Existence (16 page)

If she goes through with this, she'll claim what was once her big brother's future—a future that scares her, of violence and danger and pain, all the things she never wanted for him and wants even less for herself.

And he might never forgive her for it.

Sarah's phone buzzes in her back pocket. The elder looks at her, pointedly, and Sarah wonders whether the old man has ever even seen a cell phone. She wonders what he would say if she asked him to pause the ceremony for a moment while she texts Reena back.
Hey, it wasn't
my
idea that the Player should be a teenager
, she would like to tell him.
What did you expect?

But of course she can't do that.

Add it to the list of things she can't do, now.

Sarah is suddenly having trouble breathing. A hot flush rises in her cheeks. Somewhere, far away, Reena is hungry for gossip; somewhere, far away, Christopher is worrying about his girlfriend's supposed food poisoning. She wants to run away from this, run home to them, maybe just run, and keep running until she leaves everything and everyone behind, until there are no more hard decisions to make, only the sound of wind in her ears and the thump of ground beneath her feet.

She doesn't run.

“Put out your hand,” the leader of the Cahokian elders commands her.

Sarah does, and he lays the ancient stone on her open palm. It feels warm to the touch, and almost seems to pulse with her heartbeat, but she tells herself that must be her imagination.

The old man says several words in the ancient language of the Cahokian people. “Do you forswear all else?” he asks her then, in English. The same question has been asked of every Player for a thousand years.

There are countless reasons to say no to this question. There is Christopher; there is Tate. There is everything she wants for herself, and everything she's afraid of. Countless reasons to say no, and only one reason to say yes.

But that one reason trumps all the others.

Her family; her people. All the Cahokian lives that have been lost, and all those hundreds of thousands more that could be, when Endgame comes. They need a champion.

Sarah came to this place still unsure how she would answer the ancient question. Half expecting she would lose her nerve, back out at the last moment. She has always trusted logic, and her logic tells her that this is a foolish choice.

But there's something in her, something deeper and wiser than logic, something reaching for her destiny.

The elders chose her for a reason. She doesn't understand what it could possibly be. But some part of her—that sure, steady part
beneath rational thought—feels certain that they were right. That this is the right choice for her, and for her line. The Cahokian people need a champion, and that champion should be, must be, Sarah Alopay.

The stone burns her palm; she grips it tight, feeling suddenly connected to all those generations of Players long dead, woven into the fabric of Cahokian history. She can feel them out there, the Players of the past, dead and alive. They're watching her, waiting for her to join them. All except Tate. She can't feel him at all. “Do you pledge yourself to the survival of our people, and to the ancient oath?”

Sarah's parents have warned her not to swear unless she's completely sure. That there's no going back.

They don't spell out what the punishment would be for breaking her oath, but Sarah is Cahokian, and every Cahokian knows that promises made to the Sky People are not to be lightly broken.

Too much is at stake.

Too many have already died.

She closes her eyes, breathing in the soil and the sky. She hears the echo of Tate's screams and can almost feel the touch of Christopher's fingers grazing her lips, asking permission to kiss her for the first time. She feels something else, an insistent vibration in her hand, and for a moment she thinks it's the phone again, Reena breaking in at the most inopportune moment.

But it's the stone, waiting for her answer.

“Yes,” Sarah says, because her people have summoned her to duty, and she's been raised to believe that this is a call that demands an answer. She repeats the words that she's carefully memorized. “Yes, I swear. I swear to take your lives onto my shoulders. I swear to serve the Cahokian people to the best of my abilities and beyond. I swear to Play.”

Players are supposed to have time to learn their craft. Time for training in weapons, meditation, languages, code cracking, pain tolerance, physics and computers and bomb making. Time to
understand their responsibilities, then find a way to make their Playing their own.

Sarah has no time.

No one knows when Endgame will come: it could start tomorrow.

She's not ready.

As days of grueling training turn into weeks, she's unsure she'll ever be ready.

So are her trainers.

At Sarah's school, there's a student trying to become a professional gymnast. She hits the gym for long hours before and after school, stays up all night trying to get her homework done, never has a free second for extracurricular activities, or friends and family, or any kind of life. Though she seems happy enough with her back handsprings and her array of trophies. Sarah has always pitied her—she doesn't know what she's missing.

Sarah
does
know. Her new schedule demands she wake before dawn for a 10-mile run and calisthenics, then cram in as much of that week's subject—ancient Greek, hydrodynamics, explosives defusing—as possible before school. She sleepwalks through the day, stealing every free period and lunch hour she can to zip through the homework she no longer has time for at home. Then, after school, it's straight to the training center for martial arts and firearms, a brief meal with her family or, if she's lucky, Christopher and Reena, then more studying, then merciful, if brief, sleep.

Those are the easy days.

Some days she spends in seclusion, learning to withstand the burn of hot coals on her soft flesh, or trekking through wilderness with neither food nor water, depending on her wits and the bounty of nature to keep herself alive and find her way home.

She's starting to feel like she lives at the training facility, a nondescript building only 10 minutes from her house, its lease owned by the Cahokian elders, its interior filled with workout equipment and weapons stores. She spends more time with the experts employed by
the council, steely-eyed trainers who treat her like a machine, than she does with the people she loves.

More weeks pass, and her reflexes sharpen; her muscles harden; her skin grows insensitive to touch, her system inured to pain. Sometimes she feels like she's turning to stone.

The new skills come easily to her, as everything always has, but the trainers are unsatisfied.

They're always telling her how much harder her brother worked, how much more he wanted it, how they can tell her mind is somewhere else.

They're right.

“What happened?” Christopher asks in alarm the morning she comes to school with a black eye. He raises a finger to the purpling bruise, but she ducks his touch.

“I walked into a door,” she mumbles.

The lies are getting lamer.

Eventually, he's going to get tired of this and break up with her. Or she'll do it first and put them both out of their misery.

That's probably the right thing to do, but she can't bring herself to consider it. She's not that strong.

“Sarah . . .” He puts his arms around her, and she almost loses it. For two months, she's stayed steady, she's made herself hard; she's lied to Christopher and Reena so she can steal time for her training; sometimes she's even lied to her trainers so she can steal time for Christopher and Reena. She's told herself that this isn't so bad, that she can do it, that any day now things will get easier, life will get calmer, Tate will start speaking to her again, everything will start to seem normal again, even though it never can be. She's told herself that being the Player is no different from being a starting forward on the soccer team or being president of the honor society—just a few more things on her to-do list, no biggie. She's walled up the truth, locked it away, but now, in Christopher's arms, she feels the walls crumbling. A crowd swirls around them, students grabbing things from their
lockers, hurrying off to class, chattering and buzzing about all the important problems of junior high life. Sarah feels a sudden surge of hate for them, how easy they have it, how little they understand. She breathes deep, breathes in the smell of Christopher's soap, tries her best to block them all out. Pretend that she and Chris are the only two people that matter. The only two that exist. He whispers in her ear. “Sarah, if something was going on with you, something at home, or wherever . . . you'd tell me, right?”

She feels the sting of tears, knows that if she holds on to him much longer, she'll lose it completely. She's so tired—of lying to him and to herself that she can do it all. But if she lets herself collapse, if she lets him be the strong one and hold her up while she cries, there will only be more questions, and more lies.

“I told you, everything's fine.” It comes out more harshly than she intends, and Christopher recoils. She angles her face away so he can't see the sheen of tears in her eyes. She spots Reena picking her way through the crowd, waving eagerly as she approaches. The open, trusting look on her face makes Sarah's heart clench. “I'm late for homeroom,” she says brusquely, and before Christopher can stop her, she rushes away.

She gets better at making up excuses.

Intensive French lessons in preparation for an imaginary summer abroad, a nonexistent international math competition to study for, a doctor's appointment for Tate, a surgery for Tate, rehab and therapy for Tate—it's easy, at least, to make up Tate-related excuses, because Reena and Christopher know how angry and miserable and damaged he is, if not why. They are endlessly kind and understanding, and Sarah hates herself for lying to them.

And even then, even after all she's given up and all the energy she's thrown into her new mission, it's still not enough.

“Honey, your trainer's a bit concerned about something,” Sarah's father says, as the four of them dig into his Sunday special: spaghetti
and meatballs. It used to be Sarah's favorite part of the week, but now she's usually too busy for Sunday family dinners, and Tate almost always eats in his room.

“Which trainer?” Sarah asks, mouth full of pasta. She has a different trainer for each specialty—which means that even after nearly six months, they still feel like strangers.

Her parents exchange a glance. “Well . . . all of them,” her father admits.

“Oh.”

“They think you're too distracted,” her mother says. “That you're not focused enough on your training.”

“Are you kidding me?” Sarah feels like she's going to explode. “I'm giving
everything
to this! What more do they want from me?”

“Last weekend you went to the mall with Reena when you could have been working on your Chinese,” her mother points out gently. “And I know you've been staying up late talking to Christopher on the phone when you need your sleep”—she held up a hand before Sarah could interrupt—“and I understand: you're juggling a lot; you're doing the best you can. But your trainers have suggested we make a few changes. Maybe it's time to rethink the question of school—”

“No,” Sarah snaps. “No way. I'm not dropping out of school.”

“It would just be for a year or so, until you get your feet under you,” her father says. “And it's not exactly
dropping out
. You already know everything they're teaching you anyway. Your lessons here would—”

“No!” Sarah feels like a child having a temper tantrum, and wishes she knew how to let herself go that way, wishes she
could
have a temper tantrum, fists pounding, tears streaming. Then they would know how she feels, and they would stop this. “I'm giving everything I can to Playing, but I can't give up my whole life. Tell them, Tate.”

Tate flinches, like he's surprised they know he's there. Like he was hoping he'd turned invisible.

“No comment,” he mumbles, and fidgets with his eye patch. The doctors say he's ready to be fitted for a fake eye, but Tate refuses. He
doesn't want to pretend everything's normal, he says. And he doesn't want to give his family, or anyone else, the luxury of pretending either.

Sarah presses on. “
You
didn't have to drop out of school. You graduated.”

He shrugs. “Lot of good it did me.”

He's 18 now, and was expecting to spend the next couple of years focused solely on Playing. Sarah knows he never looked any further than that. Certainly not toward college, or a career. Tate has only ever wanted to Play. Now he lies in bed, listens to music, and promises his parents he'll figure out what to do with his life. Someday.

“You're not your brother, honey,” her mother says.

Tate snorts into his spaghetti. “
That's
for sure.”

Sarah doesn't know whether she wants to cry or use her new krav maga prowess to flip over the table and jam a fork into his neck. But either way, she's lost her appetite. She pushes back from the table and rises to her feet. “Thanks for dinner,” she tells her father, in a tone that says,
Thanks for nothing
. “But apparently, I've got work to do.”

She's standing by her locker when a shadow falls over her. Strong arms scoop her up and two hands press over her eyes, shutting her into darkness.

She flinches.

“Guess who.”

She recognizes Christopher's warm voice just in time—she was about to flip him over her shoulder and slam him to the floor. She's tensed for violence all the time now; her trainers have taught her to always be searching the shadows for enemies, to always be on alert for those who want to destroy her.