Endgame

by Kristine Smith

  Scriabin actually brightened when he saw Jani approach. “Good morning! I hope that you’re—”

  “A word, please.” Jani ignored his proffered hand, saw the light in his eyes flicker.

  “Zhenya?”

  Jani and Scriabin both turned just as Anais Ulanova emerged from the passenger cabin of Scriabin’s skimmer.

  “We’ll be leaving in a few minutes.” She glared at Jani, but this time her hatred was tempered by uncertainty. Fear. A hint of panic. “There is something I wish to discuss with you on the way to the ceremony.” She focused on her nephew, her voice ripe with conciliatory lilt. “It may take some time.”

  Scriabin studied his aunt for a few moments, then shook his head. “Oh, Ani.” He pressed a hand to his forehead, then wiped it down his face. “What have you done now?” He looked past her to the center of the drive, and swore.

  Jani followed Scriabin’s glower. To her complete lack of surprise, she saw Lucien standing beside Mako’s skimmer, watching them. Once again, hours of discussion whittled down to words left unspoken, to scant expressions. To Lucien’s bland disregard as he met Ulanova’s pleading eye, and the warm smile when he looked at Jani. To the way Ulanova’s face paled as the realization hit home that her lover had betrayed her.

  “I’ll be a few minutes.” Scriabin shot his cuffs. “I need to speak with ná Kièrshia now.” No “Tyotya.” No patient smile of Familial duty. Only the dead voice and cold eye of a man who had reached his limit.

  Ulanova held out a hand to him. “Zhenya, I—”

  “Get in the skimmer.”

  Ulanova flinched. Then she lowered her hand and, with a last sullen scowl at Jani, did as she was told.

  Scriabin waited until an aide slammed the skimmer door closed. “I don’t want to hear what you have to tell me, do I?” Weariness had replaced anger now, his normally powerful voice emerging weak. Defeated.

  “I’ll be brief.” Jani led him to the small side yard, where the small fountain burbled just loudly enough. “The time wasn’t right before to discuss this. It isn’t any better now, but the way things are going, there may not be a good time for months.” She picked up a handful of gravel from a hammered bowl and started flicking the stones one at a time into the water. “Anais sent Lucien to Elyas to kill me.” She surprised herself with her casual tone. Nothing to see here—move along. Happens every day. “She convinced Mako that he and I were still close, that he’d make a useful…maybe ‘spy’ is too harsh a word. Maybe ‘pair of eyes’ will suffice.” She flicked stones into the water with the beat of her words. Plink—plink—plink— “But the fact was, she felt Feyó more amenable and preferred the idea of having her in charge of Thalassa. My dominance would garner her nothing. She knew I didn’t trust her. Knew that if I had anything to say, she’d wind up on the sidelines.”

  Scriabin stood rigid, and stared at the stone wall in front of him. “If you heard this from Pascal—”

  “He has this habit of telling me the truth.” Jani tossed another pebble. Plink. “A choice between believing him or your tyotya is no choice at all.” She recalled Mako’s words. You reach a certain level…you assume that some might prefer if you did not exist.

  “I don’t—” Scriabin pulled a handkerchief from inside his sleeve and wiped his forehead. “I will do a little digging on my own, if you don’t mind. Some things one must confirm for oneself, however much one trusts the messenger.” He shook out the embroidered cloth, then folded it into a neat square. “I may…talk to Pascal, just to gather a few details.” He glanced at Jani sidelong, his discomfort coating him like his sweat. “In any event, she won’t…she won’t bother you again.”

  “No. She won’t.” Jani tossed the last few pebbles into the water. “I should mention that Thalassa plans to nationalize John’s share of Neoclona. It’ll settle the question of ownership once and for all, and the income should help finance our expansion.”

  “I daresay.” Scriabin paused to lick his lips. “I expect you would like assurance of my and Minister Ulanova’s support for this, election win or not.” He sighed heavily. He knew blackmail when he heard it, and who to thank for the privilege.

  “I want the takeover to happen, and Chicago to stay out of the way.” Jani brushed off her hands. “Financial support would be appreciated as well, as a show of good faith.” Because there’s a GateWay to be considered, and millions of new colonists, and the security of one-quarter of your remaining Commonwealth. A new Oligarch, eager to mend fences with disenfranchised Haárin. She didn’t say any of that aloud, of course, because she knew she didn’t have to. Scriabin was an old hand—he could do the math in his head.

  “We should get going.” Jani left him by the water and returned to her skimmer, where she found Niall waiting.

  He pulled open her door. Offered her his hand for support. “Took a little break to stretch our legs and read someone the Riot Act, did we?”

  “However did you guess?” Jani brushed off Val’s questioning stare. “Let’s go.”

  Her blood flowed down her arm, as warm as the wind, and she sopped it with strips of shop cloth that she’d worked into a braid. Then she tied the braid to a stake and drove the stake into the ground. According to an ancient Vynshà ritual, she had just taken her soul from her body and pinned it in place. Preserved it from whatever desperate act her now godless body intended to perform.

  “I’ve never seen the streets this empty.” Val stared out his window, shook his head. “Not even during the last bombing forays.” He glanced at Jani. “I won’t ask if you’re nervous.”

  “It’s not like I’m giving a speech.” She tried to smile, but the effort made her face ache. “I’m numb.” Her heart thudded as the entry to the Haárin enclave came into view and Feyó’s skimmer appeared at the gate.

  “What does he think of all this?” Val glanced toward the sky. “Wherever he is, in whatever form. What might he be thinking?”

  “That it all ended up pretty much like he predicted it would.” Jani watched one of Meva’s suborns close the doors to a skimvan, and knew it contained the reliquary. “That he won.”

  Val lay his head back and stared through the curved window at the cloudless sky. “You could be right.”

  Jani turned to track the van as they passed it, as it floated out onto the road and slowly accelerated after them, like a shark chasing down its prey.

  You won, inshah. She imagined a loud laugh, a loose-limbed walk and shining auric eyes.

  Rauta Shèràa diminished as cities always did, from center to various sections and quarters to the outskirts, until it receded, shortened, faded into the horizon behind them. Thirty minutes passed, and the land rolled and roughened, stone in white and brown and coral pink dotted with grey-green scrub. An hour passed, and even that fell away, until all that remained were the outcroppings and the dunes and the high blue milky sky.

  So where are the crowds? Jani was about to rib Niall that his sources had miscalculated by a factor of ten or more when they passed over a rocky ridge and into the shallow bowl that held the sands of light’s weeping. She saw them then, seemingly as numerous as grains of sand, held back from the center of the bowl by low barriers and patrols of mixed humanish and idomeni security. A sea of faces—the true meaning of that hackneyed phrase was driven home with a hammer as in every direction she looked idomeni filled her view.

  Then there were the skimmers, the vans and trucks and arrays and holocams.

  “Oh my God.” Val sat up straight, hand scrabbling along the seat to link with hers.

  “Told you.” Niall eyed her in his rearview as he halted the skimmer on the rim.

  Jani nodded. Her mouth had gone as dry as the land surrounding them, her muscles clenched so tight that it hurt to move.

  Niall exited the skimmer, setting his lid and straightening his tunic as he walked back to Jani’s door and opened it. “Need a hand, gel?” he asked, and offered her his.

  Jani gave Val’s hand a last squeeze and let it go even
as she reached out and took Niall’s and held it fast. Stepped out onto desolation that had not changed over the course of twenty years, breathed the light, dry air that smelled the same, felt the heat that drilled her to the hybrid bone.

  She looked off to her right, toward the site where the hospital had stood. Every block and tile had been knocked down and carted away years before, sunken into burial sites all over Shèrá, leaving only the telltale flatness that spoke of mechanical leveling and foundations and the incursion of civilization into a place not meant to contain it.

  Jani imagined the outlines of walls, three stories high and devoid of windows, a flat roof. Remembered nightfall, that first chill in the air, and the warmth of her blood as it ran down her arm.

  “Jan?” Niall leaned close. “You’re wearing the bug. Anything goes wrong, just call.”

  “I’m all right.” She let go of his hand, reached beneath her overrobe to the sheath on her belt. Slid out the short blade that Meva had sent her the previous day and started down the slope. Did her best to shut out the faces and the cams and the weighted silence, the faint whistle of wind and occasional cry of a bird the only discernable sounds. How can so many bodies make so little noise? No one spoke. Overrobes and sleeves fluttered, the only movement in the vast ring of mortality.

  As she neared the bottom, she pressed the point of the blade to her right sleeve and slashed downward, the cloth renting with a sharp ripping sound, like the opening of a tent flap. She slowed, then stopped as she reached the foot of the slope. Off to the right, twenty or so meters distant, stood Meva, bracketed by Dathim and Feyó. Behind them, upon a small altar stone, rested the reliquary.

  She started walking again. Four strides. A fifth. Then she stopped, raised her arm so the cloth tumbled back to the elbow, revealing her bare forearm. Drew the blade across her skin, then waved her arm in a sweeping arc, spraying her blood.

  That first, wasted shot. The opening of the tent. Wide, staring eyes.

  The second shot.

  One—

  Another tent. No wasted shot this time.

  —two—

  The next tent, and the next.

  —three—four—

  …another cut, another spray of blood. Another. Another. Too many times to track. Too many times.

  —fifteen—sixteen—seventeen—

  She tried to pray at first, impose order upon the random path she walked. Then realized that order had no place here.

  One Thalassan day, her soul cloth vanished. She hunted for it, couldn’t find it. Ran to Tsecha’s house to tell him, only to find that he had taken it, or sent someone to take it. He had untied the knotting and shaken loose the braids. I have returned your soul to you, nìa, he told her.

  And she returned theirs to them.

  —twenty-four—twenty-five.

  Twenty-six.

  “That part’s over.” Niall’s voice, in her ear.

  “As much as it can ever be.” Jani looked toward the network skimmers. “Hope they got it all.”

  “You’re almost through it, gel. Just a few minutes more.” Niall paused, cleared his throat. “Give the old bird a nod from me when he goes.”

  “What do we do now, Cap?”

  “Place me under arrest, Sergeant Burgoyne. I’ve broken treaty law. You have to arrest me.”

  “No, you did it to save us—”

  “If you don’t arrest me, they’ll think you were involved. Borgie—listen to me. You didn’t know what I was planning—that’s what you’ll tell them because it’s the truth. You didn’t know, and when I told you what I had done, you did your duty and placed me under arrest.”

  “Captain—”

  “I did what I had to. Now it’s your turn.”

  Jani stood over the last place. The last. Her right arm had numbed. She felt stiffness where blood had dried, the sting of the breeze across open wounds. But no pain. Not yet.

  She sheathed the blade. Turned to the right and walked. Her head felt afloat, her knees wobbly. There was a hollow where her heart had been.

  She fixed on Meva, who stood still as statuary, arms folded and hands tucked into the sleeves of her overrobe. As she drew closer, the female stepped to one side, allowing her a clear path to the reliquary.

  Jani stopped before the altar. Lifted the reliquary lid. It seemed heavier than it had in Thalassa, hard-edged and unwieldy. She brought in her elbows and braced them against her sides for support, hefting the lid like an overladen tray and setting it down on the left side of the reliquary. As her hands slid along the edge, some roughness caught her finger, the one bearing the redstone ring. She felt the sliver slide in, the sting when she pushed the lid farther up the table and applied pressure to the wound. Making sure I stay conscious, are you? Her lip twitched as she fought the urge to grin. Always the considerate one.

  She moved away from the lid and stood before the open reliquary. “Hello, old friend.” She reached into the box and took hold of the scroll, clutching it hard with her left hand to compensate for the weakness in her right. “The place has been cleaned for you. Their souls have been healed.” Her hands remained dry and steady, and she thanked her old teacher as she lifted the scroll and set it on the altar. “Follow them home,” she said as she opened the cover, then turned each page. Felt something brush her cheek, and knew it was the breeze, but decided that for today she would imagine it as something else.

  I understand more than you believe, nìa.

  “Yes, nìRau. I think you did.”

  Jani braced her hands against the altar. “The stone is so nice and warm.”

  Meva moved in beside her and placed her hand against the stone as well. “I find it cool.” She touched Jani’s right hand, then took Jani’s arm and led her up the incline. “You feel most as yourself, ná Kièrshia?”

  “I feel most as someone who’s going to pass out if she doesn’t sit down soon.” Jani fielded Meva’s look of horror. “Don’t worry—I won’t faint in front of the worldskein. I will maintain my presence and my godly composure.” She breathed, felt her heart skip, saw golden flecks invade her field of vision. “Stay away,” she said to John as he started to walk toward her. “Not until I get inside the skimmer.” She looked toward the crowds, who had not yet begun to disperse, and offered a slight hand wave to the nearest reporter, who waved back. Slid into the skimmer as soon as Niall flipped up the gullwing, then gripped the edge of her seat as John and Val piled in after her and the weight imbalance caused the vehicle to shudder and buck like a small boat in a storm.

  “When I watched you draw that blade down your sleeve and make the first cut, I thought to myself, ‘Hot damn, she nicked her brachial artery. John and I will be running down to get her in two, three minutes.’” Val pushed up her right sleeve and swallowed hard. “I assume you’re going to want these to scar?”

  “You assume correctly.” Jani felt some remnant of tension leach away as Val and John eased her onto her back. John then dragged a seat cushion out of its holder and tucked it under her knees while Val attached a transfuser pack to the crook of her right arm.

  Niall immediately began the tricky exercise of maneuvering the triple-length through the dispersing crowds. “‘Then will he strip his sleeves and show his scars, and say, “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.” Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot, but he’ll remember with advantages what feats he did that day.’ Henry the Fifth again.” He paused. Started to speak, stopped, then tried again. “Is she all right?”

  “She will be as soon as we get her blood volume back up.” Val grumbled under his breath. “Did you have to bleed quite this much?”

  “She did what she had to.” John pressed a scanner lead to her shirt just over her heart. “It was…the most starkly beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

  “Scared the hell out of me.” Val adjusted the transfuser settings, then fell back onto the seat opposite. “Hundreds of thousands of idomeni, and none of them so much as whispering.”

  Jani closed her
eyes. Felt the vehicle hum run along her spine. Drifted in and out of sleep. Dreamed of the reliquary. Dreamed she saw Tsecha, walking across the sand toward her, overrobe billowing behind him. Dreamed she heard John’s voice, Niall’s response.

  Felt the skimmer slow, then stop, and realized that she wasn’t dreaming at all.

  “I’ll only be a minute.” John said as he placed his hand on her brow.

  Jani opened her eyes just as he pushed up the gullwing and exited the skimmer. “Is this where I think it is?”

  “Yeah.” Val sat on the edge of his seat. Then he sighed, wiped his eyes, and followed his partner outside.

  “Network vans are going to be coming through any minute. I told him he needed to make it fast.” Niall sat back, pulled out his case. Soon the clove aroma drifted through the cabin. “Should’ve figured he’d want to see this place. It’s his Knevçet Shèràa, after all.”

  Jani sat up. Moved her arms, her legs. No stars in front of my eyes. Walking might prove another matter entirely, but she wouldn’t know until she tried.

  “Can’t sit still, can you?” Niall shook his head. “They might want to be alone, you know? They might just need some time.”

  Jani looked through the open door to the scene beyond. John pacing back and forth, Val standing off to one side, his hand over his mouth. No shrine on this site. No marker or fencing or designation of any kind.

  “It was a turning point for me, too,” Jani said as she disembarked. “I used to wonder what this place looked like.” She walked carefully, slowing as the hollow sensation in her chest returned. “I thought about coming here once, when you and Val went to a meeting at the consulate.” She came to a halt an arm’s reach from John, who had stopped pacing and now stared down at the ground. “Eamon even left the place unlocked, probably hoping that I’d bolt. But I couldn’t find a skimmer.”

  John didn’t respond at first. Then he crouched, worked his hand into the sandy ground, gone from dune to semi-arid as they drew near Rauta Shèràa again. “Here.” He let the ground trickle through his fingers, then made a sweeping motion with one arm. “Wreckage scattered for kilometers. Remains. We’d pick up some blackened bit the size of a finger and didn’t know if we were looking at tissue or a charred piece of transport until we scanned it.” He cleaned his hand on the leg of his trousers and slowly straightened. “Then we found—” He stopped. Swallowed. “We’d watched idomeni die for months. We weren’t allowed to help. We weren’t allowed to save…so many. I lost count. Then we found you, and decided—” He turned to look at her, eyes bright as the sun that blistered above them. “—and decided that we would save you, and that no one would stop us.” He laughed. “Law of unintended consequences. If I knew then what I knew now…” He fixed on her for a long moment. “…I’d still do it. I wouldn’t change—” He turned away. “My decision, to add to all the others that we made, and lived with, and paid for.”