by Frey, James
“Would your trainers have let you die in the woods if you hadn’t made it out on your own?” I ask him.
He looks away. I can tell that he has never considered this question. I’ve never met a Player from another line, and part of me finds it fun to compare notes. I’ve never been able to talk about this with anyone before, except for my trainers.
“You trained alone?” I ask him.
“Mostly,” he says. “But my brother was our Player before me, and I saw a lot of what he did and participated in some of his training.”
“Minoans train as a group,” I explain. “Starting when we are very young. After several years, one is chosen to be the Player and receives the golden horns.”
“Golden horns?” says Boone. “What are those?”
“A symbol,” I say. “Of King Minos, the first king of Crete. There’s a ceremony where the new Player is presented to the people and the horns are placed on her head.”
“Minos,” says Boone. “Like the legend of the Minotaur.” He snaps his fingers. “That’s where I’ve heard your name before. Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos. She helped Theseus kill the Minotaur and escape from the maze under the palace.”
I nod. Of course I have heard the story of the bull-headed Minotaur and the Athenian youths sent to him every nine years as sacrifices many, many times. I’m impressed that he knows it. “You know mythology,” I remark.
Boone nods. “I like stories about gods and heroes,” he admits.
“Sometimes, when training got really tough, I pretended I was Hercules or Jason, trying to prove myself to the gods. It helped.”
“It’s very close to the truth, isn’t it?” I say. “Isn’t that what Endgame will be, a battle to prove to our gods which of us is the greatest?”
“They’re not my gods,” Boone says as he puts his shirt back on and buttons it up. “I don’t know what they are, but they’re not gods.”
I say nothing. I don’t want to argue about this with him. Besides, my feelings are my own.
“Anyway, in a year, it’s the next Player’s problem,” Boone says.
I’m surprised. “You sound like you don’t want to Play,” I say.
“Oh, I like Playing,” he says as he puts his pants on. “I just don’t want Endgame to happen for a long, long time. Why would I want the world to end?”
“The world won’t end,” I remind him. “Not for the winning line.”
“But it will for all the other ones,” he says.
I’ve never heard anyone talk like this about Endgame. For me, it’s always been a certainty. I’ve always been prepared for it to happen, and I was taught to believe it would happen during my turn as Player. If it doesn’t, then all of my training will have been for nothing.
“Think about all the people killed during the war,” Boone continues. “For them, that was Endgame. Imagine being someone in Japan, watching those bombs fall and wipe out everything like that.” He snaps his fingers loudly. “Everything. Gone. Whole cities, and everyone in them. Imagine being in London, or here in Berlin, and listening to the planes flying overhead, filled with bombs. And you don’t know if the next one that falls is going to land on your house, or on your grandparents’ house, or on your best friend’s house. It all depends on where some pilot decides to drop them. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“But we can win Endgame,” I argue.
Boone holds up a single finger. “One,” he says. “One Player can win Endgame. The rest die.”
“I thought it was your brother who thought too much about these things,” I remark.
Boone smiles. “Maybe I’m more like him than I thought,” he says.
Then a strange look comes over his face. “And maybe that’s why the council—” he says, but he sounds like he’s talking to himself now, not to me.
“Why the council what?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says. “So, how are we going to figure out where Sauer and Lottie went?”
“We?” I say.
He shrugs. “We might as well work together, right? Now that we’re not trying to kill each other?”
I roll the needle in my fingers back and forth. Boone cocks his head. “Or are you going to kill me?” he says.
“Since I’ve stitched you back together, it would be stupid to kill you now,” I tell him.
He smiles. “Does that make me Theseus?”
I snort. “Hardly. Do you have any idea where Sauer and the girl might have gone?”
He shakes his head. “None. Do you?”
I don’t. I know someone who might, though. Now I weigh whether or not to share this information with Boone. I always repay my debts, both good and bad, and he did save me from the MGB agents. However, I’m not certain he can be of any more use to me.
“I think they’re running as far away from us as they can get,” I say.
“Finding them will be next to impossible.”
“So we’re just supposed to give up? Somehow I don’t think that’s ever an option for you.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Not at the moment, no,” he admits. “But if we put our heads together, combine information, we—”
“I work better alone,” I say.
Boone laughs. “Yeah? Look where that got you. Drugged and pretty damn near dead.”
“I already thanked you for your help,” I snap. “And I returned the favor as well. I stitched you up and told you about Sauer and the weapon. As far as I’m concerned, we no longer owe each other anything.”
He looks genuinely disappointed. He stares at me for a long time. I stare back. He blinks first.
“Okay,” he says. “I guess I’ll go, then. If you don’t mind me giving you a piece of advice, though, I wouldn’t sit around here much longer. I have a feeling our MGB friends will be back again, and they won’t take kindly to finding three more dead.”
“I don’t plan on being here when they arrive,” I say. I want to ask him where he’s going, but I don’t. I don’t want him to think we’re friends, because we aren’t.
“I guess we’re back to being enemies,” he says, as if reading my thoughts.
“Not enemies,” I say. “Competitors after the same prize.” I stick out my hand. He takes it. “Good luck, Cahokian.”
“Good luck, Ariadne Calligaris,” he says.
That he’s called me by name, instead of Minoan, does not escape me. Nor does the fact that he’s still holding my hand. “Until we meet again,” I say.
“I hope we don’t,” he tells me. “Not for two more years, anyway.”
He lets go of my hand and walks out of the room. I follow him as he goes to the door. There he pauses and turns to look at me. He opens his mouth to say something, then seems to think better of it.
“Be careful,” I say.
He smiles. Then he’s gone.
I shut the door, then watch from the window until I see him emerge from the building. I wonder if this is the last time I will see him. I’m surprised that the idea makes me a little disappointed. I should be relieved to see the last of him, as it means he’s no longer in my way. Eliminating problems is something I’m very good at, and I’ve handled this one well, getting useful information in the process. And that’s all Boone should be to me—a tool.
I push any other thoughts away. If we do run into each other again, I can’t afford to treat him as anything other than a competing Player. This is unfortunate, but it’s how things have to be. I almost wish that I’d never met him. Now, if it comes to making a choice between his life and the success of my line, I will have to treat him as another obstacle to be removed.
It might not come to that if I can find Sauer first, so I refocus my thinking to deal with that problem. As I told Boone, I don’t have any idea where he and the girl might have gone. And unfortunately for me, the people who might are the very ones I least want to deal with right now—the MGB. Boone is right that they will likely be here soon, but I don’t want to face them
here. Ironically, that means going to the last place they’ll expect me to be: MGB headquarters.
Boone
The strange, heavy fog that has covered so much of Europe for the past few months has once again settled over the city as I leave the apartment building. I half expect to be ambushed by waiting Reds as I exit the front door. As my uncle Anson would say, there are more hounds in this hunt than I anticipated. If the Minoans are interested in Sauer, and he has information that might change the course of Endgame, I don’t know who might turn up to try and take him.
But nobody confronts me as I hurry out into the dark, gray morning. As I pass by the alleyway beside the building, I see that the bodies are still there, although now the snow makes them appear to be heaps of rubble or garbage. I try not to dwell on the fact that they’re people, people who probably still have families somewhere. Families who will wonder where they are when they don’t show up to Christmas dinner.
As I walk down the street, I also find myself thinking about Ariadne. I can tell that Endgame is everything to her. That’s how it should be for a Player. If it’s not everything to you, you’re putting yourself, and your line, at risk. She knows this. I know this. I imagine all the other Players out there in the world know this.
This is more than just a job to her, though. She wants Endgame to happen during her time. I’ve seen this before. One of my trainers, a woman with the most unPlayerlike name of Fawn Flowers, was the Cahokian Player more than 40 years ago. She’s still bitter that Endgame didn’t happen during her five-year term. As a result, she was harder on me than anyone else, and she treated any failure, even hesitation during a training exercise, as a personal insult. Fawn would be furious that I didn’t kill Ariadne when I had the chance. During the three chances I’ve had.
I think about the way Ariadne touched me while she was sewing up my cut. There was a tenderness in her then that I don’t think she’s ever let out, or at least not often. I saw it in her eyes when she thought I wasn’t looking. She’s armored, like a knight, and for good reason. I can’t help wondering what she would be like with that armor removed. I wish I could find out. I wish we both could find out. Thanks to Endgame, though, we won’t.
I don’t have the first clue about where Sauer and Lottie are now.
They’d be foolish to return to the place where I found them. My guess is that Ariadne is right, and that they’re running as fast and as far as they can. And now that Sauer knows so many people are after him, he’s going to make sure he disappears for good this time.
I also know that despite what she said, Ariadne is still going to look for them. She’s not someone who gives up. It would be smart to try to tail her, see where she goes. She’ll be expecting that, though, and will be sure to cover her tracks. What I need to do is regroup and think about my next step.
As I start to cross a street, a figure steps out of the fog. A voice says, “Merry Christmas, Sam.”
A voice I know. I stop in my tracks.
“Jackson?”
I haven’t seen my brother in more than three years. But when I turn around, he’s standing there in front of me.
It can’t be him. It can’t. Yet here he is, like the Ghost of Christmas Past. I stand there, staring at him, waiting to wake up.
“We need to get off the street,” Jackson says. He beckons me to follow, then walks to a Volkswagen parked at the curb. He opens the passenger-side door. “Get in.”
I hesitate, still shell-shocked from seeing my dead brother. He tells me again to get in, and I do it. He shuts the door and goes around to the other side, gets in, and starts the engine. As he pulls away, he keeps looking at me.
“You look like Mom,” he says.
I have no idea what to say to this person who was my brother. Who is my brother. I’ve spent so long thinking he was dead that this feels like a dream. But it’s not. He’s sitting a foot away from me. And yet I can’t bring myself to ask him any of the thousand-and-one questions that are racing through my head.
“You’re dead … I … What the hell is going on?” I finally manage to blurt out.
Jackson looks straight ahead. “I know it’s not enough to say that I’m sorry,” he says. “But I am. I can’t imagine what it’s been like for everyone to think I was dead.”
“You have a headstone,” I inform him. “In the cemetery. Mom didn’t want one put up, but Dad told her it would give her a sense of closure.”
“I didn’t want any of this, Sam,” he says.
“What happened?”
Jackson takes a deep breath. “So many things,” he says. “I don’t know where to start. Did the council tell you anything?”
I shake my head. “Just that you were in Germany, and that they thought you were killed during the bombing of Berlin. Do they know you’re alive? Have they known all this time?”
“No,” Jackson says. “I let them think I was dead. They sent me to Cappadocia to spy on the Nazis. I was feeding information back to them. That’s how I found out about Sauer and the weapon. I assume you know about that, since you’re here.”
I nod. I don’t tell him that the council kept me in the dark about the weapon, and that I had to find out about it from a Minoan Player.
I also don’t tell him that I suspect the reason they didn’t tell me everything is because of him and what he did.
“The weapon is Annunaki, Sam,” Jackson says. “I’m absolutely sure of it. And if it can be built, it could change everything.”
“You told the council all of this?” I ask him.
“Of course I did,” he says. “I was so excited, I was ready to steal the plans myself. But then things changed.”
“How?”
“I fell in love with Lottie,” he says.
“Lottie? The girl with Sauer?”
“She’s my wife, Sam.”
“What? That’s insane.” I don’t believe what I’m hearing.
“Her father, Oswald Brecht, was Sauer’s best friend. She used to come to the dig site sometimes, and we started talking.”
“Her father was a Nazi?”
“Her father was a scientist. Like Sauer. He didn’t have a political bone in his body. He was only interested in studying the artifacts.”
“But he worked for the Nazis. Like Sauer.”
“It’s hard to explain, Sam. I don’t expect you to understand. You just have to trust me. Sauer and Brecht had no love for Hitler and his madness. But they couldn’t just up and leave. They had families in Germany, and they were afraid.”
I don’t know what to think anymore, so I don’t say anything. Jackson keeps talking.
“After the war, a lot of the scientists were rounded up and put on trial,” he says. “Oswald Brecht was one of them. He was found guilty of collaborating with the Nazis. Now he’s sitting in jail.”
“Why isn’t Sauer sitting there with him?”
“He would be,” Jackson says. “But Brecht told the Allies that Sauer had been killed by the Nazis because his wife was Jewish. It was true that his wife died in the camps, so they bought the story. Sauer went underground. Used a different name. Eventually they forgot about him because there were more important people to go after. Well, more important to them. They never did find out what Brecht and Sauer had discovered, and they wouldn’t have believed it if they had. They thought Hitler’s obsession with the occult and aliens was ridiculous.”
“Looks like you went underground too,” I say.
“After what happened to Lottie’s father, it wasn’t safe here for us either. I’d been working under a different identity anyway. I killed him off and created a new one. Lottie and I went to France. We have a whole new life there.”
“Why didn’t Sauer go?”
“He was born and raised here,” Jackson says. “His whole life happened here. We tried to get him to come, but he has too many memories here.”
There’s something else that Jackson isn’t telling me. I hear it in his voice.
“We come back from tim
e to time to check on him and see if he’s ready to leave. That’s why we’re here now.”
“What’s your name now?” I ask him.
“Bastien Abelard,” he says with a terrible fake French accent. He pretends to twirl a nonexistent mustache, which is supposed to make me laugh. It doesn’t. I’m too upset.
“I still don’t understand why you disappeared,” I say. “You could have just come home.”
“No,” he says. “I couldn’t. I’d disobeyed the council. They wanted me to steal the plans and the few parts of the weapon that we had.”
“Why didn’t you?” I ask him.
“I didn’t want it to get into the wrong hands.”
“And you think Cahokian hands are the wrong ones?”
Jackson sighs. “It’s not as simple as they want us to think it is, Sam,” he says. “I used to think it was too. Then I lived through the war here. I saw what the Nazis did, and what the Soviets did when they got here.” He gets quiet for a moment, as if he’s remembering things he’d rather forget. “And then I fell in love. It might be difficult to understand what I’m saying. But it’s true. When I fell in love with Lottie, it changed everything I thought I believed about how the world works. She’s not Cahokian, Sam. Do you know what that means?”
I do know what it means. When Endgame comes, even if the Cahokian Player wins, she wouldn’t be among those saved. Only those descended from Cahokians would. Then again, a truly dedicated Player would never marry outside the line.
“The council is filled with brave, intelligent people,” Jackson continues. “But they operate on one basic principle, which is that the continued existence of the line is the only thing we should focus on. But what if there’s another way?”
“Like what?” I ask. “If we don’t win, we lose.”
“What if everybody wins?” Jackson says. “What if instead of focusing on how to defeat all the other lines, we try to figure out how we can work together to defeat the Annunaki? To defeat Endgame.”
“You mean share the weapon,” I say.
“Exactly,” he says. “Look at what just happened in the war. Germany was winning. But then countries that used to be enemies banded together and stopped them. Stopped the evil. Every country could have looked out for itself, but then the Nazis would have picked them off one by one. But when the Allies combined their resources, they were able to stop this force that seemed unstoppable.”
