Endgame Novella #1 (12 page)

Akina flips her hair and laughs. The melodic trill comes so easily to her that she does it again. Akina talks with her voice but also her hands, fingers dancing through the air as she tells her friends story after story. They turn toward her as if warming themselves in the sun.

Chiyoko has no friends. No school, no stories. She has a family that cares for her and a room full of beloved books. She has a destiny, and all this is meant to be enough.

Akina has a life.

Akina has a boy named Ryo, who she calls Ri-Ri, even though he claims to hate it. She tickles his neck and he laces his arms around her waist and lifts her off the ground. She whispers in his ear, and even Chiyoko, hiding so close, listening so closely, cannot hear what she has to say.

Chiyoko follows Akina for three days, traipsing back and forth across the city, from the school with its eager audience to the Naha Main Place with its endless corridors of stores, from the mangrove woods where Akina slides her body against Ryo’s to the family estate where she talks herself out of trouble for breaking curfew. Soon Chiyoko understands everything she needs to know about the enemy. Akina is used to getting what she wants—life is easy that way, for those who are able to ask. Akina never searches the shadows, never catches a glimpse of movement, of Chiyoko’s eyes blinking in the dark.

Chiyoko is good at hiding, at turning invisible. It has saved her life more than once, and very soon it will save her again.

Akina, it is clear, has never turned invisible. Wouldn’t know how. Akina is soft, Akina is spoiled, Akina expects to win, and because of that, Akina will die.

So there is no reason to envy her, Chiyoko reminds herself.

No reason at all.

They come for her in the hour before dawn. Ten masked figures, all in black, all with swords and guns. Chiyoko likes that there are so many of them. It is a sign of respect from her uncle. He knows any fewer than that and they would have no hope against her.

Foolish, though, that they expected to catch her asleep.

She wakes as the first soft footstep crosses the threshold of the house, two floors below. By the time they burst through her door and window, she has hidden her shuriken and her favorite knife beneath her thermal gear, along with a compass and several packets of water purification tablets.

“Come along quietly and you won’t get hurt,” one of them says, and it’s times like this that Chiyoko wishes she could laugh out loud.

She comes along quietly, as she does everything. But she’s not the one who gets hurt.

She is a silent whirlwind of violence, kicking and punching, slicing flesh. Cartilage crunches beneath her fist and bones crack against hard floor. She jabs a stomach, ducks a roundhouse swing, aims the flat of her hand at an exposed throat, dances past flashing knives, her body like water, flowing through the enemy unharmed. By the time they succeed in binding her hands behind her back and lashing her legs together, there are four bodies on the floor, and two moaning in opposite corners.

There is no shame in losing this fight; she is expected to lose. She suspects she was not expected to take so many of them down with her.

“Maybe they’re wrong about her,” a woman’s voice says as something sharp pierces Chiyoko’s spine. “She’s a tough one.”

She glimpses a needle, feels something poisonous creeping through her veins.

“You want to
tell
us how tough you are, sweetheart?” a man says, giving her a rough shake.

In the silence, he laughs. “Didn’t think so.”

“Show a little respect,” the woman says. “She’s still the Player.”

He laughs again. “Not for long.” He lifts Chiyoko off the floor and swings her body over his shoulder. She is no threat to him now, hog-tied and poisoned, weak and fading.

Fading.

The laughter is softer now, as if coming from a great distance.

Or else she is the one at a distance, untethered from the world, from her body, floating farther and farther away.

Her lids are so heavy. Darkness closes in.

Hold on
, she wills herself, but there is nothing to hold.

There is nothing but empty dark, and silence.

And she is so tired.

“Sweet dreams, chatty,” the man’s voice says.

She dreams of killing him, slowly.

She dreams that he begs her for mercy, and that instead she makes it hurt.

She opens her eyes to a pounding headache and the thunder of an engine. Ropes bite into her wrists and ankles, but she slips a finger free of the bindings and that’s all it takes to extricate the rest of her. She rises on sore legs to find herself in a small cargo plane.

A small,
empty
cargo plane. Flying thousands of feet over a sea that stretches to the horizon.

With no pilot at the controls.

And a fuel gauge tipping toward empty.

Sometimes, Chiyoko thinks, it would be nice to be able to swear.

She scrambles into the pilot’s seat and scans the console. She’s never flown this kind of plane, but she’s logged many hours of solo flight time on military transport craft and a Boeing freighter with similar controls. The radio has been disabled, as has the navigational system, but the steering is intact, and it’s not hard to get a feel for the stick and ease the plane onto a level flight path.

Flight path to
where
is the question. She estimates she has about twenty minutes of flying time left, and even if she could land the plane on the open water, she wouldn’t last long. She’d be dead of exposure or dehydration or sharks long before Akina got around to ambushing her.

This is a survival exercise, and Chiyoko knows her uncle isn’t going to make it easy on her, but he also wouldn’t make it impossible. Somewhere in that endless stretch of ocean, there must be land.

She guides the plane in an ever-widening spiral, scanning the waters until she sees it. First just a speck of brown on the horizon, then, as she closes in, a spit of land dense with green. An island.

It will do for survival—just not for landing the plane.

Chiyoko levers the control stick into place with her shoe, a makeshift autopilot that will guide the plane in a loose, lazy circle around the island. Then she begins to scour the cabin for a parachute.

There is no panic. She’s been trained out of that. As she sorts through crates and unscrews panels, checking every inch of the plane for the chute she knows must be secreted somewhere, she breathes at regular intervals. Calm, collected, in and out. Heart rate low and steady. No mental sirens blare. Chiyoko knows how to suppress the dumb-animal part of her brain, the part that in most people would be shrieking incoherently.

Out of fuel!

Lost at sea!

No way out!

This is part of the test: staying calm, staying rational. Children panic—Players Play.

She uncovers a parachute beneath a loose panel in the flooring and straps it to her back. Then it’s merely a matter of dropping elevation, plotting a flight path over the island, heaving open the freight door, swiftly gauging the physics of momentum and gravity, calculating the relevant distance and velocity vectors—320 km per hour horizontal motion and a 9.8 m/s
²
vertical acceleration that without the parachute could have her smashing to the ground at a terminal velocity of 195 km
per hour—perfectly timing her bailout.

Waiting for her moment.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Jump
.

She could stay here forever.

Floating.

Blue above, blue below.

A thunder of wind in her ears, the sound of silence.

The chute rippling overhead, the ground inching closer, the seconds stretching, her isolation absolute.

There is no threat here, in the air. No attack to anticipate, no enemy to avoid. No game to Play. There is only a child’s dream of flight, a lazy drift through the clouds, like floating in a lake on a summer day.

It is like flying again over the streets of Naha, soaring through the night from roof to roof, that same weightless freedom, and she feels at home. Drifting through the air, one with the sky.

This is where she belongs.

This is where she would happily stay.

But she cannot fly, only fall, and inevitably the ground rises up to meet her. The game begins again.

Impact
.

As Chiyoko assembles her lean-to, rigging a makeshift home from bamboo stalks and the waterproof chute, she wonders when and how Akina will appear on the island. She snorts, thinking of the girl diving out of a plane. It seems more likely she’ll arrive by yacht.

Chiyoko gathers wood for a fire and then uses the lens from her compass to focus the sunlight into a spark. She strips a small sapling and fashions it into a fishing rod. Between that and the nuts and berries she’s able to forage near her campground, she should have no problems with food. She builds camp on the coast but ventures into
the dense trees in search of fresh water. She finds a spring a half mile away, and there are enough small animals feeding from it that she feels confident to drink.

She waits for Akina, waits for the ambush she knows is to come.

Waits for the girl she is meant to kill.

Two days pass, and this becomes her routine: Tend the fire. Forage for food; trek to the stream. Swim. Work out under the blistering afternoon sun; throw her shuriken at increasingly distant targets. Wait.

Wait.

Wait.

She plays out the attack in her head, imagines her hands around Akina’s throat, her knife in Akina’s belly. She kills the girl again and again in her mind.

Kill the girl; kill the doubt.

That is the promise of this mission.

All those who have questioned her will be silent. They will be forced to accept her, and to believe in her.

In the silence that follows, she will finally, fully believe in herself.

That is the promise, and so she waits for it to deliver.

She is distracted by her reflection in the water. Just for a second—no, less than that. For a heartbeat. She catches a glimpse of herself, rippling across the blue, and smiles, so that the quiet girl in the water will smile back at her. Nothing about the girl announces her ferocity. Even here, besting the wilderness, she looks like a shy schoolgirl, nothing more. Chiyoko is easily underestimated, and that has always worked to her advantage. But there are times she wishes her exterior could match what lies within. That her reflection revealed a warrior.

A warrior should never be caught off guard. Even one beat of distraction is too many, and by the time she hears the noise behind her, it is too late.

A jaguar stands before her, ready to pounce.

Two more eye her from the brush, their coats sleek, their legs strong, their teeth sharp.

She reaches for her knife, and deliberates. She could, with a flick of the hand, bury it in the nearest jaguar’s neck. But that would leave the other two alive—and her knife out of reach.

She could keep her knife close, wrestle the beasts to the ground one by one—and risk being overpowered.

If she can distract or disable one of them, maybe she can outrun the other two.

Maybe.

The jaguar closest to her—too close—lets out a low growl.

She breathes. She thinks. She does not panic. She is Chiyoko, the fated champion of the Mu line. She is trained for all contingencies; she is in control regardless of circumstance. She can do this.

Somehow.

She has studied the world’s most dangerous creatures. Jaguars, she knows, can run at nearly 100 km/hour over short distances. Their powerful jaws can bite down with more strength than nearly any animal on earth. Skull-crushing force, literally. They live and hunt alone—except during mating season. Now.

Just her luck.

Chiyoko never acts until she’s certain of success. The jaguar, on the other hand, has no doubts.

It pounces. One hundred ten kilograms of muscle and teeth fly at her, jagged claws extended, fierce jaw open wide.

Chiyoko vaults backward, flips across the spring, lands sure-footed, and readies herself to fight—when a shot echoes through the trees, and the beast drops to the ground.

Two more shots, and the other two jaguars are dead side by side.

Chiyoko spots a muzzle poking out through the leaves. And there, steady behind the scope, is Akina Nori.

I deserve this
, Chiyoko thinks as she prepares herself for a final shot and the darkness to follow. She knew the ambush was coming and
somehow fell into it anyway. Unforgivable.
My people deserve better
.

But the shot never sounds. Instead there is a soft thump as Akina drops to the ground. Chiyoko assumes a fight position. Surely the girl doesn’t imagine she can best Chiyoko in hand-to-hand combat?

“Chill out,” Akina says, lowering the weapon. “I’m Akina Nori, remember me? Satoshi’s daughter? They sent me in as reinforcements, said you’d probably need some help with the whole survival thing.”

Chiyoko purses her lips, trying to figure out why Akina would go to the trouble of lying. Why not just shoot when she had the chance? True, guns are inelegant, an amateur’s weapon, and something Chiyoko would never stoop to herself. But surely Akina has no such standards, not when the stakes are so high.

Akina misunderstands, or pretends to. “Oh, don’t get all sulky about it. You think I want to be here? I’m supposed to be front row center at a concert tonight, not in the middle of nowhere eating DIY sushi with a stick. And no offense, but it’s pretty obvious you could use the help.”

This makes no sense. Akina must have some kind of plan, but it’s incomprehensible.

“I don’t know if you noticed, but I did just save your life,” Akina says. “You could at least say thank you.” She catches herself then, and makes a face Chiyoko has seen too many times: simultaneously embarrassed, afraid of offending, irritated at the need to be afraid. “Uh, I mean, you could be thankful. Or whatever.”

Chiyoko presses her hands together and offers Akina a shallow bow. The girl is right: she did save Chiyoko’s life. Which puts Chiyoko in her debt.