by James Frey
This is it.
CHIYOKO TAKEDA
22B Hateshinai Tri, Naha, Okinawa, Japan
Three chimes of a small pewter bell awake Chiyoko Takeda. Her head lolls to the side. The time on her digital clock: 5:24. She makes a note of it. These are heavy numbers now. Significant. She imagines it is the same for those who ascribe meaning to numbers like 11:03 or 9:11 or 7:07. For the rest of her life she will see these numbers, 5:24, and for the rest of her life they will carry weight, meaning, significance.
Chiyoko turns from the clock on her side table and stares into the darkness. She lies naked on top of the sheets. She licks her full lips. She scrutinizes the shadows on her ceiling as if some message will appear there.
The bell should not have rung. Not for her.
All her life she has been told of Endgame and her peculiar and fantastical ancestry. Before the bell rang, she was 17 years old, a homeschooled outcast, a master sailor and navigator, an able gardener, a limber climber. Skilled at symbols, languages, and words. An interpreter of signs. An assassin able to wield the wakizashi, the hojo, and the shuriken. Now that the bell has rung, she feels 100. She feels 1,000. She feels 10,000, and getting older by the second. The heavy burden of the centuries presses down upon her.
Chiyoko closes her eyes. Darkness returns. She wants to be somewhere else. A cave. Underwater. In the oldest forest on Earth. But she is here, and she must get used to it. Darkness will be everywhere soon, and everyone will know it. She must master it. Befriend it. Love it. She has prepared for 17 years and she’s ready, even if she never wanted it or expected it. The darkness. It will be like a loving silence, which for Chiyoko is easy. The silence is part of who she is.
For she can hear, but she has never spoken.
She looks out her open window, breathes. It rained during the night, and she can feel the humidity in her nose and throat and chest. The air smells good.
There is a gentle rapping on the sliding door leading to her room. Chiyoko sits in her Western-style bed, her slight back facing the door. She stamps her foot twice. Twice means Come in.
The sound of wood sliding across wood. The quiet of the screen stopping. The faint shuffle of feet.
“I rang the bell,” her uncle says, his head bowed low to the ground, according the young Player the highest level of respect, as is the custom, the rule. “I had to,” he says. “They’re coming. All of them.”
Chiyoko nods.
He keeps his gaze lowered. “I am sorry,” he says. “It is time.”
Chiyoko stamps five arrhythmic times with her foot. Okay. Glass of water.
“Yes, of course.” Her uncle backs out of the doorway and quietly moves away.
Chiyoko stands, smells the air again, and moves to the window. The faint glow from the city’s lights blankets her pale skin. She looks out over Naha. There is the park. The hospital. The harbor. There is the sea, black, broad, and calm. There is the soft breeze. The palm trees below her window whisper. The low gray clouds begin to light up, as if a spaceship is coming to visit. Old people must be awake, Chiyoko thinks. Old people get up early. They are having tea and rice and radish pickles. Eggs and fish and warm milk. Some will remember the war. The fire from the sky that destroyed and decimated everything. And allowed for a rebirth. What is about to happen will remind them of those days. But a rebirth? Their survival and their future depend entirely on Chiyoko.
A dog begins to bark frantically.
Birds trill.
A car alarm goes off.
The sky gets very bright, and the clouds break downward as a massive fireball bursts over the edge of town. It screams, burns, and crashes into the marina. A great explosion and a billow of scalding steam illuminate the early morning. Rain made of dust and rock and plastic and metal hurls upward over Naha. Trees die. Fish die. Children, dreams, and fortunes die. The lucky ones are snuffed out in their slumber. The unlucky are burned or maimed.
Initially it will be mistaken for an earthquake.
But they will see.
It is just the beginning.
The debris falls all over town. Chiyoko senses her piece coming for her. She takes a large step away from her window, and a bright ember shaped like a mackerel falls onto her floor, burning a hole in the tatami mat.
Her uncle knocks on the door again. Chiyoko stomps her foot twice. Come in. The door is still open. Her uncle keeps his gaze lowered as he stops at her side and hands her first a simple blue silk kimono, which she steps into, and, after she’s in the kimono, a glass of very cold water.
She pours the water over the ember. It sizzles, spurts, and steams, the water immediately boiling. What is left is a shiny, black, jagged rock.
She looks at her uncle. He looks back at her, sadness in his eyes. It is the sadness of many centuries, of lifetimes coming to an end. She gives him a slight bow of thanks. He tries to smile. He used to be like her, waiting for Endgame to begin, but it passed him over, like it did countless others, for thousands and thousands of years.
Not so for Chiyoko.
“I am sorry,” he says. “For you, for all of us. What will be will be.”
Excerpt from ENDGAME: THE TRAINING DIARIES VOLUME 1: ORIGINS
KEEP READING FOR A SNEAK PEEK AT THE LIVES OF THE PLAYERS BEFORE THE CALLING IN:
MINOAN
MARCUS
When Marcus was a little kid, they called him the Monkey.
This was meant to be a compliment. Which is exactly how Marcus took it.
At seven years old, he monkeyed his way 30 meters up a climbing wall without fear, the only kid to ring the bell at the top. Ever since then he’s made sure he always goes higher than the other kids, always gets to the top faster. Always waits at the summit with a cocky grin and a “What took you so long?”
He can climb anything. Trees, mountains, active volcanoes, a 90-degree granite incline or the sheer wall of a Tokyo skyscraper. The Asterousia Mountains of Crete were his childhood playground. He’s scrambled up all Seven Summits—the highest mountain on each continent—including Antarctica’s Mount Vinson, which meant a hike across the South Pole. He’s illegally scaled Dubai’s 800-meter-high Burj Khalifa without rope or harness, then BASE jumped from its silver tip. He’s the youngest person ever to summit Everest (not that the world is allowed to know it).
If only someone would get around to building a tall enough ladder, he’s pretty sure he could climb to the moon.
Climbing is an integral part of his training. Every Minoan child hoping to be named his or her generation’s Player learns to scale a peak. They’ve all logged hours defying gravity; they’ve all broken through the clouds. But Marcus knows that for the others, climbing is just one more skill to master, one more challenge to stare down. No different from sharpshooting or deep-sea diving or explosives disposal. For Marcus, it’s more.
For Marcus, climbing is everything.
It’s a fusion of mind and matter, the perfect way to channel all that frenetic energy that has him bouncing off the walls most of the time. It takes absolute focus, brute force, and a fearless confidence that comes naturally to Marcus, who feels most alive at 1,000 meters, looking down.
He loves it for all those reasons, sure—but mostly he loves it because he’s the best.
And because being the best, by definition, means being better than Alexander.
It was clear from day one that Alexander Nicolaides was the kid to beat. It took only one day more to figure out he was also the kid to hate.
Marcus’s parents called it camp, when they dropped him off that first day. But he was a smart kid, smart enough to wonder: What kind of parents dump their seven-year-old on Crete and head back to Istanbul without him? What kind of camp lets them do it?
What kind of camp teaches that seven-year-old how to shoot?
And how to arm live explosives?
And how to read Chinese?
It was the kind of camp where little kids were encouraged to play with matches.
It was most definitely
Marcus’s kind of place—and that was even before he found out the part about the alien invasion and how, if he played his cards right, he’d get to save the world.
Best. Camp. Ever.
Or it would have been, were it not for the impossible-to-ignore existence of Alexander Nicolaides. He was everything Marcus wasn’t. Marcus could never sit still, always acted without thinking; Alexander was calm and deliberate and even broke the camp’s meditation record, sitting silent and motionless and staring into a stupid candle for 28 hours straight. Marcus mastered languages and higher math with brute mental force, thudding his head against the logic problems until they broke; Alexander was fluent in Assyrian, Sumerian, ancient Greek, and, just for fun, medieval Icelandic, and he was capable of visualizing at least six dimensions. Marcus was better at climbing and shooting; Alexander had the edge in navigation and survival skills. They even looked like polar opposites: Alexander was a compact ball of tightly coiled energy, his wavy, white-blond hair nearly as pale as his skin, his eyes as blue as the Aegean Sea. Marcus was long-limbed and rangy, with close-cropped black hair. If they’d been ancient gods, Alexander would have had charge over the sky and the sea, all those peaceful stretches of cerulean and aquamarine. Marcus, with his dark green eyes and golden sheen, would have lorded it over the forests and the earth, all leaves and loam and living things. But the gods were long dead—or at least departed for the stars—and instead Marcus and Alexander jockeyed for rule over the same small domain. Marcus was the camp joker and prided himself on making even his sternest teachers laugh; Alexander was terse, serious, rarely speaking unless he had something important to say.
Which was for the best, because his voice was so nails-on-chalkboard annoying that it made Marcus want to punch him in the mouth.
It didn’t help that Alexander was a good candidate for Player and an even better suck-up. The other kids definitely preferred Marcus, but Marcus knew that Alexander had a slight edge with the counselors, and it was their opinion that counted. Every seven years, the counselors invited a new crop of kids to the camp, the best and brightest of the Minoan line. The counselors trained them, judged them, pushed them to their limits, pitted them against one another and themselves, and eventually named a single one as the best. The Player. Everyone else got sent back home to their mind-numbingly normal lives.
Maybe that kind of boring life was okay for other kids.
Other kids dreamed of being astronauts, race-car drivers, rock stars—not Marcus. Since the day he found out about Endgame, Marcus had only one dream: to win it.
Nothing was going to get in his way.
Especially not Alexander Nicolaides.
Tucked away in a secluded valley on the western edge of Crete, the Minoan camp was well hidden from prying eyes. The Greek isles were crowded with architectural ruins, most of them littered with regulations, tourists, and discarded cigarette butts. Few knew of the ruins nestled at the heart of the Lefka Ori range, where 50 carefully chosen Minoan children lived among the remnants of a vanished civilization. Tilting pillars, crumbling walls, the fading remains of a holy fresco—everywhere Marcus looked, there was evidence of a nobler time gone by. This was no museum: it was a living bond between present and past. The kids were encouraged to press their palms to crumbling stone, to trace carvings of heroes and bulls, to dig for artifacts buried thousands of years before. This was the sacred ground of their ancestors, and as candidates to be the Minoans’ champion, they were entitled to claim it for their own.
The camp imposed a rigorous training schedule on the children, but none of them complained. They’d been chosen because they were the kind of kids who thought training was fun. They were kids who wanted to win. None more than Marcus. And other than the thorn in his side named Alexander Nicolaides, Marcus had never been so happy in his life.
He endured Alexander for two years, biding his time, waiting for the other boy to reveal his weakness or, better yet, to flame out. He waited for the opportunity to triumph over Alexander so definitively, so absolutely, that everyone would know, once and for all, that Marcus was the best. Marcus liked to imagine how that day would go, how the other kids would carry him around on their shoulders, cheering his name, while Alexander slunk away in humiliated defeat.
He was nine years old when the moment finally arrived.
A tournament, elimination style, with the champion claiming a large gold trophy, a month’s worth of extra dessert, and bonus bragging rights. The Theseus Cup was held every two years as a showcase for campers—and a chance for them to prove their worth. There were rumors that the first to win the Theseus Cup was a shoo-in to be chosen as the Player. No one knew whether or not this was the case—but Marcus didn’t intend to risk it. He intended to win.
He swept his opening matches effortlessly, knocking one kid after another senseless, even the ones who were older and bigger. Bronze daggers, double axes, Turkish sabers—whatever the weapon, Marcus wielded it like a champion. Alexander, who’d started off in another bracket, cut a similar swath across the competition. This was as it should be, Marcus thought. It would be no fun to knock him out in an early round. The decisive blow needed to come when it counted, in the championship, with everyone watching.
The two nine-year-old finalists stepped into the ring for a final bout. Personal, hand-to-hand combat. No weapons, no intermediaries. Just the two of them. Finally.
They faced each other and bowed, as they’d been taught.
Bowing before you fought, offering up that token of respect, that was a rule.
After that, there were no rules.
Marcus opened with a karate kick. Alexander blocked it with ease, and they pitted their black belts against each other for a few seconds before Alexander took him in a judo hold and flipped him to the ground. Marcus allowed it—only so he could sweep his leg across Alexander’s knees and drop him close enough for a choke hold. Alexander wriggled out and smashed a fist toward Marcus’s face. Marcus rolled away just in time, and the punch came down hard against the mat.
The camp was on its feet, cheering, screaming Marcus’s and Alexander’s names—Marcus tried not to distract himself by trying to figure out whose cheering section was bigger. The fighters moved fluidly through techniques, meeting sanshou with savate, blocking a tae kwon do attack with an onslaught of aikido, their polished choreography disintegrating into the furious desperation of a street brawl. But even spitting and clawing like a pair of animals, they were perfectly matched.
The fight dragged on and on. Dodging punches, blocking kicks, throwing each other to the mat again and again, they fought for one hour, then two. It felt like years. Sweat poured down Marcus’s back and blood down his face. He gasped and panted, sucking in air and trying not to double over from the pain. His legs were jelly, his arms lead weights. Alexander looked like he’d been flattened by a steamroller, with both eyes blackened and a wide gap where his front teeth used to be. The kids fell silent, waiting for the referee to step in before the two boys killed each other.
But this was not that kind of camp.
They fought on.
They fought like they lived: Marcus creative and unpredictable, always in motion; Alexander cool, rational, every move a calculated decision.
Which made it even more of a shock when Alexander broke. Unleashing a scream of pure rage, he reached over the ropes to grab the referee’s stool, and smashed it over Marcus’s head.
Marcus didn’t see it coming.
He only felt the impact.
A thunderbolt of pain reverberating through his bones.
His body dropping to the ground, no longer under his control, his consciousness drifting away.
The last thing he saw, before everything faded to black, was Alexander’s face, stunned by his own loss of control. Marcus smiled, then started to laugh. Even in defeat, he’d won—he’d finally made the uptight control freak completely lose it.
The last thing he heard was Alexander laughing too.
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About the Author
JAMES FREY is originally from Cleveland. All four of his books, A Million Little Pieces, My Friend Leonard, Bright Shiny Morning, and The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, were international bestsellers.
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Books in the Endgame Series
Novels
Endgame: The Calling
Digital Novellas
Endgame: The Training Diaries Volume 1: Origins
Endgame: The Training Diaries Volume 2: Descendant
Copyright
ENDGAME: THE TRAINING DIARIES VOLUME 2: DESCENDANT. Copyright © 2015 by Third Floor Fun, LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-233268-4
EPub Edition © February 2015 ISBN 9780062332684
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