“Fuck kepler 22b and fuck Endgame and fuck Playing,” Sarah says into the silence.
She stops crying. Jago lets his hand fall into the sheets. Sarah’s breathing deepens and slows, and after several minutes she’s asleep.
Jago slides out of bed. He gets in the shower, lets the water run over him. He thinks about the knife fighter’s eyes, about how they looked as life abandoned him. About how Jago felt, watching, knowing he’d taken that life. He gets out and towels off, dresses silently, eases out of the hotel room, the door closing silently behind him. Sarah doesn’t stir.
“Hola, Sheila,” Jago says to the clerk when he reaches the lobby.
Jago has memorized the names of everyone who works at the hotel and in the restaurant. Aside from Sheila there are Pradeet, Irina, Paul, Dmitri, Carol, Charles, Dimple, and 17 others.
They’re all doomed.
Because of Sarah. Because of him. Because of Chiyoko and An and all the Players.
Because of Endgame.
He exits onto Cromwell Road and pulls his hood over his head. Cromwell, Jago thinks. The hated puritanical lord protector of the English Commonwealth, the terror of the interregnum. A man so loathed and reviled that King Charles II had his body exhumed so it could be killed all over again. The body was beheaded and the head placed on a pole outside Westminster Hall, where it stayed for years, getting picked at and spat on and cursed until there was nothing but a skull. That head rotted away not more than a couple kilometers from where Jago walks on this night. On this road named after the usurper.
This is what they’re fighting for. To keep devils like Cromwell and libertine kings like Charles II and hate and power and politics alive and well on Earth.
He’s begun to wonder if it’s even worth it.
But he can’t wonder. Not allowed to. “Jugadores no se preguntan,” Papi would say if he could hear Jago’s thoughts. “Jugadores juegan.”
Sí.
Jugadores juegan.
Jago sticks his hands in his pockets and walks toward Gloucester Road. A man 15 centimeters taller and 20 kilograms heavier than him wheels around the corner and slams into Jago’s shoulder. Jago does a half spin, keeps his hands in his pockets, barely looks up.
“Oi, watch it!” the man says. He smells like beer and anger. He’s having a bad night and looking for a fight.
“Sorry, mate,” Jago replies, imitating the South London accent, moving on.
“You havin’ a laugh?” the man asks. “Tryna be hard?”
Without warning, the man swings a fist the size of a toaster at Jago’s face. Jago leans backward, the fist breezes past his nose. The man swings again, but Jago sidesteps.
“A right fast little twat,” the man blurts. “Take your hands out your pockets, mate. Stop fuckin’ about.”
Jago smiles, flashes his diamond-studded teeth instead. “Don’t need to.”
The man steps forward and Jago dances toward him, slamming his heel onto one of the man’s feet. The man cries out and tries to grab him, but Jago kicks the man’s stomach. The man doubles over. Jago’s hands are still in his pockets. He turns to walk away, toward the all-night Burger King down the street, to get a couple of bacon cheeseburgers. Players need to eat. Even if one of them claims to be done with Playing. Jago hears the man quickly pull something out of his pocket. Without turning to look Jago says, “You should put that knife away.”
The man freezes. “How’d ya know I got a knife?”
“Heard it. Smelled it.”
“Bollocks,” the man whispers, surging forward.
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