Endgame Novella #1 (16 page)

“Kill him,” she clarifies.

“Yes.”

“Just to prove that I can?” She snorts. “That’s stupid.”

“What’s stupid is putting the fate of our people on the shoulders of a girl who’s afraid to kill,” Henry snaps. “It doesn’t have to be easy. It should never be easy. But sometimes it must be done, and you have to
know
you can do it. Otherwise you might be the one to die.”

“You’re yabbering again,” she tells him. “I get it.”

“I just want to make sure you understand why I’m asking you to do this. And that you’re careful.” He puts his fingers to his lips and then to her forehead, as he always does before a mission, and she allows it, because before he was her trainer, he was her father, and sometimes he still is.

“I’m always careful,” she tells him.

“You’re never careful. And I know this mission is—”

“I told you, I get it. It’s peachy,” she says, not wanting to hear him hammer away at it more. Not wanting to hear her father urging her to kill. She understands that it needs to be done, and she understands that that’s what being the Player is all about. Doing what must be done. The spirits of her ancestors have affirmed that this is the way, that Alice must fulfill her duty. Whether she likes it or not, it’s time for her to prove herself.

To kill a human being.

Just to show that she can.

Alice hates Melbourne.

She hates all cities, the way the buildings press in on you and block out the sky, the air heavy with smog, the streets dense with people. The crush of bodies, the brute intrusion of humanity at every turn, its smells and fluids and inescapable whine. The cruelty of humanity, that pains her too, and it is nowhere more evident than in cities, where breathing bodies stretch along sidewalks and curl against buildings
and are treated by passersby like inanimate parts of the landscape. Eyesores to be stepped over, brushed past—overlooked and ignored. Melbourne is meant to be one of the loveliest cities in the world, but all Alice sees is a desecration of land, a trash heap of so-called civilization where once there was beauty.

She’s a creature of the land. She doesn’t want to spend any more time here than she needs to.

But she’s in no hurry to get the job done.

Zeke Cable lives in a bleak, modern high-rise that towers over its neighbors. The building is nearly all windows. It’s not a home for someone with secrets. It’s a building meant for people eager to show off, to live their lives under a spotlight, hoping passersby will envy the glow.

The doorman gives Alice the side-eye when she steps past. Even in her city drag—black skirt and impractical heels—he can tell she doesn’t belong here. But she’s hacked the complex’s computer system and put herself on the list of approved guests for apartment 12D, so there’s little he can do.

Apartment 12D is a multimillion-dollar luxury condo with views of the water, whose resident is on a business trip in Sydney.

Apartment 12D is also directly above Zeke Cable’s apartment, with a convenient network of air and heating ducts connecting the two.

From her luxury perch, Alice can listen in on her target. She can watch him through the vents, see him pack his daughter off to school in the morning and burn his toast, see him rant at the sports page and kiss his wife good-bye. And that evening, she can watch him strip down to his boxers and crawl into bed beside his sleeping wife; she can unscrew a vent and ease it open; she can lower her Colt Delta Elite and orient its muzzle in the direction of his head.

Her stocky, muscled body is a cramped fit in the narrow ducts. Her grip is slick with sweat, but she holds the gun steady.

The boomerang’s no good in close quarters like this, not when she doesn’t have enough room for a good throw. It makes sense to use a
gun.

Except she hates guns. Hates the cold machinery of them, the cold steel wall they erect between predator and prey. Hates how
easy
they make things. Her boomerangs are a part of her, an extension of her limbs. Most of the world imagines them as a joke, a child’s toy, and so much the better. The best weapons are easily underestimated. Just because Alice has only wounded, never killed, just because she prefers to hunt animals over people, doesn’t mean she doesn’t know a good weapon when she sees one.

She has many, and treasures them all. The smooth wood boomerang she’s had since she was a child, the carbon-reinforced plastic one Henry gave her for her last birthday, with its aerodynamically perfect angle and razor edge. Her mother’s boomerang, carved out of bone and handed down her line for centuries, from Player to Player, a deadly gift from the past. Each is a weapon that requires dedication and skill—more than that, it demands a deep knowing, a communing with both the world and the target. It means understanding angles and wind currents and anticipating your target’s next move before he knows it himself. A good throw casts the boomerang into the future, allowing the target to step into his own fate.

Guns feel like cheating.

All of this feels like cheating. There’s no challenge in reaching through a vent and putting a silenced bullet in a sleeping man’s head. There’s certainly no justice in it.

There’s no
sense
in it.

Henry has always done what’s best for her, and for her training. If he says she has to kill this man—if he says it’s better for the Koori if this man dies—then he must have a good reason. But there’s no reason to take that on faith.

If Zeke Cable does need to die, then Alice will make it happen. She promises herself that. But first she will take the time to get to know her target, to find out what’s so dangerous about him. She’ll convince herself of what needs to be done.

And then she’ll find it in herself to do it.

It’s a good plan.

Except that she can’t find the answer to her question. She can’t find anything about Zeke Cable that would consign him to death. She watches him in his apartment, stalks him through the city streets, slips into his office disguised as a delivery girl, hacks his computer files, taps his phones, and finds . . . nothing.

Or rather, she finds the foibles of a middling man, one who sometimes tries his best and sometimes doesn’t bother.

He’s a fine father, except when he’s in a temper and rages at his six-year-old until she bursts into tears. He follows celebrity gossip, but mocks his wife for watching reality TV. He also cheats on her, and keeps a studio apartment in the city for rendezvous with his mistresses, both of whom are nearly a decade younger than he is. He spends more of his workday surfing the Net than actually working and, probably of more concern to his employers, has embezzled nearly half a million dollars of company funds. He’s untrustworthy and often unkind.

But that’s not enough for her.

She doesn’t know what would be. She doesn’t know if Henry’s right, if there’s a softness in her that needs to be rooted out. Maybe even if Cable were a monster, an unabashed killer who took giggly pleasure in stabbing women in dark alleys or smothering small children, she would still hesitate to put him down. Would still pull back at the last second, thinking about what it means to pull a trigger, to end a life, blot out an existence for all time.

Maybe, but her father hasn’t given her the chance to find out.

He’s never been one for easy tests.

“We don’t know what Endgame will be,” he likes to say. “But we know it won’t be easy.”

Cable’s daughter is named Lily, and at six years old she has a sunshine smile, Pippi Longstocking pigtails, and a blithe trust that the world
is without shadow. She loves her father, even when he yells, and she doesn’t imagine a life in which he does not exist.

Alice knows this, because she remembers being six and assuming her parents were immutable fixtures. She remembers discovering she was wrong.

Alice watches Cable’s eyes sparkle as Lily locks her arms around his neck, watches him swing her through the air while she giggles and cries, “More, Daddy, more!”

Alice never played this kind of game with her own father—or if she did, she no longer remembers. When he smiles at her with fatherly pride, it is because she has set the explosives properly and demolished a building in one shot, or she has translated a difficult passage of Coptic that has foiled scholars three times her age. Never because she’s giggled or smiled or put her arms around him and called him Daddy.

She’s certainly never called him that.

Love doesn’t have to come with hugs and giggles, she knows that.

And love doesn’t make someone a good person, she knows that too.

Even bad guys have someone they love; even monsters have family.

But if she kills this guy in cold blood, which of them is the monster?

The longer Alice stays in apartment 12D, the longer Alice listens and watches and lives as Zeke Cable’s shadow, the less sure she is.

She descended into dreamtime to ask the question, and her ancestors answered:

You are the Player
.

This is your fate
.

She has seen the two futures spread out before her, the destruction lying in wait if she chooses to abdicate responsibility, defy her elders and her destiny.

But dreams are unspecific—loopholes abound.

Who’s to say fulfilling her duty means doing exactly as Henry says, following his orders blindly? Who’s to say Playing means obeying? Means killing?

Sometimes she wonders what her training might have been like if her mother had lived. Or whether she would have been trained at all. Maybe, having endured those years as the Player, Shayna Ulapala would have wanted a different life for her daughter—different choices. Alice tries to imagine that. Imagine if, instead of spending every second of her childhood competing with her cousins, learning to stalk prey and strike down her enemies, studying the words of the past and the threat of the future, she had grown up without responsibility, believing there was nothing to fear. Imagine if she had played with dolls and puppies, attended a normal school, made friends and cut classes, lived life like the girls on TV.

Alice tries to imagine, but it’s impossible. It’s like trying to imagine herself out of existence—everything she is, everything she’s ever known or cared about, is rooted in this life, this game.

Playing is who she is. Everything she is.

But she won’t Play by anyone else’s rules, not even Henry’s.

She’s been taught that the Koori are unique among all the peoples on Earth, because only they did not bow to the creatures from the stars. Only they were not pressed into servitude by these beings. They have been, will always be, freethinkers. Standing on their own. Beholden to no one.

She went through the motions of this mission, but her heart was never in it—perhaps because deep down, she knew the truth. Her truth.

She cannot do it.

She will not.

Alice returns home expecting Henry to be angry. It’s why—immediately after giving Zeke Cable’s employers an anonymous tip about the embezzlement, because she can at least do that much—she shut off her cell phone. She doesn’t want to talk to her father until she can do it face-to-face, explain why she’s disobeyed his direct orders, decided for herself to cancel her mission, because it was stupid.

She doesn’t plan to use the word
stupid
, of course. She knows how to
handle her father when he’s angry.

Except she’s never seen him
this
angry.

“Sit,” he says as soon as she appears in the doorway. Somehow, she can tell from his voice and the steel in his eyes, he already knows what she’s done.

“If you’d just let me explain—”

“Sit,” he says, with tightly contained fury. He flips on the TV. “Watch.”

There’s a nightmare on the screen.

Flames and smoke and screams. It looks so much like the horror she’s seen in her dreams that she has to steady herself for a moment, remind herself that she is awake, that this is life.

And when she does, the words of the newscast penetrate.

A bomb, at a Melbourne shopping mall.

An explosion, flying shrapnel, bloody children, weeping mothers, bodies piled on bodies, heads and fingers and ragged limbs.

“Don’t you dare look away,” her father snaps, but she can’t. She is fixed on the screen.

Because it’s the camera that has looked away from the carnage, has turned to the faces of the men responsible.

Three strangers, and a man she’s come to know, or thought she’d come to know, as well as anyone could.

Zeke Cable.

Part of an antigovernment anarchist group, the news says, and more pictures come on the screen: the two young women she’d assumed were mistresses.

These were the accomplices.

Conspirators.

Murderers.

The group moved ahead faster than planned when an anonymous tip set authorities on Cable’s trail. It was thanks to the tip that they were caught.

Thanks to Alice.

Many things, she now sees, are thanks to Alice.

She turns to her father, a white-hot fury building in her to match his own. “You knew,” she says. “You knew he was going to do this. And you didn’t tell me.”

“I told you he was dangerous,” Henry says. “I told you he needed to die.”

“But you didn’t tell me
why
!” she shouts. As part of her training, Alice has learned to control her emotions, especially the ones that threaten to overpower her. It’s never been something she’s very good at, and now she doesn’t even bother. She wants Henry to know she’s angry. To see how he’s betrayed her.

Tricked her into betraying her people.

“What would you have done, if I’d told you everything?” Henry asks.

“You know what I would have done,” she says. “I would have stopped him.”

“Killed him?”

“If I had to,” Alice says, knowing in her core that it’s true.

“I believe you,” he says. “But what would you have learned from that? You won’t always have all the information, Alice. Not in Endgame, not in life. You need to learn to act on the information you’ve been given. Tips, guesses, hunches. You need to know who you can trust, and be willing to act on their word. You need to take action that might seem distasteful to you, and trust that it serves a higher purpose.”