by James Frey
“No duh.”
It’s something he used to say to her when she was little and she had excitedly reported some obvious fact of life to him that was news to her. He never used to say it so meanly.
“Will you hate me, if I do it?” Sarah asks.
“Probably,” he says.
Only when he says it, when she feels her heart drop, does she realize how much she wants this. That maybe she wasn’t supposed to be the Player, maybe she’s just the backup choice—but maybe that doesn’t matter. The council picked her, Sarah Alopay. Little sis saves the world. She likes the sound of it. More than she thought she would.
“Oh,” Sarah says.
There’s a long silence between them. She presses her palm to the door, and wonders if she should tell him—that if she’d spoken up sooner, yelled and screamed until the trainer let him out, maybe none of this would be happening. That she’s a coward, and he’s paid the price.
“But I’ll hate you even more if you don’t do it,” Tate says. “It’s your call.”
Last month, for French homework, Sarah had to make a list of the things she liked best. She was bored by the assignment, bored by the class, which like all her subjects, comes easily to her. And she certainly wasn’t going to reveal her true personal preferences to her French teacher, who has a unibrow and smells like foot. So she dashed off a list that was a lie, filled with whatever French words popped most quickly into her head: le gâteau and les chiens and ma famille.
But that night, in her journal, she made a list for herself.
Things I Like:
my BFF
my brother
my parents, sometimes, when they’re not being JERKS
soccer
algebra
being smart
Saturday afternoons
scary movies
Christopher
Christopher
CHRISTOPHER
Christopher is her boyfriend, and has been for nearly one year. He is handsome and funny and acts like a boyfriend out of a romantic movie, the kind who brings you flowers and candy and tugs at the corners of your lips when you think you’re too sad to smile. Sarah is only 14, which she knows is probably too young to love anyone, except that Romeo and Juliet were also 14, and that makes her think that maybe there’s no such thing as too young and maybe she and Christopher are forever—and that night she got so distracted thinking about her boyfriend and the way his eyes squint when he laughs and the way her heart thumps when he puts his arm around her and slips it into the pocket of her jeans that she forgot all about her list.
In the middle of the night, she woke up from a nightmare slick with sweat. She couldn’t remember anything about the dream, but she couldn’t fall back asleep. So she turned on the light and pulled out her journal again, and added one more thing to the list, something she would never have confessed to her French teacher or Christopher or anyone else, especially not Tate, who wanted to save the world.
Things I Like:
being normal
“But why me?” she asks again, as the car speeds toward the Mississippi River. In three more hours, they will reach the most sacred spot of the Cahokian people, and Sarah will swear herself to her new fate. Three more hours—then there’s no turning back. “I still don’t understand why they would pick me.”
Her mother doesn’t talk while she’s driving: she prefers to focus all her attention on the road. So it falls to Sarah’s father to turn around and reassure his daughter. “Because you’re brilliant and kind and wonderful,” he says, and she can tell from the set of his face how much he hates this, and how much he’s trying to hide it.
Tate refused to come.
“None of that crap is my problem anymore,” he said through the closed door of his room. He doesn’t leave his room unless he has to, nor will he let anyone in. “Have fun, little sis.”
Sarah’s phone buzzes for the third time in an hour. It’s her best friend, Reena, wanting to know how her big date night went. Last night was the one-year anniversary of the first time Sarah kissed Christopher Vanderkamp. Christopher planned a romantic dinner for them, and Reena will want every detail.
Yesterday afternoon, Reena came over to help her choose an outfit for the date. “Not that one,” she sniffed at the ruffled black dress Sarah pulled out first. “You want him thinking make-out sessions, not funerals.”
Sarah put the dress back on its hanger and held up a lime-green skirt for Reena’s inspection. She knew Reena liked this one—Reena was the one who had picked it out.
But her best friend wrinkled her nose. “It just doesn’t look like you.”
“You told me that was a good thing!” Sarah reminded her, laughing. “You said that’s why I had to get it, so I could transform myself into a ‘sexy beast.’”
Then they were both giggling.
“I have most certainly never uttered those words in my whole life,” Reena said, with as much dignity as she could muster while snorting with laughter.
“Did so.”
“Well . . .” Reena shrugged. “Who told you to listen to everything I say?”
“Pretty sure you did,” Sarah said. “You tell me that basically every day.”
“Then listen to me now.” Reena climbed off Sarah’s bed and rifled through her closet, pulling out a pair of worn purple corduroys and a long black shirt. It was Sarah’s favorite outfit. “Wear this.”
“You always tell me that makes me look boring,” Sarah reminded her. Reena prefers bright colors, wild patterns. All year, she’s been begging her mother for permission to dye her hair blue. Anything to make her stand out.
Reena grinned. “Apparently, Christopher Vanderkamp likes boring.”
Sarah elbowed her best friend; Reena whacked her gently with a pillow. “Christopher likes you,” Reena reminded her. “It’s been a year—you don’t have to pretend to be someone else for him. He just wants you. Smart, wonderful, dependable, maybe ever-so-slightly boring Sarah Alopay.”
“You think?” Sarah asked. After all this time, she still couldn’t quite believe that someone like Christopher wanted someone like her. “It’s just . . . he’s so amazing.”
“Yeah, and fortunately, he’s smart enough to realize you’re amazing,” Reena pointed out. “It’s what makes you perfect for each other.”
Sarah agreed to wear the purple cords; she promised to call Reena in the morning and tell her everything.
And when she said it, she really believed she would. Even though she and her parents were supposed to leave the next day for the sacred ceremony. Even though her stomach was churning, thinking about how much everything in her life was about to change—and how she couldn’t tell Reena or Christopher about any of it.
She put on the cords. She put on the black shirt. She brushed a light layer of silver shadow across her eyelids and put on the pink lip gloss Christopher liked, the kind that tasted like bubble gum.
Then she rushed to the bathroom, bent over the toilet, and threw up.
She couldn’t do it.
She couldn’t face him across the table, smile, tell him how happy he made her, pretend that everything was fine. She couldn’t lie to him like that.
So she lied to him another way.
“I am so sorry,” she told him on the phone. “I was feeling fine a couple hours ago, but now my stomach is just, like, Nope, don’t think so.”
It wasn’t quite a lie, because every time she thought about the future, her stomach flipped somersaults all over again.
“Is this . . .” He hesitated. He’d been doing that a lot, lately. Ever since Tate got hurt, ever since she’d gotten the offer from the elders, there were so many things she couldn’t say to him. He could tell she was holding something back—so he started holding back too. “Is this about your brother? Because if you’re not in the mood for a whole big thing, I could come over, we could watch one of those terrible movies you insist on loving—”
“They’re not terrible!”
&nb
sp; “I love you, but anything called SlasherFest Summertime Fun, Part Three is a terrible movie.”
“It’s Slasher Summer Camp Fun, Part Four,” she corrected him, thinking, He loves me, he loves me, he loves me. “And it’s awesome.”
“I’m just saying, we don’t have to do this whole dinner thing. I just want to see you. Cheer you up.”
Sarah sighed. “Look, I know I’ve been kind of weird, lately—”
“Dude, he’s your brother. I get it.”
Christopher thinks that all her bad moods, all the new distance between them, are about Tate’s injury. And she lets him think it. Which isn’t fair to anyone.
But it’s easier.
“I want to see you too,” she said, thinking, I love you too, but she couldn’t say that, not with what she was about to do. How could she promise herself to him when she was about to promise herself to the Cahokian line? “But I’m really just sick, I swear. Unless you want me puking all over your precious Converse—”
“Enough said.”
Sarah smiled. Nothing was more important to Christopher than his sneaker collection.
“Rain check?” she asked.
“Just try to get out of it. I dare you.”
She hung up the phone, wondering if she’d made a mistake. Maybe she could have just told him the truth. But how, exactly, would that work? Christopher was cute and rich and the star quarterback on the JV football team; he was sweet and funny and endlessly understanding. But no way would he understand if she told him she was a descendant of an ancient civilization and she was about to devote the next six years of her life to training for Endgame, just in case the Sky People returned and decided it was time for the end of the world.
No, even Christopher wouldn’t understand that, and she couldn’t expect him to.
He sent her a sweet text this morning, with a GIF of a dancing gorilla to make her smile. He’s been trying to so hard lately to make her smile. She hates disappointing him.
Sarah puts the phone away. She doesn’t want to lie to her best friend any more than she wanted to lie to Christopher. It’s easier just to ignore her for the day. Once she gets back home, once she’s officially sworn in as the Player and starting on her new life, then she’ll decide how to deal with her old one. She slips in her earbuds and turns the music up as loud as she can stand it: Arcade Fire, Christopher’s favorite band. Sarah closes her eyes and tries to lose herself.
It’s a six-hour drive from Omaha to Collinsville, Illinois. They make it in eight—Sarah’s mother is a very careful driver.
It’s midnight, and the historic site is closed to tourists. The council, of course, has a man on the inside, and so everything is prepared for them. Sarah and her parents rush through the gate, though Sarah’s father laughs and says there’s no point in hurrying.
“After all, they can’t start without you,” he says, and Sarah tries to laugh too.
Her parents are doing the best they can to pretend that this is an occasion for pride and joy—and that they’re not remembering the last time they were here, hand in hand with their precocious preschooler, Tate stumbling over the oath that would indebt him to his people for life.
One thousand years ago, these acres were home to the continent’s first and greatest civilization. For more than half a millennium, the Cahokian people ruled over their teeming metropolis—and then, mysteriously, vanished. Nothing was left of the city but three square miles of grass and soil mounds, the largest of them 10 stories tall. Nothing was left of the civilization or its people but a handful of survivors, and a story handed down through hundreds of generations.
A story of a bargain made with the Sky People. The Cahokians would receive power and technology, enough to rule over the young nation for centuries. In return, when the Sky People asked, the Cahokians would hand over a precious resource: 1,000 of their children.
The Cahokians ruled, as planned. After 500 years, the Sky People came back, as promised. They demanded payment—and the Cahokians refused.
For the first time in 10,000 years, a human civilization waged war against the creatures from the sky. They fought bravely—and died horribly, all of them, the civilization annihilated with a single blast, only a handful of survivors left to tell the tale.
These survivors, travelers who returned home to find everything they knew and love destroyed, were sentenced to a humiliating punishment of their own: the Sky People reached into their minds and obliterated the true name of their people.
Hundreds of years later, Europeans conquered the continent and assigned a new name to the vanished people: Cahokia. The New World has no idea there are survivors of the ancient civilization, that the Cahokians lived, haunted by its past glories and defeats.
The Cahokians had been forced to forget their name, but they remembered their history, and they struggled on in secret, determined that their bloodline should survive.
By now, most North Americans have Cahokian blood running through their veins; their survival now depends on Sarah’s willingness to fight.
It is said that across the world, the sacred sites of the other 11 ancient lines have been preserved: underground temples, secret caverns, hidden passageways that the land developers and tourists know nothing about.
Not here.
The European invaders proved nearly as skilled as the Sky People at obliteration. There are no hidden passageways running beneath the Cahokian mounds. There are only millions of cubic feet of soil raising the earth to the sky, and postholes showing where the ancient people once erected Woodhenge—an arrangement of wooden posts that symbolized the Earth and the four cardinal directions, used to communicate with the gods.
Sarah’s people have erected new posts for the night, and now she stands at their center.
The eldest of the elders is before her, a 6,000-year-old stone in his hand.
Sarah recognizes the stone; she’s seen it every day of her life, hanging from Tate’s neck. It belongs to the Player, and always has.
If she goes through with this tonight, it will belong to her.
She won’t be the normal one anymore, the one who takes shortcuts on her homework and scarfs pizzas with her best friend and has nothing more important to think about than whether Christopher will ask her to the school formal. She won’t be a backup anymore. She’ll be the Player, and the lives of her people will rest on her shoulders.
If she goes through with this, she’ll claim what was once her big brother’s future—a future that scares her, of violence and danger and pain, all the things she never wanted for him and wants even less for herself.
And he might never forgive her for it.
Sarah’s phone buzzes in her back pocket. The elder looks at her, pointedly, and Sarah wonders whether the old man has ever even seen a cell phone. She wonders what he would say if she asked him to pause the ceremony for a moment while she texts Reena back. Hey, it wasn’t my idea that the Player should be a teenager, she would like to tell him. What did you expect?
But of course she can’t do that.
Add it to the list of things she can’t do, now.
Sarah is suddenly having trouble breathing. A hot flush rises in her cheeks. Somewhere, far away, Reena is hungry for gossip; somewhere, far away, Christopher is worrying about his girlfriend’s supposed food poisoning. She wants to run away from this, run home to them, maybe just run, and keep running until she leaves everything and everyone behind, until there are no more hard decisions to make, only the sound of wind in her ears and the thump of ground beneath her feet.
She doesn’t run.
“Put out your hand,” the leader of the Cahokian elders commands her.
Sarah does, and he lays the ancient stone on her open palm. It feels warm to the touch, and almost seems to pulse with her heartbeat, but she tells herself that must be her imagination.
The old man says several words in the ancient language of the Cahokian people. “Do you forswear all else?” he asks her then, in English. The same question ha
s been asked of every Player for a thousand years.
There are countless reasons to say no to this question. There is Christopher; there is Tate. There is everything she wants for herself, and everything she’s afraid of. Countless reasons to say no, and only one reason to say yes.
But that one reason trumps all the others.
Her family; her people. All the Cahokian lives that have been lost, and all those hundreds of thousands more that could be, when Endgame comes. They need a champion.
Sarah came to this place still unsure how she would answer the ancient question. Half expecting she would lose her nerve, back out at the last moment. She has always trusted logic, and her logic tells her that this is a foolish choice.
But there’s something in her, something deeper and wiser than logic, something reaching for her destiny.
The elders chose her for a reason. She doesn’t understand what it could possibly be. But some part of her—that sure, steady part beneath rational thought—feels certain that they were right. That this is the right choice for her, and for her line. The Cahokian people need a champion, and that champion should be, must be, Sarah Alopay.
The stone burns her palm; she grips it tight, feeling suddenly connected to all those generations of Players long dead, woven into the fabric of Cahokian history. She can feel them out there, the Players of the past, dead and alive. They’re watching her, waiting for her to join them. All except Tate. She can’t feel him at all. “Do you pledge yourself to the survival of our people, and to the ancient oath?”
Sarah’s parents have warned her not to swear unless she’s completely sure. That there’s no going back.
They don’t spell out what the punishment would be for breaking her oath, but Sarah is Cahokian, and every Cahokian knows that promises made to the Sky People are not to be lightly broken.
Too much is at stake.
Too many have already died.
She closes her eyes, breathing in the soil and the sky. She hears the echo of Tate’s screams and can almost feel the touch of Christopher’s fingers grazing her lips, asking permission to kiss her for the first time. She feels something else, an insistent vibration in her hand, and for a moment she thinks it’s the phone again, Reena breaking in at the most inopportune moment.