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The news on the TV is BBC. All day it’s the same. The meteors, the mystery at Stonehenge, the meteors, the mystery at Stonehenge, the meteors, the mystery at Stonehenge. Sprinkled here and there with some stuff from Syria and Congo and Latvia and Myanmar, plus the tanking world economy, reeling from a new kind of financial panic that, Sarah and Jago know, is the result of Endgame. The suits on Wall Street don’t know that, though. Not yet, anyway.
The meteors, and the mystery at Stonehenge. Wars, crashing markets.
The news.
“None of this will matter once it happens,” Sarah says in the early evening.
“You’re right. Nada.”
A commercial. A local ad for a car dealership. “I guess some of it I won’t miss,” Sarah says. Maybe she does feel like a joke.
Jago should be happy about this. But he just stares at the TV. “I don’t know. I think I’ll miss it all.”
Sarah glares at Earth Key. She was the one who unlocked … no. She has decided to stop blaming herself. She was only Playing. She didn’t make the rules. Sarah sits on the edge of the bed, her hands planted firmly on the mattress, her elbows locked. “What do you think it’ll be, Jago?”
“I don’t know. You remember what kepler 22b showed us. That image of Earth …”
“Burned. Dark. Gray and brown and red.”
“Sí.”
“Ugly …”
“Maybe it’ll be alien tech? One of kepler’s amigos pushes a button from their home planet and—poof!—Earth is screwed.”
“No. It’s got to be more terrifying than that. More … more of a show.”
Jago flicks the remote, the TV shuts off. “Whatever happens, I don’t want to think about it right now.”
She looks at him. Holds out a hand. Jago takes it and sits on the bed next to her and pushes his shoulder into hers.
“I don’t want to be alone, Jago.”
“You won’t be, Alopay.”
“Not after what happened at Stonehenge.”
“You won’t be.”
They flop onto their backs. “We’ll leave tomorrow, like we planned. We’re going to find Sky Key. We’re going to keep Playing.”
“Yeah,” she says unconvincingly. “Okay.”
Jago takes her head and turns it gently. He kisses her. “We can do this, Sarah. We can do it together.”
“Shut up.” She kisses him back. She feels the diamonds in his teeth, licks them, nibbles at his lower lip, smells his breath.
Anything to forget.
They fool around, and Sarah doesn’t say “Play” or “Earth Key” or “Sky Key” or “Endgame” or “Christopher” for the rest of the evening. She just holds Jago and smiles, touches him and smiles, feels him and smiles.
She falls asleep at 11:37 p.m.
Jago doesn’t sleep.
He is sitting in bed at 4:58 a.m. Stock-still. No lights. Two windows looking over a slender courtyard to the left of the bed. The blinds are open, ambient light suffuses the glass. Jago can see well enough. He’s already dressed. Sarah is too. He watches her sleep. Her breathing slow and steady.
The Cahokian.
He tries to remember a story his great-grandfather, Xehalór Tlaloc, told him about a legendary battle between humans and the Sky Gods that took place hundreds of years ago. A battle that the humans, who according to Xelahór didn’t even have guns at their disposal, somehow managed to win.
4:59.
If he and Sarah both want to survive, they will need to beat the Sky Gods a 2nd time. But how did the humans do it? How could humans with spears and bows and swords and knives defeat an army of Makers? How?
5:00.
How?
The air changes. The hair on Jago’s neck stands up. He whips his head to the door. The crack of light from the hall is unbroken. He stares at it for several seconds, and then it goes out.
He grabs his pistol from the side table. Pokes Sarah with a bony elbow. Her eyes pop open as Jago clasps a hand over her mouth. His eyes say, Someone’s coming.
Sarah slides to the floor. She grabs her pistol and quietly charges a round. She rolls under the bed. Jago slips to the floor and rolls under too.
“Player?” Sarah whispers.
“Don’t know.”
Then Jago remembers. He points his chin to the center of the room. Earth Key is still on the coffee table!
“Shit,” Sarah says.
Before Jago can stop her, Sarah slides out and gets to her knees, but then she freezes. Jago peers past her legs. There, just outside the windows, are two black tactical ropes, dancing back and forth.
“La joda!” Jago whispers.
And then the door bursts open. Four men in staggered single file push into the adjacent living room. All black, helmets, night vision, toting futuristic-looking FN F2000 assault rifles. At the same moment there’s a thud from outside, and the windows crack in every direction. Two men immediately rappel down the ropes and kick the glass. It shatters inward, shards raining onto the floor. The men swing in and land right in front of Sarah. She’s in a deep crouch, her gun leveled on the face of the lead soldier. She hesitates to shoot, and she hates herself for it.
But her senses are sharp, and she notices that the rifles have a strange attachment where the grenade launcher would normally be.
“Don’t move,” the lead soldier says with a British accent. “Except to lower your gun.”
“Where’s the other one?” asks the lead who came through the door.
One of the men behind him says, “Going thermal. There—”
Pop-pop!
Jago fires and rolls to his right, away from Sarah. Both shots hit the legs of the man who switched his goggles. This man’s shins are armored, but Jago guessed as much, and the bullets tear through the flesh and bone just above his feet. He falls to the floor, crying out. None of the other men move to help. Instead they begin firing.
But not bullets.
Sarah springs straight up from her crouch, pulls her knees to her chest, her head nearly touching the ceiling. Two darts sail beneath her. Thup-thup. They hit the wall.
Thup-thup-thup-thup-thup. Jago’s on his feet too. He yanks a metal lamp from the bedside table and dances forward, twirling and ducking and spinning. Four darts zip through his shirt, a 5th grazes his hair, but none hit flesh. A 6th clangs off the metal of the lamp.
“Net!” says the lead soldier that came through the window. The man behind him fires a weapon that looks like a small RPG.
A dark blob expands through the air, heading for Sarah. She fires twice, hitting two of the metal balls that give the net its weight and propel it forward, but it’s no use. The net is coming for her.
Jago underhands the lamp toward Sarah. The net hits the lamp and the mesh wraps around it like a closing fist. Sarah drops to the floor, deflecting the snarled lamp to the side. Both Players then surge forward, firing simultaneously, twisting their bodies as they move, making themselves harder to hit with the darts.
Impossible to hit.
Jago fires across the room at Sarah’s assailants, using the angle to blast the night-vision goggles off both their faces without actually killing them. Sarah fires across the room at the men facing Jago. She hits two of the dart-gun attachments mounted to the rifles, hits one of the men square in the middle of his bulletproof vest, and with her 5th shot shoots the TV on the far side of the room. It explodes in a shower of sparks, blue and orange and green. The men stand their ground. “Go lethal!” one shouts.
Jago drops to his knees as the first soldier live-fires. Half a dozen 5.56 × 45 millimeter rounds scream over Jago’s head as he brings the top of his pistol hard into the man’s groin. Jago fires twice at the men just behind the lead soldier, hitting one on the hand and the other on the shoulder. Jago then reaches up and pulls a grenade off the man’s vest. Just by the shape and weight he can tell that it’s a flashbang.
At the same time, Sarah moves toward her two men. One lets off a volley, which she evades by leaping out the broken window.
She grabs a rope and slides down the outside of the building six feet. She pops the pistol into her waistband with her other hand. While she’s sliding, she loops the free end of the rope over her foot. She reaches out and grabs the other rope and loops it around her other foot. Then she lets go with her hands and swings backward. She tucks her chin to her chest and pushes all the air out of her lungs as her back slams into the side of the building. She can feel the pistol come free. She is upside down, like a high-wire circus performer, the ropes and her flexed feet keeping her from falling headfirst down three stories. She hears her gun clatter to the ground in the courtyard below as she reaches behind her ankles and grabs each rope and pulls herself up so that her feet are only inches below the edge of the window.
Jago sees Sarah launch out the window, doesn’t worry about the lightning-quick Cahokian, closes his eyes, throws the flashbang against the far wall.
The room lights up, and a loud noise echoes over everything and out into the London night, bouncing off buildings and into the street and sky. Jago stands and pistol-whips the back of the lead officer’s neck. He goes down in a heap. Jago sees that the man he shot, still lying on the floor, is taking aim with his rifle. Jago pirouettes around the next stunned soldier, grabbing him by the shoulders, just as the prone soldier fires. Two quick bursts. But every slug sails into the Kevlar vest of the man between them. Jago jumps sideways, throwing the man forward onto the metal coffee table. He’s already unconscious from the impact of the slugs.
Earth Key rolls across the table and stops, teetering on the edge, as if it doesn’t want to fall.
Jago’s about to spin and help Sarah when a knife flashes out of the cloud of smoke. It slices Jago near his right hand, the one with the gun, and cuts deep across the wrist. The gun falls to the floor, bouncing off Jago’s foot. The knife slices upward, nearly catching Jago. He folds back to avoid it and bends so far that he has to plant his hands behind him to keep from tumbling over. One lands on the cold surface of the coffee table, the other on the muscly leg of the soldier who took a dozen point-blank slugs to the back. Jago feels a tactical knife strapped to this thigh. He draws it and wheels and gets his feet back under him. The soldier with the knife steps out of the smoke, ready to fight.
Jago sets his feet and covers his throat with his free hand. The man lunges from the smoke. Jago sidesteps, and the blade catches him fast along the left forearm, slicing his shirt open but not his skin.
The angle of attack allows Jago to push the man farther to the side. He drops his blade, steps forward, plants his left hand on the man’s arm just above his elbow, and grabs his wrist with his other hand. He pushes hard into the arm and yanks the wrist in the other direction, and the man’s arm snaps clean at the elbow. The man screams, and Jago feels the tendons release the knife. It falls, the heavy handle causing it to flip over. Jago kicks up his heel and hits the knife on the butt. It reverses course, sailing upward. Jago releases the man’s wrist and snatches the blade out of the air.
Just as he catches it, the man head-butts Jago across the forehead, which hurts, especially since he’s still wearing a helmet.
If pain mattered to Jago, this would have been a good move.
But pain doesn’t matter to Jago.
The Olmec cups his left hand over the back of the soldier’s neck and brings the blade up fast into his throat. Warm blood shoots over Jago’s hand. He steps away as the man gets busy dying.
While Jago fights, the two tasked with capturing Sarah recover from the flashbang. They look at each other and then out the window. They ready their rifles and step to the edge. The guns swing into the air, the men clear left and right and don’t see her. Then one clears up while the other clears down.
Sarah waits. Still hanging upside down, she crunches up and grabs the unsuspecting man by the cuff of his shirt. She pulls hard and falls back, and the man comes with her, arcing out of the window. He falls to the ground, yelling the whole way until there’s a sickening sound and silence. Sarah looks up, knowing the other soldier is still there. Their eyes meet. He pulls the trigger and fires wild.
Thk-thk-thk-thk-thk! A volley rings out, but because Sarah is still swinging, he misses, the bullets making high-pitched firecracker noises on the concrete and metal in the courtyard below. He aims again, and has her sighted this time. Sarah keeps her eyes open. Christopher had his eyes open. She will too.
But then the man slowly pitches forward and falls out of the building, a knife planted to the hilt in the back of his neck.
“You all right?” Jago calls from inside the room, his body still frozen in the throwing position.
“Yes!”
“There’s one more.”
Jago spins to the wounded man on the floor. The man says, “Rooster call! Repeat, rooster call!”
Jago drops instinctively as something zips into the room from outside and, unfortunately for the soldier, hits him dead in the face. His head explodes.
“Sniper!” Sarah yells from outside.
“Coming!” Jago shouts.
Sarah’s a sitting duck. She points her feet and drops, the rope running over her ankles and under her heels. Just before hitting the ground, she flexes her feet and extends her hands over her head. She slows. Her hands meet the ground. She kicks the ropes free of her ankles and folds out of a perfect handstand.
She’s safe from the sniper. In the room above, Jago sets off two more flashbangs. They’re loud, and he can’t hear a thing as he vaults forward, sliding over the coffee table, grabbing Earth Key. Three rounds explode in the floor just behind him. He scurries forward, only a few meters to go. The coffee table takes the next three sniper rounds. A meter. A round sings by, only centimeters from his head.
Screw this.
Jago stands, yells “Catch!” and throws Earth Key out the window. He dives out after it and snatches one of the ropes with both hands. Sniper rounds, coming from the north-northeast, ping off the building. His hands burn. His hands bleed. He twists, gets his feet on the exterior wall, comes to a stop. The sniper lost his angle and isn’t firing anymore. Jago loops the rope under his butt and rappels the last six meters to the ground.
“Catch yourself,” Sarah snips. Jago spins just in time to grab an F2000 that Sarah throws at him. It claps into Jago’s bleeding hands. He doesn’t care about the pain. He likes it.
He’s Playing.
Sarah bends to pick up the other rifle and the pistol that fell from her waistband. Jago pulls the knife out of the man’s neck. Sarah takes two flashbangs from one of the men. Jago pulls a spray canister off the hip of the same man, along with a satchel not much bigger than a baseball.
“What’s that?” Sarah asks, squinting at the canister.
“Aerated C4,” he says almost giddily.
“Whoa. Never messed with that. You?”
“Naturally.”
“That bag the blasting caps?”
He looks. “Sí.”
“Great. Now let’s get out of here.”
Jago nods. “You got Earth Key?”
Sarah pats a small lump in a zippered pocket. “Good throw.”
Without another word they take off at a dead sprint.
