Endgame: The Calling (36 page)

Lago Beluiso, Lombardy, Italy

Aisling stares at the cave’s wall. She is cross-legged. A small fire burns behind her. A skinned rabbit roasts on a spit. The sniper rifle rests across her thighs. She closes her eyes and meditates on the images on the wall, just as she has every day since arriving. She wonders if this is what her father did. And for how long. And if these images drove him mad, or if he had always been mad.

This is not how Aisling imagined her Endgame, studying ancient paintings. The painting she is seated before depicts 12 human figures standing among a primitive circle of stone monoliths. The stone shapes look vaguely familiar, but she can’t place them. Her eye is drawn to the 13th figure as it descends from on high. This 13th wears a helmet studded with lights and a thick suit. It holds something that looks like a star.

The 12 stand in a circle, their arms stretched skyward, toward the visitor and the void he emerges from. Their arms are stretched toward everything. Toward nothing.

“Spaceman visits naked people,” mutters Aisling.

The 12 have exaggerated genitalia. She noticed that right off, had to learn to discreetly avert her eyes or the meditation wouldn’t take. Six men. Six women. All have swords or spears. Warriors. All, except for one, have their mouths open, singing to the heavens or crying out or screaming.

The one with her mouth closed—a woman—stands in the center of the circle. She holds a round object. A disk. She appears to be fitting it into a rock or a rise in the earth. Or perhaps she is removing it.

A disk. Like the one that kepler 22b had at the Calling.

Above the 13th figure—the one in the helmet, the visitor, the Maker—is a giant red ball in the sky.

Below them all is a black gash. The 12 seem to be sinking into the darkness, slowly. Or perhaps those are just the shadows cast by Aisling’s small fire.

There is another painting farther into the cave. Aisling has meditated before that one too, but gained no insight. In it, the woman from the first painting, the one with the disk, stands in a small oval boat. The boat looks as if it is made of stone. Aisling wonders why it doesn’t sink. Maybe whatever savage painted it all those millennia ago didn’t know crap about sailing.

Anyway, the woman in her little boat is adrift on an endless ocean. Her face is serene, but Aisling can’t figure out why. It doesn’t look like a pleasant voyage. The ocean is steaming—or maybe smoking—and there are dead fish floating on the surface. The woman doesn’t seem bothered by all this. She holds the disk in her hands and drifts along.

For whatever reason, the woman with the disk reminds Aisling of the mute girl from the Calling. Chiyoko. The Mu.

Maybe she has the disk? Maybe kepler 22b gave it to her?

Or maybe the Mu is chasing the disk?

Maybe . . . one of the others has the disk. . . .

The fire cracks; the rabbit roasts.

Aisling breathes, concentrates on the air passing through her nostrils, waits patiently for a revelation.

What will be will be.

Renzo’s Garage, An Nabi Yunus, Mosul, Iraq

The Peugeot 307 is ready. Sarah and Jago will leave Mosul in the morning. They’re on opposite ends of the couch. The TV is off.

They have barely spoken since they woke up on the couch next to each other. As they slept, their arms and legs intertwined. Neither of them knows what to make of it. Sometimes Jago thinks that Sarah is warming up to him as more than just a temporary ally. He catches himself thinking about her like one of the beautiful American tourists he would take dancing and to the beach and to his bed, and he kicks himself. She is not one of those silly girls—she is beautiful, yes, but dangerous and crafty. They are Playing together now, but when the end of the game comes they will not be able to be together. Unless they can figure out some way around the rules, only one of them can win.

But that time is not now, and for now Jago cannot tell if Sarah is playing him or being sincere. Either way, he only wants her more.

Sarah swings between wanting Jago and not wanting Jago. She remembers the speech she gave at her ill-fated graduation. She thinks if she is happy she will have a better chance of winning Endgame. She fears despair; she fears grief; but above all she fears being alone. No Tate. No Christopher. No Reena. She sees Jago as a friend more and more. Being more than a friend with Jago might complicate things but it would also make her happy. Happy won’t win her Endgame, though. And that is all that ultimately matters.

I am happy and able because I allow myself to be happy
, she remembers saying to her classmates.

What foolishness.

Naïveté.

Jago is reading the 307 manual and pretending to ignore Sarah. She turns to him, setting down the Middle Eastern fashion magazine she found stashed in Renzo’s things.

“Jago?”

“Hm?”

“You talked about it a little before, but what was your life like before this?”

Her question surprises him. He sets down the manual. “What does that matter?”

She eyes him playfully, can tell immediately that he doesn’t want to share. So she’ll start. “Like I said, I was normal. Normal high school with regular kids.”

“Yes,” Jago says, waving his hand. “I remember. And you had a normal boyfriend.”

“Uh, yeah,” Sarah says, quickly changing the subject. “My dad’s a lawyer and my mom works for the parks department.”

Jago laughs. “Are you kidding?”

Sarah raises an eyebrow, not understanding what’s funny. “No. Why?”

“That is—what’s the English word, hm? Simple and cute? Quaint. Such quaint lives for former Players.”

“Why? What do your folks do?”

“Run a large criminal organization. Control a city.”

“Oh.”

“You still think in terms of
normal
, Sarah Alopay,” Jago says, staring right into her eyes. “As if that’s something we can go back to. As if that ever applied to us. We are not normal, or descended from normal. We’re special.”

Sarah knows exactly what they are.

Assassins.

Acrobats.

Puzzlers.

Spies.

Jago’s fingertips spider gently across hers. She doesn’t move away.

“The rules do not apply to us,” he says.

He’s right, Sarah thinks. She realizes, at that moment, why she felt more comfortable with Jago in that airplane bathroom than she ever did with Christopher. It’s because Jago is
like
her. They are the same in ways that Christopher could never understand.

She feels a pang of guilt for Christopher, her abandoned, sweet, normal boyfriend. But in that moment, Sarah Alopay does not want normal. She wants Jago.

“Are you going to feed me some line about the end of the world next?” she asks, her voice low.

“Would that work?” he asks.

“Don’t bother,” she replies.

Sarah reaches up and gently traces the scar on the side of his neck.

Jago smiles and the 307 manual goes tumbling to the floor. He leans forward, crossing the empty couch and pressing himself onto her body.

“This better not be part of the game,” he says.

“It’s real, Jago. It’s as real as anything in the world.”

And as she says that, a part of Sarah hopes it isn’t true. She hopes this is just a wild teenage whim and that she’s not actually falling for Jago. Falling in love with a rival would be about the worst thing that could happen. But then they kiss.

And kiss.

And kiss.

And Sarah forgets.

27.338936, 88.606504
^lxiii

Bardi Turkish Tour Bus, Seats 15 and 16, on the D400 7 km from K
z
ltepe, Turkey

Christopher can’t stop thinking of Sarah. Of her hair. Her bare shoulders. Watching her run. Looking into her eyes. Her laugh, lacing their fingers together, playing footsies under the table at the diner down in the Old Market.

He can’t stop.

He is with Kala and they are two hours from the site in southern Turkey.

The site of her clue.

Her mysterious clue.

They’re on a tour bus surrounded by people their age. People drinking and laughing and cuddling and dancing. Kala did some sleuthing on the internet in Dubai and found that a band of self-styled “Meteor Kids” from Ankara and Istanbul were risking their necks to stage some kind of unsanctioned laser-light rave in honor of the unknown ancestors who constructed Gobekli Tepe—and they were doing it
at
Gobekli Tepe. Tonight.