The Calling

Welcome

ALL PLAYERS (#ulink_80715a4e-f4a3-5a7a-b6bc-c4d26769db0a)

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. He reaches a hand into his vest—a fisherman’s utility jacket covered with small pockets and zippers. Marcus notices. His dagger is drawn and itching to spill some blood. But if that jittery little creep has a gun or something long-range, he’ll have to act fast.

“What’re you doing?” Marcus demands, flipping his knife from hand to hand.

An pauses. “M-m-m-m-meds. I have to take my m-m-m-m-meds.”

Chiyoko silently retreats into the shadows. No one notices her disappear.

Sarah looks at her watch. It is 3:13:46 a.m.

If Jago has the disk, then I am going with him, Sarah decides. Aside from the strategic advantage, I’m not sure I’m ready for this. Maybe he’ ll help me stay alive.

Hilal steps forward to where the center of the circle was. He holds out both his hands, empty. He’s one of the few not to have gone for a weapon.

“Sisters and brothers of Endgame, let’s talk,” Hilal says, his voice smooth. “We have much to discuss. This night does not have to end in bloodshed.”

Baitsakhan titters, amused by the coward. Everyone else ignores Hilal. Kala doesn’t take her eyes off Jago and doesn’t lower her spear.

Shari, noticing Chiyoko’s absence, barks in her Indian accent, “Where’s the mute?”

Alice scans the perimeter of their circle. “Lit out. Smart girl.”

Hilal looks grim, disappointed. He knew it would be difficult to make peace, but he expected them to at least hear him out. “Sisters and brothers, we should not be fighting. Not yet. You heard the being. There are no rules. We can work together, for the good of the people and creatures of Earth. We can work together, at least until we are forced to work against one ano—”

He is interrupted by a swoosh as a rope with a weighted metal object on the end of it flies from the shadows. It wraps tightly around Hilal’s throat. He raises his hands to his neck. The cord is pulled taut, and Hilal spins in place and falls, choking, to the ground.

“What the hell was that?” Maccabee asks, swiveling.

Baitsakhan doesn’t wait to find out. He also sprints into the forest. Another rope attack issues from the darkness, this one from a different place, as if from a different person. It lashes out at Jago, but as the rope nears, he jumps backward, and the cord falls limply to the ground before being whisked into the woods.

A twig snaps. They catch a glimpse of Chiyoko’s pale skin and black hair darting through the undergrowth.

“It’s the bloody mute!” shouts Alice.

As they turn to Alice, an arrow whistles from the darkened forest and hits Maccabee’s right thigh. He staggers and looks down. A long shaft has pierced the front of his leg and punched through the back; blood is welling and starting to run. It was that little mongrel boy, Baitsakhan, sniping from the cover of the woods. Without thinking, Maccabee snaps the shaft and pulls the arrow free. It is excruciating, but he does not cry. He is infuriated. The little shit ruined a perfectly good suit.

“To hell with this, I’m gone,” Kala says, forgetting about Jago. She sprints for the pyramid.

“Stop this madness!” Hilal has freed himself from the rope and gotten his breath back. “It does not have to be this way!”

In response, an arrow thuds into the dirt between his legs. Hilal scrambles away, also into the woods.

“Maybe save the sermon for another time, preacher,” says Aisling, before she follows him into the forest.

Another whistle cuts the air. Sarah’s instincts take over, and she reaches toward Jago’s head and with her bare hand snatches an arrow out of the air just before it would have found its mark in Jago’s skull. Jago looks at her. He has never seen someone do that before. He is wide-eyed, grateful. “How did you—”

“We have to get out of here,” Sarah says. She can’t believe she did that either. She practiced it over and over and over, sliced her hands to ribbons trying to catch arrows, but she never succeeded. Not until this moment.

She throws the arrow to the ground and grabs Jago by the hand. “Let’s go.”

They turn toward the forest and begin to run.

An Liu is no longer fishing around for his bottle of pills. He stands, shoulders square, facing what is left of the group. He wears a sinister smile.

A third arrow flies from the woods, striking An square in the chest. An looks down, amused, and flicks the shaft away from the ballistics vest that went unnoticed beneath his fisherman’s pockets. He casually tosses a small, dark sphere the size of a walnut toward the remaining Players. Marcus, who is closest, is taken by surprise. His instincts lead him to reach out and catch An’s offering. But just before it can land in Marcus’s hand, it explodes.

The blast is much bigger than the size of the bomb would suggest. Bodies fly. Sarah loses her hearing, and for a few moments all is chaos. She lifts her head to see the zombielike form of Marcus. Both of his arms are gone at the shoulder, and his jaw hangs dislocated and slack from his skull. Blood covers his face and upper body. The skin on the left side of his head is shredded like cheese, and his ear is hanging low by his neck.

Something falls spinning from the sky and lands at Sarah’s feet. A finger. Pointing 167°49'25".

Sarah’s stomach turns as she is reminded of the meteor strike and her graduation and leaving Christopher.