Endgame Novella #1 (10 page)

It’s over almost as soon as it begins.

And there’s a hole at the center of her mother’s head.

And her father’s.

And her sister’s.

Their bodies are motionless. The floor is thick with blood. Alad is frozen in a corner, watching.

Someone is screaming.

Kala realizes it’s her.

She forces herself to stop, and then there is only the thunder of helicopters overhead. There are the four men with guns, and the woman who led their charge.

Zikia, who has come to claim her.

Kala was so sure she wasn’t followed. So sure they wouldn’t figure out where she was going. So sure she’d been careful.

She was so careless with her family’s lives.

“Players cannot be compromised by attachment,” Zikia says. “You know that. Caring is weakness. Love is threat.”

“How?” she says, because she must know what she’s done.

“Well done, Alad,” Zikia says. “You’ve shown us all your true colors.”

Kala turns to him, the boy she loves, the boy who is her entire world, knowing it’s impossible.

Knowing nothing is impossible.

“Alad?” she says, and in that word is a plea:
Tell me this woman is lying. Tell me you wouldn’t
.

He doesn’t.

He says, “I’m sorry.”

There has always been an empty place at Kala’s center. It was filled, for a moment. But now, with those two words, the emptiness consumes her.

“I had no choice,” he says. “You were betraying the cause, I had to tell someone, and they said if I told them where we were going, they’d let you off the hook, they’d let me be the Player, and you know how
much I wanted that, you didn’t want it at all, and that just wasn’t fair.” He’s babbling. It’s background noise to her, barely audible above the buzzing in her ears, the echo of her sister’s laughter. “They would have found us anyway, eventually. You know that. I thought it would be easier this way. That we could both get what we wanted. I didn’t know what they were going to do, Kala. You have to believe that. You have to forgive me. How could I know?”

There is, somehow, a weapon in her hand. A Caracal pistol, her favorite. Compact and deadly. Just like her.

“You gave yourself away to a fool,” Zikia tells her. It is Zikia’s gun, and Zikia’s hand on her shoulder, its gentle pressure telling her what she needs to do now. Who she needs to be now. “Your misguided attachment blinded you to the truth of him, and look what it’s done.”

Caring is weakness.

Love is threat.

“Kala,” Alad says. Pleads. “Kala, I love you. I only did this for us. For our future.”

She can smell the blood, its iron tang. This is what she will think of now, when she remembers her mother. Not saffron, but blood.

Not the life she could have had, but death.

“Kala,
please
.” Alad’s voice breaks.

Kala
is only a word she chose to call herself. It is not real. No more real than Simin, that leftover from a child’s dream. Kala means “time,” the destroyer of all things. There are those who say Kala is the name of the god of death.

She is 5SIGMA. She has always been 5SIGMA. She sees that now. She sees the way forward.

She pulls the trigger.

Blood blossoms at the center of his forehead. His eyes go wide, then empty.

She has always had excellent aim.

“Good,” Zikia says. Then: “I’m sorry it had to happen like this.”

“I’m not,” Kala says, and is already in motion, stepping past Zikia,
past the bodies of the people she will force herself to forget, past this present and into her future. She will not pause to cry, or to regret.

She has been scooped out, emptied of the capacity for tears, and of the weakness that goes with them.

She will move forward. She will forget Alad, forget her family, forget love, forget what was or what might have been, focus only on what is.

Playing.

Winning.

Surviving.

There is nothing else.

MU

CHIYOKO

All day, every day, Chiyoko belongs to her people. Her life, her time, her choices, none of them are her own. She lives for the Mu, the thousands who share her ancient bloodline and will rely on her to save them if Endgame comes. It is both obligation and honor; it is a promise she made before she was old enough to understand sacrifice. A promise made on her behalf, before she was born. The stars spelled out her fate six days before baby Chiyoko made her way, red-faced and gasping—but never crying, never that—into the world. She was training for her role before she was old enough to understand what training meant, that training was anything other than life. She has never had friends, never had hobbies. She has never doubted the person she would grow to become, the things she would be capable of, the obligations she would serve, because her uncle told her what would come to pass, and she knew no other way but to believe him.

She begrudges none of it. The Mu are her people and she is their Player. Her days belong to them.

But her nights are her own.

By day she endures an isolated, regimented existence, her every minute accounted for. She is a precious object, to be protected at all costs. Yes, the training is rigorous and often puts her life in danger—she’s leaped from airplanes, scaled skyscrapers, infiltrated military installations, walked through fire—but those are calculated risks,
efficient
risks. They serve a purpose. When she is not enduring missions, preparing for an end that might never come, she is meant to
be safe at home, under her uncle’s watchful eye. If and when Endgame begins, she will be the champion of her people. But until then, her uncle never tires of reminding her, she is a 13-year-old girl. A 13-year-old girl who can tie a hundred different knots, load a machine gun in three seconds flat, disarm a man three times her size. But she cannot do something so simple as open her mouth and ask for help.

Chiyoko lived 13 years as a Player-to-be, and accepted the limitations of that life, having never known any other. But 10 days ago, on her 13th birthday, she ascended. Player-to-be no more. She is now the Player, the one and only. She has placed her hands on the ancient scrolls, the ones that tell of the near obliteration of the Mu by their alien overlords. She has sworn to protect her people in the event that these merciless beings finally return. The Mu were saved once, by the cruel grace of the creatures from the stars. Only Chiyoko can save them again. This she swore to do—silently, with a slow nod of the head that her uncle understood. She could hear several of the elders on the Council of Twelve muttering, as if a promise were not a promise unless spoken aloud. As if her entire life had not been a promise of service to them and their needs.

She thought things would change after the ceremony. That upon coming of age she would live a freer life, able to make her own choices.

She was wrong.

If anything, her uncle’s rules have gotten more oppressive. She is still a precious possession, now more precious than ever. Her skills, her energies, her days—these belong to her people, her uncle reminds her, as he pushes her ever harder.

Chiyoko lives to please her uncle, the only one who believes in her without reservation. She delights in meeting his expectations and exceeding them. So by day she lives the life he sets out for her.

By night she flies.

Rooftop to rooftop, soaring over the streets of Naha, a creature of the dark. She runs up the sides of building, vaults over walls, lets momentum carry her up, across, away. She never hesitates at the edge
of a roof: to hesitate is to fall. She flings herself at edges, leaps across chasms, holds tight to those seconds aloft, defying gravity. In those seconds, suspended between roofs, tens or hundreds of feet above the ground, she can be free.

Her trainers called it parkour, and they taught her well. No one knows how much she took the training to heart, that she has made the night city her own.

Chiyoko has always been good at secrets.

Some nights she spies on her neighbors, alighting on a balcony or windowsill and stealing glimpses of a stranger’s life. More often she enjoys her solitude, letting her mind drift into fantasy as her body takes flight: She is a vampire; she is a superhero; she is a monster. She is an anime vigilante, flickering in two dimensions across a cartoon sky. She wonders what they would make of her, these innocents, if they caught sight of her silhouette streaking across the low-hanging moon. Whatever it might be, it couldn’t be stranger than the truth.

That she
is
a superhero. A vigilante. That she is fated to save the world. Or at least her people. And she’s been taught to understand that they are all of the world that matters.

In the day, while she trains with her uncle, she bears this responsibility without telling anyone of her doubts: Can she do it? Is she strong enough? If Endgame comes, will she survive? She keeps her fears to herself, and lets no one guess how much she dreads Endgame, how much she hopes her time as the Player will pass without incident. That the days and years will slip past until she ages out of eligibility and the fate of the world slides onto someone else’s shoulders.

At night, the doubts disappear. They have no more hold on her than gravity.

She feels it as she leaps fearlessly into shadow: certainty. A sureness that she is the one, that Endgame will come, and come soon. That she will rise to meet it.

Part of it, surely, is the solitude of night, its promised escape from the doubting eyes of the Mu. Out here in the dark, there is no one to
wonder how a girl who can’t speak can do anything else. No one to treat her like she is broken, damaged, stupid,
wrong
. No one to smile and pretend to believe her uncle, believe she is up to the challenge, while their gaze shines with the truth of their skepticism.

No wonder it’s easier to believe in herself when she can be invisible.

But that’s not all of it.

That may be what sent her into the night for the first time, but it’s not why she stayed, or why she can’t stay away.

Soaring from building to building, she becomes one with the dark. A shadow slipping across the sky, she feels connected to the stars as she never does on the ground. Only in motion, in the air, can she hear them singing to her. Whispers on the breeze, chimes in the night, a message meant only for her ears.

We are coming
.

We are coming
.

We are coming back
.

Alone in the dark, she imagines she can feel their presence, their watchful eyes, those beings from the stars. And their eyes hold no doubt. They know she is the one. They know she will be ready.

This is why she defies her uncle’s wishes and sneaks into the night. She needs these booster shots of confidence. She needs that belief that comes only in darkness, to get her through all those hours in the light.

But tonight is not about confidence or freedom.

Tonight is about learning her fate.

Tonight she scales the barbed-wire gate surrounding Satoshi Nori’s estate and climbs his ivy-carpeted walls. She perches lightly on a sill and activates the transmitter she long before hid in his sitting room. The transmitters are long-range, and she could have eavesdropped on this conversation from the comfort of her own home. But she prefers it here, with the wind sharp on her cheeks and the Mu Council of Twelve bickering in hushed tones behind the bulletproof glass. Twelve of them, one for each of the original 12 tribes of Mu that stood up to the creatures from the stars. As reward for their rebelliousness, 11 of
the tribes were wiped from the Earth. One line remained, one charged with remembering the price of defiance. The Mu have been obedient servants ever since, playing their role in the game, warning the ancient bloodlines of humanity about the Endgame to come. Millennia of tradition and servitude, all resting in the hands of these 12 old men and women. These are the 12 who have placed the burden of her people on Chiyoko’s shoulders, and among them now are those who would try to take that burden away.

They may refuse to face her, but they can’t stop her from facing them.

They may treat her like a child, but they’re fools if they think she’s going to act like one, letting decisions be made for her, letting conversations fly over her head that will decide her future.

Satoshi Nori is the de facto leader of the Mu—he is neither the wisest nor the boldest among them, but he has the most money, and that counts for plenty.

Chiyoko has been listening in on him for more than a year now. Which is how she knows his to be the loudest voice speaking up against her, arguing that a girl like her—a
defective
like her—should not be the Player, no matter what the signs may say.

Unlike her elders, she has never much cared what Satoshi thought. But maybe she should have. Because this afternoon she overheard her uncle agreeing to attend a meeting of the council, a meeting in which they would hear Satoshi out once and for all.

The Council of Twelve meets, as a rule, only once a year. An unscheduled meeting is agreed to only under grave consideration—if her uncle agreed to attend, he must have had good reason. He must have believed Satoshi would say something worth hearing.