her eyes. There, in the darkness, a piece of cloth floating through the air and settling on the rail.

A piece of cloth that matches Jago’s shirt.

She takes a step forward to see what else she might find, but freezes when she hears voices in the distance. Men, frantic and yelling.

No time.

She shakes with fear. No time to see what’s left of Jago Tlaloc.

Fear.

She rubs her sleeve over her eyes and vaults onto the tracks and runs away.

Runs away from another death.

Another death of someone she loved.

Aisling has been sitting in the room for one hour and three minutes. No one has come to see her, no one has brought her water or a bag of chips, no one has spoken to her over an intercom. The room is empty except for a table and a chair and a steel ring in the floor and a bank of fluorescent lights in the ceiling. The table and chair are both metal with rounded edges and welded joints. Both are secured to plates that are set in the concrete floor. The walls are blank, painted white with a yellow tint. There are no pictures, no shelves, no vents. There isn’t even a two-way mirror.

But Aisling is being watched. There’s no doubt about that. Somewhere in this room are a camera and a microphone. Probably several. Because there are no dangerous items in the room, the men who brought her here didn’t even handcuff her. They just put her in the chair and left. She has not moved from the chair. She has been meditating since the door closed and the bolts inside the door slid into the locked position. Three of them. They were whisper quiet, but she still heard them.

One, two, three.

Shut in. This, she thinks, is worse than the Italian cave.

She lets the things that come to her mind arrive and pass. Or tries to, anyway. Just because she’s a Player doesn’t mean she’s an expert at everything. Shooting, fighting, tracking, climbing, surviving. Solving puzzles. Languages. Those are what she’s really good at. Centering herself, opening her mind, all that om om om bullshit, not so much.

Although all that shooting practice couldn’t help her take down that fucking float plane when it mattered most.

When it might have saved the world.

Let it pass. Let it pass.

Breathe.

Let it pass.

She does. The images and feelings come and go. Memories. The rain lashing her face as she sits on the northeastern gargoyle’s head on top of the Chrysler Building. The taste of wild mushrooms scavenged from the Hudson Valley. Her heaving lungs pushing out water when she nearly drowned in Lough Owel, Ireland. The creeping fear that she can’t win, or doesn’t deserve to win, or shouldn’t win, the doubt that every Player who isn’t a sociopath must confront. The bright blue of her father’s eyes. The spooky voice of kepler 22b. The escape from the Great White Pyramid. The regret that her crossbow bolt didn’t skewer the Olmec in the attic of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. The anger over what the cave paintings showed her in Italy. The anger that the Players are being played by the keplers. The anger that it’s not fair. The anger from knowing that Endgame is a bunch of bullshit. The anger.

Let it pass.

Let it pass.

Breathe.

The door whispers. One, two, three. The latch turns. Aisling doesn’t open her eyes. Listens, smells, feels. Just one person. The door closes. Whispers. One, two, three.

Shut in.

A woman. She can tell by the smell of her soap.

Light-footed. Steady breathing. Maybe she meditates too.

The woman crosses the room and stops on the other side of the table.

She introduces herself: “Operations Officer Bridget McCloskey.” The woman’s voice is raspy, like a lounge singer’s. She sounds big. “That’s my real name. Not some cover bullshit, Deandra Belafonte Cooper … Or should I say Aisling Kopp?”

Aisling’s eyes shoot open. Their gazes lock. McCloskey is not what Aisling expects.

“So you admit your passport is a fake,” McCloskey says.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I say Aisling Kopp, your eyes pop open. That’s an admission in my book, a hundred times out of a hundred.”

“What book is that? Fifty Shades of Grey? Letters to Penthouse?”

McCloskey shakes her head with a look of disappointment. She’s in her early 40s. Like Aisling she has red hair, except that hers has a Bride of Frankenstein streak running from her forehead all the way through to the tip of her tight ponytail. She’s leggy and stacked and flat-out hot, like a Playboy bunny just a few years past her prime. She has eyeglasses with teal frames and very little makeup. Her eyes are green. Her hands are veined and strong, the only giveaway that she’s the real deal. She must have been stunning when she was Aisling’s age.

“You’d be surprised how often I hear degrading shit like that,” McCloskey says.

“Maybe you need a new line of work.”

“Nah. I like my job. I like talking with people like you.”

“People like me?”

“Terrorists.”

Aisling doesn’t flinch and doesn’t speak. She understands that from a law-enforcement perspective any Player of Endgame could absolutely be considered a terrorist—but what does this woman know about Endgame?

“No more smart mouth? I’ll remind you that you’ve been caught trying to cross the US border under an assumed name.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Arrest?” McCloskey chuckles. “How quaint. No, I’m not with the part of the government that arrests people, Miss Kopp. I’m with … another part of the government. A small and exclusive part. The one that deals with terrorists. Up close and personal like.”

“Well, we have a problem, then, because I’m not a terrorist.”

“Oh, dear! So you’re telling me this is all one big misunderstanding?”

“Yes.”

“So I’m wrong in believing you’re a member of a very old sleeper cell that, once called to action, can and will do anything to achieve its goals? That’s not you?”

“A sleeper cell, huh? Is this a joke?”

McCloskey shakes her head again. “No joke. Did you hear what happened in Xi’an? You have anything to do with that?”

The mention of the Chinese city causes Aisling’s heart to quicken. A shiver runs down her neck. If she can’t head off her body’s hardwired threat response, then she might break out in a cold sweat. She can’t break out in a cold sweat. Not in front of this woman, who already seems to know a bit too much.

“What, the meteor? Is my sleeper cell responsible for that? Lady, if I could control meteors, you can bet I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

If I could control meteors, Aisling thinks, the Event would never come.

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