Endgame Novella #2 (9 page)

“So, that went well,” Jamal says wryly, once they're alone.

Shari is about to answer when a swell of nausea surges over her. She drops Jamal's hand, runs for the nearest bathroom, and slams herself inside just in time to heave up her breakfast. She sits on the cold tile, head hanging over the toilet, sweat dripping down her face, and breathes, waiting for the nausea to pass.

This is morning sickness, yes.

But this is also defiance—of her people and her traditions, and perhaps her common sense.

This, Shari thinks, is how it feels to know there's no turning back.

There's a soft knock at the door. “I'm fine, Jamal,” she says, pressing a palm to the door, like she can draw his strength right through it. “I'll be out in a moment.”

It's not Jamal.

“I said you
could
do it,” Helena's sharp voice says. “I didn't say it would be easy. Don't disappoint me.”

No part of it is easy. Not the morning sickness (which lasts well into the afternoon and twilight), not the swollen ankles or the sore feet, not the compressed bladder or the heartburn, not the fatigue, not the headaches, not the acne, not the way that she's come to think of the baby—this thing she's looked forward to for so long—as a rapidly growing parasite that is colonizing her body from the inside out. Shari has always thought of herself as a Player of the mind, not the body, but for more than a decade she's maintained rigorous control over both. She's worked hard to transform her body into a graceful and powerful machine, all coordination and ropy muscle. Now, after only a few months, all her efforts have been erased. Her balance is gone, her limbs clumsy; her lungs heave and her heart pounds after only a few flights of stairs. She once heard her sister-in-law say that being pregnant made her feel like a hippopotamus, but Shari now thinks that's an understatement. She feels like an elephant. A whale. Maybe even a brontosaurus, some lumbering prehistoric creature out of sync with the modern world. She feels ancient and impossible—and many nights, lying in bed, cramping with the kicks of the thing inside her, listening to Jamal sleep peacefully and hating him for it, she wonders if she'll feel this way forever.

If she's made a terrible mistake.

Jamal senses her hesitation, her regrets, and resents her for it, and they've started fighting—tentatively at first, two people afraid of hurting what they love most, but then full-throated, no-holds-barred screaming matches. He accuses her of loving Endgame more than she loves their family; she accuses him of dismissing everything she holds sacred, of not knowing her at all. She accuses him—though only in secret, in her mind, because this is a line she fears to cross—of suckering her into making the worst decision of her life.

Then she argues with herself, and remembers that she loves Jamal, and that she loves their child, or will, and the joy that feeling brings her is worth lumbering around like an elephant.

At night, in bed, Jamal tells her stories of what their lives will be like
soon, and strokes her hair, and she pretends to be strong and doesn't admit that she is afraid.

Maybe, she sometimes thinks, she was wrong and everyone else was right. How could she have been so arrogant to think that she could be both the Player and a mother? She loves Jamal, she loves her line, she loves her duty—but what's to say love is enough? What's to say the love of one won't destroy the others?

As the days skid downhill toward her delivery date, it's as if she can feel a clock ticking from her swollen stomach.

She wakes one night to a stab of fear, alarm bells ringing in her mind, a nightmare already fading but the urgency of it still sharp: explosions in the sky, blood on the ground, and Shari, too clumsy and slow and big to do anything but watch.

“I can't do this,” she whispers, and then gasps as there's another stab—it's not fear after all, it's pain, and the mattress beneath her is wet with her broken water and the baby is writhing and kicking and this is labor.

This is happening—whether she can do it or not.

The pain splits her wide open.

The pain screams through her, a wild sound of monsters tearing each other to shreds.

The pain is a creature of its own, devouring her.

The pain is an ocean, tossing her on its waves.

Somewhere, in the foggy distance, is her mother's soothing voice, the urgent pressure of Jamal's hand, but these things seem irrelevant, almost imagined; there is nothing real but her body and the baby and the pain that fuses them together into one.

Shari retreats into herself, as she's been taught to do, finds the eye of calm at the heart of the pain.

Finds clarity.

Finds
strength
.

There is pain like never before, and the tidal wave crashes down on
her with such force that the old Shari might have broken, but this new Shari, strong and sure and ready, bears it and endures . . . and then? An absence. An emptiness. A wave washing out to sea. A hollow inside, where once she was full.

A soft weight in her arms.

A baby's cry.

A new life.

Jamal brushes her hair back from her sweaty forehead. Shari holds the child.

Her daughter.

Shari smiles down at her child and finally understands how very wrong she was to doubt this. To imagine that she should, that she could, deny herself this moment—that she could not Play and love all at once. That she had to choose.

There is no choice.

There is no weighing of priorities, no danger of distractions, no question of which matters more, Endgame or her family, her duty or her love.

There is only this child. There is only love in her.

Playing, fighting, preserving tradition, protecting the line, all of that is a
part
of loving her, all of that will be better for loving her, because as Shari fights for the Harrapan and for herself and Jamal, she fights for her daughter. When Endgame comes, if it comes for her, she will triumph over the other Players. She must. Because what they will want, she will
need
.

Shari will Play for this small, precious girl; Shari will do anything and everything to save her world.

“What do we name her?” Jamal asks, and Shari loves him more than she ever has, because look what they have created together. It seems impossible that they have found each other, but impossible to imagine a world where they didn't. She remembers the first time he confessed himself to her, the first time she took him in her arms, and how strange it was for something to feel so right, so fated, understanding
now that it was fate, guiding them here. To her.

They will name her Alice.

And she will save the world.

When the phone rings, Maccabee Adlai is dreaming of soft hands massaging cold skin, nails scraping across flesh, lips parting in a pleasurable gasp of pain. Satin sheets shimmer in the warm glow of candlelight, and beyond the window ocean waves lap at a tropical shore.

He wakes with a sigh to the phone's shrill ring, his girlfriend's snores, and the cheap, scratchy cotton that passes for bedding around here. Part of him is inclined to silence the phone and slip back into the warm embrace of the dream. If it were anyone else on the other end of the line, he would.

But he knows that ring.

His caller will not be silenced.

Maccabee feigns a yawn and groans, just in case the girl is awake after all and observing him. The average 16-year-old boy would take seconds, maybe minutes, to ease into alertness at four a.m., especially one who'd only fallen asleep a couple of hours before, after consuming a bathtub's worth of gin (or at least appearing to). And his mission here depends on seeming like a normal teenage boy.

The yawn is fake, but the groan is real. Maccabee is anything but average, and there's little he hates more than feigning it.

He slips out of bed, snatches the phone, and silently retreats to the tiny closet he shares with his roommate. Maccabee has been stuck in this hellhole of a boarding school for six months, and he still hasn't adjusted to its indignities. It isn't just the thin, overstarched sheets or
the limp, bland meals masquerading as food. It's the rooms the size of prison cells and the privacy they deny him, the communal bathrooms filled with the stink and stains of oafish adolescents. It's the need to pretend that the homework isn't beneath him, that the teachers aren't borderline illiterate, that he cares about grades or football scores or who is screwing who and why. The Baden Akademie is meant to be an elite educational institution, its student body drawn exclusively from the 1 percent. It claims to afford every advantage to the children of the rich and powerful, who will one day grow up to be masters of the universe. For Maccabee, that's motivation enough to endure its daily tedium. He just didn't realize it would all be so depressingly
ordinary
. He's tired of pretending to be anything but himself: Exceptional.

“What is it?” he whispers into the phone as quietly as he can. His roommate imbibed enough vodka and Klonopin last night to knock himself out for a week, and his girlfriend once slept through not only a fire alarm but an actual
fire
, but Maccabee doesn't believe in taking chances.

“Kalla bhajat niboot scree.”
It's a woman's voice, speaking in a language nearly as old as time itself. Only 10 people on the planet understand these words, and Maccabee is one of them. Direct translation is impossible: they're an expression of trust and security, alerting him that she can speak frankly, asking if he can do the same.

“No, Ekaterina. There is no privacy here,” he reminds her.

She grunts, plainly annoyed. He enjoys her irritation—after all, it's her fault he's here.

“No matter,” she says. “We need to set up a meet. I need something of you.”

“When?” He won't allow himself to sound eager. She hates that.

“I land in Zurich on Tuesday.”

Two days from now and, conveniently, visitation week. Wealthy, neglectful relatives will be flying in from all over the world, the rules relaxed in their honor.

“I'll reserve us an eight p.m. table at Der Kunstkochen,” he says, before
she can insist on some disgusting hole-in-the-wall with rancid beef. He knows her ways too well, and he understands that sometimes circumstances call for discretion. But sometimes—as when Maccabee has endured six months of dining hall cuisine—circumstances call for Zurich's finest restaurant, for caviar, champagne, and a perfectly fried filet of wild sea bass paired with black olives and shallots.

“I don't know,” she says, but he can hear the hesitation in her voice.

After all, Ekaterina is the one who taught him to appreciate the finer things in life. She's the one who, before sending him to this godforsaken city, told him of the Kunstkochen and its caramel soufflé with the apple tatin heart.

“Eight p.m.,” she says, the temptation of impeccably prepared pastry too much for even her iron will to withstand. “Don't be late.”

“I look forward to it,” he says, then hopes he hasn't said too much.

“Indeed, my—” She stops herself abruptly. She always calls him “my Player,” but she can't do so on an unsecured line. No one here can know Maccabee's true role in the future of humanity, that he is the Nabataean champion, pledged to save his ancient race from extinction. And so she swallows the word, replaces it with one she never uses. “My son.”

She cuts the line.

“Love you too, Mom,” he says sarcastically, into the dead air.
Love.
It's not a word he would ever dare say where she could hear him, or would ever want to. That kind of sorry playacting is for his inferiors. They cling to family, to their pathetic ideas about how mothers should care for their sons and how sons should cling to their mothers, because it's all they have. Maccabee has Ekaterina, who's taught him to be strong, to raise himself. She's given him so much more than so-called motherly love. She's given him a destiny, a place in history. Only ordinary people have ordinary mothers, Maccabee reminds himself. He slips the phone beneath his pillow and climbs back into bed.

His girlfriend's eyes drift open. “Who was that?”

“Business,” he says.

She laughs unhappily. “You're funny,” she says, but he knows what she's thinking. That it was another girl on the phone. That the rumors about Maccabee, how he takes what he wants from a girl and casts her aside, are true. That this boy who claims to love her is taking secret four a.m. phone calls from someone else. Maccabee lets her think it. Having a girlfriend in this place is useful in more ways than one, but it doesn't matter who the girl is. When this one gets too tiresome, there will always be another.

In the meantime . . .

“Since you're awake,” he says, “I should point out we have two hours before you have to sneak back to your room.”

“However will we fill the time?” she says playfully, then tucks her long, blond hair over her shoulder and exposes a long stretch of neck.

He closes his eyes, thinking of Tuesday night, wondering at the need for the meeting and what will come of it, whether change is on the horizon, if Ekaterina will be proud of all he's done here, and then he presses his lips to bare skin and wraps his arms around a narrow waist and, for the time being, thinks no more.

Sometimes this place has its advantages.

Maccabee arrives at the restaurant early. Ekaterina, of course, is earlier. She has never allowed him the upper hand, even for a second.

“Mother,” he says, unbuttoning his blazer, then sitting down across the table from her.

“Ekaterina,” she corrects him.

“Yes, of course. Ekaterina. I trust your flight over was smooth.”

“We aren't here for small talk, my Player,” she snaps.

“Of course,” he says again. He has been wondering whether perhaps there is no important mission; perhaps it's just been long enough that she wanted to see him, made an excuse.

But he should have known better.

A waiter silently materializes at their table, handing Maccabee a wine list. “Will you have something to drink, sir?”

Maccabee suppresses a smile and orders two glasses of their most expensive wine. Six feet five, more than 200 pounds of raw muscle, with a fine dusting of stubble across his tan chin, he looks at least a decade older than his age. It comes in handy. He catches the waiter glancing back and forth between him and his mother, brow subtly furrowed, and knows what the man assumes. That this is an intimate rendezvous, that this woman must be
very
wealthy to entice such a handsome younger man.

They make quite a mismatched pair, Maccabee and Ekaterina. Like the restaurant, with its fine china and antique chandeliers, its tuxedoed waiters moving in elegant sync, Maccabee oozes wealth and good breeding. He speaks fluent German with a perfect Swiss accent (one of 13 languages he can speak like a native). His nails are manicured and buffed, his bespoke suit worth thousands and his A. Lange & Söhne watch worth exponentially more. He makes himself the center of every room he steps into.

Ekaterina taught him how.

She taught him everything: how to dress like a gentleman, to speak like he owns the world, to infuse his chilly smile with warmth when required, to charm the most beautiful of women into giving him what he wants, to woo and entice and persuade, to carry himself like a man of power with enough conviction that it becomes the truth.

Not that anyone would guess it to look at her.

In her youth, Ekaterina possessed legendary beauty and knew how to use it. She wielded her appearance as a weapon—hardly the only one in her arsenal, but often the most dangerous. But Ekaterina has no vanity. Invisibility carries a power of its own, she taught Maccabee. Especially for a woman of her age: Men
want
to underestimate her, to ignore her. She helps them do so, wearing frumpy dresses two decades out of fashion and two sizes too big, spraying her hair into a tangled and graying nest, letting her caterpillar eyebrows creep across her face.

Tonight she is wearing a fanny pack.

She looks like nothing so much as a hapless tourist who stumbled upon this Michelin-starred restaurant while in search of a McDonald's. And this, Maccabee knows, is exactly the way she likes it.

“You still share a room with Jason Porter?” his mother asks. Their shared native language is Polish, but she speaks in the ancient Nabataean dialect, a long-dead language closely related to Aramaic. They are the only two on the continent who speak it.

This place is not your home,
she told him about Warsaw, as soon as he was old enough to understand.

This language is not your language.

These people are not your people.

He was three years old when she told him of their Nabataean heritage, four years old when she told him of Endgame and promised that she would make him the Player.

Nine years later, the promise came true.

Maccabee has spent years studying the Players of the other lines—his competition. He knows most of them have been chosen for the honor through prophecy or competition. Children pitted against children in demonstrations of brute force, children trusted with the fate of their people because some alignment of the stars or the tea leaves suggested it would be so.

It is, in Maccabee's opinion, foolish. Worse than foolish: naïve. Moronic. Fatal. To leave such a crucial choice to fate or accident? To imagine that because an eight-year-old could win a wrestling competition or a baby happened to be born in the shadow of Mercury in retrograde, they were worthy of Playing the ultimate game? Anyone stupid enough to believe that deserves to perish, as all those lines inevitably will.

The Nabataeans know better. The game is strategy; life is strategy. The honor of Endgame falls only to those savvy enough to accrue power, ruthless enough to use it. Ekaterina is both, and she has created her son in her own image.

Maccabee doesn't know how many strings she had to pull, how
many people she had to blackmail, how many millions she had to spend. What he knows is that he is the result of her life's dream. He is the reason she sought out a Nabataean man with the body of an Olympian and the brain of an Einstein, bore his child, then disposed of him so he couldn't interfere. Maccabee is what Ekaterina made him, and he cannot remember a time when he hasn't shared her dream of the future. He Plays for her as much as he does for his line.

“You know I would have alerted you to a change in condition.”

She nods. “Good. The Porter boy's mother arrived in Zurich this morning and is staying at the Schlosshotel im Altstadt. I need you to gain access to her room and retrieve a thumb drive. She carries it in a bottle of aspirin.”

“Might I ask why?”

“You know better than that,” she says.

He does.

His mother has no official job and never has. The line is, ostensibly, ruled by a council of three, elected every five years. But these are merely figureheads, puppets; those who know anything know that Ekaterina pulls the strings, even though she's not officially a council member. No one begrudges her, or if they do, they don't live long enough to act on it—she's proved she wants only what's best for the line. She accrues financial and political power for their people, in any way she can, and embedded Maccabee at the Akademie foreseeing exactly this kind of opportunity. Children, she has explained to Maccabee many times, make their parents significantly vulnerable. Most children, at least. Most parents.

“I'll need you to do it in such a way as to guarantee she doesn't raise a fuss when she discovers it's missing,” Ekaterina adds. “That's essential.”