Endgame Novella #1 (15 page)

So she was not surprised when the dream came, her ancestors whispering her fate in her ear. She was not surprised to wake with the red kangaroo nuzzling the hollow of her neck, sacred creature of her people offered as a tribute from the sleeping world to the waking one.

She has not returned since, because she has not needed to return—her path as the Player has been clear, her training easy and almost joyful, her days driven by a purity of purpose.

Until now.

Now she’s returned to her homeland, to the earth that gifted her with her duty and destiny. She’s returned for guidance from her ancestors. She’s walked; she’s fasted; she’s wilted in the heat and shivered in the night. She’s waited for the dreams, and the dreams have not come.

Alice has patience. She trusts the land; she trusts the spirits of her people. She waits.

She watches the stars. They feel closer tonight.

Everything feels closer tonight: the sky, the ground, her future. The time is near, she thinks. The answers are close.

She breathes.

She trusts.

She sleeps.

She dreams.

Flames streak from the stars. Dusty plains erupt in pillars of light.

The sky is on fire.

Alice watches the world begin and end and begin again. She is an eye of calm at the center of the raging storm of eternity.

She is Alice Ulapala, Player of the Koori. Savior of the Koori. She is Alice the Player, but also Alice the 112th, an infinitesimal point on the unbroken line of her people. She is both at once, and also neither, also a free-floating consciousness on the sea of time, dipping into the now and the then and the might someday be.

In this place between, there is no one-thing-after-another, no cause and effect. No boundaries between past and present, between Alice and her people and her world.

This is where Alice will find her answers. From her ancestors. From herself.

This is where the spirits of the Koori dwell, all memories of past and possibilities of future mingling together, melting into an endless stream.

This is dreamtime.

Her question is not asked in words, nor is the answer spoken aloud.

But as Alice slips deeper into dreamtime, as she soaks in the desire of her line and the visions of fiery future, she understands.

The future is unwritten, its possibilities branching in two directions: death and life. This moment is the hinge.

She
is the hinge.

What she does now, what she chooses to do, how she Plays, this will alter the flow of events. This will carry her line forward, or end it.

Alice is Alice the 112th. She is only a single Player in a line of Players stretching back through the millennia. But she sees here, in this place that is no place, that she is the one that counts.

Alice feels the tendrils of the waking world reaching for her, pulling
her from the dream.

Color and light fade away, and the heaviness sets in.

The weight of reality.

The weight of time.

She holds fast to the dream as it fades. She lets her spirit stretch through the flow of ancestors, the eternal slivers of soul of all who came before, and, as she always does, seeks out a single bright light in the shimmering stream.

Somewhere among that line, somewhere in dreamtime, lives her mother.

Or, at least, the elemental piece of her mother that slipped into eternity as her body returned to the earth.

But the line is unbroken, the stream undifferentiated. Her mother is only one of many, a single star in a cluster of galaxies, unfindable.

Alice never stops looking.

She wakes knowing what she needs to know.

She needs to stop delaying and fulfill her duty.

She needs to Play.

She radios Henry, her trainer, who’s waiting on her word, the plane fueled and ready to go. She didn’t tell him why she needed to come out here, or how much—but she didn’t have to. Henry knows her well enough to understand why, for the first time, she has hesitated. As he knows her well enough to trust that she will return, ready to fulfill her obligations, to carry out her next mission, to follow orders. He knows her well enough to wait.

And she knows him well enough to know he hated every minute of it.

Now she puts him out of his misery.

“Come and get me, mate,” she says into the satellite phone, marveling that even out here in the heart of nowhere, this tiny machine can commune with the stars. Or at least a mechanical approximation of them whirling through the ether, beaming her words to an airstrip 300 miles away. “And make it snappy.”

There’s nothing much Alice loves about flying. Especially in this tin can of a plane.

Especially with Henry at the controls.

He’s always a nervous driver, and being several thousand feet above the surface of the earth never helps his mood.

“Still the same as the last thirty times you checked,” Alice teases as he sneaks yet another glance at the altimeter.

“It never hurts to be careful.”

“No Player ever won by being careful,” Alice says.

“And that’s why I never let
you
drive,” Henry points out. “Now, can I get back to outlining your mission?”

“You’re the boss,” she says, but when he returns to describing the target, she tunes him out. Instead she stares out the mottled window, watching the plane’s wing tear through wisps of cloud. True, there’s nothing to love about flying, but it’s better for her than what’s waiting on the ground.

“Are you even listening?” Henry asks, without looking over at her. He knows her that well.

“Maybe it’d be easier to pay attention if ya didn’t yabber on so much,” she suggests.

“This is important, Alice.”

“Everything’s
important
with you, Henry. You’d think the fate of the world was at stake or something.” She grins, because that’s what she does when she’s nervous. Finds something to laugh about. Something to let out the pressure and remind herself that life isn’t always so deadly serious. Even her life. Henry, on the other hand, doesn’t crack a smile. “Sometimes I think you’re missing the humor gene.”

“I have an excellent sense of humor,” Henry says drily. “That’s why I only laugh at things that are
funny
.”

“Oh, I see, you’re training me to tell better jokes. Glad to see you finally realize that a good Player needs a sense of humor.”

“A Player has no need to be funny,” Henry says sternly. But he can’t
help himself. His lips quirk into a small smile. “My daughter, on the other hand, should find herself some better material. This family has a reputation for comedy to uphold.”

Alice gives him a gentle slug on the shoulder. “Yeah, Dad, that’s what I always say about you. You’re a laugh a minute.”

He pretends to take offense at the insult, and she pretends to mean it, and for a moment, everything is like it used to be between them. For a moment, they are father and daughter, the two of them against the world, laughing in the face of death and danger.

Then the moment passes. Henry hands her a dossier. “Study it. We’ve only got a half hour till we land.”

He didn’t used to be this serious. When he first started training her, he made it into a game. She was five years old and her mother was dead. They both needed something to do—some way to be with each other and to be with their own grief, without letting it consume them. Training showed them the way. Henry taught her to be strong, taught her to run and hunt and fight. He taught her to love her people, and to love life again, even without the person who had given it meaning. They trained hard, but they also laughed, a lot. They came to know each other, to understand each other and trust each other, as they never had before. They learned to be two instead of three. And they did it all without forgetting the woman they’d lost, not for a single second. How could they, when life was all about Playing, and Alice’s mother had been a Player?

Not just any Player, but one of the best.

She’d broken records (and more than a few noses). She’d made a name for herself by the time she was fourteen, been beloved by her people for her courage, infamous for her fearlessness and steely nerve. She’d bested one death-defying risk after another, waiting eagerly for Endgame to arrive so she could fulfill her destiny and save the world.

But it didn’t matter how good she was—she’d ended up just like every other Player before her. Waiting in vain for the beings from the stars to return. Growing up, growing old, until she was too old to Play. Old
enough to fall in love, take a husband, bear a daughter, get cancer, die.

Infamous nerve, fearlessness, courage—none of it helped her, not in the end.

Or rather, it did help.

Just not enough.

At first, Alice trained to forget her mother—pushing her body to its limits was the best way to escape her mind, and her pain. But later, she trained to remember. She dreamed of becoming as good as her mother, as brave and strong. The older she got, the fuzzier her memories got. Life before her mother’s illness was little but old stories and faded photos. Alice had always thought that if she could really do it, if she could be named the Player, she would have a connection to her mother that neither time nor death could break.

Maybe Henry had thought so too.

Maybe he’d thought that by turning her into the Player her mother used to be, he could bring his wife back.

Maybe he still thinks so, even though now Alice
is
the Player, and she’s no closer to her mother than ever.

The only thing that’s changed, now that it’s official, is Henry.

Training used to be the thing that made them a family. But once she officially took on her role as a Player? Training took over their lives. It’s all Henry talks about anymore, all he thinks about. In his eyes, she’s a Player first, a daughter second. Sometimes she wonders if he even remembers he’s more than just her trainer. If, maybe, he wishes he weren’t.

“I don’t know what you’re so worried about,” she tells him now. “I’ll get the job done. Don’t I always?”

“This isn’t like the others, Alice. This is your first kill.”

“Tell that to the dingoes,” she points out. She once took out three with a single toss of her boomerang, a personal record.

“Your first
human
kill,” he says, like she needs the reminding. Like this whole field trip to the bush, this journey into her dreams, hasn’t been about exactly this moment. This mission. Her first human kill.

She’s mastered everything else a Player could possibly need to do. She’s an expert in 16 different forms of hand-to-hand combat, can handle ancient weapons just as well as she can an AK-47; she’s leaped out of airplanes, scaled mountains, scavenged for artifacts at the bottom of the sea, deciphered coded passages that have foiled expert cryptographers for centuries. But she’s never killed a person before. She’s always found a way to avoid it, another way to get the job done. A better, easier, less deadly way.

Until now.

Now Henry says it’s time she learns what it means to kill.

Learns whether or not she has it in her to do it.

Learns now, before her life and the lives of her entire people are at stake.

This dossier in her lap lays out the life of a man who will be dead by sunrise, if she does what she’s supposed to do.

She opens the file.

Zeke Cable is a 42-year-old bank executive with a wife, a child, a three-bedroom condo in a fashionable part of Melbourne, and a studio in a significantly less fashionable one. His juvenile record shows a couple of misdemeanor charges from his days as a graffiti skate punk, but since then, he’s stayed clean. No record, not even a drunk-driving charge. No signs of criminal activity or domestic abuse. No sign he’s done anything deserving of death.

And she’s supposed to kill him?

“What the bloody hell is this, Henry?” she growls.

“What?”

“You know what.”

Maybe so, but he pretends not to. “I don’t think I’m asking you to do any more than you’re capable of,” he says. “The target poses minimal risk to you.”

“I’ll say,” she snaps. “You want me to shoot some random guy? Some innocent who hasn’t done anything wrong?”

“Everyone’s done something wrong.”

“You know what I mean.”

“And you know what I mean,” Henry says. “He’s not Koori, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Alice laughs angrily. “You think
that’s
what I’m worried about? So if he’s not Koori, it means he deserves to die?”

“It means you’re not meant to care whether he dies or not,” he says. “The
Koori
are your concern. No one else.”

Alice remembers a time, long ago, when she was still doing target practice with her boomerang. She spotted a kangaroo streaking through the bush and was set to take it down, when her father stayed her hand. “There are those who believe roos are sacred to our people,” he told her. When she asked if
he
believed this, he shrugged, and said better safe than sorry. “It’s always better to err on the safe side when it comes to killing, Allie.” He had called her that when she was small, and then, eventually he stopped. She didn’t remember when, or why. “Killing is one choice you can’t take back.”

Even when he was pushing her past her limits, he was gentle with her then.

That stopped too.

And apparently he’s changed his mind about killing.

Or maybe his rules are different when it comes to people.

“I thought you were going to set me out against a criminal, Henry,” she says. A part of her knows there’s no point in arguing, but she can’t help trying. He’s taught her never to give up. “A drug dealer. A gangster. A terrorist. You know, a
bad guy
.”

“Like in the movies?” he says, keeping his eyes straight ahead. She doesn’t know if he’s refusing to look over at her, or just doesn’t want to bother. “Real life isn’t always so black-and-white, Alice. Though if it makes you feel better, Zeke Cable
is
a bad guy.”

“Oh, yeah? What, did he cheat on his taxes? Roll a bloody joint?”

“He’s dangerous, Alice. He’s a dangerous man whose death is necessary for the protection of the Koori people. You don’t need to know why. You don’t need to see evidence. You just need to trust me, and do as
you’re told.”