Endgame Novella #1

by James Frey

  Kala and Alad are a little more subtle.

  It takes no more than a snip of the right wire to disarm the electrified gate. From there, it’s easy. They can scale barbed-wire fences in their sleep. Alad goes first, flinging himself up and safely over the barbs like a gymnast on the uneven bars. He snatches hold of the other side of the fence to break his fall, then climbs down the rest of the way. Safe. Free.

  She loves to watch him move, watch his muscles ripple and flex. Even now, when a wrong move could set the sirens blaring and the guards running, she allows herself a moment of wonder. Impossible to believe that he belongs to her—that they belong to each other.

  Then it’s her turn. She climbs halfway up the fence, pushes off with her legs, vaults her body up and over the barbed-wire rim, tumbling head over heels, then makes a blind grab and wraps her fingers tightly around chain link. She dangles midway up, six feet from the ground. This close to freedom, climbing is too slow. She pushes off again, sailing through the night air. This is how it feels to be free, she thinks.

  Like flying.

  She lands gracefully, the force of impact vibrating through her bones, and without pause they are both running, across the desert, into the night, eager to put miles between them and the camp before anyone notices they’re gone. This is the plan: Run until dawn, then find a suitable hiding spot, a cave or a dried creek bed, somewhere they can wait out the searchers who will come with the sun.

  They don’t speak, or even look at each other. Instead Kala falls into step behind Alad, watching his smooth, even gait, the steady pumping of his arms, the sweat dripping down that familiar curve of neck, thinking of the first time she really saw him, and how little she knew, before that, of what it meant to be alive.

  These are the rumors—this, they say, is what happens when you shirk your duty, foolishly try to escape:

  They come for you.

  They find you, wherever you hide.

  They blindfold you, tie you up, toss you into an unmarked van, hold you at a secluded location until you’ve learned the errors of your ways.

  Learning comes through brainwashing.

  Or through starvation.

  Or through torture.

  They cut off fingers; they pry out teeth. They waterboard and electrocute. If they suspect you’ve given away the secrets of your training, that you’ve spilled dangerous information to the wrong party, they cut out your tongue.

  At least, these are the stories.

  All the stories concern Players-in-training, children who are of little value to the big picture. There are no stories of what happens to Players gone rogue. It is simply not done.

  Or if it is done, the penalties are too awful to speak of.

  Kala believes none of it. These are bedtime stories, used to scare children who might otherwise contemplate running from the closest they have to a home.

  But she does believe they will come for her. So it’s a good thing they’ve taught her so well how to hide.

  And, if it comes to that, how to fight.

  Her family lives in Abyaneh, one of the oldest villages in Iran, home to fewer than 200 families—and on many days even more tourists, looking to commune with a Persian past. It is in the center of that country, more than 1,500 kilometers away, and will require crossing north across the Yemeni/Saudi Arabian border, finding passage across the Persian Gulf, and then making their way into the heart of Iran.

  She knows these facts about her family, and many others: She knows her mother’s name is Roshan Jahandar and her father is Parham. She has a nine-year-old sister, Mina. She knows her own name, her name at birth—Simin, which means “delicate” and surely was meant for some other girl. She whispers it to herself sometimes, at night, trying to imagine who that girl might have been, whether somewhere inside Kala she still exists. She knows her father is a doctor and her mother a writer of online instruction manuals. She knows she has her mother’s green eyes and her father’s lopsided ears, and her sister has precisely the same shade of hair. The files she’s broken into have many facts, and the internet has supplied many more. But nowhere in the files, or in the gigabytes of data floating in cyberspace, are answers to the questions that really matter, the facts she needs to know.

  Whether her parents remember her; whether they wanted to give her away.

  Whether she was loved; whether she is missed.

  What it means to be a daughter, to have a mother and a father.

  What it means to have a family, and whether this one still belongs to her.

  They travel only at night, navigating by the stars, making their way slowly across the desert, tracking miles across the dunes from dusk till dawn. Days are for curling up in dark places and whispering each other to sleep. They have learned how to find hidden rivulets of water beneath the earth, and how to slow their metabolisms to stretch the length of time they can subsist without. They are trained to spot traces of life, to sniff out human trespassers in the wild and track them down. And so it is that on the third night, as their water is running out, they find a bedouin camp. While the travelers sleep, Kala and Alad rifle through their supplies, taking what they need. They also take two camels. After that they make better time, and soon they have reached the Shaybah oil fields, meaning they are well across the Saudi Arabian border and only a few kilometers from the United Arab Emirates.

  The oil field has its own airstrip, and it is child’s play to steal a plane. Kala drops the flight crew one by one with a series of toxic darts, while Alad takes out the pilots with a simple choke hold. She is about to slit their throats, just to be sure, but Alad stays her hand.

  “It’s not necessary,” he says. “We can do it without that. And if we can, we should.”

  They can. They do.

  Kala reminds herself that they are starting a new life now. She will have to learn to be soft.

  They dump the pilots on the runway. They have both logged hours in the flight simulator on several models of plane and helicopter. Kala settles into the pilot’s seat with Alad beside her and, with a roar of the engine, eases the plane off the runway and into the air. In no time, they are in the emerald city of Abu Dhabi, gaping at skyscrapers and tourists dripping with jewels, luxuriating in the air-conditioning of their spacious hotel suite. A stolen credit card number has bought them a palatial spread, complete with a Jacuzzi and all the water they can drink.

  There is the temptation to stay. At least for a little longer.

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Kala says to Alad, as she’s said so often. “We’re really doing it.” She needs to keep repeating it, to make herself believe. Every time she falls asleep, she worries she’ll wake up back at the camp, only to discover this has all been a dream.

  “We really are,” he tells her, as he always does, and then kisses her. He always does that too.

  They hack the Emirates Airline site and assign themselves two seats on a flight to London, leaving the next morning. They do this under their own names—then claim two more seats on a flight to Tokyo under the names Enki and Enlil, the Sumerian gods of earth and air. If the minders are searching for them, these are the bread crumbs they will find. Kala hopes they will assume the London tickets are fake—too obvious, too easy to track—and uncover the Tokyo flight. Then the wild goose chase will commence.

  In the meantime, Kala and Alad will acquire fake passports, charter a boat across the Gulf, and then—because everything is safer in a crowd—ride endless buses north into Iran, at least until they reach Ardestan. There they will steal a car, or perhaps, if whim overtakes them, two motorbikes, and venture into the countryside.

  She’s covered her tracks in the camp’s computer system. The minders will have no reason to guess where she’s going—no reason to think she’s trekking into her past rather than her future.

  Even if they somehow do, she’ll be gone before they have time to figure it out. She doesn’t need to stay with her family, doesn’t need to bring danger to their door.

  Sh
e just needs to see them.

  To know.

  “Don’t worry,” Alad says as their bus bumps along endless miles of dusty brown landscape. Someone a few rows behind them is carrying a crate of chickens, whose squawk is nearly as bad as their smell. “We’ll get there soon.”

  He thinks she’s impatient, but the closer they get, the slower she wants to move.

  What if she hates them? What if they hate her?

  Worse: What if they are simply strangers? If she steps through the door and feels nothing? If the thing she’s been looking for her entire life turns out not to exist? She’s been searching so long for that missing piece—but if she doesn’t find it here, she won’t find it anywhere. And that hole at her center, the one even Alad can’t fill, will be empty forever.

  These are the fears that keep her awake at night. But then Alad will murmur something in his sleep, or roll over and curl an arm around her, and her worries fade away.

  Nothing can go wrong now.

  The village is smaller than she imagined. There are, along the way, cell towers and satellite dishes, all the necessary trappings of modern life. There are, in the heart of the town, befuddled tourists gaping wide-eyed at the red soil and the colorful traditional garb. But as they creep through the village’s terraced streets, it’s easy to imagine they’ve been transported back in time. It feels so remote here, untouched by time—the kind of place you would seek out if you wanted to hide from the world.

  This is what Kala thinks as she stands on the front step of the house that could have been her home. Maybe they came here to forget her; maybe they came here to get away.

  The houses have no addresses—they stopped in the café to ask how to find the Jahandar family and half the room was able to tell them. A mile north of the grocery at the end of town, where civilization is reclaimed by nature, they will find a small blue cottage surrounded by fig trees. Everyone says: “And tell them we say hello.” Her family is popular in this place, that’s clear. They are loved.

  Here is the house. Here are the trees. Here is Kala, discovering what it means to be afraid.

  The files couldn’t tell her why her family was chosen to donate a child, why she was chosen: whether they gave her away willingly, whether they volunteered. They moved to this village one year after she was taken—or given—and have been here ever since. What were they escaping? Kala wonders. Memories, or me?

  “Maybe this is a bad idea,” Alad says, because surely he can smell her fear. He’s giving her a graceful out. “You don’t have to go in.”

  “We came all this way . . .” She hates how her voice sounds: so small, so defeated.

  “And we can go farther,” he says, eyes lighting up with the possibility. “We keep talking about the future, Kala—but why wait? Let’s start it tonight. Now. Let’s forget about the past and start the rest of our lives.”

  They have agreed to go to Paris next, because the movies say it’s the most romantic place on earth. Alad is right, they could go right this moment, bring their future to life.

  She loves him for suggesting it, for offering an out that carries no shame.

  He can see she is afraid, and he doesn’t hate her for her weakness. She loves him for that too.

  “You think they forgot me?” she says.

  Alad brushes a finger across her cheek. “I think no one could forget you.”

  Inside, there is music playing.

  No, not music—scales, stumbling up and down the keys. Kala imagines a child’s unsteady hand.

  She imagines a sister.

  She knocks on the door.

  “Can I help you?”

  Kala recognizes the woman’s face from the photos in the files. A couple of inches shorter than Kala and many inches rounder, she has the weathered skin of someone who’s spent too much time in the sun. She looks like a nice woman, but she looks like a stranger.

  “Yes?” the woman, the mother says, growing impatient. There is no recognition on her face. “What is it?”

  Kala had always thought she would feel something. That some pheromone or long-dormant memory would spring to life at the sight of her mother, that love would spontaneously appear. She knows better than that—knows it is a fundamental law of nature that something cannot spring from nothing.

  But isn’t it also a law of nature that mothers always know their children?

  Shouldn’t there be something of her infant self in Kala’s face, something that calls this woman to her, makes her see?

  And if not, if there’s nothing left, then what is she doing here?

  “Maybe we should go,” she murmurs to Alad. He takes her hand. Maybe he’s about to pull her away; maybe he’s going to convince her to stay. She’ll never know. Because at that moment, a small girl runs into the room. She peers around her mother’s bulk to get a glimpse of the visitors, favoring them with a gap-toothed smile.

  The mother looks nervously between the child and the strangers, and Kala wonders whether she’s thinking about the last time a set of strangers came to her door, expressing too much interest in her child. “I ask you one more time, who are you and what do you want here?”

  There is so much to tell, but Kala is capable of squeezing out only a single word. The word that, for the first time, feels like it belongs to her.

  “Simin.”

  The woman goes still. Color drains out of her face, and she calls for her husband, or tries to, but her voice rises no higher than a whisper. “Get your father,” she croaks to the child. “Now.” The child scurries away, but the mother does not take her eyes off Kala. She does not move.

  “Simin?” she says, finally, her voice wobbling on the second syllable. “My little Simin?”

  Kala has waited so long to say it: “Mother?”

  Then there is screaming, and there are arms around her and a mother’s tears and a father’s laughter and somewhere in the symphony of joy a child’s nervous squeal and Kala breathes in the scent of saffron and nutmeg and finally understands, This is what it means to come home.

  It’s like watching herself in a movie. This can’t be real, this scene she’s dreamed of so many times, all of it coming true exactly as she imagined. Dreams like this aren’t supposed to come true.

  But: Here is her father serving her and Alad a heaping bowl of lamb stew; here is her mother weeping and weeping, smoothing her hair and peppering her forehead with kisses; here is her sister, fearless and bright, already in love with the handsome young man who brought her big sister home.

  They are brimming with questions about what her life has been, but she doesn’t want to talk about that. She has questions of her own: about the life that she missed, the family she never had, the person they hoped she would be—but those questions are so big, she doesn’t know how to begin to ask.

  For now, she just wants to soak them in. To live inside this feeling, like she’s swallowed the sun. This feeling that, she realizes, must be happiness. The feeling of living a life you’ve chosen, with the people who are meant to belong to you.

  They’ve just finished dessert and are sipping steaming mugs of chai when she hears the thunder in the distance.

  Which is strange, because the night is clear.

  It’s only when she catches sight of Alad’s expression that she realizes that it’s not thunder.

  It’s a helicopter in the distance, coming closer, maybe more than one.

  Kala has been trained to act fast. She has been raised to be a hero, to save her people.

  But when it counts, she is too slow.

  She is on her feet as the men smash through the windows and the door. She is screaming “Get down get down” as they raise their guns. She is flinging herself at her sister, to shield the girl from harm, as the first shot goes off. She is a frenzy of motion . . . but all of it too late.

  It’s over almost as soon as it begins.

  And there’s a hole at the center of her mother’s head.

  And her father’s.

  And her sister�
�s.

  Their bodies are motionless. The floor is thick with blood. Alad is frozen in a corner, watching.

  Someone is screaming.

  Kala realizes it’s her.

  She forces herself to stop, and then there is only the thunder of helicopters overhead. There are the four men with guns, and the woman who led their charge.

  Zikia, who has come to claim her.

  Kala was so sure she wasn’t followed. So sure they wouldn’t figure out where she was going. So sure she’d been careful.

  She was so careless with her family’s lives.

  “Players cannot be compromised by attachment,” Zikia says. “You know that. Caring is weakness. Love is threat.”

  “How?” she says, because she must know what she’s done.

  “Well done, Alad,” Zikia says. “You’ve shown us all your true colors.”

  Kala turns to him, the boy she loves, the boy who is her entire world, knowing it’s impossible.

  Knowing nothing is impossible.

  “Alad?” she says, and in that word is a plea: Tell me this woman is lying. Tell me you wouldn’t.

  He doesn’t.

  He says, “I’m sorry.”

  There has always been an empty place at Kala’s center. It was filled, for a moment. But now, with those two words, the emptiness consumes her.

  “I had no choice,” he says. “You were betraying the cause, I had to tell someone, and they said if I told them where we were going, they’d let you off the hook, they’d let me be the Player, and you know how much I wanted that, you didn’t want it at all, and that just wasn’t fair.” He’s babbling. It’s background noise to her, barely audible above the buzzing in her ears, the echo of her sister’s laughter. “They would have found us anyway, eventually. You know that. I thought it would be easier this way. That we could both get what we wanted. I didn’t know what they were going to do, Kala. You have to believe that. You have to forgive me. How could I know?”