by James Frey
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 ULAPALA
CMA CGM Jules Verne, Passenger Cabin, En Route from Darwin to Kuala Lumpur
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.
SHARI CHOPRA AND THE LEADERS OF THE HARAPPAN LINE
Best Good Fortune Banquet Hall, Gangtok, Sikkim, India
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.