by James Frey
Still, he burns.
And now they will burn.
They’ve posted guards in front of his old apartment; he knocks one out with an efficient choke hold and the other with a blow to the head, then lets himself in to retrieve what he needs: a bottle of Lorelei’s perfume, so he can breathe her in when he needs to remember. His journal, a record of every step of his journey from ignorance to acceptance, which he’d left behind in hopes that Pop and Lorelei might come to understand. A photo of Lorelei, so that Aisling will never forget her mother’s face. Then he sets the incendiary device and watches his past bloom into flame.
Next stop: the High Council chamber. Hidden in the basement of what looks, from the outside, to be a dilapidated veterans’ hall.
Declan disables the security system with a few simple clips of the wire cutters, picks the complicated locks on the chamber door, and lets himself in.
It’s easy.
They gave him all the tools he needs to betray them.
The Falcata is hanging in its place of honor over the long council table. He takes it in his hands, presses his lips to the cool metal, a sign of respect for its deadly blade.
Sitting in an ancient brass bowl in the center of the table is a small, polished stone.
This is the mark of the Player. The symbol of responsibility and commitment to the line, of the promise made to the gods and to the coming apocalypse.
Once, his birthright.
Now, Molly’s.
Soon, Aisling’s, unless he can stop them.
He pockets the stone.
Then he places the second incendiary device.
Slips out into the night with the ancient sword, activates the device.
Stands in the shadows, watching the heart of the La Tène line burn to the ground.
It’s only a symbol. A message. Meant to remind them that he is out there, that he will destroy everything they have and everything they are if that’s what it takes to stop them, to prevent Endgame, to save Aisling.
Destroying what’s precious to them doesn’t make up for what he’s lost.
But it feels good.
When he returns to the delta, the shack is gone.
Razed to the ground.
No Agatha. No Aisling.
Declan turns his face to the sky and shrieks his pain to the heavens. His scream shreds the silence of the swamp. Birds scatter into the clouds. Coyotes sing back to him, and together they howl at the moon.
Then, from the trees, another sound. Faint, but familiar.
A child’s cry.
He follows the sound, his heart thumping, lips moving in time with the drumbeat of his pulse, please, please, please.
He finds them curled up together in the hollow of a fallen tree, Aisling tearstained and screaming, Agatha bleeding from too many wounds.
“I don’t know how they found me,” she whispers, as Declan frantically tries to staunch the blood. “But they don’t know the swamp.”
“Where are they?” Declan asks, panic flooding him. Has he just walked into an ambush?
“They looked for a while, then gave up,” Agatha croaks. “Took their guns and their helicopters away. Outsmarted by old Agatha. Again.” When she laughs, blood froths at her lips.
“You saved Aisling,” Declan says in wonder.
“No more children should be sacrificed to this bloody game,” she says, gasping at his touch. Her forehead burns.
“How long have you been hiding out here?”
“I held on until you came back.”
“We’ve got to get you to a hospital.”
He can’t risk it, but for her, after what she’s done, he will.
“No,” she croaks. Then: “No point.”
When he was the Player, Declan learned how to kill, but he also learned how to save. And he learned how to know when people are beyond the point of saving. How to recognize the absence of hope.
She wraps her fingers around his wrist. “Save her from this life,” she says.
He nods. Promises. “Tell me what I can do for you,” he says. “Anything.”
“Save me too,” she says, her gaze feverish but fierce. “Make the pain stop. Please.”
He uses the Falcata, because she is a hero and deserves an honorable blade.
An honorable death.
Declan runs; the La Tène give chase. The line has spent a millennium sowing a global network of allies and informants—there is nowhere beyond their reach, nowhere to hide. He creates a labyrinth of dummy accounts, uses cash whenever possible, invents several fictional personae and sends them off on planes and trains to the ends of the earth. He lays careful bread-crumb trails leading to dead, and sometimes deadly, ends; he sets traps, drawing on his own networks and on mercenaries whose loyalty he can afford to leave in his wake, faceless men and women who alert him whenever the La Tène catch his scent and close in.
As they always do.
Sometimes he and Aisling are gone long before they show up, leaving behind hotel rooms scoured of prints, dingy apartments stuffed with a stranger’s belongings. Sometimes the two of them only just make it. He’s a former Player; he knows never to set up camp without formulating an escape plan, and so everywhere they squat, whether it’s for hours or weeks, he devises a hiding place for Aisling, somewhere she will be safe if he has to fight their way out.
Most of the La Tène won’t dare attack if he has the baby in his arms—she’s too precious to them. But Molly, a Player herself, doesn’t see any Player’s—or future Player’s—life as sacred, and she’s all too confident in her own aim. She comes at him no matter who might get caught in the crossfire.
They have been on the run for two months when they slip across the French border and make their way to Paris. Declan finds them a small garret on the Left Bank, a few blocks from the Seine, and as weeks pass uneventfully, he begins to relax. Aisling falls in love with the city, or at least her small corner of it—they spend hours every day in the large children’s playground in the Jardin du Luxembourg. She becomes snobbish about croissants, only favoring the ones from the boulangerie down the street, and has already started chatting with the pigeons in her own pidgin French. Declan wonders whether it’s possible that they have found a new home.
They’re sitting in Place Dauphine, dipping croissants in a steaming mug of hot chocolate, when it happens. Nothing major, nothing he can put his finger on, just a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye that sets his heart racing.
As Aisling nibbles on the soggy croissant, and Declan keeps a smile fixed on his face, he scans the plaza—and gasps.
There it is, in the northern corner of the square, nearly hidden behind a rack of secondhand books, that familiar head of black hair.
Molly.
Swiftly but casually, Declan straps Aisling into the pouch on his chest that he uses when they need to make a quick getaway, and stands from his chair. If he can just get her safely out of the square and into a crowd—
Aisling screams as something whistles past her ear.
Then, suddenly, there’s a hail of tranquilizer darts and a puff of tear gas and the square erupts into chaos.
Declan runs.
He holds tight to Aisling and takes off toward the Seine, vaulting onto the Pont Neuf and kicking his nearest pursuer over the rail, sending him tumbling into the murky river. He pushes through crowds on the Quai des Grands Augustins, racing for Notre Dame and its swarm of oblivious tourists. Past bridges and bouquinistes, knocking over carts and crepe trucks, anything that will stall them in their chase, across the Petit Pont, until finally the gray, gargoyled edifice looms over them and Declan melts into the crowd, hundreds of parents holding squirming babies to their chests, just like him. He allows himself a heartbeat of relief, but this is only a temporary escape. He lets the throng push him across the square, then slips into one of the apartment lobbies with an entry code he’s memorized for just such an emergency. He waits in the lobby as the hours pass and the shadows deepen, Aisling miraculousl
y calm in his arms, as if she understands exactly what’s going on and trusts him to deal with it. He wishes he trusted himself that much. There’s relief in this escape—but not much of it, because Molly is still out there, somewhere. Maybe Molly will always be out there.
When night falls, he decides it’s time to risk it—they slip out of the building, and his enemies are nowhere to be found. The search has moved on, for now, leaving Declan space to flee the country and seek out yet another new home.
He knows better this time than to imagine that he’ll find anywhere they can stay for long. No matter how far they go, no matter how safe it seems, he’s always expecting Molly to find them.
And she always does.
It happens again in Mexico, this time an ambush in the plaza outside San Miguel de Allende’s Parroquia, and he loses them in that pink monstrosity, holding a mask to Aisling’s face as the tear gas drifts over them and they make for a back exit leading to the Cuna de Allende and, beyond it, freedom.
He always has an escape plan, and he always needs to use it. Dangriga, Belize; Mzuzu, Malawi; Stockholm, Sweden; Bn Tre, Vietnam. Six months pass, then a year, and still there is no safe haven for them, no home, no rest, and no end—not unless the impossible happens, and the La Tène give up.
Or he does.
“This is no way for you to live,” Declan tells his daughter. “Your mother would hate this. And hate me for it.”
They’re sitting on the eastern bank of the Rhine River. Aisling plays happily in the mud along the shore. She’s just starting to walk now, and can say a small handful of words. Soon she’ll be old enough to ask questions Declan can’t answer.
“You see that giant rock, Aisling?” He points across the river, to the jagged stone jutting hundreds of feet into the air.
She claps her hands. “Mountain!”
Declan brushes her hair away from her face. It’s a tangled nest of red curls. He should be taking better care of it. He should be taking better care of everything.
“Sort of a mountain,” he agrees. “Do you know what its name is?”
Aisling shakes her head.
“It’s called the Lorelei,” he tells her.
Aisling shouts happily, “Mama!”
He’s taught her well.
He shows her Lorelei’s picture every night, tells her stories of the mother she’s already started to forget. Lorelei has been dead for one year, three months, and four days. Aisling doesn’t cry about her mama anymore, or ask for her. Declan doesn’t know whether this is tragedy or relief.
“Yes, your mama was named after this Lorelei,” he says. It’s not precisely true. The German poet Heinrich Heine wrote a poem about the Lorelei, and her parents named her after that.
“Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, Daß ich so traurig bin,” he recites for his daughter now, as he so often recited for his wife. He loved this about Lorelei, that she was born inside a poem. She didn’t speak German, but he does, of course—he speaks almost every language—and she liked to hear the words in their original language, in his voice. He translates for Aisling, now: “‘I don’t know what it should mean that I am so sad.’”
But he does know what it means.
He knows why he’s brought her here, to this deserted spot near Saint Goarshausen, where he feels like his wife is watching over them both. He and Lorelei came here on their honeymoon—she wanted to show him her rock. It’s not every woman who has her own mountain, she told him then.
They were so happy.
“We can’t keep running forever,” he says. He’s talking to himself; he’s talking to Lorelei. He takes Aisling into his arms. She squirms for a moment, then settles happily onto his lap. “We can’t keep living like this. You can’t keep living like this.”
He came here so he could find the strength to admit it.
He was the Player; he was trained to give everything to the fight. To believe he could win until his dying breath.
But running isn’t winning. Even if they could run from the line forever, that’s no way for Aisling to grow up.
That’s no way to carry out the promise he made to himself, that he would do everything he could to stop Endgame, to persuade his line that they’ve made a terrible mistake.
He’s done with running away.
He’s going to do what he’s been trained to do, and fight.
Maybe he will lose.
Probably he will lose.
But either way, Aisling will have a place to grow up, people who love her, a home. Either way, Lorelei will be avenged and Declan will know he’s done everything he can to make things right.
“That’s it, Aisling. No more running.” The thick clouds blow open for a moment, and a splash of sun lights up the Lorelei. “Now we make our last stand.”
The climb is more difficult than Declan remembers. Of course, the last time he was here, he didn’t have a small toddler strapped to his chest.
The last time he was here: it was six years ago, the culmination of many months of searching. For clues, for artifacts, for answers.
“None of this is ours to know,” Pop told him, when Declan explained why he was traveling the globe, why he was so desperate to track down the evidence of his forebears, the Players of the La Tène line stretching back for hundreds and thousands of years.
“How can it not be?” he asked Pop. “We’re supposed to give our lives up to a cause we don’t even understand? What sense does that make?”
“It made perfect sense to you until last year,” Pop said, irritable. They’d had the conversation one too many times. “What changed?”
“Nothing,” Declan said, because he’d promised Le Fond never to breathe a word of them. “I just started asking questions, that’s all. That’s not a crime.”
“Be careful,” Pop warned him. And when Declan said that there was no need to be careful, that he could climb a 1,500-meter mountain in his sleep, Pop said, “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
Six years ago, Declan summited a peak in the Italian Alps, high above the Lago Beluiso, and picked his way into the darkness of an ancient cave. He aimed his headlamp at a wall covered in primitive paintings. They looked as old as time itself.
There was the painting of 12 humans standing amongst tall stones—Stonehenge, he’d realized almost immediately. The sacred place.
That understanding had come easily. The others had taken time. Days of fasting and meditation to clear his head, hollow it out so he would hear the gods speak.
What did it all mean, the picture of the strange creature descending to Earth with a stolen star? The six men and six women screaming into the skies? The woman in the boat, so alone on a desolate sea?
He stared at the images until he was half mad with hunger and solitude, and only then did truth cut through the fog. He saw what he was meant to see.
He saw Endgame for what it really was: the vicious cycle, the evil joke.
The end of days.
Now he returns with his child. He returns to wait for someone to come for him, to kill him and take her away. Six years ago, he returned to Queens bursting with his nightmare truth—and no one would hear it. His father refused to listen. The High Council commanded his silence.
Now they will come for him, to this place where he found those unwanted answers.
Maybe they will finally listen.
Maybe they will see what he saw.
It would be worth it, giving up his life, giving up his daughter, if there’s even a chance that he can make them hear the truth.
He hopes it won’t come to that. But if it does, he’s prepared.
He lights a fire, he roasts some meat, he feeds Aisling and himself, he sings his daughter to sleep, and he waits.
He waits for two days and two nights.
Then they come for him.
“We know you’re in here, Declan.” Molly shouts. “Show yourself.”
Declan holds on to Aisling as he steps into the light. She giggles and waves at her older cous
in and her grandfather. It warms him, that she still recognizes her family. It means she hasn’t forgotten everything yet. Some part of her must still remember her mother.
“We don’t want to hurt you,” Declan’s father says; he takes aim with the rifle. “Just give us the child.”
“You won’t shoot me while I’m holding her,” Declan says, hopes. “You won’t risk it.”
“It’s over,” Pop says. “Give us Aisling. Come home with us. We’ll work this out.”
“There’s nothing to work out,” Declan says. “Look around you—simply open your eyes and see. Why do you think I brought you here?”
Pop sighs heavily. “I don’t know why you do anything you do, Declan.”
“We have to break the cycle, pop. We have to. We can stop this now. Look at the paintings, Pop.” Declan shines his flashlight at the cave wall. “You see those twelve figures, those have got to be Players, and I’m certain that the figure in the center—”
“You will stop this nonsense or I will shoot you where you stand,” his father snaps.
So that’s it. Even now he won’t listen. He won’t see. Declan’s given his father all the chances he can. “I tried,” he says, then slips a hand into his pocket and presses a small switch.
The cave mouth explodes in a hail of shattered stone. Molly dives out of the way, lightning fast, but Pop’s body is no longer as quick as his instincts. He takes a rock to the head and goes down.
Somewhere, in the back of Declan’s mind, where he’s still capable of rational thought, he feels sorry to see it.
There’s no time for regret, not as long as Molly’s still alive. She’s fast, but she’s still been caught off guard—as soon as he sets off the device, Declan is in motion before Molly has regained her footing. Declan leaps over his father’s body and launches himself toward her, swinging the Falcata at her neck. Molly dodges the blow, comes at him low and hard with the knife, slashing at his knees, trying to knock him off balance so she can get a clear shot at his jugular. He stabs the sword through her foot.
First blood.