Alice doesn’t like beds as much as she does hammocks, especially on ships, so she’s slung her hammock across her small cabin. She lolls around, letting the motion of the sea swing her back and forth.
She tosses a knife end over end and catches it. Tosses and catches. Tosses and catches. One slipup and it could land in her eye, skewer her brain.
Alice doesn’t slip up.
She’s not thinking of much. Just the knife and of slaughtering Baitsakhan when she finds him.
And of the fear on Little Alice’s face. She has seen it in her dreams so many times that it’s burned into her consciousness.
Little Alice.
Screaming.
What is it about this girl she’s never met? Why does Alice care about her? Dream about her?
Shari’s a good nut, that’s why. I am too. The rest are bastards, so fuck ’em.
Her satellite phone rings. She picks it up, presses talk.
“Oi, that Tim? Yeah, yeah. Right. Good! And you spoke to Cousin Willey in KL, yeah? Great. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Naw, none of that. Just my blades. No, Tim, I mean it! I don’t need any guns, I’m telling ya. You know me. Purist and all. Oh, all right, fine. You make a good point. Every one of these Player bastards is probably armed to the teeth, true and true. Just keep ’em small, and only hollow tips. Yeah. Yeah. Listen, any news on the rock? Anyone figure out where it’s gonna hit? ’Cause when it does, your Alice doesn’t want to be nowhere near. You neither? ’Magine that.”
She flicks the knife into the air above her head. It turns nine times. She catches it between her index finger and her thumb. Tosses again.
“Any luck with Shari? Oh, really? When were you gonna tell me, ya wanker? I oughta come back there and carve your freckle out, Tim. Well, what is it, then?”
She catches the knife by the handle and leans so far out of the hammock that she thinks she’s going to flip out, but she doesn’t. She sticks a leg out the other side and is perfectly balanced. She scratches a number on the wall. 91-8166449301.
“Thanks, Tim. Don’t die until you get to see it all go down. Gonna be a sight. Yeah, later, mate.”
She presses talk again, settles into her hammock, calls Shari’s number.
Rings 12 times, no one answers.
She calls again.
Rings 12 times, no one answers.
She calls again.
Rings 12 times, no one answers.
She calls again and again and again and again, and she will keep calling until someone does answer.
Because she has something very important to tell the Harappan.
Something very important indeed.
They are all here.
Shari and Jamal, Paru and Ana, Char and Chalgundi, Sera and Pim, Pravheet and Una, Samuel and Yali, Peetee and Julu, Varj and Huma, Himat and Hail, Chipper and Ghala, Boort and Helena, Jovinderpihainu, Ghar, Viralla, Gup, Brundini, Chem, and even Quali, toting a three-week-old Jessica, who is wrapped in soft linen cloths of alizarin and turquoise.
The other children are here too, more than 50, too many to name, from two to 17, including Little Alice. They’re playing and caring for one another in the adjoining room and in the herb-and-rock garden beyond, leaving the grown-ups alone, as they have been instructed. Seventeen servants are there, all of whom double as guards, and there are 23 more who are only guards, armed discreetly, stationed all around the hall.
They have been meeting, eating, and drinking juice and chai and coffee and lassis—never alcohol for the Harappan—for over three hours. The smells of curry and coriander, lentils and bread, turmeric and cream and hot oil, lemon and garlic and onions, fill the air, along with the rich and heady odor of bodies and sweat and cinnamon and rosewater dabbed behind ears and along necklines.
All of them talking at once.
For three hours they were polite and respectful, catching up with one another, kindnesses exchanged, the familiarity of close relations.
But 16 minutes ago the arguing started.
“The Harappan cannot sit on the sidelines,” Peetee says. He is 44 and the tallest of their clan, a former trainer in cryptography. He has dark, deep-set eyes that tell of sadness, and henna-dyed hair that speaks to his vanity.
Gup, a 53-year-old ex-Player and bachelor who lives in Colombo and who fought against the Tamils just for the diversionary nature of violence, nods with him. “Especially now that Endgame is under way. What is the point of our Player retreating like this? We are teetering on the precipice of, of, of—well, if not our destruction then certainly a sea change for humanity. The Event will see to that.”
“The Player has her reasons,” says Julu, one of Shari’s aunts. She speaks without taking her eyes from her hands, which are habitually fingering a strand of crimson prayer beads.
“Reasons?” several of them blurt at once. “Reasons?”
“What reason could there possibly be?” a booming female voice asks from the far end of the table. “I demand to know. It looks to me as if she fled at the drawing of first blood.” The voice belongs to Helena, 66, a former Player, the 2nd-most esteemed of the last 208 years. She is squat and round and strong and still swift. “A finger? I would have given an eye and a lung and a leg before I came hopping home. I would have given an arm and my hearing and my tongue! No, I would have given all! I would not have come home for any reason but death!”
Boort, her husband of 46 years—they were married at the stroke of midnight on the day she lapsed—reaches out and pats her forearm. “Now, Helena.”
“Aand mat kha!” she exclaims, shucking off Boort’s hand so she can point at Shari. “That—that—that girl gave up! She gave up. She never even made a kill in all of her training! Takes some effort to wiggle out of that time-honored obligation. More effort than what she put into Playing. I had thirty kills before I lapsed. But her? No! She is too good for death. Imagine that! A Player of Endgame. A Player of Endgame who also happens to be a mother. Can you believe it? That is what we have pinned our hopes to. A spineless quitter.”
Now the room is quiet; Helena’s words are like a volley of gunshots, everyone taking cover, not yet ready to poke their heads back out. Shari, for her part, does not flinch at any of it. She sits straight-backed and listens. Her eyes have moved to each speaker, and so now she stares at Helena. Her stare is calm and confident. She loves Helena like family, in spite of her ire. Loves all of these people.
Helena bristles at Shari’s look, which she mistakes for insolence. “Do not glare at me like that, Player.”
Shari tilts her head to the side as if to apologize, but remains silent. Her eyes drift past Helena to the children’s room, where she picks out a flash of Little Alice’s bright-pink trousers among the wheeling limbs of children. Jamal squeezes her knee under the table, just as he would if they were alone in their yard, watching a sunset.
“Helena, you may be right, but it serves no purpose to compare Shari Chopra to you or any other Player.” This is Jovinderpihainu, a former Player and the elder of the Harappan line. He is 94, as sharp as he was when he was 44, even 24. He is small and shrunken in his orange