Endgame Novella #1 (6 page)

And, of course, speculate endlessly about the choice: when it will come, how it will be made. This is the favorite hobby of Kala’s cohorts, and they never shut up about it.

Kala doesn’t play along. She’s never seen the point. She likes that Alad doesn’t see it either.

Friendship in the camp is not encouraged, but neither is it forbidden. And somehow, without realizing it, Kala lets Alad become her friend. They begin to count on each other; more than that, they begin to know each other. When they spar, she can anticipate his movements—recognize a feint, block a punch before he throws it. At meals, Alad now reaches without asking for her untouched saltah, at least when the stew is made with goat, which she detests. When he can get his hands on some halvah, he always snags extra for her, though never enough to satisfy her sweet tooth. They don’t talk about anything that matters, but then, no one talks about things that matter. Nothing is permitted to matter except their training. Not their hopes for the future, and certainly not their faded memories of the past.

Everyone has at least a few that they hold precious and secret.

Kala remembers a red stuffed elephant named Balih, and she remembers her mother’s smell, a comforting waft of saffron and nutmeg.

At least, she thinks it was her mother.

She prefers to believe that.

Even without talking, Kala can sense Alad’s moods. When he broods, she can almost see the dark cloud hovering over him—and when he brightens up, he nearly sparkles. He brightens often when she is near, and it makes her feel sparkly as well.

Which is ridiculous.

She tells herself that this is a natural bond between two warriors. That it will make her stronger, and strength is what she needs to endure the passage of time. That maybe this—knowing someone inside and out, needing them near, skin prickling when they are—is what it means to be family.

Kala doesn’t know much about family. But she knows family doesn’t make your stomach flip when they smile. Family’s touch doesn’t feel
like an electric charge.

Kala doesn’t believe in lying to herself, so she is forced to admit: it is not family, and it is not friendship. It is something more.

And something more is definitely forbidden.

Kala swings the ax in a wide circle. It cracks hard against the staff of Alad’s ax. Her teeth clack together with the impact.

Alad feints left, swings right, Kala anticipates him, blocks the attack.

She always anticipates him.

He is fast; she is faster.

“You’re dragging today,” he teases her. An undercurrent of tension hums in his voice. He’s lost three bouts in a row, and he’s about to lose this one too.

They both know how much he wants to win.

“I’m just taking it easy on you,” Kala says, and pretends this is a joke. She leaps gracefully as he swings his ax at her ankles. The blade whirs harmlessly beneath her feet. Kala twists in the air, head over heels, landing behind him, her ax already in motion.

He dances away just in time. The blade slashes at his tunic, tears through the thin cotton. She can see his anger rising, has come to recognize the telltale signs. The sweat beading at his neck, the twitch of his ear, the way his grip tightens on the ax. He’s not angry at her—never at her. He’s angry at himself.

She attacks; he blocks.

She attacks again; he blocks, swiftly and surely.

But she can feel his ax give way to hers when she bears her weight against it, and she knows his arms are tiring.

She wields the ax like it’s weightless. Like it’s an extension of her arms. She spins and dances, whirls and leaps. In her hands the blade is a quicksilver, a blur of deadly motion.

“I’m just waiting for the perfect moment to make my move,” he says, and jabs at her. She grins at his boast as she darts from reach.

She can hear the gasps beneath his words. He’s tiring. She could fight
forever.

Instead she swings the ax up hard, then turns it at an abrupt right angle, spins around, knocks his feet out from under him. That fast he is on his back, the tip of her ax pressed to his chest.

He smiles up at her, and she can see what it costs him to lose, and to bear it. “You’re beautiful when you’re a sore winner,” he says.

“I didn’t say anything,” Kala protests.

“You’re thinking it.” He winks.

She clasps his hand and pulls him to his feet. Every time they fight, he hopes to win, but she knows he never will.

It’s not that he’s a lesser fighter. It’s that he’s too eager to win. Too needful. When Kala takes a weapon in her hand, she gives way to the emptiness at her center. She needs nothing but to make clean cuts, to let the ax or dagger or sword do its job. She lets herself not care—because she has come to understand that in battle, caring gets in the way.

She’s glad Alad doesn’t ask for the secret of her triumph. She doesn’t want him to know how easy it is for her. Especially now that she sees there is another way. Now that she sees what it is to be desperate, to
need
. She envies his heat, draws close to him as if to warm herself on his fire.

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.”