Endgame: The Calling (29 page)

Jago sleeps sitting up, his body leaning into the empty seat that separates them. Sarah is working on her code. She uses a worn nub of a pencil and scribbles on an inside-out barf bag. She writes using an ancient, long-forgotten number system.

She’s making some progress, but it’s hard. There are simply too many numbers. If all the numbers are used, the coordinates will be accurate to the 6th or 7th decimal place. Furthermore, she can’t be sure if the coordinates are UTM or LAT/LON. Still, she is generating a list of possibilities. What she needs now is a map so she can start making educated guesses. She stares at the markings on the bag, puts the pencil on the tray table. She turns to Jago. His eyes are open. He is staring at an empty spot near her shoulder.

She smiles.

“How’s it going?” he asks.

“It’s going. I need a map,” she whispers.

“They have those in Iraq.”

“Good.”

Sarah stares at Jago for a few moments as the numbers scroll through her head. Jago mistakes her gaze for something more and asks, “Want to go into the bathroom with me?”

“What? No!” She laughs.

Jago recovers, saying, “I mean to check each other for chips. Weren’t we going to do that ASAP? ASAP was a while ago. . . .”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.” But really she hasn’t forgotten. Since leaving China she’s actually thought about it a lot.

“I think we should do it before we go through Iraqi customs. Just in case.”

Sarah turns away from Jago. “I’ll go in first and undress. Last one on the right side. Give me a couple minutes.”

“Cool.”

Sarah slides her sneakers off and pushes them under the seat in front of her. She stands and squeezes past Jago’s knees. When she’s in the aisle she whispers, “And don’t get any funny ideas.”

“Same to you,” he says.

Sarah snorts and walks toward the back of the plane.

The flight is nearly all men. A few Westerners, but most are Middle Eastern. One man stares at her without any compunction. Sarah gives him the hardest look she can muster, which is pretty damn hard. He looks away.

She goes into the lavatory and looks in the mirror and begins to undress. She folds her clothes and puts them on the closed toilet seat. She washes her hands and splashes water on her face.

She checks the front of her body, under her breasts, under her chin. She pulls down her underwear and inspects the area that Jago will not be allowed to check. She runs her hands over her thighs, down her knees, over her shins and the tops of her feet. She sees nothing. No chips, or anything else that could be used to track her.

She stands and splashes more water on her face.

She is eager, nervous, unsure about Jago inspecting the rest of her body. The only boy to have ever seen her, or touched her, is Christopher. And it was under very different circumstances from these. The first time was in his room. His parents were in Kansas City for the weekend and he was home alone with his uncle, who spent most of the weekend drinking beer and watching football. They snuck upstairs and locked the door to his room and spent four hours kissing each other, touching each other, slowly taking off each other’s clothes. After that, every chance they got, they snuck away. They’d been saving their first time, and they had planned on going there while they were away this summer. Another thing lost to Endgame, though Sarah knows if she wins, she’ll have the chance again. As she looks at her body and imagines Christopher’s lips and hands, his body pressing against her own, Jago knocks. She lets him in and closes the door quickly.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“You ready?”

“Yes.”

He sits. She turns away from him and unfastens her bra. She holds her arms across her chest. “I’ve already done the front,” Sarah says, her voice shaking a little.

“Were you clear?”

“Yes.”

Sarah holds her breath. Jago bends down, reaches for her. His touch is light. He runs his fingers over her ankles, up her calves, behind her knees. Sarah feels instantly at ease. He may have been a little suggestive before, but he isn’t now. All he seems to be doing is looking for a subcutaneous chip.

He reaches the top of her thighs and stops.

“I don’t know. . . .”

Sarah hesitates, then pulls down her underwear. “It’s fine. We need to check.”

Only Christopher has seen this much of me,
she thinks.

Jago’s fingers move slowly up the back of her thighs, sending chills through Sarah. And even though it’s not supposed to feel great, given the situation and the reason, it does. She closes her eyes as his fingers move upward, and she takes a deep breath. And shockingly, she realizes that she was never, not once, this comfortable around Christopher. No matter where they were, or what they were doing, much of their intimate time together felt like the awkward stumblings of teenagers. There’s something about Jago that feels more real, more adult than Christopher. More like what she always imagined love and intimacy were supposed to feel like. When she was with Christopher, she felt like she was a girl with a boy. Jago makes her feel like a woman with a man.

She opens her eyes and watches in the mirror as he continues to inspect her. His face is inches from her skin, his fingers moving lightly and slowly. She doesn’t want him to stop, not now, or ever, and when he’s done, she immediately misses him.

“Okay so far,” he says.

“Keep going.”

He stands, starts again, with his fingers, his eyes. He moves up her back, her sides. Her spine curls as he reaches her shoulder blades. And when he parts her hair around her neck and looks carefully at the hairline, she can feel his breath on the back of her neck, sending another round of chills through her body. He’s standing behind her, inches away, and though she doesn’t know if it’s real or not, she thinks she can feel heat from his body warming hers. He runs his fingers down her arms and she closes her eyes again, knowing that he’s going to be finished soon, wishing he weren’t. His fingers move slowly away from her wrists, and she wants them back, wants them back more than she’s wanted anything in her entire life.

“You’re clear,” he says. “I don’t see a thing.”

“Good,” she replies as she refastens her bra.

He hands her her clothes. She watches him undress while she puts her things back on. It’s a funny dance in such close quarters. Their elbows knock as Jago lifts his shirt over his head. He smiles nervously as they switch places. Sarah sits on the toilet. Jago hands her his shirt and undoes his belt. He lowers his pants and hands them to her in an unfolded clump. She puts the clothing in her lap and he turns his back to her.

They repeat the searching process. Sarah is more nervous now than when Jago was looking at her.

She starts at his heels, his Achilles, moves up, and despite her training, she has to fight to keep her hands from shaking. His calves are thin and taut. She puts her hands around them, checks both sides of them, and she can see his pulse through the veins. She quickly calculates his heart rate at 49 bpm, which means he’s clearly not as nervous as she is, which makes her even more nervous. She continues up his thighs, which, despite the fact that he’s thin, look incredibly strong, like they’re carved from rock. She moves slowly, pretending to be extremely careful, but really just loving the feel of her fingers on his skin.

When she finally moves her fingers away, even though she doesn’t want to, she says, “Your turn.”

He slowly pulls down his underwear. She wants to look but can’t, so she closes her eyes and runs her hands over him. She moves quickly, somehow thinking she’s cheating on Christopher, even though she broke up with him, and even though she’s doing what she’s doing for a practical reason. She keeps moving her hands here and there and here until she says, “Clear.”

“You sure?” Jago asks, and she can hear the smirk in his voice.

“Positive,” she blurts.

She moves up his back, which is defined by long thin muscles. He doesn’t have more than a pound of fat on his entire body. She runs her hands over his back, shoulders. She can feel that his heart is now humming along at 56 bpm. She is doing this to him and she knows it. And she likes it. That he clearly feels something similar to what she does. Feels her hands on his body, and feels her in a way that excites him.
Somehow,
she thinks to herself,
this is actually better than fooling around.

She looks closely at Jago’s neck. He has another scar there, like the one across his face, that is raised and purplish. She hesitates, wonders if this is where Chiyoko’s chip is embedded. But the scar is too small, too deep, so she decides it can’t be. Her hands move over it, past it, and the chip remains undetected. Sarah moves on and sifts her fingertips through Jago’s hair. She slows down because she’s almost done, and she doesn’t want it to end. When it does, her hands fall to her sides, and she’s sad.

“You’re clear too.”

“Good.”

They stare at each other for a moment, both unsure of what to do, if anything. Both unsure if they felt the same things, which they did, which they absolutely did. They hear an announcement, and the plane begins the initial descent into Mosul.

“I’ll see you back at the seat,” Sarah says, breaking the silence.

“I’m right behind you.”

“Great,” she says as she opens the door and quickly steps out.

She doesn’t want to think about his body anymore.

But she can’t help it.

Green Pyramid of the plains, from far-ebbed Time
^lxi

Liu Residence, Unregistered Belowground Property, Tongyuanzhen, Gaoling County, Xi’an, China

An rolls over and his arm moves across his bed. The side of the bed she is on.

He opens his eyes.

The side of the bed she
was
on.

Blink.

He sits up quickly. He can smell her on the pillow, but the bed is cold. She’s not in the bathroom.

Blink.

What time is it? 1:45. 1:45
p.m.
! Since he was a small child, An has never slept more than four hours in a row. But last night, this morning,
this afternoon
, he slept for over 15.

Blink.

Did she drug him?

Blinkblink.

He jumps out of bed and runs through the house. Not in the kitchen. Not in the workroom. Not in the spare bedroom. Not in the storage room. Not in the living room. Not in not in not in not in.

Blink.

He runs to the basement, to the epileptic room of computers and televisions and keyboards and servers and web-bots and programs and aggregators and script managers and boxes and flash drives.

She is
blink
she is
blink
she is
blink
not in there either.

SHIVER.

He’s crushed. An drops into his chair and stares at his bare knees, which are starting to shake. Out of the corner of his eye, he notices a folded piece of paper lying across a keyboard. On top of this, at an angle, is a plain business envelope with tiny lumps poking up from within.

Blink. SHIVER. Blink.

He reaches out, opens the envelope. He looks inside.

A clean, thick, neat coil of her hair. He takes it out and holds it, brings it up to his nose and smells it.

He misses her already. And though he appreciates the gesture, this makes it almost worse. To smell her, but not to be able to see her or touch her.

There is more in the envelope. He peers into the crease and sees the small crescent moons of fingernails. An entire toenail, ripped free of the skin and cuticle. A splotch of dried blood.

He holds the hair to his cheek. It is so soft, so soft. He closes the envelope and picks up the paper, unfolds it, stares at the graceful Chinese handwriting.

Dearest An,

I am sorry. I hope you can forgive me. I cannot fully imagine what I must mean to you. I want nothing dishonest between us. You have been lied to far too much in this life. I will not do that to you. Not anymore.

The truth: I intended to sleep with you so that I could leave. I know I was to be your prisoner. I could not let that happen. I have a lead in the game, and I do not intend to relinquish it.

What I did not intend was to have to write words such as these. I thought I would just leave and never see you again. But here the words are.

An wipes a real tear away from his tattooed one and reads on.

Yesterday, when I woke, you were nothing to me but an opponent. I can’t explain what happened since. But something did happen. My effect on you is plain to see. It is easy to understand, if not the why, at least the what. The effect you have had on me is subtler. You were not my first, An, so it wasn’t that. It was something else.

Something precious and rare.

Like you.

I have known about Endgame since I came from the womb. It is who I am. I love my parents, my cousins, my aunts and uncles, all who taught me and guided me. We were a quiet, contemplative group of people, always weighed down by the game, but we were also happy. I was never beaten or tortured. Yes, I endured pain in training, as we all surely have, but nothing like you have had to endure.