by James Frey
Aisling had Marrs wake him up before they shoved off. She expected Pop to be groggy and disoriented, but as soon as his eyes opened he pulled at his restraints and his neck muscles trussed his skin and he screamed through his teeth, “Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!”
“Pop!”
“Traitor!” he shouted, picking up right where he’d left off in the bunker in Ayutthaya.
“Hit him with another dose, Marrs,” Aisling said quietly. Marrs did and Pop’s eyes flagged and his neck relaxed and he slouched. “Shesatraitor, Ais. Donbeonetoo. Dontrussherfriends.”
Aisling took one of his hands. “I have to. It’s the only way to stop Endgame. Won’t you help us?” And then more quietly, “Won’t you help me?”
He blinked before saying no.
Aisling hung her head. “I want you to help me, Pop,” she said quietly.
“No.”
“What else would you have me do?”
“Win.”
She looked at the top of Pop’s head. Thin white hair, tan scalp, age spots. “Enough of that already, Pop. Abaddon hit. Our home is probably gone. Shit, all of New York City is probably gone. Who knows how many are dead. No one’s winning this thing . . . except maybe the kepler.”
“Win. win . . . er try to beat tha Maker but on yer own.”
She shook her head and held out her hand. “I’ll take it,” she said to Marrs. He passed her the syringe that was plugged into Pop’s IV. She cradled it in her fingers.
“I know wha yer doin, Ais. Why yer doin it.”
“No, you don’t, Pop.” She put her thumb over the plunger. “I’m doing this for everyone. But mostly I’m doing it for you and for Dad. For Declan.”
“Fugh me and fugh Declan. Whadideeno?”
She pushed the plunger all the way in. “He knew more than either of us. I’ll see you later, Pop. Sweet dreams.”
“Fugh Declan an fugh yoo . . .” And then he was gone once more.
They left him belted down in the plane and took off on foot.
According to Hilal, the Donghu monument is located in a cave at 45.1646, 98.3167, 4.3 miles from where they landed. They walked uphill over mostly open land, and then through a crooked arroyo leading up the mountain like a witch’s finger. Aisling enjoys the movement, the sweat, the dry and fresh air in her lungs. She enjoys the desolation, too. The sky is grayish blue, undoubtedly filling with some of the ash and gas and water vapor that Abaddon has thrown to the heavens. On the ground there are no scampering animals, no yurts, no horses or riders, and absolutely no regular people trying to figure out what to do after the impact. No people at all as far as she can tell.
It occurs to Aisling that the men and women who live nomadically in this place—including Baitsakhan’s line members—might not be affected by Abaddon at all. They’re resourceful, they know hardship and deprivation, and they have a long and unbroken history of survival in a harsh environment. So long as Abaddon doesn’t completely cover the sky in clouds for years, these Mongolians and others like them across the Eurasian Steppe and down into the ’Stans should be fine.
After about an hour she stops and checks the GPS. “Got a mile left. How do you think we should approach? If Wayland’s men are bent on destroying these places, we have to assume they could be here too.” She glances across the otherworldly landscape.
Jordan points. “Get on that knoll and see what you can see through the scopes. I’ll cover.”
“Got it,” Aisling says.
She and Marrs drop their packs and scramble up a rocky hill. Aisling sights through her sniper’s scope as Marrs works with the range finder and his GPS, scouring the mountainside for the cave’s exact position. It takes a few minutes, but then he says, “There. A little to your left . . . two degrees higher . . . That’s it.”
Aisling peers at Marrs’s spot. It doesn’t look like much. A fold in the side of the rock face about 10 feet above a shallow canyon floor. Marrs says, “A little farther up the canyon are some steps cut from the stone. They’re kind of worn, but they’re definitely steps.”
“Oh, yeah. I see them.” Aisling brings her eye away from the scope. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s there.”
“No.”
“Guess there’s only one way to find out, huh?”
“Yep.”
They keep walking.
They make the cave in under an hour, encountering nothing but more rock and dust and the cool air rolling down the mountainside. In spite of the emptiness Aisling scans the surrounding country the whole time, looking for movement, tracks in the dirt, reflections, any pattern that’s out of the ordinary. She sees none. But she knows how easy it would be to camouflage oneself in this place.
Too easy.
Before taking the steps up to a ledge-like path, Aisling pops two canisters of tear gas into the cave mouth—a rough and low semicircle whose sides curve inward like an old man’s toothless mouth. The gas pours out of the cave and into it at the same time, the canisters hissing.
No one screams, no one runs out.
Aisling pulls on a gas mask. “All right, let’s go.” She leads them up the steps, a beige FN SCAR pulled to her shoulder. She walks along the narrow ledge, scanning the walls, the ground, the cave’s entrance.
Something catches her eye. A bright silver hairline near her feet.
She drops to one knee. Jordan stands over her. “What is it?”
Aisling runs her fingers over the dirt. “I swear I saw something,” she says. “Trip wire, maybe.”
“Where?”
“Right—there!”
It flashes again. It’s curled over the ground, not more than a few inches long. “Not a trip wire. Looks like . . . hair.” She picks it up and inspects it. “It is hair. Silver hair.”
Jordan pokes his rifle into the cave.
Aisling stands. “The kepler has silver hair,” she says slowly.
Neither Jordan nor Marrs says anything to that. None of them want to run into the alien prematurely.
Aisling stands. “Stay loose and let’s move.”
She ducks into the entrance, which is less than five feet high. Jordan comes next and then Marrs. They walk through the tear gas in an awkward semicrouch for 15 feet before the cave opens up. Light here is scant, so they flip down the goggles on their helmets and activate their night vision.
The chamber is large and round. There are no prehistoric paintings like in the cave in Italy, no signs of previous occupants like a fire pit or footprints, and no seven-foot-tall aliens waiting for them.
It’s just a cave.
Except for the perfect and narrow rectangle cut from the stone 34 feet away.
Aisling hoists her rifle and walks to it carefully, testing each step before putting her weight down, eyeing the ground for booby traps or wires.
She reaches the doorway. The ground slopes sharply on the other side through a passage that’s the exact dimensions of the door—8 feet high and 2.5 feet wide. Her eyes run up one side, over the top, and down the other. And there, near the ground, she sees two things that nearly stop her heart.
She kneels. Brushes away a pile of dirt collected in the corner.
And yes. There. A small rune of two snakes twisted together, devouring the other’s tail.
“The mark of Endgame. Like on Hilal’s book,” Aisling says. She points at the other thing. The faintest outline of a shoe print. “Looks like we might not be alone after all.”
“Let me see,” Jordan says.
They switch places while Aisling scans the rest of the floor inside the chamber. “I don’t see any others. Whoever it was was good at erasing tracks. No sweep marks . . . no telltale craters or anything.”
“Maybe it was a ghost,” Marrs says.
“Maybe,” Jordan says.
Aisling pushes forward and disappears through the doorway. This time Marrs is second, and Jordan covers the rear.
Down, down, down, 50 feet, 100, 150. As they descend the air gets cooler and damper. The sounds change, as if t
he walls are sponges soaking up noise.
At the bottom the tunnel makes an abrupt left turn. Aisling stops. She pulls a small pen-sized periscope from her breast pocket and slides it past the edge of the wall. She looks inside.
The tunnel goes a few more paces and then opens into a hard-angled room. It appears empty.
She stashes the periscope and brings the rifle back up and turns the corner. She steps carefully, never letting her heels touch the ground. She checks her corners. Clear. She steps forward again. Jordan squeezes her shoulder. She stops. It is very cold here, and the night vision shows that the room is somehow illuminated. She risks flipping her goggles up, and yes, the room’s walls glow with a faint blue phosphorescent light. There’s a round, bowl-shaped depression in the center of the room, its surface covered with shiny metallic leaf. She pulls out a flashlight and shines its white beam into the bowl.
Gold.
They split up and look around.
The room is shaped like a six-pointed star, with one of the inward-facing points blunt and flat. Another doorway—a portal, it appears—is surrounded by more mysterious glyphs, though she recognizes some as Egyptian and Sumerian and an old version of her line’s written language as well. She runs her hands over these. Her breath hangs thick in the air. This portal reminds her exactly of the one set into the Great White Pyramid in the Qin Lin Mountains.
She touches the jet-black stone in the middle of the doorway, half expecting her hand to pass through it.
But it doesn’t.
It’s rock hard and freezing and her hand recoils from the cold.
“What do you think? Twenty degrees in here? Less?” Aisling asks.
But no one answers. Marrs is too busy searching the opposite side of the room and Jordan inches toward something tucked into one of the corners.
“Come here,” he whispers, his voice slithering around in a bit of acoustic gymnastics. “You should see this.”
Jordan stares at four tubelike objects. They’re the size of people and they’re stacked like logs, one on top of the other.
“Holy shit,” Aisling says. She tiptoes past him. She shivers. The air near the tubes is well below zero. “kepler 22b stacked us up in these shroud things at the pagoda in Xi’an. He’s been here recently.”
“What’re you talking about?” Jordan asks.
Using the muzzle of her rifle Aisling catches the edge of the nearest tube and lifts it away. The other side of the material is covered with a dark, glittering surface, like a star-filled night sky. Inside the tube is the face of a corpse, his skin blue and pale, his eye sockets large and set farther apart than most people’s.
“That looks like one of the guys who stormed Stella’s bunker,” Aisling says.
Jordan slips the knife between the man’s lips and pries his jaw open.
He has no tongue.
“A Nethinim. Definitely one of Wayland’s guards.” Jordan peels back more of the shroud. The man is dressed in full tactical gear, his hands resting on the receiver of a Bushmaster ACR.
“I meant to ask before—why do they not exactly look . . . human?”
“They are human, but Wayland messed with their genetics to make them appear more like Makers. These men were here to destroy this place, Aisling. Like they destroyed Stonehenge and the other monuments too.”
“To wit,” Marrs says from across the room. “Check it out.”
Aisling and Jordan quickly cross the chamber to find Marrs tucked into a star-point near the portal. He’s hunched over something, his rifle slung at his side, his hands working in front of him.
“What is it?” Aisling asks, her eyes glancing all around nervously.
“A bomb,” Marrs says casually.
“What?”
“Don’t worry. It’s been disarmed. Strange design. Looks like PETN is the main explosive, but I haven’t seen one configured like this before. And here—” He points at a metal panel on the side.
The same glyph that marked the threshold in the room above.
Jordan points at the bomb. “So 22b came down here from wherever he is, killed Wayland’s guys, and broke up their bomb. I thought he was only supposed to come back to wrap up Endgame?”
“He was,” Aisling says. “Apparently the rules of the game have changed for him too.”
Marrs stands and faces them. “Why would he do any of that? Seems risky.”
“Because Sun Key is here?” Jordan asks.
Aisling shakes her head slowly. “I don’t know. It doesn’t look like it. Maybe he took it with him?”
“But why go through the trouble is what I mean,” Marrs says.
“It’s like Stella and Hilal said—one of these places has Sun Key, therefore 22b can’t sit on his thumbs while they’re getting blown up by a band of Maker-looking humans loyal to Stella’s dead father. So he decided to come here and put a stop to it.”
Marrs snaps his fingers. “Aisling—what if Endgame has run so far off the rails for him that he’s getting nervous?”
This feels like a revelation. Aisling says excitedly, “Yeah . . . What if he feels squeezed by Wayland’s demolition crew on one side and us on the other? What if he thinks Endgame won’t have a winner, and for some reason that’s not acceptable? He could be out there doing whatever it takes to make sure Maccabee is crowned the winner, since Maccabee is the only one interested in winning the way he’s supposed to. 22b could be bringing Maccabee Sun Key right now, killing whichever other Player he comes across along the way, killing Wayland’s men too, interfering even more than he did when—”
Her jaw drops open.
“What?” Jordan asks.
“Fuck.”
“What?”
“What if 22b finds our plane? What if he finds Pop? I thought he was safe out there, but . . .”
Aisling doesn’t wait. She bolts out of the chamber, Jordan and Marrs following. Up, up, up through the tunnel, outside, off the ledge, double-timing it down the arroyo toward the plane. Aisling is in much better shape and she wants to get her legs into a dead run and Jordan yells, “Go!” and she takes off and within 15 minutes she’s not much more than a speck to Jordan and Marrs.
Her pack digs at her shoulders and bounces painfully on the base of her back. Her rifle is heavy and after an hour and 20 minutes her arms are leaden and she has to slow down, but she’s a lot closer. She stops for a moment behind a boulder and checks the GPS: 0.74 miles to the plane.
Have a look first, Ais. Fools rush in.
She gets on top of the boulder and surveys the flat section of desert where they landed. The scope zips over the Bombardier and her nerves ease up. It’s there. It isn’t a smoldering pile of scrap metal. She moves the scope back and finds it and zeroes in.
And then her heart nearly jumps out of her chest and through her shirt.
The plane is where they left it. It’s not engulfed in flames. Its tires are fully inflated. Its door is closed.
But its wings are lying on the ground. They have been cut off clean and neat by who knows what and they are lying on the ground.
Aisling spits a string of curses. She puts her eye back to the socket and looks everywhere for 22b but sees no sign of anything. She scans and scans and scans.
She slides down the boulder and paces and breathes and tries to calm her heart and finally after 15 minutes she hears the noisy footsteps of Jordan and Marrs approaching. She tells them the news.
“And Pop?” Jordan asks, badly concealing his disappointment at losing the plane.
“Don’t know,” Aisling says, her voice shaking. “I’ve been waiting for you before going down there. I think you should stay here and cover with the long guns. I’ll go alone. You can run if things go south.”
Marrs quickly says, “Not alone, Aisling.” Jordan charges a round into his rifle in agreement.
She doesn’t argue. They strip their gear to the essentials and a few minutes later, as the sun begins to cradle into the horizon, they take off.
They triple-
time, guns up the whole way. When they’re 500 feet from the plane they fan out, Aisling in the center and Jordan and Marrs 30 feet on either side. She moves up a little so they form a three-point wedge. She looks and looks in the late evening twilight.
Nothing.
They reach the plane. Aisling’s heart has never beaten so fast. Marrs gawks at the wings, thinking, It’s as if lasers cut them.
Aisling indicates the plane’s door with her rifle, signaling that she’ll cover Jordan while he opens it.
Jordan nods. Marrs moves into a cover position too. The door swings down and the stairs fold out.
More nothing.
Aisling forces her legs forward, her heart in her throat, and bounds silently up the stairs and clears the cockpit and pivots into the cabin.
Empty.
Empty except for Pop Kopp. She slides to him, checking behind seats. Clear. She kneels next to him. Feels his arm. Warm. The pulse is there. His breath is good. Yes, he’s against everything she’s trying to do in Endgame, but he’s alive, and that’s what matters.
She goes back to the door. “He’s all right,” she says.
A chill wind blows from the south.
Marrs says, “Good.”
And then it gets very cold and a ring-shaped pulse tears the air between the three of them and it hits Marrs in a millisecond and he gets pushed back a few feet as if he’s been punched in the chest and then he kind of disappears, leaving a few shreds of cloth and metal and probably skin too but no blood, and all of these pieces blow away and are gone.
Aisling and Jordan fire at will at the spot where the pulse came from. The rounds bounce away and some seem to be absorbed into the air itself, or the dirt, or the rocks, Aisling can’t really tell. She breathes out and sees her breath in the chilly air and Jordan shouts, “Fire in the hole!” and he pumps out one, two, three grenades from his launcher, and somehow all three are caught by a huge invisible hand, and they explode, and Aisling hears the explosions, but it’s like they went off miles away or underwater, and she can’t see them. Not at all.
And then another pulse, this one aimed at Jordan, who fires a fourth grenade at the same moment, and this one does explode as expected and Aisling is thrown backward into the plane and she can’t see what’s happening to Jordan, if he was vaporized too or blown up or knocked on his ass like her. She kicks her feet in front of her and scoots backward. Her back hits the far side of the cabin and the open door is in front of her and her heart booms all over now, in her temples and toes and armpits. The air shimmers and her feet are like ice and only then does she realize that 22b is invisible and right in front of her! She presses the trigger and holds it down and the bullets simply hit 22b and slide around him and continue off into space, as if he’s Teflon coated.
