Jago still doesn’t bother to take his hands out of his pockets. The silver metal flashes in the lamplight. Jago lifts a leg and kicks straight back, hitting the man in the ribs. The knife misses Jago as he folds forward and lifts his foot and cracks the man in the chin. Then Jago brings his foot down on the man’s knife hand. His wrist slams into the ground, the instep of Jago’s shoe on top of it. The knife comes free. Jago flicks it away with the toe of his shoe. It falls over the edge of the curb and clatters down a drain. The man moans. This skinny shit beat him without even taking his hands out of his pockets.

Jago smiles, spins, crosses the street.

Burger King.

Sí.

Jugadores juegan.

But they also need to eat.

Odem Pit’dah Bareket

Nofekh Sapir Yahalom

Leshem Shevo Ahlamah

Tarshish Shoham Yashfeh

Hilal moans while he sleeps. Whimpers and shakes. His head, face, right shoulder, and arm are burned from the incendiary grenade the Nabataean lobbed at him as he retreated underground.

Eben pulled him to safety. Threw blankets on him, snuffed out the flames, tried to calm him, injected him with morphine.

Hilal stopped screaming.

The power was out when the attack came, despite the backup systems. Eben called Nabril in Addis on a hand-crank radio, and Nabril said the power failure was the result of a solar flare. A huge one. One like he’d never seen before. The strange thing was that it was concentrated there, on Aksum, just at the moment that Hilal was writing his message to the other Players. Just as the Donghu and the Nabataean knocked on the hut’s door. All of which was impossible. Solar flares disrupt wide areas, entire continents. They don’t have pinpoint accuracy. They aren’t aimed.

Impossible.

Impossible, except for the Makers.

Eben considered this in the immediate aftermath of the ambush as he attended Hilal by lamplight. Eben had two Nethinim assistants, both mutes. They placed Hilal on a stretcher, hooked him up to an IV, took him seven levels beneath the surface of the ancient church. Eben and the Nethinim bathed Hilal in goat’s milk. The white liquid turned pink. Charred flecks of skin floated to the surface.

They prayed silently as they worked. As they tended. As they saved. Bubbling skin. The crisp, sulfuric smell of disintegrated hair. The creamy waft of the milk-and-blood mixture underneath.

Eben cried quietly. Hilal had been the most beautiful of any Aksumite Player in 1,000 years, since the legendary female Player Elin Bakhara-al-Poru. Hilal had the blue eyes, the perfect, smooth complexion, the straight white teeth, the high cheekbones, the flat nose and perfectly round nostrils, the square chin, and the tightly curled hair that framed his smooth boyish face. He looked like a god. All gone now. Burned away. Hilal ibn Isa al-Salt would never be beautiful again.

Eben sent for a surgeon from Cairo to perform three skin grafts. An eye doctor came from Tunis to try to save Hilal’s right eye. The grafts were successful from a medical standpoint, but Hilal will always be gruesome. A patchwork of the formerly beautiful boy. The right eye was saved, but his vision will surely be affected. And it is no longer blue. Now it is red. All of it save the pupil, which is milky white.

“It will never go back,” the eye doctor said.

He was so beautiful. A king for angels. But now. Now he appears to be half a devil.

Eben thinks: But he is our devil.

It’s been nearly a week since the attack. Eben kneels next to Hilal in a plain stone bedchamber. A small wooden cross over the bed frame. A white porcelain sink against one wall. Some pegs for robes. A small chest containing fresh sheets and bandages. A hook on the headboard for the IV. There is a small cart with a heart rate monitor, wire leads, and electrodes. The Nethinim—both of them tall and strong, one a man, one a woman—stand attendant, silent, armed, just outside the door.

Hilal has slept the entire time. He occasionally moans, whimpers, shakes. He is still on morphine, but Eben is already weaning him. Hilal has learned to live with pain, and while this pain will be more intense and permanent than what has come before, if Hilal is to continue with Endgame, then he is going to have to acclimate.

To more pain. To disfigurement. To his new body.

If he is not going to continue, then Eben needs to know. And for that, Hilal needs his mind to be clear.

So he is being weaned.

While Hilal has slept, Eben has prayed. Meditated. Remembered Hilal’s words: I could be wrong, Hilal said before the morphine took him. The Event could be inevitable.

Eben knows this is not the case. Not after what the being said on the television. Not after the solar flare that pinpointed Aksum. The Makers are intervening. The only other possibility is that the Corrupted One somehow did it. The being that the Aksumites have been searching for all these centuries. Searching for in vain. The one called Ea.

But even the Corrupted One does not have the power to control the sun.

So Eben knows: it was the Makers.

And Eben knows that this is savagery. They brought humans to life and they are supposed to oversee our near extinction, to reset the Earth life-clock and let the planet recover from the damage done, but They are not supposed to interfere with the Playing of Endgame. They made these rules, and now They break them.

Which means that perhaps it is time.

Time to see what’s inside the legendary, but very real, container.

It’s been waiting since Uncle Moses faked its destruction and secreted it away and told the sons of Aaron to protect it at all costs. And never to look upon it or open it. And he commanded: Only break the seal on the Day of Judgment.

That day is near.

This is the end of an age.

Soon the mighty Aksumites will take their charge and see what power rests between the gilded wings of the cherubim of glory. Soon Eben ibn Mohammed al-Julan will risk destruction for the sake of Endgame.

Once Hilal returns to consciousness and clarity Eben will break the covenant with the Makers and see if the line of Aksum can give them a taste of their own medicine.

FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE, MAY 1981

In March 1967, an intercept technician with the USAF Security Service intercepted a communication between the pilot of a Russian-made Cuban MIG-21 and his command concerning a UFO encounter. The technician has since stated that when the pilot attempted to fire at the object, the MIG and its pilot were destroyed by the UFO. Furthermore, the technician alleges that all reports, tapes, log entries, and notes on the incident were forwarded to the National Security Agency at its request. Not surprisingly, several months later the agency drafted a report entitled UFO Hypothesis and Survival Question. Released in October 1979 under the US Freedom of Information Act, the report states that “the leisurely scientific approach has too often taken precedence in dealing with the UFO question.” The agency concluded that no matter what UFO hypothesis is considered, “all of them have serious survival implications.”

There is Alice and there is Shari and there is a little girl wedged between them, frightened and whimpering. Shari and Alice stand back to back, crouched in fighting stances, Alice with her knife and a boomerang, Shari with a long metal rod tipped with a tangle of nails. Circling them are the others, also armed, cooing clucking snarling threatening. Beyond them is a pack of dogs with red eyes and men dressed in black and armed with rifles and scythes and billy clubs. Above them is a scrim of stars and the keplers’ faces and their seven-fingered hands reaching, their razor-thin bodies still, their mocking laughter ringing. In their midst there is a distortion in space like a hole in the stars. And before Alice can consider all this, the others move at once and the little girl screams and Alice throws her boomerang and pushes her knife into the chest of the short tanned boy, who spits in her face as he bleeds, and the little girl screams and screams and screams and screams.

Alice shoots up in her hammock, her fists gripping the edge so she doesn’t tumble out, her hair a wild dark explosion, moonlight reflecting off its curls in white turns.

She takes a breath, slaps her face, checks her boomerangs. Checks her knife. Still there, embedded in the wooden column above the eyelet holding up one end of her hammock.

She is on the porch of her little shack near the lagoon. Alone. Beyond the lagoon is the Timor Sea. Behind her, on the other side of the shack, is the scrub and bush of the vast Northern Territory. Alice’s backyard.

She has been at home meditating, listening to the dreamtime and tracing the songlines with her memory. Thinking of the ancestors, the sea and sky and earth. She has been there since the kepler broadcast his “Play on” message and since she received another clue in her sleep. This one not a puzzle, but explicit and direct, if not exactly fixed.

She wonders if other Players got new clues. If one of the others has already figured out where she is. If one of them is drawing a bead on her right now with a sniper rifle, in the distance, silent and deadly.

“Bugger you!” she yells into the darkness, her voice spreading over the dry land. She flips out of the hammock and stomps to the edge of the porch, wiggles her toes, lets her arms out wide. “Here I am, you hoons—take me!”

But no shot comes.

Alice snickers and spits. She scratches her ass. She watches the bright light of her clue, a mental beacon in her mind’s eye. She knows exactly what it is: the location of Baitsakhan, the Donghu, the terrifying toddler, the person who wants to kill Shari and maybe this girl Alice has seen in her dreams over and over. Alice guesses that this girl is Shari’s Little Alice, but why the Donghu, or anyone, would want her killed isn’t clear. Why Little Alice is important—if she’s important—remains shrouded.

Regardless, Big Alice is going to find Baitsakhan and kill him. That is how she will Play. If this leads her closer to one of the three keys of Endgame, so be it. If it doesn’t, so be it.

“What’ll be’ll be,” she huffs.

A shooting star cruises the firmament and fades in the western sky.

She spins, walks inside her shack, snatches her knife from the wooden post. She picks up the receiver of an old push-button phone, curly cord and all. She punches in a number, puts the receiver to her ear.

“Oi, Tim. Yeah, it’s Alice. Look, I’m on a freighter tomorrow predawn, and I need you to use your unmatched skills to locate a certain someone for me, yeah? Might’ve mentioned her. The Harappan. Yeah, that’s the one. Chopra. Indian. Yeah, yeah, I know there must be a hundred million Chopras in that country, but listen. She’s between seventeen and twenty, probably on the older end of that spectrum. And she has a kid. Maybe two or three years old. Here’s the kicker, though. The girl’s name’s Alice. That oughta narrow it a little. Yeah, you call me on this number when you get it. I’ll be checking the messages. All right, Tim. Good on ya.”

She hangs up and stares at the backpack on her bed. The black canvas roll covered with weapons.

She has to get ready.

And she told her Students, her Acolytes:

You can feel it.

Everything that is good is a facade.

Nothing worthwhile lasts.

If you are hungry, you eat, and you are full, but that fullness just reminds you that you will be hungry again in the future. If you are cold, you make a fire, but that fire will die, and then the coldness creeps back in. If you are lonely, you find someone, but then they get tired of you or you get tired of them and, eventually, there you are—alone again.

Happiness, satisfaction, contentment, all of these create a veil spread thinly but convincingly over suffering. The pain awaits, always, underneath.

Everything the children perceive themselves to be and all that they devote themselves to—food, sex, entertainment, drink, money, adventure, games—exist to insulate them from fear.

Fear is the only constant, which is precisely why we should listen to it.

Embrace it. Keep it. Love it.

Greatness comes from fear, Students. Using it is how we will fight.

Using it is how we will win.

—S

Beep.

SHIVER.

Beep-beep.

SHIVER.

Beep-beep.

SHIVERBLINKSHIVERBLINK.

“CHIYOKO!”

An Liu tries to sit, but he is restrained. At the wrists and the ankles and across SHIVERblinkblink the chest. He glances left and right and left and right. His head is killing him.

Killing.

The pain radiates over his right eye and around his temple and to the back of his skull and down his neck. He can’t remember how he got here. He’s on a gurney. Sees an IV stand, a rolling cart with a heart and respiratory monitor. BLINKshiverblink. White walls. Low gray ceiling. A bright fluorescent light overhead. A framed picture of Queen Elizabeth. An oval door with an iron wheel in the middle. A black four stenciled above it.

He can feel the room shift and hear it blinkblink hear it creak.

A wheel on the door.

The room shifts and creaks in the other direction.

He’s on a boat.

“Ch-Ch-Ch-Chiyoko …” he stammers quietly.

“That’s her name, eh? The one who got flattened?”

A man’s voice. SHIVERblinkSHIVERblinkblinkblink. It comes from above his head, out of eyeshot. An lifts his chin, strains at the straps. Rolls his eyes up until the pain in his head becomes almost unbearable. He still can’t SHIVER he still can’t see the man.

“Chiyoko. I was wondering.” He hears the scratch of a pen on paper. “Thanks for finally telling me. Poor girl just got flattened like a pancake.”

Flattened? What’s SHIVERSHIVER what’s he blinkblinkblink what’s he talking about?

“D-d-d-don’t say—”

“S’matter? Something in your mouth?”

“D-d-d-don’t say her n-n-n-name!”

The man sighs, steps forward a little. An can just make out the top of his head. He is a white man with tan skin and a mop of brown hair, straight thin eyebrows, and deep lines in his forehead. The lines are not from old age but from frowning. From yelling. From squinting. From being British and way too serious.

An already shiverBLINK already knows: British Special Forces.

“W-w-w-where—”SHIVERSHIVERSHIVERblinkSHIVER. It hasn’t SHIVER hasn’t been this bad SHIVERSHIVERSHIVER …

The tremors haven’t been this bad since Chiyoko left him in bed that night. His head whips back and forth and his legs shake and shake.

SHIVERblinkSHIVERblink. He needs to blinkblinkblinkblinkblink to see her. That will calm him down.

“Twitchy lad,” the man says, stepping around to the side of the gurney. “You wanna know where your girlfriend is, that it?”

“Y-y-y-y-y—”

An is stuck on the sound. He keeps saying it, his mind and mouth on a loop.

“Y-y-y-y-y-y-y—”

The man places a hand on An’s arm. The hand is warm. The man is skinnier than An expected. His hands are too big for his body.

“I have questions too. But we can’t talk until you’ve gotten ahold of yourself.” The man turns away. He picks up a syringe from a nearby tray. An catches a glimpse of the label: serum #591566. “Try to breathe easy, lad.” The man pulls up An’s sleeve on his left arm. “It’s just a pinch.”

No!

SHIVERblinkblinkblinkSHIVERSHIVER.

No!

“Breathe easy now.”

An convulses. He feels whatever he’s being injected with move through his arm, into his heart, his neck, his head. The pain disappears. Cool darkness washes into An’s brain, like the waves outside, gently rocking the ship back and forth, back and forth. An feels the drug pull him beneath the surface, down into the dark ocean. He’s suspended. Weightless. He doesn’t shiver. His eyes don’t BLINK. All is quiet and all is dark. Calm. Easy.

“Can you speak?” The man’s voice echoes as if it is in An’s mind.

“Y-yes,” An says without much effort.

“Good. You can call me Charlie. What’s your name, lad?”

An opens his eyes. His sight is fuzzy around the edges, but his senses are strangely acute. He can feel every centimeter of his body. “My name is An Liang,” he says.

“No, it’s not. What’s your name?”

An tries to turn his head but can’t. He’s been restrained further. A strap across his forehead? Or is this the drug?

“Chang Liu,” he tries again.

“No, it’s not. One more lie and I won’t tell you anything about Chiyoko. That’s a promise.”

An begins to speak but the man claps one of his big hands over An’s mouth. “I mean it. Lie to me one more time and we’re done. No more Chiyoko, no more you. Do you understand?”

Since An can’t move his head at all, can’t nod, he widens his eyes. Yes, he understands.

“Good lad. Now, what’s your name?”

“An Liu.”

“Better. How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“Where are you from?”

“China.”

“No shit. Where in China?”

“Many places. Xi’an was last home.”

“Why were you at Stonehenge?”

An feels a tickle in his ear. A scratching noise close by.

“To help Chiyoko,” he says.

“Tell me about Chiyoko. What was her last name?”

“Takeda. She was the Mu.”

A pause. “The Mu?”

“Yes.”

“What is a Mu?”

“Not sure. Old people. Older than old.”

An hears the scritch-scratch noise again. He places the sound. A polygraph. “He’s not lying,” the man says. “Don’t know what he’s talking about, but he’s not lying.”

An hears a tinny voice over an earpiece. Someone else is watching and listening. Giving Charlie with the big hands and wrinkled forehead instructions.

“What you inject in me?” An asks.

“Top-secret serum, lad. I tell you more than that and I have to kill you. It’s not your turn to ask questions yet. I’ll let you ask yours after you answer a few more of mine, deal?”

“Yes.”

“What were you helping Chiyoko with at Stonehenge?”

“Get Earth Key.”

“What’s Earth Key?”

“Piece of puzzle.”

“What kind of puzzle?”

“Endgame puzzle.”

“What’s Endgame?”

“A game for end of time.”

“And you’re playing it?”

“Yes.”

“Chiyoko was too?”

“Yes.”

“She was Mu?”

“Yes.”

“What are you?”

“Shang.”

“What is Shang?”

“Shang was father of my people. Shang are my people. Shang is me. I am Shang. I hate Shang.”

Charlie pauses, writes something on a pad that An can’t see. “What does Earth Key do?”

“Not sure. Maybe nothing.”

“Are there other keys?”

“Yes. It is one of three.”

“Earth Key was at Stonehenge?”

“I think yes. Not sure.”

“Where are the other two keys?”

“Don’t know. That is part of the game.”

“Endgame.”

“Yes.”

“Who runs it?”

He cannot resist saying the words. “Them. The Makers. The Gods. They have many names. One called kepler 22b told us of Endgame.” The serum they put in him tickles the synapses in his frontal cortex. It is a good drug, whatever it is.

Charlie holds a picture over An’s face. It’s of the man from the announcement that was made on every screen in the world—TV, mobile phone, tablet, computer—after Stonehenge changed, after that beam of light shot to the heavens. “Have you seen this person before?”

“No. Wait. Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Yes … yes I see it before. That is disguise. Could be kepler 22b. Could not be him—her—it. Not a person.”

Charlie takes the picture away. Replaces it with a picture of Stonehenge. Not as it was, quaint and ancient and mysterious, but as it is now. Revealed and altered. An unearthly tower of stone and glass and metal rising 100 feet in the air, the age-old stones that marked it jumbled around the tower’s base like a child’s discarded blocks.

“Tell me about this.”

An’s eyes widen. His memory of Stonehenge stops before anything like that appeared. “I do not know about that. Can I ask question?”

“You just did, but yes.”

“That is Stonehenge?”

“Yes. How did this happen?”

“Not sure. Can’t remember.”

Charlie leans back. “I guess you wouldn’t. You were shot, you remember that?”

“No.”

“In the head. You concussed pretty badly. Lucky for you, you’ve got a metal plate in there. A metal plate coated in Kevlar. Some bloody foresight, that.”

“Yes. Lucky. Another question?”

“Sure.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

Charlie pauses, listens to the little voice in his earpiece.

“We don’t really know. You were shot, we know that. With a special kind of bullet that only a handful of people have ever seen. You were clutching the end of a rope that led to the body of a young man. Or what was left of his body. He was blown up above the chest. Only his lower torso and legs were left.”

An remembers. There was the boy he put the bomb leash around. There was the Olmec. There was the Cahokian.

“Your girlfriend, Chiyoko—”

“Not say her name. Her name is my name now.”

Charlie gives An a hard stare. His eyes are blue, then green, then red. It’s the drugs, An tells himself. The good drugs.

“Chiyoko,” Charlie says, emphasizing the name, savoring it in a way that stings An. “She was right next to you. One of the stones toppled onto her when this thing under Stonehenge came up. Crushed the lower two-thirds of her body. Killed her instantly. We had to scrape her up.”

“She next to me, though?” An asks. His eyelids flutter. “After I shot?”

“Yes. Was she the one who shot you?”

“No.”

“Who did?”

“Not sure. There were two others.”

“These two, they had the ceramic and polymer bullets?”

“Not sure. The guns were white, so maybe.”

“What are their names?”

“Sarah Alopay and Jago Tlaloc,” An says, struggling to pronounce these foreign names.

“They’re playing this game too?”

“Yes.”

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