meaning of “stop.”
“What else is in there?” she said, but she was smiling, toying with us. This was the start of the game for her. She was enjoying it. Two easy kills before moving on to the real Calling.
“It gives the history of the game,” I said. “It explains how the Makers started Endgame as just that: a game.”
Kat jumped in. “You don’t have to fight. The Makers started all of this as sport for themselves—initially they just hunted us themselves.
Then they turned us on each other.”
As I sat there and watched her, I realized something: this was real.
I had had my doubts all summer, while we were at the ranch and hearing John and Walter talk to us every night about the Players, the Calling, Endgame itself. Even while we were delivering invitations, there was a voice in the back of my mind that said that Agatha, Walter, and all the others were delusional. That aliens weren’t real. But now I had to face the facts. There really were Players. They really had responded to our bizarre invitations. They didn’t just have to Play. They were eager to.
Raakel stood up, and we did the same. I felt the gun heavy and cold against my back.
“We are done,” she said.
“Here,” I begged. “Read the pages.” I pushed the papers to her. If she took them and looked down, we could get the jump on her.
She glanced down at the papers, laughing. “I don’t care what your book says. I don’t know where it came from, and there’s no reason I should believe it. Like I said: maybe you’re from another line? Maybe you’re trying to get rid of your competition.”
“Just read the pages,” I said again. “Please.”
She laughed and took them from me, and immediately Kat and I both grabbed our guns.
There was a flash of movement, the papers dropping from her hands.
She changed the sword back to her right hand—she wasn’t ready; she had been too cocky.
I saw the Beretta in Kat’s hand before I could draw my gun.
Raakel swung the sword just as Kat fired.
The sword hit Kat in the arm, and she screamed. Raakel grunted loudly, reminding me of a tennis player whose racket had just connected with a hard serve.
My gun was out and I fired. We were too close for me to miss her, but I was scared, trembling, and my shots were off target: my first hit her in the thigh; then I hit her stomach three times.
Kat dropped the Beretta from her injured hand, and Raakel dropped the sword.
“Aman tanrım,” Raakel said, as she stumbled back and sat on the bed. There was blood everywhere—spatters all across the blankets, a sure sign that the bullets I’d fired had exited her back. She had her hands on her abdomen.
“Aman tanrım,” she said again, sucking in air as the blood flowed.
“Bok. What did you do?”
“We had to stop you,” I said.
Next to me, Kat ran for the bathroom.
“Kat?” I called.
“I need a towel,” she said. There was a trail of her blood on the carpet.
“We have to get out of here!”
“You’re fools,” Raakel said with a wince. “You can’t stop everyone. You can’t stop the Makers.”
“You should have listened,” I said.
“Someone will take my place.” Raakel’s voice was weak. “Don’t you know that? And someone will take their place. And it will continue.
There’s no way to stop us.”
“We’re going to stop everyone,” I said.
She grimaced, hunching over. “Kill me,” she said. “You want to stop me, so just do it. I’m going to bleed out.”
I held the gun to her head.
There was the sheriff. There was Tommy. Staring back at me with lifeless eyes over the barrel of my gun.
Kat came back. “We have to get out of here.” She had a white hand towel wrapped around her arm. “I need you to tie this.”
“Just do it,” Raakel repeated.
I couldn’t force myself to look at her.
“Do it,” Kat said.
I closed my eyes and fired two bullets into Raakel’s head. When I looked again, Raakel was slumped over, sliding off the bed and onto the floor in front of me.
“You tried, Mike,” Kat said, gritting her own teeth against the pain.
“We both tried as hard as we could.”
“Did we? Well, it wasn’t good enough.” I felt tears welling up in my throat, hot and painful. “Kat, I don’t know if we’re going to convince any of them.”
“I need you to tie this,” she said again, her voice shaking. I turned and looked at her. She was pale and scared.
“Come on,” she said. “We’re going to have police on us any minute now. We probably woke up everyone in this whole hotel.”
I put my gun back in my waistband and took the ends of the towel in my hands. “How is it?” I asked, as I tied it into a makeshift bandage. “It’s the back of my arm,” she said. “So no arteries or anything like that. But it went down to the bone. I need stitches.”
I tightened it and then reached down to pick up her fallen gun. She took it with her left hand.
“There’s a back stairway,” she said.
“Okay.”
She took a robe from the closet and pulled it on, putting the Beretta into a pocket. As we got outside into the hall, we saw a dozen other guests, most of them in pajamas or bathrobes; they all looked tired and bewildered, wondering where the noise had come from. Rumors of whatever was going on in the Olympic apartments had to be passing around. Kat and I played it cool, trying to take on the same look that the others had.
An employee of the hotel made an announcement in German that I didn’t understand, but Kat did.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said.
“The back?” I asked.
“No, the lobby.”
At the front desk Kat asked the clerk a question in German, and he nodded.
He opened a drawer, neatly organized with all kinds of toiletries: toothbrushes, shower caps, fingernail clippers. He pulled out a little packet and a book of matches and handed them to Kat.
“Danke,” she said.
“Bitte.”
We slipped out the front door and crossed the street to a park. It was still dark out, but the eastern sky was beginning to lighten.
“What’s that?” I asked, as she led me to a picnic table.
“A sewing kit,” she said, sitting down and opening the small packet, revealing thread, needles, and a couple of buttons. “You’re going to stitch me up.”
We had a first aid kit in the backpack and she opened it and took two painkillers. I opened an alcohol swab and wiped the vicious gouge. The Turkish blade had cut cleanly—a straight cut through the sweatshirt, skin, muscle, down to the bone. I lit a match to sterilize the needle