Sky Key

by James Frey

  She skids to a stop by a bunch of kids hanging on the corner in the midafternoon sun, all of them skinny and muscly with straight-brimmed ball caps and baggy shorts hanging off their asses. They don’t see too many redheaded white girls riding $20,000 German motorcycles in these parts.

  “Yo, top o’ the morning to ya!” one kid shouts. His friends laugh.

  Aisling smiles, yanks the key out of the ignition, jumps off the bike, tosses the key to him.

  “Trade my bike for your cap,” she says with a wink. She takes off on foot, grabbing the kid’s all-black Nets hat right off his head, and leaps over a low iron fence parkour-style, disappearing into the tree-lined project, the boys all yelling, “Oh, shit!” “For real?” “What the—?”

  She gets more looks from grandmas and little kids and teenagers as she sprints through the housing complex. She considers scaling one of the buildings and hiding on the roof until things cool off, but that would be too conspicuous and the cops are likely to put out choppers soon if they haven’t already.

  No. She needs to get home, and fast. If she can get there with some time to spare and grab a bag of toys from the basement safe room, then she’ll be able to disappear for good.

  Disappear and Play.

  Run and not get caught.

  Stop the Event if she can. If she can’t, win the game.

  By myself.

  She hits a chain-link fence, scales it, drops down, and is back on the street. She hears the sirens in the distance and, sure enough, a chopper coming from the south. There aren’t many people around in this section of the development, but the ones who are watch her with a sort of detached wonder. Like so many city people, they’ve learned to mind their business.

  No one says anything when Aisling walks up to a purple-and-yellow souped-up Honda Civic, jumps through the open window, and hot-wires her new ride in less than five seconds, which might be a street record.

  A lilting narco-corrido track pours out of the sound system. She turns it down and puts on the Nets cap and pulls away from the curb casually, her wrist hanging limp over the top of the wheel. She takes a pair of sunglasses off the dashboard and slips them on.

  She drives south a few blocks, a cruiser screaming past her toward Linden, and turns west. She guns it for a quarter mile, goes casual again, and works her way back toward JFK on side streets, hoping that the police haven’t put up a blockade anywhere on Cross Bay Boulevard.

  They haven’t.

  Less than half an hour later she rounds the corner onto West 10th Road. The next 10 minutes are critical. Broad Channel is nothing more than a natural bridge in the middle of Jamaica Bay. The police, or this McCloskey person, could easily pin her down. If they block the roads, she could get on Pop’s boat to try to escape, but boats are not very good for that sort of thing.

  So she crosses her fingers and hopes.

  She stops four houses shy of the teal bungalow. No sign of anyone.

  She gets out. She pushes her hands into her pockets and trudges forward.

  Still nothing. The block is quiet.

  She turns up the walk, stops by the garden gnome in the tiny yard, flips his pointy red hat back, and pulls out a little case with a combo lock on it. Puts in the number, 9-4-6-2-9, opens it, and takes out the key.

  Aisling goes to the front door. She looks over her shoulder one more time. A 747 angles skyward out of JFK. A starling chirps on the roof’s gutter. The bolt in the lock slides open. She pushes the door and slips in and closes the door and locks it.

  The house is dark.

  She puts her right thumb on an unmarked section of the wall. A red light comes from behind the paint. A drawer in a side table slides open on silent rollers. Without looking, her eyes darting from corner to corner and down the hall, Aisling pulls a silenced Sig 226 out of foam casing pressed into the drawer. The safety is already off. This gun’s safety is always off.

  “Pop?” Aisling calls for her grandfather.

  No answer.

  “Pop? It’s me. It’s Ais.”

  No answer.

  Aisling pads through the hall to the door that leads to the basement. Still watching the corners, searching everywhere, the pistol pointing and waiting for a target. No one is there. She’s alone. She stops. Raps a spot on the wall with her fist. A section of wood paneling swings back to reveal a combination safe dial. She spins the dial from pure muscle memory. 59 right. 12 left. 83 right. 52 left. 31 right. The door clicks open.

  Aisling opens the heavy door—it looks wooden but is really three-inch-thick steel—and closes it behind her. The lights go on automatically as soon as it bolts shut. She’s safe.

  She goes down the stairs and passes two racks of guns, a pantry, an empty hazmat suit, scuba gear, and a bulletproof plexiglass closet full of all kinds of hand-to-hand weapons, some of them museum-quality, ancient, and utterly priceless.

  She ignores all of it and goes straight for two bags hanging on a wall. One a backpack, the other a duffel. The go bags. They contain everything she’ll need.

  She turns and stops by the bulletproof closet. Places her eye in front of a retinal scanner and punches away at an alphanumeric, case-enabled keypad. The sequence is 25 characters—GKI2058BjeoG84Mk5QqPlll42—25 characters she has known by rote since the age of seven (she always complained to her grandfather that he should change it periodically, but he never did). The door slides open. She steps into the climate-controlled partition and takes her line’s most cherished sword, a curved steel Falcata from the 6th century BCE—the only steel sword in all of Europe at the time, and a weapon that counts exactly 3,890 lives ended on its razor-sharp edge. The La Tène Celts who trace their blood to the ancients, those who received knowledge directly from the Makers, knew how to make tempered steel for millennia, and told no one their secret. A sword of steel in the 6th century BCE was as good as a magical blade.

  She slips the sheathed Falcata into the top of the duffel bag and leaves the glass room. Aisling heads back up the stairs, the lights ticking off behind her. She emerges into the hall and closes the door and is about to leave when she’s frozen by the sound of clapping.

  “Nice escape, Ms. Kopp,” a man’s voice says from the living room.

  Aisling spins. A man in his mid-to-late 40s sits in Pop’s favorite Barcalounger. He is exactly average in height and build, if a little thick around the middle. He’s an extra on a movie set, a face in the crowd. He has graying hair with a bald spot, and a little bit of stubble on his cheeks. He’s plain in every visible way, except for the long scar Aisling can just make out on the side of his face and neck, and even that seems unremarkable on this man’s ordinary face. He wears blue jeans and a light gray V-neck and black trail runners.

  Aisling wouldn’t pay this guy any attention, except that he’s pointing a compact model HK416 at her. Right now. The red laser sight is trained on her throat. He was clapping by patting his thigh with his right hand.

  A lefty. I wouldn’t have guessed.

  Aisling doesn’t raise her pistol. “You must be McCloskey’s boss.”

  “Bravo.”

  “Got a name?”

  “Greg Jordan.”

  “McCloskey outside?”

  “She’s on her way.”

  “She’s probably pissed.”

  “Actually, no,” he says, his eyebrows rising slightly. “She’s relieved. Anything less than the stunt you pulled and she wouldn’t think you’re worth fighting for. Marrs, though—he’s pissed. He’s one of those ‘I’m too old for this crap’ guys.”

  “I guess I’ll apologize, then.”

  “Good. He’ll appreciate that.”

  “So the airport—that was a test?”

  “What isn’t a test, Ms. Kopp? Especially now that Earth Key has been recovered?”

  “Good point.”

  “Can I tell you something about myself? Since we’ll be spending a lot of time together.”

  “Hate to break it to you, Greg, but we’re not going to be spending a lot of
time together.”

  “That hurts, Ms. Kopp. What is it—you don’t like us?”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  Jordan sighs. “I wouldn’t trust us either in your position. But here’s the thing. I trust you. I have to.”

  “Because I’m your Player?”

  “Yeah, that. And because I have no other option.”

  “Sounded like McCloskey would disagree. She seemed to think there was another option. She said she didn’t want to hook up with me, and that you were the one who convinced her.”

  “That’s true. All of it. See? We’re earning your trust already.”

  Aisling presses, not satisfied with any of this. “What was your other option if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “It’s not important. Now that the asteroid is coming, nothing is as important as working directly with you.”

  “I’d still like to hear it.”

  He sighs again. “We wanted to stop Endgame from happening.”

  Aisling smirks. “And you really thought you could do that?”

  Jordan shrugs. “I guess we dreamed big. Crazy, right?”

  Aisling lets some of the tension out of her shoulders. In spite of her misgivings about accepting help, she likes this guy. “Totally crazy.”

  “But listen—you didn’t let me tell you that thing about myself.”

  “Shoot.”

  Jordan smiles. The irony is not lost on him. He still hasn’t lowered his gun. He’s got a steady hand.

  “I don’t like to drop f-bombs. Never have. A lot of station chiefs I’ve worked for—especially stateside ones—love to drop f-bombs. It’s like they live off them or something, like they provide sustenance. Personally, I think an overreliance on f-bombs is a sign of arrested development, a kind of pointless bluster. A few people are experts at using them and using them often—they can pull it off. But they’re a gifted few.”

  “Okay . . .” Aisling says, drawing the word out.

  Jordan waves his right hand demonstratively. “That said, a well placed f-bomb—just like a well-placed actual bomb—is very effective. I think of them as finite, you know? I hold them in reserve for when I really need them.”

  “I think I know where this is going.”

  “No, I don’t think you fucking do.”

  “That was one.”

  Jordan smiles again. In spite of his misgivings about this whole Endgame thing actually going down on his watch, he likes this girl. “We have your grandfather.”

  Aisling takes a half step forward.

  “Ah-ah. Careful,” Jordan says.

  The gun.

  “Go on.”

  “He’s not a prisoner. He’s on board with us—he wants you to accept our offer. But you have to understand that what McCloskey told you is true. We’re the good guys, but when we need to be the bad guys, we can be very fucking good at doing very fucked-up things. So—if you want your grandfather to live, then you will say yes to us. We will be your best fucking friends to the end of time. That is a promise. But you have to say yes and mean it. You’re the Player—our Player—and we need you so badly that we’re prepared to do anything to make sure you accept us. Say yes, Aisling. Say yes and mean it. No fucking bullshit. Understand? Say. Yes.”

  First McCloskey and now Jordan—these agents love their big speeches. Aisling wonders if they take a training seminar for them. All the same, she feels like Jordan might be more self-aware than his crackpot cohorts. But she also wants to kill him. For forcing her to take his help when, really, she’s the one helping him. And for threatening Pop. She could probably kill Jordan now, finish him off before she died from blood loss, but then that’d be it for Pop and for Playing.

  So what else can she do?

  She shrugs. “I want to see Pop.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “No, Jordan. It’s a fuck yes.”

  U+2624vii

  HILAL IBN ISA AL-SALT

  JetBlue Flight 711, Taxiing to Gate D4, McCarran International Airport, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States

  No one liked the look of Hilal ibn Isa al-Salt.

  No one in Addis, no one at Charles de Gaulle, no one at JFK, and no one on the flight to Las Vegas. They didn’t like that half his head was wrapped in bandages, or that these were mottled by rust-colored bloodstains. They didn’t like the blue eye next to the dark skin, and they especially didn’t like the damaged red-and-pink eye peeking between the wraps. They didn’t like that they had to shield their children’s eyes, or console them after they began to cry at the sight of the Aksumite. They didn’t like his straight white teeth—perfect in every way except that they were housed in the face of this . . . this . . . this monster.

  Which, on the outside, is what Hilal ibn Isa al-Salt has become.

  The only people who spoke to Hilal during his trip were those who had to—the desk agents and the flight attendants and the customs officials and the people who shared the misfortune of sitting next to him on the plane. The most recent seatmate, a young African-American woman, simply whispered, “Oh my God,” and said nothing else. She spent the entire flight from New York looking away, or sleeping, or pretending to sleep.

  Hilal spent the entire flight staring at the back of the seat in front of him. Meditating, accepting the searing pain that will envelop him for the rest of his days, learning to like it.

  He also reflected on his new mission.

  He has come to Las Vegas for one reason—because the phonelike device hidden for over 3,300 years in the Ark of the Covenant with the Makers told him to come home.

  At least that is how Hilal and Master Eben interpreted it.

  When the device glowed to life in the Kodesh Hakodashim, it revealed a seamless image resembling bright interstellar background noise, woven with countless strands of darkness and planes of color, an impressionistic tapestry of space and time in three dimensions. Hilal moved the device up and down and back and forth in sweeping arcs, and this background remained pinned in place, as if the device were a handheld window that afforded a view of an alternate universe.

  But when Hilal positioned the device in certain ways, it revealed three distinct images.

  The first was a data set, a hazy list of two-point coordinates that Hilal discovered he could scroll through by tapping the top or bottom of the device. The list is only visible when Hilal holds the thing with his arm extended to true south. There are well over a thousand numbers in degree-minute-second notation. Virtually all are static, but several change incrementally over time, as if whatever they reference is on the move.

  The 2nd image emerged from the cosmic pattern when Hilal raised his arm to shoulder height and pointed the device east-southeast. There he saw a bright orange, spherical light, pulsating with the rhythm of a fast heartbeat. Hilal initially guessed that, perhaps, in this direction, millions of light years away, was the keplers’ home planet—but this idea was dashed as soon as he started to move. Hilal and Eben had to go to Addis Ababa that night to consult with a plastic surgeon about Hilal’s wounds, and as they traveled south to the Ethiopian capital, he had to adjust the device’s orientation, edging it north, to relocate this orange blob.

  It seemed as though this bright light marked some stationary object on Earth.

  An object located, based on some basic triangulation, in the eastern Himalayas.

  An object that may or may not be essential to Endgame.

  The 3rd image was not a list of numbers or a blot of light, but a symbol. A staff entwined with a pair of snakes, two small wings sprouting from the staff’s top, just above the snake heads.

  The caduceus. Representative of medicine to some, of snake oil and lies to others. The sigil of Hermes, messenger of the Makers, who separated the fighting snakes with his rod and taught them peace.

  To Hilal and Eben, the caduceus means something else entirely. Something sinister. It is enough for Hilal to pause his Endgame, to delay seeking the shining beacon in the Himalayas, and to fly across the world to Las Vega
s. Before Hilal can continue, he must deal with the Corrupter. He of many names: Armilus, Dajjal, Angra Mainyu, Kalki on his white horse.

  The Devil. The Antichrist.

  Ea.

  For this is the Aksumite line’s secret: theirs is unique in that it has not one but two purposes. First, like the others, the Aksumites guard the secrets of human creation and stay vigilant in preparing a Player for Endgame. But they must also seek and ultimately use the rods inside the sacred ark to destroy Ea once and for all.

  Ea, the leader of the Corrupted Brotherhood of the Snake, must die. And Hilal will be the one to kill him. This is what Hilal knows.

  He also knows that it was Ea who poisoned the soul of man. The snake in the Garden of Eden. He steered humanity away from spiritual understanding, hid from them the Ancient Truth.

  This Ancient Truth is what Hilal would pass on to what is left of humanity after the Event. Whether he lives or dies, wins or fails at Endgame, Hilal would see Earth be free of the influence of Ea the Corrupter. He has tormented us for too long.

  Hilal wants every person to see, to feel, to comprehend that no god or scripture or holy man or temple or kepler or Maker is needed for enlightenment. That the key to paradise resides within each and every human being.

  That we are each the god of our shared universe. To know and accept the Ancient Truth is to at last shuck off the psychological shackles forged for centuries by Ea.

  But first, Ea must be destroyed.

  “This is the Ancient Truth that must be taught to the new world.”

  Lost in thought, Hilal actually speaks these words as the plane bumps to a stop at the Jetway.

  The young woman sitting next to him, the same woman whose only words were “Oh my God” upon seeing him, can’t help herself. “What was that?” she asks.

  Hilal turns to her. His blue eye. His red eye. The blood-speckled bandages. “Excuse me?” His voice is low, scratchy, rough.