Reap

“It's time,” I said to Kat.

We double-checked our guns, made sure they were loaded, flicked off the safeties, and headed down the hall. We stopped at room 412. It was five in the morning.

Ready?
Kat mouthed.

I nodded.

I knocked on the door.

This was it—what we had been preparing for all summer. We—just Kat and I—were knocking on the door of a Player. Raakel, the Minoan. Last week, Kat and I had planted a bomb next to her house in Istanbul, “inviting” her to come to Zero line's fake Calling. We thought she might have died in the explosion—the bomb was supposed to imitate a sign from the heavens, a message from the alien Makers.

And now we were supposed to reason with her, with this Player who was trained to be a killing machine. That's what a Calling was meant to be: the starting point of a bloodbath in which twelve killing machines, representatives of their civilizations, would each try to be the last one standing in a global fight that would decide the fate of the world.

And we needed to stop it.

My M1911 pistol was tucked into the back of my pants, covered by a long Munich Olympics T-shirt. Kat was carrying a Beretta in the front pocket of her sweatshirt. I had my backpack for our walkie-talkie and
a few other supplies we might need.

There was the sound of the deadbolt being unlocked, and I tensed up, wishing my gun were in my hand. But no. We were here to talk to her, not to kill her.

Kat and I already had blood on our hands, and we didn't want more.

The door opened.

Raakel stood there, fully dressed in a pair of jeans and a loose blouse. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail. There was a smirk on her face. Despite the early hour, she looked fully awake and ready for the Calling.

“I was wondering when you would show up,” she said with very little accent. “You followed me with all the stealth of stampeding bulls. You're staying in a house with sixteen or seventeen others?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out. We were supposed to be surprising her, not the other way around.

“We're here to talk to you,” Kat said.

“How do you know who I am?” Raakel asked. “For that matter, who do you think I am?”

Kat answered. “You're the Player for the Minoans.”

“How do you know this?” she asked. “What line are you from?”

“Zero line,” I said, finally getting my voice back. “We have important things to talk to you about.”

“There is no such line.” She opened the door an inch or two wider, just enough to let us pass. With her eyes trained carefully on us the whole time, she motioned us into her room. I caught a flash of metal at her side, and I realized she was carrying a blade that looked like a sword of some kind. My pulse was pounding so loud I was sure she could hear it.

“Consider us a group of concerned citizens,” Kat said. I noticed the shake in her voice, and I wondered if Raakel could tell how nervous we were.

Raakel laughed as she closed the door. I walked to the table in the corner of the room, and when we sat, I got a better look at the weapon
she was holding: a long, skinny machete. My heart jumped into my throat at the look of the sword.

“Oh, this?” she said with a cold smile, sitting on the foot of the bed and laying the sword across her lap. “It's called a yata
an. I assume you're both armed. I wanted to even things out. Now: talk.”

Kat and I gave each other a look. Her tanned face was pale, or maybe it was just an effect of the lamplight. She was scared. I wondered if she could see the same fear on me.

I turned to Raakel. “We're here to tell you to give this up. Our group is talking to all twelve lines this morning. We want you to ignore the Calling, and to stop Playing.”

Raakel laughed. “I am a Player. I've trained for this for seventeen years. My whole life. It's not just something I do; it's who I
am
. Why on earth would I give it up just because two strangers ask me to?”

“The Makers shouldn't be running the world. They shouldn't be toying with humanity like this. It's just a game they're playing.”

“It's a game
I'm
Playing,” she said.

Kat and I exchanged glances. We knew we were right, but I don't think either of us felt fully prepared to convince someone to give up everything that made them who they were.

“You have to give it up. All of you do—all of the Players from all of the lines. Listen: if you don't Play—if we can keep everyone from Playing—then there can be no Endgame. We can save the world.” Raakel narrowed her eyes.

Kat jumped in. “The best way things can work out right now is that one of you wins and only your line will survive, and the other eleven lines on Earth get destroyed. Right? That's the best-case scenario if you Play Endgame. Millions of people will still die.”

“And you two think that my not Playing will save those lives?” Raakel tightened her grip on the machete. “I don't know what you believe you understand about Endgame, but this entire world rests on the game. The history of the human race rests on the game. That's why we Play. It's always been this way.”

“But,” I said, “what happens if no one Plays? If there's no winner, there will be no losers.”

She shook her head. “If there's no winner, we
all
become the losers. If we defy the Makers, what's to stop them from killing all of us as punishment? Just wiping us off the face of the Earth and starting over?”

“Here,” I said. I reached to pull several papers from my back pocket.

Raakel jumped up, her sword ready in her hand.

“Sorry,” I said, freezing. “I have something for you to read. Can I just pull it out of my pocket?”

“You read it to me,” she said.

I had spent a year as a furniture salesman, and I knew when I was losing a customer. Usually they didn't threaten me with swords, though.

With trembling fingers, I unfolded the Xeroxed pages. “This is from an ancient document that we acquired from trusted sources on the inside.

“‘This is the lie, the one that has fueled your life and the lives of all who have come before you. I have risked everything to remove the veil of mystery that shrouds the Annunaki. . . . It will all be for nothing. . . .

“‘The Mu had a choice. You have a choice.

“‘To Play the game is to lose the game . . .

“‘Prove to the Annunaki that you are not mindless animals, that you can think. . . . We, all of us, deserve a chance to live.

“‘Choose to question what you have been taught.

“‘Choose to be free, that we might all be free.

“‘Choose not to Play.'”

Kat spoke. “That's from the Brotherhood of the Snake. We know at least two lines had this document in their archives. Maybe you recognize it?”

“The Brotherhood of the Snake?” Raakel scoffed. “Who are they to tell me how I should be Playing? I've never even heard of them.”

“Just think about it,” Kat said. “I totally understand what you're
feeling right now. You're being confronted by two people you don't know, and you're being told to give up everything that you've ever been trained to believe. But this is real. It doesn't get more important than this.”

I watched Raakel watch Kat, her eyes narrowing. Now that we were sitting there, facing a real Player, I couldn't help but see the cracks in our plan. We'd been thinking about this as a question of reason, that the Players would discuss it rationally. But I didn't realize until now what an emotional decision we were asking them to make. What did it feel like to be asked to give up your entire belief system? I remembered how hard it had been for me to believe in what Zero line was doing. It took having my hand forced—realizing I had nothing left—for me to join them. I wondered: If I'd had a real choice, would I have left Berkeley to go on this crazy mission?

Raakel shifted the sword to her left hand.

“So what if I don't Play, and you can't convince every other line? I will have to Play, or my line will perish.”

“We're out this morning to stop every other line,” I said. “That's our goal.”

“Why should I trust you? Maybe you're working for another line, trying to remove some of the Players.”

“Look at me,” I said, raising my voice slightly. “My name is Michael Stavros. I'm Greek. Odds are I'm a Minoan, just like you. If I believed that stopping you would cause the death of me and all my family, do you really think I'd be doing it?”

“What is this word you use?
Stop
? What is that supposed to mean?”

Kat's voice was pleading now. “It means that we want you to turn around and get on a plane back to Istanbul. Don't Play the game.”

“Just ‘don't Play the game'?”

“That's right,” she said. “Don't Play the game.”

“And what do I tell my family? My line? Their hopes are pinned on me. The lives of millions rest on my shoulders. And I should just turn my back on my responsibility?”

“You tell them just what we're telling you. That you don't believe in it. That you're walking away.”

Raakel stood up. For what felt like several minutes she paced the room. The machete never left her hand.

“And if you can't convince me to do that, how are you supposed to stop me? Does your Zero line have a plan for that?”

Damn it.
For a minute I'd thought we had her.

“We're supposed to stop you,” Kat said. “That's all. Stop.”

“You think it will be that easy? You underestimate me. I know some of the other lines,” Raakel said. “We watch each other. The Harappan. You will not ‘stop' him. And the Mu. And probably many others. You will fail. And then what will you do?”

“We will stop them,” I said. “We will.”

My heart rate was skyrocketing, and I felt sick to my stomach. We were going to have to kill her. One of us had to draw our gun and fire it before Raakel could swing her vicious sword.

I hadn't shot anyone since I killed the sheriff back in California. That seemed so long ago, but so present. I still saw that man's face down the sights of a gun, no matter how many rounds I had fired down the shooting range.

“Stop us how?”

Neither Kat nor I said anything. We sat, tense, staring at Raakel and the sword in her hand. This was not how this discussion was supposed to go. She was supposed to see reason. She was supposed to know that the game didn't have to be Played. But I saw now how naïve we were being.

One of us is going to die.

Raakel was going to swing her sword and kill one of us, and if we were lucky, the other one would draw their gun and shoot before she turned on them. And that was the best case. The worst was that neither Kat nor I would make it out of here alive. We were going up against people who had been trained by mentors like Walter. The Players were too good for us. And they had been indoctrinated
from birth. They weren't going to be convinced in a 20-minute conversation. They weren't going to give up on everything they'd been raised to believe.

“There's more to this book from the Brotherhood of the Snake,” I said, trying to get Raakel to think about something other than killing us, and the meaning of “stop.”

“What else is in there?” she said, but she was smiling, toying with us. This was the start of the game for her. She was enjoying it. Two easy kills before moving on to the real Calling.

“It gives the history of the game,” I said. “It explains how the Makers started Endgame as just that: a game.”

Kat jumped in. “You don't have to fight. The Makers started all of this as sport for themselves—initially they just hunted us themselves. Then they turned us on each other.”

As I sat there and watched her, I realized something: this was real. I had had my doubts all summer, while we were at the ranch and hearing John and Walter talk to us every night about the Players, the Calling, Endgame itself. Even while we were delivering invitations, there was a voice in the back of my mind that said that Agatha, Walter, and all the others were delusional. That aliens weren't real. But now I had to face the facts. There really were Players. They really had responded to our bizarre invitations. They didn't just
have
to Play. They were eager to.

Raakel stood up, and we did the same. I felt the gun heavy and cold against my back.

“We are done,” she said.

“Here,” I begged. “Read the pages.” I pushed the papers to her. If she took them and looked down, we could get the jump on her.

She glanced down at the papers, laughing. “I don't care what your book says. I don't know where it came from, and there's no reason I should believe it. Like I said: maybe you're from another line? Maybe you're trying to get rid of your competition.”

“Just read the pages,” I said again. “Please.”

She laughed and took them from me, and immediately Kat and I both grabbed our guns.