It’s been nearly a week since the attack. Eben kneels next to Hilal in a plain stone bedchamber. A small wooden cross over the bed frame. A white porcelain sink against one wall. Some pegs for robes. A small chest containing fresh sheets and bandages. A hook on the headboard for the IV. There is a small cart with a heart rate monitor, wire leads, and electrodes. The Nethinim—both of them tall and strong, one a man, one a woman—stand attendant, silent, armed, just outside the door.
Hilal has slept the entire time. He occasionally moans, whimpers, shakes. He is still on morphine, but Eben is already weaning him. Hilal has learned to live with pain, and while this pain will be more intense and permanent than what has come before, if Hilal is to continue with Endgame, then he is going to have to acclimate.
To more pain. To disfigurement. To his new body.
If he is not going to continue, then Eben needs to know. And for that, Hilal needs his mind to be clear.
So he is being weaned.
While Hilal has slept, Eben has prayed. Meditated. Remembered Hilal’s words: I could be wrong, Hilal said before the morphine took him. The Event could be inevitable.
Eben knows this is not the case. Not after what the being said on the television. Not after the solar flare that pinpointed Aksum. The Makers are intervening. The only other possibility is that the Corrupted One somehow did it. The being that the Aksumites have been searching for all these centuries. Searching for in vain. The one called Ea.
But even the Corrupted One does not have the power to control the sun.
So Eben knows: it was the Makers.
And Eben knows that this is savagery. They brought humans to life and they are supposed to oversee our near extinction, to reset the Earth life-clock and let the planet recover from the damage done, but They are not supposed to interfere with the Playing of Endgame. They made these rules, and now They break them.
Which means that perhaps it is time.
Time to see what’s inside the legendary, but very real, container.
It’s been waiting since Uncle Moses faked its destruction and secreted it away and told the sons of Aaron to protect it at all costs. And never to look upon it or open it. And he commanded: Only break the seal on the Day of Judgment.
That day is near.
This is the end of an age.
Soon the mighty Aksumites will take their charge and see what power rests between the gilded wings of the cherubim of glory. Soon Eben ibn Mohammed al-Julan will risk destruction for the sake of Endgame.
Once Hilal returns to consciousness and clarity Eben will break the covenant with the Makers and see if the line of Aksum can give them a taste of their own medicine.
FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE, MAY 1981
In March 1967, an intercept technician with the USAF Security Service intercepted a communication between the pilot of a Russian-made Cuban MIG-21 and his command concerning a UFO encounter. The technician has since stated that when the pilot attempted to fire at the object, the MIG and its pilot were destroyed by the UFO. Furthermore, the technician alleges that all reports, tapes, log entries, and notes on the incident were forwarded to the National Security Agency at its request. Not surprisingly, several months later the agency drafted a report entitled UFO Hypothesis and Survival Question. Released in October 1979 under the US Freedom of Information Act, the report states that “the leisurely scientific approach has too often taken precedence in dealing with the UFO question.” The agency concluded that no matter what UFO hypothesis is considered, “all of them have serious survival implications.”
There is Alice and there is Shari and there is a little girl wedged between them, frightened and whimpering. Shari and Alice stand back to back, crouched in fighting stances, Alice with her knife and a boomerang, Shari with a long metal rod tipped with a tangle of nails. Circling them are the others, also armed, cooing clucking snarling threatening. Beyond them is a pack of dogs with red eyes and men dressed in black and armed with rifles and scythes and billy clubs. Above them is a scrim of stars and the keplers’ faces and their seven-fingered hands reaching, their razor-thin bodies still, their mocking laughter ringing. In their midst there is a distortion in space like a hole in the stars. And before Alice can consider all this, the others move at once and the little girl screams and Alice throws her boomerang and pushes her knife into the chest of the short tanned boy, who spits in her face as he bleeds, and the little girl screams and screams and screams and screams.
Alice shoots up in her hammock, her fists gripping the edge so she doesn’t tumble out, her hair a wild dark explosion, moonlight reflecting off its curls in white turns.
She takes a breath, slaps her face, checks her boomerangs. Checks her knife. Still there, embedded in the wooden column above the eyelet holding up one end of her hammock.
She is on the porch of her little shack near the lagoon. Alone. Beyond the lagoon is the Timor Sea. Behind her, on the other side of the shack, is the scrub and bush of the vast Northern Territory. Alice’s backyard.
She has been at home meditating, listening to the dreamtime and tracing the songlines with her memory. Thinking of the ancestors, the sea and sky and earth. She has been there since the kepler broadcast his “Play on” message and since she received another clue in her sleep. This one not a puzzle, but explicit and direct, if not exactly fixed.
She wonders if other Players got new clues. If one of the others has already figured out where she is. If one of them is drawing a bead on her right now with a sniper rifle, in the distance, silent and deadly.
“Bugger you!” she yells into the darkness, her voice spreading over the dry land. She flips out of the hammock and stomps to the edge of the porch, wiggles her toes, lets her arms out wide. “Here I am, you hoons—take me!”
But no shot comes.
Alice snickers and spits. She scratches her ass. She watches the bright light of her clue, a mental beacon in her mind’s eye. She knows exactly what it is: the location of Baitsakhan, the Donghu, the terrifying toddler, the person who wants to kill Shari and maybe this girl Alice has seen in her dreams over and over. Alice guesses that this girl is Shari’s Little Alice, but why the Donghu, or anyone, would want her killed isn’t clear. Why Little Alice is important—if she’s important—remains shrouded.
Regardless, Big Alice is going to find Baitsakhan and kill him. That is how she will Play. If this leads her closer to one of the three keys of Endgame, so be it. If it doesn’t, so be it.
“What’ll be’ll be,” she huffs.
A shooting star cruises the firmament and fades in the western sky.
She spins, walks inside her shack, snatches her knife from the wooden post. She picks up the receiver of an old push-button phone, curly cord and all. She punches in a number, puts the receiver to her ear.
“Oi, Tim. Yeah, it’s Alice. Look, I’m on a freighter tomorrow predawn, and I need you to use your unmatched skills to locate a certain someone for me, yeah? Might’ve mentioned her. The Harappan. Yeah, that’s the one. Chopra. Indian. Yeah, yeah, I know there must be a hundred million Chopras in that country, but listen. She’s between seventeen and twenty, probably on the older end of that spectrum. And she has a kid. Maybe two or three years old. Here’s the kicker, though. The girl’s name’s Alice. That oughta narrow it a little. Yeah, you call me on this number when you get it. I’ll be checking the messages. All right, Tim. Good on ya.”
She hangs up and stares at the backpack on her bed. The black canvas