Endgame: The Calling (15 page)

Jago Tlaloc, the Olmec. Clearly aligned with Sarah Alopay, the Cahokian. The Players of the ancient tribes of the Americas. She watches them walk toward the pyramid. Chiyoko is near enough to hear their voices but not their words. Maccabee is limping close behind. Jago and Sarah have still not noticed him. Just behind the Nabataean is Aisling Kopp. Who will catch who, who will fight who, who will die?

The Olmec leads the Cahokian through the door. They vanish like a magic trick. Chiyoko starts to step forward, hoping to get in before Maccabee, but he’s too close. She knows what the others don’t—that the Olmec has the disk. Among the Mu the disks are worshipped as sacred and mysterious symbols. Chiyoko recognized it instantly: a disk of Baian-Kara-Ula. Disks that fell from the sky many ages ago. Disks with information and knowledge, clues and direction.

She has to follow it. If another Player gets the disk, she’ll follow that Player. She’ll continue to follow it until she spots her opening, and then she’ll steal it. She knows it leads to Earth Key.

And she knows that she is the only one who knows.

Because this is the clue that kepler 22b left in her mind. In very simple language, it told her:
As the Mu, only you understand where the disk will lead.

Chiyoko watches Maccabee reach the doorway, stumble through, vanish. Aisling is less than a minute away. None of them have noticed Chiyoko. She’ll go in after the Celt. Chiyoko waits. Surmises that she has only one more minute at the Calling. Only one more minute in the presence of the magnificent glimmering pyramid. She bows to it, shows her respect and admiration, shares a quiet moment with it, thanks it for being.

A small distant twang jostles the air on her eardrum, interrupting her reverie. She drops to the ground instinctively as an arrow cuts the air right where her heart was.

One of them
did
notice her.

The boy.

Baitsakhan.

Chiyoko figures that seven long strides of open ground separate the edge of the woods from the portal. She will not risk getting shot to get there. She knows she has to move or the boy will kill her. As she crawls forward, another arrow punctures the ground near her, but it is a desperate shot. She is certain the boy can no longer see her.

She reaches a thick tree and stands behind it, traces the invisible arc of the arrows that have been shot at her. Finds the spot where they were fired and sees him crouched among the green.

He’s 90 feet away.

Well within striking distance.

She reaches into her jacket and pulls out five razor-sharp, titanium shuriken. Her fingers dance around them and they fan out like cards. She flips one into the air with one hand, catches it with the other.

She is not impetuous. Killing for her has always been the child of opportunity and necessity, and she doesn’t take it lightly. We are human. We have one life that should be honored. Taking a life should always be a considered decision.

She moves quietly down the hill, the pyramid at her back. She wills her eyes to dilate against the glow of the explosion’s lingering flames. She stops next to a fallen tree, plants her left foot, throws.

Baitsakhan is nearly surprised.

Nearly.

At the last moment he drops, and the throwing star misses, burying itself in a tree trunk.

Chiyoko breathes.

Stays still.

Waits.

She catches sight of Aisling Kopp passing through the portal.

She watches as Baitsakhan stands and exposes himself, loading an arrow and frantically looking for her.

Fool
.

She throws a star, and it hits the boy on the outside of his shoulder, disappears into his flesh.

He cries out.

She relocates again, putting herself on a path that leads directly to the door. She throws another star, the six points whirling through the air like a silent saw blade, on target to stop in the middle of the boy’s forehead. But just before it strikes, there’s a gust of wind that blows it off course, and it glances off his scalp, taking a chunk of flesh and hair with it.

He cries out again, issuing a challenge, and desperately shoots an arrow into the night.

Chiyoko breathes. The gust subsides. She turns to the pyramid, performs a forward flip over a large rock, and when she is upside down she throws the last of her shuriken at the annoying one-named boy, Baitsakhan, the Donghu of the 13th line. She lands squarely on her feet and silently sprints through the mystical door, unsure if she hit her target.

She doesn’t care. The boy is too rash to last for very long. If she didn’t kill him, someone else will.

Chiyoko appears in the secret room where they first gathered. She is not at all disoriented like the others were. She sneaks to the door and down the old stairs and sees Aisling leave the main chamber at the top of the building. Chiyoko waits, hugs the wall, and moves around the edge of the room like a ghost. She does not notice the two sequestered in the rafters, and they do not notice her.

And just like that, she is gone.

Hsu Village, Qin Lin Mountains, China

Hilal ibn Isa al-Salt has beautiful hands.

No matter how many walls he has scaled, how many knives he has thrown, how many machetes he has wielded, how many stones he has moved, how many bones he has broken, how many wires he has soldered, how many pages he has turned, how many push-ups, pull-ups, and handstands he has done, how many punches he has thrown, how many boards he has broken, how many guns he has cleaned, he has always taken care of them, his beautiful hands.

Coconut oil.

Rosemary tincture.

The freshly rendered fat of young lambs at the slaughter.

An ivory-handled file.

His nails are perfect disks, white against his dark skin. His cuticles are smooth. His calluses invisible. His skin like velvet.

He does not pass through the portal of the Great White Pyramid, shrouded in otherworldly mystery and age, but opts for the woods. At first he moves fast to stay ahead of the smoke and fire—and the other Players. The mad ones who wouldn’t listen to him, wouldn’t even give him five minutes before the killing started. Hilal sighs.

As he exits the orbit of the ageless pyramid, the woods grow quiet and still. They become familiar, as all forests are to those who have spent time in them. He encounters none of the others who also left through those woods, and after 12 hours of hiking he reaches a small outpost that is not on his map. It’s not much more than a dirt crossroads, a cow, a flock of chickens, a collection of wooden shacks.

He stops in the middle of the crossroads. No one emerges from the huts, but smoke billows from makeshift chimneys and he can smell food cooking.

A young girl finally appears from one of the buildings, the muffled voices of her caretaker urging her to stay inside. She ignores him. She’s curious and moves into the road. She has never seen a man with black skin. His bright blue eyes—a gift of his ancient heritage—are even more shocking.

He might as well be an alien.

The girl—seven or eight years old—stops in front of Hilal.

A red string around her neck is weighted down by a small silver cross.

Hilal holds out his beautiful hands, forming a bowl. He lowers them and she peers into them. They’re empty. He watches her appreciate the fineness of his skin, how it is lighter on the palm side. And she sees the little scar on the heel of his right hand. Her eyes widen and she rises on her toes.

It is a little cross of his own, branded into his otherwise flawless skin.

“I come in peace, sister,” he says in English. She has never heard such sounds, but his voice is so soft that her thin lips crack a grin.

It fades quickly as Hilal hears footsteps behind him.

The girl waves her hands as if to ward off a bad spirit and scampers back a few feet.

Hilal stays put.

He doesn’t need to look to know what is coming.

He closes his eyes. Listens. It is a man. Barefoot. Trying—and failing—to run quietly. His arms are raised. In his hands is something like a bat or a staff. His breath is suppressed and nervous and charged.

Hilal steps to the right at the last second as an ax slices the air millimeters from his shoulder. The sharpened head is buried in the ground, and Hilal reaches out calmly and takes his assailant’s right thumb and snaps it. The ax comes free, and Hilal draws the man’s thumb in an arc. Where the thumb goes, the man follows.

Hilal allows a small scowl to pass across his face. This man should have known better. He does a flip as Hilal takes a knee, still holding the thumb, and the man slams into the ground, his wind taken from his lungs.

The man strikes out with his left hand, but Hilal dodges the feeble attempt and holds out his hand, once again showing the cross on his palm to this outcast band of Christians.

“I come in peace,” he repeats in English. “As our mutual brother Christ once did.”

The man pauses, a look of confusion wrinkling his eyebrows, before he tries to strike again.
Violence, always violence as a first resort.
Hilal shakes his head disapprovingly and jabs the man in the neck, temporarily paralyzing him.

Hilal lets go of the man’s thumb, and he slips to the ground like a rag doll. Hilal stands and announces to the small town, this time in passing Chinese, “I am a hungry traveler from another world. Help me, and I will do what I can to help you when the time comes.”

A door creaks open. Another.

“And come it will, my Christian brothers and sisters, come it will.”

12.0316, 39.0411
^li

Taxicab #345027, Registered to Feng Tian, Passing over Xi’an Old City Wall, China

It is 11:16 a.m. later that day. Sarah and Jago have not slept. They haven’t seen another Player since leaving the pagoda. They had rice and tea and oranges for breakfast and ate on the move. They stayed away from the pagoda and the meteorite crater and the city center. They eventually found a cab, climbed in, and said, “Hotel.” The driver has been moving south for over an hour, trying to convince them to get out, but they keep handing him cash and telling him to drive on, to go farther away from the city. They want a small place, an out-of-the-way place. They haven’t found one yet. The driver keeps driving.