Endgame: The Calling

by James Frey

  She prays for luck and deliverance.

  But mostly she prays for vengeance.

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  AN LIU, CHIYOKO TAKEDA, SARAH ALOPAY, JAGO TLALOC

  Terracotta Warriors Museum, Secret Star Chamber, Lintong District, Xi’an, China

  Six seconds.

  “Where did she come from?” Cheng Cheng asks, alarmed at the sudden presence of Chiyoko. He clutches the disk to his chest, afraid of this stranger who inconveniently showed up just as he’s about to unlock the secret of his life’s work. Cheng Cheng has not noticed An’s little present, or he would have more reason to be afraid.

  The ball rolls to a stop at the feet of the ancient stone warrior.

  “An Liu!” Sarah shouts.

  Blinkblinkblinkblinkblink.

  And there he is, the Shang, rushing into the Star Chamber, tackling Chiyoko to the ground.

  Five seconds.

  Cheng Cheng says, “What is—?”

  Sarah grabs Cheng Cheng and pulls him toward the opening at the opposite side of the chamber. She saw what An Liu did to Marcus back at the Calling and knows what he’s capable of. They have to move quickly.

  Jago snatches the disk away from Cheng Cheng, who tumbles onto his knees in the entrance to the tunnel. Sarah starts to go back for him, but Jago grabs her hand and drags her forward.

  “Forget him!”

  Three seconds.

  An pulls Chiyoko to the other tunnel, making sure to keep his armored body in between her and the bomb.

  “Go!” he says to her. They’re close, touching, and his tic is completely gone. As they move away, Chiyoko peers over her shoulder, hoping that the disk is safe.

  One second.

  Jago and Sarah run, hunched, into the darkness.

  Zero seconds.

  Boom.

  The force of the explosion throws Jago and Sarah 23 feet forward. Lucky for them, Cheng Cheng, still hunched in the tunnel’s opening, acts as a kind of sacrificial plug, shielding the Olmec and the Cahokian from the worst of the blast.

  They look up, relieved to be alive. But then the first rocks begin to fall around them.

  The tunnel is collapsing.

  “Move!” Sarah says. She is in front now and can hear Jago coughing a few feet behind her.

  They run as fast as they can through the pitch black, the walls shaking, dirt and rocks falling on their heads and gathering at their heels. For 30, 40, 50 feet there is no light, and Sarah, keeping her arms in front of her, continually plows straight into walls before figuring out which way to turn.

  “It’s too dark!” she yells. She can feel Jago’s hand curled on the back of her shirt.

  The air is choked with dust. Breathing is hard. A low rumbling builds behind them. Jago has to put his mouth against her ear to be heard.

  “Keep going unless you wanna be buried alive!”

  In the other tunnel, Chiyoko is out cold. An is lying on top of her, coughing. He puts his fingers to her neck. Her heart is beating and her breath is steady, but his fingers come back hot and sticky. Blood.

  Oh God, what have I done? An thinks desperately, as he licks the blood from his fingertips. My tics are still gone; her chi is that strong. I must have it.

  He stands. Pulls a green glow stick from his vest, shakes it and snaps it, illuminates the tunnel. He hears a rumbling nearby, but this tunnel was farther outside the blast radius than the one the others ran toward. An and Chiyoko should be spared any cave-ins. He hopes the others aren’t so lucky.

  He looks down at the Mu Player. She has a lump on her head above her right eye and some scratches on her cheeks. The blood is coming from her neck. He holds the glow stick near.

  Please no, please no.

  He pulls at the skin and she moans.

  Not the carotid artery. Not the carotid artery.

  “There!” Jago shouts.

  A sliver of light appears in front of them. As they sprint toward it, the lit space widens and grows. Sarah digs deep and finds another gear—she has always taken comfort in the fact that she is the fastest person she has ever known—and her step lightens as she cruises across the shaking floor.

  Jago can see now, the tunnel dimly illuminated from the light up ahead. He lets go of Sarah’s shirt, realizing that he doesn’t have much choice. She’s so much faster than he is.

  Sarah reaches the end of the tunnel and makes a sharp turn, and she’s out. She skids to a stop just inches from a sword that looks primed to take her head off. Another Player lying in wait, ready to attack?

  No, just one of the clay warriors. Her adrenaline still pumping hard, Sarah breathes a sigh of relief. Then Jago crashes into her back and they fall to the ground.

  Behind him, a plume of dust ejects from the tunnel as it fills with earth. The Star Chamber is buried once more.

  “Sorry,” Jago mutters as he helps her up.

  “Glad you caught up,” Sarah replies, glancing at the wreckage behind them.

  Wordlessly, Jago brushes the dust from his eyes. Sarah studies him. He looks wounded somehow, disappointed; it’s the same look opposing goalies used to give her on the soccer field.

  “You know, it wasn’t a race,” she says.

  Jago looks up at her. “Wasn’t it?”

  Before Sarah can reply, someone shouts at them.

  They are back in Pit One, at the rear of one of the long rows of ancient guardians. The viewing platform is about 30 m away. Tourists point in their direction. Guards yell in Chinese.

  “We better go,” says Jago.

  No blood squirts out of Chiyoko’s neck. It’s just a gash. It will need stitches, though. An Liu hoists Chiyoko over his shoulder and walks slowly through the tunnels, the ghostly, ethereal light of the glow stick showing the way. He makes it back to the tent, sets her gingerly down. The light is better. He can see.

  He removes the flak jacket and his motorcycle helmet. The back of the jacket is jagged with shards of clay from the exploded warriors. It is good that he wore it. Good that he shielded her. He examines the rest of her body and she is whole. Only bleeding from her neck. The only concerns now are an infection of the wound and possible concussion from the head contusion.

  An smiles. No tics, no shivers, no stutter. He marvels at the clarity of his mind. He has no idea how, but the girl does this to him, something in her or of her. He must get it from her.

  Whatever he has to do, however he has to do it.

  He unrolls a field kit. Pulls a syringe. Shoots the skin around the wound with a lidocaine-epinephrine mixture. Chiyoko moans again. An knows that the injection stings, usually more than the injury itself. He waits 12 seconds and pulls the skin aside and douses it with iodine and saline. He pulls the skin together and closes the gash with butterfly bandages. The stitches will come when they arrive back at his place.

  He checks her pulse.

  Strong.

  Her breath.

  Good.

  He hears shots being fired in the direction of the entrance, half a kilometer to the southwest.

  He puts his helmet back on and pulls her over his narrow, hunched shoulders and leaves the tent and makes his way back to his motorcycle.

  He walks calmly, steadily, easily, her spell still working on him.

  He feels young and strong and nervous. It is the best feeling he can ever remember having.

  And he’s never going to let it go.

  “Follow me!” Jago yells, bobbing and weaving through the statues. Sarah follows, hot on his heels. The guards are after them, clambering down the metal stairs, yelling and pointing. The guides usher the tourists from the action.

  “They must think we blew up the tunnel!” Sarah says, running.

  A guard plants his feet wide on the platform. He raises a pistol and aims it at them. They keep moving through the warriors, making sharp turns, keeping their movements unpredictable.

  The guard fires and the shot echoes through the hangar, zinging past Jago’s head and blowing apart the should
er of a nearby warrior.

  “Guns at a tourist spot!” shouts Sarah, a little shocked. “Are they nuts?”

  “It’s China. They take this shit seriously,” Jago replies. Back in Juliaca, he had men shoot at him for much less.

  Sarah sprints by a warrior holding a crossbow. She pulls the weapon from the statue’s hands. It’s loaded, ready, untouched for two millennia. She hopes it still works. The guard fires again, and this shot goes just wide of Jago’s head. Sarah skids to a stop and drops to her knees, bringing the stock of the crossbow to her shoulder in a single motion. She’s trained with crossbows, killed deer with them, hit targets from 300 yards. But never anything like this. She tries to center herself and pulls the release.

  The power of the ancient bow surprises her, and the bolt flies fast and true. It strikes the guard’s hands, moves straight through them, and he drops the gun on the floor and starts screaming.

  “They built good crossbows,” Sarah says, impressed not just with it but with herself. Jago snorts, shocked that the old weapon even functioned at all.

  Three more guards appear on their level, coming directly toward them. Jago isn’t going to take any chances with the ancient bows. He grabs a sword from one of the statues and runs directly at the nearest guard, keeping a wall on his right. The guard is young and scared. He raises his gun. When Jago draws close, he angles his body and plants his feet on the wall, using his momentum to keep running, his body parallel to the ground, for several feet. In this way Jago gets around the awestruck guard, and when he’s behind him, he hits the back of the guard’s neck hard with the butt end of the sword’s hilt. The guard goes down in a heap.

  Sarah throws the crossbow away and runs for the guard nearest her. She executes a perfect flying forward flip as the guard shoots and misses. She lands right in front of him and pushes hard into the middle of his chest with the heels of both palms. He drops his gun and collapses, gasping for air.

  “Here!” Jago yells, sprinting toward an open door under the platform. Sarah grabs another crossbow from the final line of soldiers and follows him to the exit. They spill out into the daylight, their eyes blinking. There are no guards nearby. Not yet, anyway.

  “Over there!” Sarah says, pointing toward a parking lot. They cover the 40 yards in under 4.5 seconds and skid to a stop next to a blue Chery Fulwin hatchback. The windows are rolled down. Jago throws the sword into the backseat and climbs into the driver’s seat. He leans under the steering wheel and tears off the fuse panel and within four seconds the car is on.

  “You’ve done that before,” Sarah says, impressed.

  “Like you haven’t.” Jago grins at her.

  “Not that fast.”

  Jago smirks, wondering if she’s trying to make him feel better. Whatever, it’s working. He puts it in reverse just as half a dozen guards appear at the edge of the lot. “Buckle up.”

  Three guards close in behind the car as Jago guns it, doing a perfect J-turn right out of the parking spot. Two of the guards jump away, and the last gets nailed by the side of the little car. Jago drops the car into 2nd gear and floors it. They peel out of the lot, breaking through a checkpoint. The guards gather in front of them like a swarm, waving hands and pistols, as the car speeds down the hill toward the main road. A large metal gate is sliding closed behind the guards.

  It’s going to be close.

  Two men move to help the gate close faster, and shots are fired. Jago and Sarah hunker behind the dashboard. The windshield is peppered with bullets, turned into a white wall of webbing. Sarah sinks lower in her seat and kicks her feet up—once, twice—knocking the windshield loose. Jago can see again.

  The gate is more than half closed. They’re not going to make it.

  “We can plow through!” yells Jago.

  “Not in this piece of crap,” Sarah says back, tugging at her seat belt. “You ever see crash-test dummies in Peru?”

  Jago puts the screaming engine in fourth, tries to squeeze every ounce of power out of it.

  The guards scatter as the car comes for them. The two assisting the gate turn and run. It’s only ¾ths closed now, but that will be enough to stop them.

  Sarah squints at the guard booth. She thinks she can see the panel that operates the gate. There are two guards standing in front of it, watching, dumbfounded, not to mention a window in the way. They’re traveling at high speed, have seconds until impact. It’s an impossible shot.

  Trust your training, Sarah. Don’t overthink it. That’s what Tate would say. Don’t overthink it.

  Sarah kicks the crossbow into her hands from the footwell and, without even shouldering it, shoots.

  The bolt sails between the two guards, shatters the window, and just nicks the key that operates the gate mechanism. It turns in the opposite direction; the gate slowly grinds backward just as their car reaches it. Sparks shoot up along the doors, the side mirrors ricocheting off, but they’re through.

  As they drive away, the bewildered guards disappearing in the distance, Sarah screams with pleasure and Jago just laughs.

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  AISLING KOPP

  Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York, United States

  Thousands of miles away, Aisling Kopp stares tiredly at a headstone. She doesn’t want to be here, the cemetery unpopulated on this sunny day, at least by the living. She should be back in China or Turkey or somewhere else, following the clues of Endgame. Even though it was her clue, in a way, that brought her back to New York, far away from the action.

  The headstone belongs to Declan Kopp. Aisling’s father.

  “Why’d you make me come here?” Aisling asks the old man standing next to her. “This some kinda motivational thing? ’Cause we coulda just done that on the phone, Pop.”

  Aisling’s grandfather seems lost in thought. He snaps to when she speaks, turning his bad, milky-white eye toward her. His hands are folded peacefully behind his back. He is missing three fingers on his left hand. He has a bushy white beard and long white hair still tinged with traces of orange. Decades ago, this man was a Player. Just like his son, Declan, was a Player.

  Aisling’s father, in the ground, dead for almost as long as Aisling’s been alive.

  It was her grandfather who trained Aisling. He taught her everything she knows. He was there, in the dirt next to her, spotting for her, when Aisling made her first kill. It was with the same reliable Brugger & Thomet APR308 sniper rifle that now sits at Aisling’s feet, broken down and packed away in a sleek black case. That first kill, the expression of pride on her grandfather’s face, it is one of Aisling’s fondest memories.

  And that is why, when Pop insisted that she come back home just as Endgame had finally begun, Aisling begrudgingly complied. It was the clue that had set her grandfather off. Aisling had told him the random string of numbers over the phone, and her grandfather had used a tone of voice she’d never heard before.

  Afraid.

  All because of 19090416. Whatever that was supposed to mean.

  So Aisling had hopped two trains and four planes and ended up back in Queens, worn out from traveling and wanting to move on as quickly as possible. As much as she loves him, Aisling knows that the time for men like her grandfather is past. The work of the trainers is done.

  “I have never told you how your father died,” Pop says matter-of-factly.

  Aisling glances at her chunky pink wristwatch. “You’re picking now?”

  “Wasn’t important until now,” muses her grandfather. “But I think They want you to know. For whatever reason.”

  Aisling thinks about that kepler thing. She’d hate to have to guess at its motivations, at what it knows, and why. Luckily, she doesn’t have to. Endgame is simple. Kill or be killed.

  “What gives you that idea?”

  “Your numbers: they’re the day he died, mixed up.”

  Aisling sniffs, feeling incredibly dumb for not figuring that out. “That’s some pretty simple coding for big-shot aliens.”

>   “Like I said, child, they wanted you to figure it out. It’s the why that’s troubling.”

  “Go on, Pop.”

  “Your father, after eligibility passed him by, he couldn’t let Endgame go. He spent years studying it. Studying Them. Trying to figure it all out.”

  Aisling remembers one of her first lessons, something Pop has ingrained in her since childhood. “It’s not for us to know,” she says. “What will be will be.”

  “That’s what I’ve always taught you, child, but . . .” Her grandfather raises a hand. “Your father, he had some ideas. Wasn’t a popular man amongst our line. Had you with an outsider, bless her. When the High Council decided you’d grow up to be a Player, he took it badly.”

  Aisling is paying attention now. She’s never heard so much about her mother and father, has always known better than to ask. But now the floodgates are open. “What’d he do?”

  “He fled. Killed the active Player in the process. Took the stone, your birthright, and you. You were just a babe, years away from eligibility. He said he was breaking the cycle.”

  “What the hell does that mean? That he was going to end our line?”

  Her grandfather sighs, shaking his head. “Presumably, but I never really knew for certain. The High Council sent me to find the two of you, and the stone, and eventually I did. And I restored order to our line.”

  It takes a moment for this to sink in. “You killed him,” Aisling states.

  Pop nods. “My son. Your father. Through the scope of the rifle at our feet. Yes.”

  Aisling exhales slowly through her nose. She’s not sure how to interpret this, not sure what to do with this information.

  Her grandfather holds out a folded piece of paper. “These are the coordinates of where he took you. Where he died. Maybe They want you to go there.”

  Aisling takes the piece of paper, glancing at it. Somewhere in Italy. She stuffs it into her back pocket. “Go there and do what?”

  Her grandfather shakes his head. “Perhaps see what your father did. Perhaps understand like he did.”