Endgame Novella #2 (5 page)

It's over.

“I'll never understand how it came to this,” Pop says. Aisling has wrapped her chubby arms around her grandfather's neck. She burrows her face into his shoulder.

Propped on his other shoulder is the rifle.

“Is there another way?” Pop asks. “Please tell me there's another way.”

The other way is surrender. Declan could raise his hands, palms out, agree to return to Queens with his father. Allow his Pop to raise Aisling in his own image, turn her into a warrior. Try his best to be a voice of sanity, keep asking unwanted questions, forcing their faces into disturbing truths, bide his time until Aisling is ready to listen.

Except that he's killed Molly; he's killed the Player. Even if Pop can forgive that, the High Council won't.

Even if they could, Declan couldn't forgive himself.

For losing Lorelei, for losing Aisling, for losing everything.

Declan can't stand by and watch as they turn his daughter against him.

“I'll never stop trying,” Declan says honestly. “Not as long as I'm alive. There is no other way.”

Declan's father nods. He knows when his son is speaking the truth. He strokes Aisling's hair and levels the rifle.

“Promise me something?” Declan asks.

“If I can.”

“Tell her about me?”

“Of course.”

“No,” Declan says. “Not that easy. Not your version of me. Not just the parts you approve of. Tell her what happened here. What I tried to do for her, what I believed—whether you agree with it or not.”

Pop doesn't say yes or no, so Declan presses on.

“There's a small notebook, tucked into her carrier. It's my journal. Everything I've learned about Endgame over the last few years, everything I've been trying to tell you. It's in there. Even if you refuse to look at it—someday, let her make her own choice. I need her to
understand why her parents left her alone.”

“She'll never be alone, son. I promise you that.”

“She deserves to make her own choices someday, Pop. She deserves answers.”

“She'll get them,” he says. “When she's old enough. When she's ready. I can promise you that.”

“Okay, then. Do what you have to do. I'm ready.” Declan drops his head. He thinks about the day Pop taught him how to fire that rifle, and how much he wanted to please his father and strike the bull's-eye. He thinks about the first night he kissed Lorelei, his fingers threaded in her long, black hair, the street falling still around them, the stars shining impossibly bright, such a rare thing in New York. He thinks about Aisling, the sweet, clean smell of her scalp, the pressure of her little fingers curling around his thumb, the musical chime of her laughter, the delight she takes in squirrels and birds, chasing them through the trees.

“I'm so sorry,” Pop says, but Declan barely hears him; he's wholly lost in his vision of Aisling—as she is, and as she will be. He can see her clearly as if he's seeing through time: tall and proud, her mother's fierce eyes and her father's fiery hair, an Aisling old enough to fight and wonder and fall in love, an Aisling he will never meet, and as his father pulls the trigger, he says good-bye to this Aisling of his mind's eye, says
I'm sorry
and
I love you
and
someday you'll understand
, and he can almost hear her voice, lilting and sure like her mother's, promising him that yes, someday she
will
understand, someday she will pick up his fight, and she will be the one to win it.

Declan smiles at this, and is still smiling when the bullet comes home.

Declan's father is alone with the bodies.

Alone with the bodies, and his granddaughter. Though she is crying, she is warm and breathing and alive, so he focuses on her, not the pooling blood, the tragic waste. There's nothing he can do about the past; he focuses on the future.

He finds the journal where Declan said it would be. A small, black leather notebook, crammed with his son's familiar sloppy handwriting.

He takes a lighter from his pocket, flicks three times until flame sprouts, then touches fire to page.

Aisling stops crying. She stares in wonder as the pages char and turn to ash: Declan's delusions and madness, banished from this world for good.

Declan's father hopes he's doing the right thing.

He has to be.

“Come on, sweetheart. Let's get out of here.” He bundles up his granddaughter and then himself, preparing for the long walk back to civilization. He'll send a team in for the bodies—outsiders, not members of the line. No La Tène will ever return to this cave of horrors, not if he can help it. He will have the bodies brought back to Queens for a hero's burial. Declan, after all, was a hero once. That's the Declan he'll tell Aisling about someday. A father she can be proud of. A father she deserves. “There's nothing here for us anymore.”

He carries her past the bodies, out of the dark cave, into the light. He will take her home, raise her and love her as his own, train her to fight and to win. He will tell her lies, stories that it will be easy for her to hear, and he will live every day in fear that she will catch a scent of the truth, follow in her father's mad footsteps, that he will lose his granddaughter as he has lost his son.

Maybe, someday, he will even tell her the truth, and she will be his judge.

He treks back down the summit, head lowered against the freezing wind, protecting Aisling from the chill as best he can. Behind them, the cave settles back into ancient quietude. The strange paintings wait, as they have always waited, to deliver their silent message. Someday, perhaps, someone will return to hear it.

This is the story Aisling's grandfather will never tell her, though many
times he wonders if he should.

This is the story of how everything could have changed. How maybe it still can.

Maybe, now, it's Aisling's time: to try again.

She will trace her father's footsteps back to the place where his life ended and her new life began; she will follow his answers to questions of her own. She will, if she has the wisdom and the courage, defy what she has been taught—defy the mission given her in infancy, and forge one of her own.

And she will, just maybe, find a way to fulfill her father's dream that she determine her own fate, and her grandfather's dream that she save her people.

A way to succeed where her father failed.

A way to break the cycle.

This is the story of Aisling Kopp's past.

Her future—and that of all humanity—has yet to be written.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Focus.

Be.

Shari Jha sits cross-legged in the corner of the schoolyard, eyes closed, hands pressed together at heart center.

At least, her body is in the schoolyard.

Her mind floats. She drifts through the dense fog overhanging the multicolored roofs of Gangtok, rises above it, skims across the Himalayan peaks, soars up into the empty, endless blue.

“Can't believe
she's
going to be our Player.”

“Sitting there like a lump every day.”

“Shh, she'll hear you!”

“
Taato na chaaro.
Don't be an idiot. She can't hear anything when she's like this.”

She does hear, of course. Every word, every snicker. When she turns inward like this, lets her mind unspool from her body, her senses only grow sharper.

She will not dignify them with her attention.

They don't matter.

Nothing matters but maintaining her focus.

Proving to herself that she can find her inner calm, no matter how dire—or irritating—circumstances may be.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

“What's your problem with her, anyway?”

“She's a snob.”

“Not to mention a wimp.”

“How's she supposed to save our line when all she does is sit around and meditate?”

“
I
heard she hasn't even killed anyone yet.”

“
I
heard they tried to make her, and she cried.”

Someone snorts. “We're all doomed.”

“It's not like she's the Player
yet
.”

“You guys, I still say she can hear us.”

“She's out of it—look, I'll prove it.”

Something hits her cheek, cracks sticky and foul. A raw egg, by the smell of it.

Thrown, by the voice of it, by Aman Dhital, her second cousin, who's been an obnoxious little worm since birth.

Shari doesn't open her eyes. She doesn't let their words disturb her, or the globs of yolk dripping down her face. She doesn't let her mind lose its purchase on peace and calm, up there in the clouds.

But she does dig her hands into the earth, choose a solid, smooth stone one inch in diameter, and fire it with perfect accuracy at the center of Aman's forehead.

There's an indignant squeal of pain, then a storm of footsteps as the boys take flight.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Smile.

Someday, Shari will be the Player.

This has been true for as long as she can remember. It is the first true thing she knew about herself, along with her name and the rosewater smell of her mother's skin. “You will be our Player,
meri jaan
,” her mother would whisper, wrapping her in soft blankets and rocking her
to sleep. “You will make us proud.”

The Makers decreed it, when she was still a bulge in her mother's belly, still half dream. The Harrapan elders read the signs, in the chai leaves and the stars, and they knew Shari would be one of the chosen.

In two years, when the current Player lapses, she will be the Player of the 55th line, the Harrapan Player, as were Helena and Pravheet and Jovinderpihainu and Lavilninder before her. At 13, she became old enough to be eligible for Endgame, but there can be only one Player at a time. Shari will not take over the role until the current Player turns 19. She is 14 now, and for the next two years, she will train, she will wait, she will live in this strange limbo, pretending at a normal life and waiting for her destiny to begin.

This is her honor; this is her burden; this is her life.

It is a lonely one. Shari would never admit this out loud—and if she did, who could believe her? With seven brothers and 13 sisters, most of them all living in the same house, with her aunts and uncles, with her father's many wives, with cousins scattered all through Gangtok, with the telltale Jha features reflected back to her wherever she looks, with a life so crowded that solitude is nearly impossible, how can she be lonely?

And yet.

Family is family; they love her without knowing her. As for beyond her family, there are those who know her as a future Player and keep their distance through fear or respect. There are girls at school who dress and speak like Shari, whisper eagerly about her every move, but never get close; there are boys who disapprove of the kind of Player she intends to be, who want a warrior, not a thinker, who mistake her silence and stillness for frailty. Then there are those who don't know what she is—only an inner cadre of Harrapan know of Endgame, the Player, the Harrapan stronghold in the Valley of Eternal Life, and they are all sworn to secrecy. These strangers, who live in her city and go to her school but don't know this most basic fact about her—they don't see her at all. To them, she is only Shari Jha, the solitary girl with sad
eyes who rarely speaks.

The knowledge of Endgame is considered so powerful, so dangerous, that it's safer to keep it limited to a trusted few. The others know only that there are things they
don't
know, and that they are better off. Sometimes, Shari wonders what it might be like to be among the ignorant, to imagine that her world would continue on without end. Sometimes, she envies them.

Shari knows what it is to have a friend, but only through watching others: She watches her little brothers and sisters laugh easily with the children they bring home from school, fighting with sticks or chasing peacocks. She sees her older siblings strut proudly through the marketplace with their throngs of friends; she sees them fall in love, go starry-eyed and weak-kneed, court and marry and build a home.

She thinks:
Not for me, not now.

She thinks:
Maybe someday, when I have lapsed.

She does not think:
If only
. . . or
I wish . . .

Shari has trained her mind to follow her every command. It does not stray without her permission, and she does not permit it foolish hopes or imagined lives.

She focuses on her training, physical and mental. She does her daily calisthenics, studies her books, hones her memory, meditates, waits.

Then, one day, a voice breaks into her meditative fog. This voice is different—neither hostile nor curious. It doesn't interrupt her focus but instead, somehow, adds to it, as if the voice is speaking from within.

Also different from the other voices, which whisper and giggle and wonder about her. This voice speaks
to
her.

“I don't know how you do it,” he says, his voice pleasantly reedy, like the sound of wind humming through the birch trees. He has a strange accent, not the Nepali-inflected English of her homeland, but not quite foreign either. It shifts and flows as he speaks, as if each word and syllable is deciding for itself to whom it belongs. “Thirty seconds
and I'm already bored.”

Shari can tune out anything.

But for reasons that escape her, she doesn't want to tune out this. She opens her eyes.

An unfamiliar boy smiles back at her, his grin rakish and inviting, like he's eagerly waiting for her to ask what's so funny, so he can let her in on the joke. He's a couple of years older than her, and though she knows everyone in this school—everyone in this city, it sometimes seems—she doesn't know him.

“Didn't mean to interrupt you,” he says, running a hand through unruly black hair. Maybe he intends to smooth it, but he has the opposite effect, and Shari has the strange impulse to reach over and flatten his cowlick. A blush reddens his umber cheeks. “Well, actually, I did. So I guess . . . mission accomplished?”

“Can I help you?” Shari asks. She speaks formally, though without hostility.

The boy shrugs. “You always look so peaceful over here, figured I would try it too, but . . .” He casts an amused glance down at his knee, which is jiggling against the ground. “Guess I'm not really built for peaceful.”

“It can take practice,” Shari says, smiling as she remembers the first time her grandfather taught her to turn inward, how she managed to clear her mind for about 30 seconds before she heard Tarki screeching and was already halfway across the yard in chase of the peacock before she remembered she was supposed to stay quiet and still.

“What's so funny?” the boy asks.

She doesn't answer personal questions as a general policy. But something about this boy tempts her to make exceptions. “I didn't really learn to meditate until I realized I should practice in a room where I couldn't hear our pet peacock.”

His eyes widened. “You have a pet peacock?”

“Well, he's not technically our pet, but . . .” How to explain the wild peacock that has made his home in her backyard? “He's chosen us, I
suppose.”

“You're full of wonders, Shari Jha,” he says, and before she can ask how he knows her name, he adds, “and you have a very nice smile.”

Shari's not used to compliments. At least, compliments that aren't about her coordination or dedication or mental acuity. She stares at the ground, waits for the moment to pass.

“You're wondering how I know who you are,” he says.

“If I were wondering something, I would ask.”

“So I guess you're not wondering who I am?”

She says nothing.

“There's that smile again,” he says, like he's won something. Then he holds out his hand. “I'm Jamal Chopra. New kid. Grade ten. And I know who you are, because everyone seems to know who you are, but no one will tell me why.”

“Is that why you came over here?” she asks. “To discover why I'm so noteworthy?”

“Well, yeah.”

“And?”

“And . . . I'm still mulling it over.”

“I think I should be offended by that,” Shari says.

“Something tells me my opinion of you is very low on your priority list.”

“That's assuming you've made the list,” she says, and realizes she's having fun.

“So, if I wanted to continue my research—”

“Into the source of my exceptionalness?”

“Indeed. Might you be persuaded to join me for a chai after school?”

Shari tenses. “I, uh, I don't do that.”

“You don't drink tea?”

She can feel a blush rising in her cheeks. “No, I don't . . . you know. Go out. With boys.”

It's not like her to stammer. But then, none of this is like her.

“Never?” he says. “Not one single date?”

“Never.”

It's not actually a rule for the Player designate, more of an unspoken tradition—she's not supposed to have anything in her life that could distract her from her purpose. It's never mattered much before.

He laughs. “Then it's a good thing I wasn't asking you on a date.”

“Oh.” Now her cheeks are on fire. She tells herself that it doesn't matter what this stranger thinks of her, that she's beyond such trivial things, that she's spent years making herself a placid surface, hard as diamond but smooth as glass. All of this is true, and yet she still wants to drill a hole in the earth and sink into it. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to presume; I simply—”

“Chill out,” he says, an Americanism that doesn't sound so foreign in his strange accent. She doesn't like to be told to calm down—she doesn't like to be told
anything
. She is Shari Jha, solely in charge of herself. But the timbre of his voice has its intended effect: she chills. “I could use someone to give me the lay of the land. Haven't had a good chai since I got here, so if you know where to go, that's a start.”

“Do I know where to go to get a good chai?” Shari echoes. “You've asked the right question, Jamal Chopra, new kid of grade ten. Pay attention, because I'm about to change your life.”

Shari watches him carefully as he takes his first sip. She likes this boy well enough, but if he can't appreciate a steaming mug of Rayamajhi chai, he's not worth much.

There are some who claim the best chai in Gangtok will be found at Golden Tips, while others swear by the café in Pagdandi Books, but as far as Shari is concerned, these people don't know what they're talking about. The third best chai in all of Gangtok is the tea that Jovinderpihainu's wife used to make, a recipe lost with her death. The second best chai is made by Shari's own mother, served with a ginger and lemongrass mixture sprinkled across the top. But the best chai in the city—in all the world, in Shari's opinion, at least in the 36 countries she's visited—is the mouthwatering blend served in
Sri Rayamajhi's tiny café off Nehru Road. It doesn't look like much: The door, squeezed between an old bookshop and a car repair shop, is barely visible from the street and layered with rust. The four tables inside all wobble on crooked legs, and Shari once fell through the seat of one of the rickety chairs. The air is thick with dust, the ceiling crumbling plaster. Sri Rayamajhi is ancient, and as mean as he is wrinkled. He treats Shari with respect, because of her position—but his version of respect is barely concealed contempt. She doesn't mind; as long as his chai continues to taste of nirvana, the old man can scowl at her as fiercely as he'd like.