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“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.”
“For who?”
An’s eyes flutter again. “F-f-f-or their l-l-l-lines. She is Cahokian. He is Olmec.” An’s head jerks. Fresh pain sizzles across his medulla oblongata. The good drugs are wearing off.
Charlie holds another sheet of paper over An’s face. Two security images. “These two?”
An squints. “Y-y-yes.”
SHIVER.
“Good.”
Charlie whispers something incomprehensible into a microphone.
Beep. Beep-beep. Beep. Beep-beep.
The heart-rate monitor. Other details in the room are coming back to An. The edges of his vision aren’t fuzzy anymore. He is resurfacing from the dark waters. The SHIVERS are back.
“Where is Ch-Chi-Chiyoko?”
“Can’t say, mate.”
“On this boat?”
“Can’t say.”
“C-c-c-can I see her?”
“No. You’ve only got me from now on. No one else. Just you and me.”
“Oh.”
An’s head jerks. His fingers dance.
“Are-are-are …” He trails off, gives up, whispers. “The game, you understand …”
“Understand what?”
“You all die.” An says it so quietly that Charlie can barely hear.
“What?” Charlie asks, turning an ear toward him.
“You all die,” An breathes, quieter still.
Charlie leans over. Their faces are less than half a meter apart. Charlie squints, his forehead wrinkles. An’s eyes are closed. His mouth is agape. Charlie says, “‘You all die’? Is that what you sai—”
An bites down hard. A plastic cracking noise comes from inside An’s mouth. This Charlie can hear very clearly. And then An exhales, blows out with a hiss like a punctured balloon, and an orange cloud of gas shoots from behind his teeth and right into Charlie’s face. Charlie’s eyes go wide and fill with tears and he can’t breathe. His face burns, his skin is on fire everywhere, his eyes feel like they’re melting, his lungs are shrinking. He falls forward onto An’s chest. It only takes 4.56 seconds, and after that An opens his eyes again.
“Yes,” An says. “Y-y-y-you all die.”
An spits the fake tooth from his mouth, the poison inside one that he spent years gaining an immunity to. The tooth clicks across the metal floor. The little voice in Charlie’s earpiece is screaming. Two seconds later an alarm sounds, reverberating through the metal hull of the boat. The lights go out. A red emergency light flips on.
The room shifts and creaks. Shifts and creaks.
I’m on a boat.
I’m on a boat and I have to get off.
The future is a game.
Time, one of the rules.
(#ulink_3e41212f-2861-5cc6-afcc-66c22f71af2b)
“It is I,” Maccabee Adlai, Player of the 8th line, says into an inconspicuous wireless microphone. He speaks a language only 10 people in the entire world understand. “Kalla bhajat niboot scree.”
These words have no translation. They are older than old, but the woman on the other end of the call understands.
“Kalla bhajat niboot scree,” she says in return. They have proven their identities to each other. “Is your phone secure?” the woman asks.
“I think. But who cares. The end is so close.”
“The others could find you.”
“Screw the others. Besides,” Maccabee says, wrapping his fingers around the glass orb in his pocket, “I would see them coming. Listen, Ekaterina.” Maccabee has always called his mother by her first name, even when he was a boy. “I need something.”
“Anything, my Player.”
“I need a hand. Mechanical. Titanium. Don’t care if it’s skinned.”
“Neurologically fused?”
“If you can do it quickly.”
“Depends on the wound. I’ll know when I see it.”
“Where? How soon?”
Ekaterina thinks. “Berlin. Two days. I’ll text an address tomorrow.”
“Good. Listen. The hand isn’t for me.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not for me, and I need you to put something in it. Something hidden.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll send you specs and code over encrypted botnet M-N-V-eight-nine.”
“Okay.”
“Repeat it,” Maccabee says to his mother.
“M-N-V-eight-nine.”
“It’ll arrive twenty seconds after this call ends. The name of the file is dogwood jeer.”
“Understood.”
“I’ll see you in Berlin.”
“Yes, my son, my Player. Kalla bhajat niboot scree.”
“Kalla bhajat niboot scree.”
Maccabee hangs up. He logs into a ghost app on his phone, launches it, and hits send. Dogwood jeer is off. He turns the phone over, removes the battery, and throws it into the waste bin next to the hotel’s front desk. He takes the phone in both hands and, as he crosses to the gift shop, cracks it down the middle. He goes to a refrigerator full of sodas and opens the door. The cold hits him in the face. He pulls the air into his lungs. It feels good.
He reaches into the back of the case for two Cokes, drops the phone. It clatters behind the racks.
He pays for the Cokes and heads back to the hotel room.
Baitsakhan is on the couch in the junior suite. He sits on the edge of the cushion, his back straight, his eyes closed. The gauze on his wrist stump is blotted by spots of dark blood. His remaining hand—his right hand—is in a fist.
Maccabee closes the door. “I got you a Coke.”
“I don’t like Coke.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“Jalair liked Coke.”
I wish I were Playing with him instead, Maccabee thinks. He twists open his soda, it makes a little hiss, he takes a sip. It tickles his tongue and throat. It’s delicious. “We’re going to Berlin, Baits.”
Baitsakhan opens his deep brown eyes and gazes at Maccabee. “The wind doesn’t blow me there, brother.”
“Yes, it does.”
“No. We have to kill the Aksumite.”
“No, we don’t.”
“Yes, we do.”
Maccabee pulls the orb out of his pocket. “There’s no point. Hilal is nearly dead. He isn’t going anywhere. Besides, his line would be guarding him. It would be suicide to go back there now. Better to wait it out. Maybe he dies anyway and spares us a trip.”
“Who then? The Harappan? To avenge Bat and Bold?”
