in a brilliant red-and-blue head scarf, says with a thick Persian accent. The force and confidence of her tone is at total odds with her appearance. Her eyes are as green as dampened jade. “89th, sisters and brothers, I trace my line through the ancient, golden heart of Sumer.”
She likes words, Jago thinks. A poet. Probably a liar.
“Alice Ulapala. 34th. Koori,” Alice says with an endearing Australian accent. She’s huge, muscled, and a little plump. A wrestler. A shot-putter. A weightlifter. Her skin is dark, and her eyes are darker, a mop of curly black hair as wild as a nest of snakes. She has a pale, crescent-shaped birthmark above her right eye that disappears into her hair. Without compunction or ire she spits on the ground before the next person speaks.
Only the next person—the last person—doesn’t speak.
Chiyoko Takeda.
All eyes move to the mute. She has pale, ivory skin and shoulder-length hair with bangs cut in a perfectly straight line above her eyebrows. Her full lips are deep red. Her cheeks high and round. She fits the stereotype of a demure Japanese girl, but her eyes are forward and confident and determined.
Chiyoko Takeda does not speak. She is from the 2nd. Her line is more than ancient. Nameless and forgotten. We will call it Mu. kepler 22b raises its right hand, reaches out, opens its fingers. A white hologram sprouts from its palm. It is a perfect circle 8.25 inches in diameter.
A deep gong resonates in the chests of the 12, and a thin, bright light shoots from the top of the pyramid, marking a point in the night sky. kepler 22b begins to read, and as it does, the holographic circle turns slowly.
“Everything is here. Every word, name, number, place, distance, color, and time. Every letter, symbol, and glyph, on every page, in every chip, on every fiber. Every protein, molecule, atom, electron, quark. Everything, always. Every breath. Every life. Every death. So says, and so has been said, and so will be said again. Everything is here.”
The gong resonates in their chests again and the light from the pyramid disappears.
“You are the twelve. All are fated to die—except one. The one who will win.”
kepler 22b looks up from the hologram and regards them carefully.
“As it is with all games, the first move is essential.”
kepler 22b looks back to the hologram.
“To win you must acquire three keys, and the keys must be found in order. Earth Key. Sky Key. Sun Key. All the keys are hidden here on Earth.”
kepler 22b grabs the holographic disk midair and tosses it like a Frisbee. It stops cold over the center of the circle and begins to grow, patterns spreading across the surface. Twelve hairlines of light shoot from it and each strikes one player in the middle of the forehead. The Players all see the same thing through their mind’s eye: Earth, as if from space.
“This is Earth.”
The image changes. The blue of the oceans becomes gray. Streaks of black move across continents. Red scars bloom. The poles become whiter. The expanse of blue and the bands of green and the blots of brown are gone. The vibrant colors of a living Earth appear only in tiny, clustered pinpricks.
“This will be Earth after the Event. The Event is coming, and it is part of Endgame. The Event will destroy everything. The winner of Endgame earns survival. Survival for themselves and for every member of their line.”
kepler 22b pauses.
The image of the ravaged Earth disappears.
“Endgame is the puzzle of life, the reason for death. It holds the origin of all things, and the solution to the end of all things. Find the keys, in the order prescribed. Bring them to me, and you will win. When I leave, you will each receive a clue. And Endgame will begin. The rules of Endgame are simple. Find the keys in order and bring them to me. Otherwise, there are no rules.”
Welcome xlix
Somewhere in the Qin Lin Mountains, China
kepler 22b vanishes. The guards standing in front of the pyramid vanish. The pyramid remains, glimmering, imposing, otherworldly. The door reappears, though no one knows where it leads.
Feeling slowly returns to the Players’ limbs. There are pins and needles in their fingers and toes, and also in their minds. kepler 22b did something to them, pushed some kind of information into their brains, and now their heads ache. All of them are bleary. All of them know that they must recover quickly. A delay now could mean the end.
There are no rules.
Jago looks around. They’re in a small clearing; the forest gets thicker a few meters from where they sit, and the pyramid waits in the opposite direction. The forest could provide good cover. The pyramid—well, Jago doesn’t want to guess what might be in there, or where the door might lead.
Sarah is next to him, blinking her way back to awareness. Her presence is strangely comforting—one familiar thing amidst an overwhelming sea of questions. He notices something on the ground a few feet away from Sarah’s knapsack. The gray stone disk that hung around kepler 22b’s neck. You will each receive a clue.
Jago dives for it.
Chiyoko notices Jago move for the disk. He’s the first one to act.
Impressive. Chiyoko’s own muscles are stiff, sluggish.
She fights this weariness and also lunges for the disk, but Jago is faster. Chiyoko’s fingertips graze the cool stone surface as he snatches it away.
Jago jumps to his feet. Sarah shoulders her bag and stands beside him. Chiyoko reaches into her bag and pulls out a coil of rope. She can’t give away to the others that Jago has a disk of Baian-Kara-Ula, or she’ll never be able to steal it for herself. Slowly, very slowly, she begins to back out of the clearing.
Jago takes his eyes off Chiyoko. The mute girl saw him take the disk but is leaving him alone. A smart play. Better to avoid open conflict at this point. Jago will have to keep an eye on her. He slips the disk quickly into a small knapsack he bought in Xi’an and grabs Sarah by the arm. Her muscles are hard, tense.
“Let go of me,” she whispers.
Jago leans close to her ear. “I have kepler’s disk. Let’s get out of here.” Finding the disk is a piece of luck, even if neither of them knows exactly what it means. They have an alliance, and now they have an advantage. Better to not let the others find out, Sarah thinks. It could make us a target. She wishes Jago hadn’t grabbed her arm. She shrugs him off and steps to the side, hoping they didn’t give anything away. But Kala saw their exchange. “What did you just say to her?” She holds a short golden spear, lowers it, ready to strike.
Jago meets her eyes, unblinking, and smiles with his diamond-studded teeth so that dimples form in his pockmarked cheeks. “You want to die so soon, little girl?”
Jago and Kala stand across from each other, loose, confident, unbending. It’s the first of many confrontations that will decide the outcome of Endgame.
One by one around the circle, weapons are drawn. This is exactly what Chiyoko was worried about, why she backed away. The paranoia in the air is palpable. She takes another step backward, toward the cover of the woods.
An begins to tremble.