Endgame Novella #1 (17 page)

“You want me to just follow orders, is that it?” she says snidely. “Last I checked, I was the Player, not you. Last I checked, you were
never
good enough to be a Player. Why would I follow anyone’s orders, especially yours?”

She expects this to push him over the line, but instead the words seem to move him in another direction. He softens, if only slightly.

“You’re not really angry at me,” he says.

“Wanna bet?”

“You’re angry at yourself. For letting all these people die.”

“You—”

“No, Alice.
You
.”

Something in her disintegrates. Because even if he’s wrong, he’s still right. Not him. Or not just him.

Her.

She switches off the TV, but she can’t switch off her mind, her photographic memory calling up every body part, every tearstained face, every scream. These will remain in her head, forever. These will remain on her shoulders, forever.

“It was difficult for her at first too,” he says, and Alice goes still.

He’s talking about her mother.

He almost never talks about her mother.

“She had to learn to wall away her humanity,” he says. “To Play coldly, rationally. It’s not enough to know you can kill in the heat of action. You need to be able to kill because necessity dictates it, because
reason
dictates it, no matter how you might feel.”

“You want me to kill off my humanity?” Alice says, incredulous. “If that’s what’s necessary to win Endgame, then what’s the point? How could the slice of humanity worth saving be the one that’s least human?”

“If Endgame comes, you won’t be Playing it to save your own life,” her father points out, almost gently. “You’ll be Playing to save your people. Maybe it’s worth it to make yourself a little less human, if it means your people can live. Your mother thought so.”

Alice can’t bear to hear this anymore.

She can’t bear to hear him urging her to shut off, to shut down, to make herself someone cold and heartless.

She can’t bear to hear him claiming that her mother did exactly that.

She can’t bear to think he might be right.

In the dream, she is alone.

Alone with cold earth and empty sky.

The Mothers and Fathers and Sisters and Brothers of the line have abandoned her, for she has abandoned them.

She listens for her people.

Listens for the earth.

Listens.

Listens.

But there is only silence.

This has happened before. A Player walking away from her duty. And so from her people.

A Player who will not Play.

Alice knows: there is no place for a soul like that among the Koori. No place in the eternal stream of ancestors, no place in past, present, or future.

To walk away from one is to walk away from all.

To exile oneself from the Koori and the land, from the heart and the breath of life.

To be alone.

She cannot live like this, in this abomination of silence.

Life cannot survive in a vacuum.

Alice cannot survive the emptiness left in her ancestors’ wake.

She is Koori, and Koori are never alone.

To be alone is to be no longer Koori.

To lose them is to lose herself.

This dream, she knows, is her future.

One possible future.

But only if she chooses it.

She chooses her people. She chooses her duty, her obligation, her privilege.

She chooses her father.

And her mother.

She can’t make up for what she’s done—for what she’s let this monster do.

But she can make sure he never gets the chance to do it again.

She can be cold and rational; she can weigh the risks of due process and a juried trial; she can decide, heartlessly, that, better late than
never, Zeke Cable should die. At her hand.

In the dark before dawn, she leaves her father a note, assuring him that when she comes back, she’ll be ready to begin her training in earnest.

To turn herself into whatever her people need her to be.

Even if it’s a killer.

The prison is a couple hundred miles outside of Sydney. It is a maximum security facility, with several layers of security checkpoints and a fleet of armed guards. It is a cement fortress, impossible to break out of—or into.

Alice doesn’t need to break in. They open the door wide and welcome her through the gates. Because all the technology and armory in the world can’t compensate for human foolishness.

She’s always looked older than her age, and her falsified documents are flawless. One checkpoint after another waves her through, just another government agent with top clearance come to speak to the high-priority prisoner. A young female one, and so easily overlooked. Easily underestimated.

She insists on being alone with the prisoner. His legs are chained together, and another chain wraps from his ankles to the wall. He is nailed in place like a rabid guard dog, but he’s no danger to her. He’s no fighter. She knows him well enough to know that.

Though she’s been wrong before.

“Who are you?” he says sourly. “Another fed? I’ll tell you what I told them. The only criminal here is the government. You’re the oppressors. We’re the slaves. All I did was deliver a wake-up call. Sacrifice to a higher cause. You all want to talk about killers and innocent victims, look in the mirror. Look at what your so-called civilization has done to the planet. To the people. Wake up, and see what you’ve wrought. Wake up, because there’s more to come.”

“That’s more than enough. I’m not here to talk,” she says, and lets down her hair, pulling out the long strand of wire that’s been holding it
in place. She stretches the garrote tight, giving Zeke Cable a chance to take in the razor-thin, gleaming wire she intends to wrap around his throat.

“Give me a break,” he says. “You think you can scare me into naming names? Giving up all our plans? You all may be a bunch of criminals, but you’re not stupid enough to try that.”

“I don’t know who you think you’re talking to, mate, but I can promise you, I’m not stupid. And I’m not trying to scare you into anything.”

He must hear something in her voice, something that spells out serious business, because his face goes pale. He starts yelling, screaming for someone to come.

But the cell is soundproofed, and he can’t reach far enough to press the switch that would summon the guards. She’s wearing a low-frequency signal disrupter that will force the video surveillance into a stutter: Anyone watching will see only the same few seconds played over and over again in a loop. No one will see what happens next.

They are alone, and they will remain alone until the job is done.

“What are you,” he whispers, “some kind of crazy vigilante?”

“There’s nothing crazy about this,” she says, though her heart doesn’t seem to know it, thumping away like a lunatic pounding on its padded walls. “Killing you, after what you’ve done? To keep you from doing more? That’s just logic. It’s justice. An eye for an eye, mate. A life for a life.”

“Bullshit, it’s revenge,” he spits out. “It’s murder.”

“You can’t murder an animal. I’m putting you down, that’s all. Like a wild dog.” She doesn’t know why she’s bothering to argue with him. Why she’s letting him postpone the inevitable.

“Then we’re both animals,” he says. “Look in the mirror, sweetie, we’re the same. You’re about to have blood on your hands too.”

“There won’t be any blood,” she says, and advances on this man, this man she’s watched at home and at work, with his child and with his wife, this man she’s seen snore through the night and whistle through the day, this man she thought she knew but never knew at all.

This man who has carved a wound across his city that will take years to heal.

This man who deserves to die. So she tells herself, and she believes it.

This is justice.

Not vengeance. Not rage. Not sorrow or guilt or raw animal need.

He is the animal
, she tells herself, trying to do as her mother would do, freeze out the heat of anger and need, wall away her self, retreat to something cool and calm. But there is nowhere to retreat to. Not from the screams of his victims—
their
victims. Only one thing will silence those. Only one thing will start to fix the thing they broke together.
I will put him down
.

She will.

She does.

She loops the wire around his neck.

She pulls it tight, cutting off his airway.

She listens to him gasp and wheeze.

She holds firm against his flails and spasms.

She feels the life leak out of his body; she feels him lose the will to live.

She feels herself lose something too.

She feels the pulse stop beating.

She feels the skin grow cool.

She has done this.

She has killed.

It was supposed to be easy, erasing this man, whoever he was and is and might have become, from the living world. It was supposed to feel right. To
be
right.

She turns the body to the wall. She presses the switch on the cell door to signal her readiness to leave, walks calmly down the corridor, submits herself to the security searches, readies herself for the possibility that she will be caught, that they will see through her to the thing inside, the thing that has killed.

Now, finally, too late, she feels cold.

Numb.

Now, finally, too late, her mind is clear, her blood ice.

And clearly, coldly, numbly, she hears her father’s words echo in her ears.

Killing is one choice you can’t take back
.

Henry is waiting for her outside the gate.

“I didn’t tell you to come,” she says, through the car window.

“I know,” he says. There’s gray in his hair she’s never noticed before. Lines creasing his forehead, hollows beneath his eyes. They’ve both gotten so much older than they used to be. “I came anyway. Get in.”

She collapses into the passenger seat.

Says nothing.

Closes her eyes, wishes for the obliteration of sleep.

Hopes not to dream.

They drive for a long time, in silence. She opens her eyes only when the car eases to a stop. They have parked in a glade, a wonder of grass and trees and stream, all emerald greens and vivid sky blues. A delicate white footbridge crosses the stream. It feels like a storybook, and it’s easy to imagine a troll crouching beneath the bridge, fairies peeping out from periwinkle blossoms.

She stumbles on the pebbled path, and he reaches out to steady her. She lets him. Even though they both know she doesn’t need him; she’s too strong to fall.

“Do you know where we are?” he asks.

Alice can’t breathe. She nods.

She hasn’t been here in nearly a decade. She hasn’t been here since her mother died.

This is the place they would come, she and her father, when the hospital got too much for them. When they needed a moment to breathe, to forget central lines and IV drips, to listen to the wind and the water rather than the beeping of heart monitors and the siren song of a code blue. This hidden idyll, only a few miles from the hospital, was where they would come to return to the earth, if only for
an hour or two. To root themselves in the land and try to believe there would be life after death—that they could lose their foundation and somehow still go on.

They stand on the bridge, side by side, staring down at the water. It’s cloudier than Alice remembers.

“I did it,” she tells Henry. “I killed him.”

“I know.”

“I thought it was what you wanted. What she would have wanted. I thought I could do what you said, be cold. Like a machine. Do it because it was the right thing to do.”

“But . . .”

“But it doesn’t feel right,” she admits. “It didn’t feel cold.” She shivers, cold now, cold always. She wonders if she will ever be warm. “I can’t do that again. I won’t.”

“No, I don’t think you will.”

“I mean, I can kill, if I need to. But only if I need to. Never again like . . . that.”

“I know.”

Alice can feel the tears leaking out, and is ashamed. She is the Player. Players don’t cry. “I’ve made so many mistakes.”

Henry puts his hand over hers. “I made the mistake.”

“I can do this,” she insists, suddenly terrified that he’s regretting all their choices, regretting pushing her as hard as he has. That everything will be taken away from her. “I’m strong enough. I am.”

“Of course you are,” he says. “I’m the one who . . .” He shakes his head. Sighs heavily. “You had to learn to kill. But this wasn’t the way to teach you. This wasn’t the lesson you should have learned. None of this was.” He finally faces her, and squeezes her hand, so hard it nearly hurts. “You didn’t fail me, Alice, and you didn’t fail your people. I’m the only one who’s failed here.”

“No,” she says, too quietly to hear. Then louder, because it’s true, and she needs him to know it.
“No.”

“Was this the right choice for you, this life?” he says. “Are you happy?”

They’re both surprised when a small snort of laughter bubbles out of her. “Not right now.” She smears a sleeve across her nose. “But usually? Yeah.” She realizes the deep truth of it only as she says it out loud. Playing was never a choice; it was a birthright. She would Play because her mother Played. That was the plan from the beginning. That was the agreement between her and Henry. Playing was how they would keep her mother alive.

That was how it began.

But now?

She Plays because she is the Player.

Because she
wants
to be.

She has chosen. She keeps choosing, every day. Even when it hurts, even when it burns, this is the life she chooses. Not because it’s the only life she’s ever known.

Because it’s the life she wants.

“It’s been good, Henry. Training. Playing. It’s all good. I’m good. I’m telling you, I can do this. I can be as good as she was.”

“Alice, you can’t be the Player your mother was,” he says.

No words have ever hurt more.

But then he continues. “You can only be the Player
you
are. You can only be Alice. I was wrong to try to make you into something you’re not. I don’t know, maybe . . .” He hesitates, as if afraid to say it. “Maybe your mother was wrong herself. But you, Alice. You’re not cold. You can’t be, and you shouldn’t be. All that crap about walling away your humanity? You know what that was?”