by James Frey
She wonders, sometimes, if her fighting will suffer. But it’s easy to put that fear out of her mind.
There’s a certain advantage in knowing how not to care.
They sleep in bunkhouses—one for the boys, one for the girls—as it has always been. Little more than cabins of hard clay, with narrow cots and cubbyholes for their belongings. They have very few belongings: knives and swords, of course, tangles of circuitry, and favored toxins. Some girls fashion jewelry from wire and polished stones, and everyone eventually figures out how to scam personal pleasure items out of the minders. Stuffed animals, when they were small, then puzzles and games, now comic books and football banners. They all have their own laptops, of course, and while access to the internet has been disabled, they were all taught to program, to hack, to build and rebuild the circuits from scratch, before they were 10 years old—if they want to punch through a firewall and connect with the world, no one can stop them.
Their laptops are frequently searched for contraband material; their belongings are itemized and approved. There are no locks, no doors, no privacy, but none of this is needed. After all, they have no secrets from one another, or from their minders.
Or, at least, they are not supposed to.
Those who keep secrets learn early to keep them in their heads.
This is where Kala keeps her shreds of memory, the scents and colors of a family that has probably long since forgotten her. No one knows how carefully she has pieced together these fractured shards, trying so hard to make some comprehensible picture come into view. She doesn’t know why it matters to her and to no one else. Maybe because she’s missing a piece of herself. She believes that if she knew them, could find them and face them, she could fill the puzzle in.
This is her most dangerous secret.
It has, for so long, been her only secret. After tonight, she will have two.
Kala sleeps beneath the southernmost window. The moon is already setting when Alad appears at the opening, the stars bright. Something has kept Kala awake. Like she knew he was coming.
She is ready.
They have spent years practicing the art of subterfuge, so it is nothing for her to ease out of bed and launch herself silently through the window. The other girls never stir in their sleep. It occurs to her that she may not be the first to have had a midnight caller—how many girls have tiptoed past her cot, slipped open the door or climbed out the window? How many have breathed in the night air and the musky scent of nerves and need, clasped hands, and run into the night?
She prefers not to know. She doesn’t want to think of this as something usual, common. There is nothing common about the way she feels when Alad takes her hand and looks at her, so full of fear and hope, nothing usual about their soft footsteps padding across the camp until they reach a secluded clearing, within the perimeter of the base but still far beyond prying eyes. The camp is built on an excavated lake bed, one of the few areas in this arid corner of the country where clay and stone interrupt the endless miles of sand. There is nothing here but the scratchings of spiders, the bare rock, and the two of them.
Kala should be nervous. Of being caught—of not being caught, and whatever happens next. But when he cups her chin in his strong hands, when he whispers, “I couldn’t wait any longer,” when she closes her eyes and some powerful force draws their lips together, it all feels too right for worry.
It is like running. No thought, only motion: only breath, only heartbeat, only the body and its needs.
Except there is no motion now.
She has never felt more still. She never wants to move from this place, from his arms.
“You’re so beautiful,” he tells her, and she goes tense, because she knows it to be a lie. She knows her green eyes are too wide apart and her slim, muscled body is all sharp lines and hard edges. Her black hair is hacked off close to her scalp, which makes her ears look huge. These aren’t things she minds, but they are things she knows.
Then he continues.
“You’re like a living weapon,” he says quietly. She can feel his lips move against the skin of her neck. “A blade. Shining in the night. The way you move, the way you strike . . . it’s like liquid starlight.”
She understands now. When he says beautiful, he means strong. Where he finds strength, he sees beauty.
In this, most of all, they are the same.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t want this,” he whispers. “Me.”
She is afraid of how much she wants it.
Him.
Their kisses are urgent, their embrace furious, hands and lips exploring uncharted territory, skin warming to the touch, burning with contact, with need.
Kala has always wondered what it would feel like, the connection to another person, the thing called love, but she has never really understood it.
Somehow, her body knows what to do.
After, they talk.
Not like before, when they talked like everyone else, about nothing. Now, it is like a door has been thrown open. Kala has never even realized that she wanted to talk, to give voice to all her carefully hidden thoughts. She’s never seen the point. But she must have wanted it, because talking with him is almost as satisfying as being with him. Every word is a release.
They meet every night, and lie together under the stars.
Everything Kala knows about love she learned from the movies. Or at least from the movies they are allowed to stream on their computers—and the ones the minders don’t know they stream. The minders consider some movies to be good practice for learning foreign languages; the Players-in-training consider it good practice for the life they will someday live beyond the barbed wire of this encampment.
In the movies, when a boy and a girl lie together beneath a jewel-studded sky, the boy charts the constellations for the girl and awes her with his understanding of the cosmos. Kala and Alad memorized the map of the sky when they were children. For those who know what is to come, there is no beauty in the stars, only danger.
He cannot awe her. Everything he knows, she knows, and vice versa.
So they talk about what they don’t know.
“What do you think it’s like, growing up in a family?” she asks him.
“Total hassle,” he says. “You’re always trying to make curfew or getting grounded, you have to do the dishes and take out the trash, and I bet you’d get in real trouble if you set off a grenade in the backyard.”
Kala sighs happily, thinking of the homemade explosives she tested yesterday, which turned an old equipment shed to a heap of ash. “I would miss grenades,” she admits.
“Besides, they’re sort of like family,” he says. “The minders.”
She laughs. “They’re nothing like family.”
“And how would you know?”
“You remember the day your first minder left?” she asks, and she can feel his muscles tense beneath her fingers. “That’s how I know.”
By this point, they have been through dozens of minders, some lovable and some forgettable, some who changed their lives and some who seemed determined to ruin them. No minder stays with them for more than a few months—it’s the best way to prevent personal attachments from forming—and eventually their faces begin to blur together. But no one forgets their first.
When the children are brought to the camp at age four, each one is assigned a minder. Kala’s was a round woman with a stern voice but a ready smile: Hebat, which means “lady of the skies” in the ancient language of their people. Alad’s was Kingu, “the great emissary.” Kala barely remembers this time, but she remembers feeling frightened and alone, clinging to Hebat’s skirt with chubby toddler fists. She remembers how Hebat wiped her tears when she cried and helped her blow her nose when she was ill. Hebat taught her how to speak Persian and Sanskrit, to dress herself and tie her shoes, to brush her teeth and wrap her hair into braids. Hebat read her to sleep at night, and by eagerly looking over her burly shoulder, Kala taught herself to read too. Hebat was her
entire world—and then, one day, Hebat was gone.
Gone without saying good-bye.
Gone without leaving any word of how to contact her.
Gone for good.
Everyone’s first minder leaves like this; it is the first important lesson Players-in-training must learn. No one person matters; no personal attachment lasts. After that first year, they are placed in a series of ever-shifting groups—different units within the larger cohort, different minders, different camps. She and Alad have been in the same grouping for a few weeks, and Kala already lives in fear that he will be taken away from her. Nothing and no one stays the same here for more than a few months. The only constant in life is Endgame.
Kala has never spoken of her first minder to anyone. “Mine was Hebat,” she says now. “I really thought she loved me.”
“We all thought that,” Alad admits.
“I know that now, obviously. But for years, I felt like such an idiot.” Something else she’s never said aloud. But it feels like she can tell Alad anything. Or at least almost anything. “Like it was this secret shame. That I’d fallen for her act. Imagine that, five years old and already beating myself up for not seeing through the bullshit.”
After Hebat, Kala was different. That was the first sliver of ice in her heart. The beginning of the cold, the empty. After Hebat, she had wanted not to feel, had wanted to forget her beloved minder and the parents who came before. She was angry and alone, and so she taught herself not to care. By the time the anger faded and the loneliness grew, by the time she needed to care again, she no longer remembered how.
Maybe if she found them again, the ones she’d left behind . . . maybe if she could remember the faces of her mother and father, she could remember everything else she’d lost.
She needs to be whole again, now more than ever. Because now she has him.
“It was a good lesson,” Alad says. “I bet you never fell for anyone’s bullshit again.”
“It was a cruel lesson.”
“To prepare us for cruel lives. To harden us.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to be hard,” she says.
He presses his lips to the smooth flesh of her stomach, and even though there is nothing beneath it but rigid muscle, he says, “I bet we can still find a few soft spots. If we try.”
Sometimes, it’s better not to talk.
They avoid each other now, during the day, so no one will suspect the thing between them. It’s agony to stare at him from across the room while she should be working on her ancient Sumerian translations, wanting to brush aside the lock of hair that’s fallen across his eyes, knowing she can’t. But it’s the delicious kind of agony, like pressing on a bruise. It distracts her from her training. She’s slowed down, and people notice.
“What’s different about you?” Britney asks one night, as they brush their teeth, and Kala nearly laughs with delight. She likes the idea that there is something different about her, that the other girls can see her happiness painted on her skin, a badge of honor.
“It’s a mystery,” she says, and Britney shakes her head and then, for good measure, her booty. (Britney named herself after her favorite American pop star and never lets anyone forget it.) She’s used to Kala keeping her secrets to herself; they all are.
But this is the first time Kala wishes she didn’t have to.
Alad is terrified of what will happen if the minders find out. Kala, on the other hand, can’t bring herself to worry. “What’s the worst they can do to us?” she asks him, tickling the spot behind his knee where he’s especially sensitive.
“I don’t even want to think about it,” he says.
But she has thought about it. A lot. The worst they can do is disqualify her from being a Player. Would that be so bad?
She’s played hard because she’s liked how it feels to win, because it’s a good way to pass the time. The others are all so desperate to be selected, to gain the recognition, to earn the chance to save their people. For Kala, all of that has always rung hollow, like everything else. Player. Endgame. Bloodline. Nothing but words, no more or less important than any others.
Now she has something real.
Now she knows what it is to really care, and she knows what she wants. All she wants.
Alad.
Let them discover the truth. Let them send her away. What does it matter to her, as long as Alad goes with her?
And she knows he would.
He loves her as much as she loves him.
She can tell.
“I wish we could stay here all night,” Alad tells her, in the place she has come to think of as their place, the clearing dusted with pebbles and moonlight. “I wish I could wake up beside you.”
“Someday,” she says, then stops.
They never talk about the future.
“Someday this will be all be over and we can be together for real,” he says.
She wants to freeze this moment in time and live inside it forever.
“Tell me,” she says. “Tell me a story.” She nuzzles her head into the curve of his shoulder and presses her palm to his. She likes that their hands are exactly the same size. That they know the same languages and can perform the same complex algorithms and multivariable equations with the same lightning speed. That he is slightly stronger but she is slightly faster. This is not how it is in the movies, but that doesn’t matter. She thinks this is the way it should always be.
“Once upon a time, there was a handsome boy and a beautiful girl.” His voice is like honey, slow and deliberate. “They grew up together, but even though the girl was very smart, she was slow to notice the obvious.”
“Which was?”
He grins. “Which was that the boy was amazing. A prince among men.”
“I bet the girl wasn’t too shabby herself.”
“You bet right,” he says. “The girl was . . . she was a miracle.”
The word sits between them. He does love her, she knows that now, without a doubt. It’s not just the things he says; it’s the way he says them. The way he looks at her when he does.
She wonders if that would change, if he knew her secret—if he knew what she’s done.
“The boy and girl were forbidden to be together, but they found a way,” he continued. “Every night, they came together and—”
She puts a finger to his lips. “It’s not polite to kiss and tell.”
He clears his throat. “And had a very nice time. Then, one day, the boy was chosen as his generation’s Player.”
“Oh, the boy?” she says.
“Naturally.”
She gives him a teasing shove. “Sexist pig.”
“Oink.”
“If you think just because you’re the guy, you—”
“May I continue with my story?” he asks her.
She can’t play mad for long. She doesn’t care who is named the Player in this story, any more than she does in life. She doesn’t care about the game; she wants to know what happens after. “You may,” she says.
“Anyway, the boy was chosen to be his generation’s Player, not because he was a boy, which is a stupid thing to assume, but because he was a magnificent example of the human species, quite possibly the apotheosis of the race.”
“And modest too.”
“Exactly.” Alad strokes her as he speaks, his fingers trailing back and forth across her body in time with his words.
“The boy and girl were separated for a time . . .”
She wants to make a joke here, to keep the mood light, to prove to him and to herself that the story isn’t real, but she can’t do it. The thought of being separated from him, it’s like a physical ache. Like imagining someone amputating a limb.
“But their sacrifice was worth it,” he says. “Because the boy acquitted himself admirably as a Player, and when his tenure was over—”
“Uneventfully.”
“When his completely lacking in eventfulness tenure was over, he was showered with all the rewards that acc
rue to a Player past his prime. Fame, fortune, power.”
This much, she knew, was true. Former Players had their pick of the good life—the rest of their bloodline saw to it that they got whatever they wanted, as thanks for their years of duty and sacrifice. Players-in-training got no such advantage: You were sent on your way with a small bank account and a forged high school diploma, and you hoped that would be enough. You spent the rest of your life on call to any Player who might need you—except for the ones who came crawling back, volunteering to be minders, because they could imagine no other life. But actual Players? It was like winning the lottery. Assuming you survived long enough to cash in your ticket.
“Totally free of responsibility and obligation, the boy and girl moved to a beautiful mansion in Abu Dhabi. They got married and had two very handsome sons, and promised each other they would never be apart another day in their lives. And they lived happily ever after.”
Kala rolls over on her side so she can get a clear look at his face. “So do you really want that?” she asks.
“What, marriage? Kids? Yeah. I know we’re young, but eventually . . .”
“No, not that. I mean, yes, that, I’m glad you want that, because . . .” She shakes her head. Everything’s getting muddled. Until tonight they have never talked about the future, and now suddenly it’s all laid out before her, a street paved with gold. It’s so much, so fast. And there’s so much he still doesn’t know about her. “I mean, do you really want to be chosen as the Player?”
“Of course I do.” He sits up, looks at her like she’s a stranger. “Don’t you?”
She sits up too, and takes his hands. It’s good to hold them, but not as good as it is to be held by them, to curl her body into his embrace and feel cut off from the rest of the world. “I guess? I don’t know, I never gave it much thought.”
“Yeah, I can see how that would be, given that it’s our entire purpose in life. And has been since we were born.”