Endgame: The Calling (19 page)

An will
blink
An will
blinkblink
find them.

Find them and stop them.

No winners.

BlinkSHIVERSHIVERblink.

None.

An swivels in his chair again, catches a quick-cut montage of the meteoric destruction on BBC World. Over it is a title with light trails and lens flares. It says:
End Times?

People are wondering; yes, they are wondering.

An smiles.

He stands and walks upstairs, out of his basement, into the kitchen, out the door. It’s a bright and cheery day. He needs
blinkblink
he needs some air. He needs some air and some
blink
transistors and soldering wire and a new pair of needle-nose
blink
needle-nose pliers from the hardware store.

Besides, he likes to watch the people scurry about.

All the people who will die die die. All the people who will
blinkblinkblinkblinkblink
who will die.

Some will try to stop the Event.

Will try to be heroes.

Will try to win.

To hell with the others.

People will die. Millions, hundreds of millions, billions of people will die.

There is no hope for the future, and An loves it.

Huímín Street Market, Xi’an, China

Chiyoko hustles through a busy market just outside the city center of Xi’an. She ditched the taxi and the dead driver and gathered her belongings from her dank little hotel room. She is going to relocate to the countryside, but first she needs to buy some things. A fleece sweater, makeup, and hair dye. And she needs to find a hardware store so she can get the items she’ll need to steal cars or motorcycles or boats or whatever else she wants to steal.

She is relocating so she can be closer to Jago and Sarah. So she can be closer to the disk.

The disk that is just like the ones found in 1938 in a cave near the China-Tibet border: the disks of Baian-Kara-Ula.

They were initially thought to have been made by a local tribe of isolated pygmies named the Dropa, but when the technology became available, they were radiocarbon-dated and discovered to have been at least 12,000 years old.

Chiyoko knows that these disks are just a few of many that existed through antiquity going back much farther than 12,000 years. Going back 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 years. Well into the last ice age, when the coastal boundaries of Earth were very different than they are today. Back when the great ice caps made the seas shallow. When the advanced ancient cities, since submerged by the Great Flood and lost to water and ignorance, stood like beacons on the coastlines.

Back when everyone knew that the disks were power.

Here is how Chiyoko knows: In 1803, a strange vessel, floating in the northern Sea of Japan, was discovered by Japanese fishermen. The vessel, egg-shaped and 5.45 meters in diameter, was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Today it might be considered a submersible or a space capsule or even a chunky flying saucer, but they had no notion of what it was back then. It was made of crystal, metal, and glass. The fishermen peered into it and saw that the floor was cushioned and the walls were adorned with flourishes of wallpaper depicting unknown things. There were words everywhere, but the language was a mystery.

Strangest of all was the woman—yes, woman—inside. Pale-skinned, tall, red-haired, slant-eyed. There was no telling how long she’d been aboard her strange vessel, or how she’d managed to survive at sea.

The fishermen towed the entire thing—the vessel, the woman, and all—to shore. The woman got out. She carried a quicksilver box, which the village gossips determined was a container for her husband’s severed head. She spoke their language with a strange accent and offered no explanation for where she had come from or why she had come. For some reason, the villagers took to her, and eventually she settled down, marrying a local blacksmith. There she stayed until she died, and never, not once, did she open the box. At least not in the presence of any villager, not even her Japanese husband. No one ever knew what was inside, if there was even anything at all.

This woman was Mu.

Perhaps she was the first, or perhaps she was meant to be the last. When the Japanese villagers pulled her out of the ocean and took her in, they became Mu as well. She chose a boy from the village, a strong boy named Hido who apprenticed with her husband, and called on him once a week. She taught this boy the secrets of her ancient line, one that was long thought wiped out.

In time, he became a Player.

The 2nd line was restored.

For Hido, the woman opened the box. She took out the disk inside. She gave it to Hido. And she said only, “This is of the ancient and for the ancient. It contains everything and nothing. It is not one of the keys, but it will lead directly to the first. The first move is essential.”

Hido did not understand and was given no explanation. The woman said to pass the disk down the line, along with her words, and that when the time came, they would make sense.

And so now they do. To Chiyoko Takeda, the 7,947th Player of the 2nd line. All she needs is the disk.

But, of course, she doesn’t have it. The disk watched over by her line was lost. Chiyoko has only ever seen sepia-tinted pictures of her great-great-grandmother Sachiko Takeda holding it proudly like a prize. In the picture she is young, able-bodied, strong. She wears a set of workman’s clothing. A
katana
hangs from her belt. She is ready for Endgame, right there in that picture taken in 1899. So long ago.

But Sachiko was lost. She was lost when a ship sailing from Edo to Manila went down in a tempest.

And the disk was lost too.

But not anymore. Chiyoko knows with every fiber of her being that the disk that the Olmec and the Cahokian possess is the same one that used to belong to her line. She has no idea how kepler 22b retrieved it, but that is immaterial.

She must get it from them.

It belongs to her by right.

Chiyoko works through the market methodically and discreetly. She is dressed down, like a chambermaid running errands for her mistress. The clerks who deal with her barely say a word. As she pays for the hair dye, she slides a small square of paper toward the clerk. Written on it in Mandarin are the words
hardware store
.

The clerk points at the door and left and says there is one five storefronts down.

Chiyoko gives her a curt and appreciative nod and leaves the drugstore.

She finds the hardware store and wanders in and looks for a voltmeter and some spare batteries and a wire cutter and an assortment of automotive fuses and some metal shears and a roll of stiff tin flashing. A chain-smoking matron at the back of the store barks orders to her employees. Chiyoko is the only other woman in the place.

She brings her stuff to the counter and pays. She turns. Keeps her head down. Stays discreet. She walks down a narrow aisle to the door. Just as she is about to exit, a person rounds a corner quickly and bumps into her.

“Excuse me,” he says.

She looks up.

And sees the red tattooed tear of the Shang Player, An Liu. His bloodshot eyes widen.

Her heart beats faster.

A vein along his temple shows that his heart quickens too.

And for a brief moment neither of them moves.

W
j
nháng Hardware Store, Xi’an, China

The Mu Player—inches away and filling with energy—is beautiful and delicate and serene. An knows that their fight will have to be brief and decisive. He can’t risk getting arrested.

He will kill her quickly and leave.

Disappear back underground.

The edge in her deep, round eyes seems to suggest that she feels the same way. An takes a step forward. She takes a step back. He gathers his chi into his fingertips and jabs at her solar plexus. She blocks this easily with the flat of her hand and lets the energy of An’s attack dissipate through her hand, down her arm, fanning out through her body and into the ground and the static of the very air around them. She breathes in and counterattacks, pushing her palm forward.

An has never felt anything like it. She doesn’t even touch him and he is pushed back a full foot. It takes all the power of his glutes and thighs, all the concentration rising through his feet and legs and lungs and neck and skull not to be thrown a dozen feet into the wall.

They hear the matron yell at one of her employees. No one has noticed them yet.

An shuffles forward in two quick swishing movements. She retreats. They are at the start of a darkened aisle stocked with cans of paint. It occurs to An that aisles in hardware stores containing paint should not be dark but light; otherwise how can the customer know what color he is getting? But he doesn’t dwell on this. Chiyoko has dispensed with her bags and has both palms up and facing him. Her thumbs are hooked together so that it looks like she is making a butterfly shadow puppet. Her right leg is behind her. An seeks out the small sliver of space that will allow his next attack to pass through her guard.

He sees it.

At the sternal notch.

He pushes his chi up from the pit of his stomach and strikes with lightning quickness. He is not sure that he’s ever moved so quickly, but she is faster. She raises her hands and snags his finger in the crook of her thumbs and folds her fingers over his. He pulls back and she closes her fists with such ferocity that they generate a little breeze that crosses his face.