to relax. Aisling falls in love with the city, or at least her small corner of it—they spend hours every day in the large children’s playground in the Jardin du Luxembourg. She becomes snobbish about croissants, only favoring the ones from the boulangerie down the street, and has already started chatting with the pigeons in her own pidgin French. Declan wonders whether it’s possible that they have found a new home.
They’re sitting in Place Dauphine, dipping croissants in a steaming mug of hot chocolate, when it happens. Nothing major, nothing he can put his finger on, just a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye that sets his heart racing.
As Aisling nibbles on the soggy croissant, and Declan keeps a smile fixed on his face, he scans the plaza—and gasps.
There it is, in the northern corner of the square, nearly hidden behind a rack of secondhand books, that familiar head of black hair.
Molly.
Swiftly but casually, Declan straps Aisling into the pouch on his chest that he uses when they need to make a quick getaway, and stands from his chair. If he can just get her safely out of the square and into a crowd—
Aisling screams as something whistles past her ear.
Then, suddenly, there’s a hail of tranquilizer darts and a puff of tear gas and the square erupts into chaos.
Declan runs.
He holds tight to Aisling and takes off toward the Seine, vaulting onto the Pont Neuf and kicking his nearest pursuer over the rail, sending him tumbling into the murky river. He pushes through crowds on the Quai des Grands Augustins, racing for Notre Dame and its swarm of oblivious tourists. Past bridges and bouquinistes, knocking over carts and crepe trucks, anything that will stall them in their chase, across the Petit Pont, until finally the gray, gargoyled edifice looms over them and Declan melts into the crowd, hundreds of parents holding squirming babies to their chests, just like him. He allows himself a heartbeat of relief, but this is only a temporary escape. He lets the throng push him across the square, then slips into one of the apartment lobbies with an entry code he’s memorized for just such an emergency. He waits in the lobby as the hours pass and the shadows deepen, Aisling miraculously calm in his arms, as if she understands exactly what’s going on and trusts him to deal with it. He wishes he trusted himself that much. There’s relief in this escape—but not much of it, because Molly is still out there, somewhere. Maybe Molly will always be out there.
When night falls, he decides it’s time to risk it—they slip out of the building, and his enemies are nowhere to be found. The search has moved on, for now, leaving Declan space to flee the country and seek out yet another new home.
He knows better this time than to imagine that he’ll find anywhere they can stay for long. No matter how far they go, no matter how safe it seems, he’s always expecting Molly to find them.
And she always does.
It happens again in Mexico, this time an ambush in the plaza outside San Miguel de Allende’s Parroquia, and he loses them in that pink monstrosity, holding a mask to Aisling’s face as the tear gas drifts over them and they make for a back exit leading to the Cuna de Allende and, beyond it, freedom.
He always has an escape plan, and he always needs to use it. Dangriga, Belize; Mzuzu, Malawi; Stockholm, Sweden; B
Or he does.
“This is no way for you to live,” Declan tells his daughter. “Your mother would hate this. And hate me for it.”
They’re sitting on the eastern bank of the Rhine River. Aisling plays happily in the mud along the shore. She’s just starting to walk now, and can say a small handful of words. Soon she’ll be old enough to ask questions Declan can’t answer.
“You see that giant rock, Aisling?” He points across the river, to the jagged stone jutting hundreds of feet into the air.
She claps her hands. “Mountain!”
Declan brushes her hair away from her face. It’s a tangled nest of red curls. He should be taking better care of it. He should be taking better care of everything.
“Sort of a mountain,” he agrees. “Do you know what its name is?”
Aisling shakes her head.
“It’s called the Lorelei,” he tells her.
Aisling shouts happily, “Mama!”
He’s taught her well.
He shows her Lorelei’s picture every night, tells her stories of the mother she’s already started to forget. Lorelei has been dead for one year, three months, and four days. Aisling doesn’t cry about her mama anymore, or ask for her. Declan doesn’t know whether this is tragedy or relief.
“Yes, your mama was named after this Lorelei,” he says. It’s not precisely true. The German poet Heinrich Heine wrote a poem about the Lorelei, and her parents named her after that.
“Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, Daß ich so traurig bin,” he recites for his daughter now, as he so often recited for his wife. He loved this about Lorelei, that she was born inside a poem. She didn’t speak German, but he does, of course—he speaks almost every language—and she liked to hear the words in their original language, in his voice. He translates for Aisling, now: “‘I don’t know what it should mean that I am so sad.’”
But he does know what it means.
He knows why he’s brought her here, to this deserted spot near Saint Goarshausen, where he feels like his wife is watching over them both. He and Lorelei came here on their honeymoon—she wanted to show him her rock. It’s not every woman who has her own mountain, she told him then.
They were so happy.
“We can’t keep running forever,” he says. He’s talking to himself; he’s talking to Lorelei. He takes Aisling into his arms. She squirms for a moment, then settles happily onto his lap. “We can’t keep living like this. You can’t keep living like this.”
He came here so he could find the strength to admit it.
He was the Player; he was trained to give everything to the fight. To believe he could win until his dying breath.
But running isn’t winning. Even if they could run from the line forever, that’s no way for Aisling to grow up.
That’s no way to carry out the promise he made to himself, that he would do everything he could to stop Endgame, to persuade his line that they’ve made a terrible mistake.
He’s done with running away.
He’s going to do what he’s been trained to do, and fight.
Maybe he will lose.
Probably he will lose.
But either way, Aisling will have a place to grow up, people who love her, a home. Either way, Lorelei will be avenged and Declan will know he’s done everything he can to make things right.
“That’s it, Aisling. No more running.” The thick clouds blow open for a moment, and a splash of sun lights up the Lorelei. “Now we make our last stand.”
The climb is more difficult than Declan remembers. Of course, the last time he was here, he didn’t have a small toddler strapped to his chest.
The last time he was here: it was six years ago, the culmination of many months of searching. For clues, for artifacts, for answers.
“None of this is ours to know,” Pop told him, when Declan explained why he was traveling the globe, why he was so desperate to track down the evidence of his forebears, the Players of the La Tène line stretching back for hundreds and thousands of years.
“How