But behind him, Xander breathes hard, gasping with effort, while Marcus smiles and picks up the pace.
It takes them half the day to reach the summit.
Now the fun can begin.
It’s like a different planet up here—a dead, arid one choked by sulfuric gases and thick clouds of ash. The gaping vent in the rock spews clumps of lava and burps puffs of oppressively hot air. They’re braving this climb without masks, and the foul gases—toxic enough to eat through metal—burn Marcus’s eyes and scald his throat. Small fissures in the rock called fumaroles exhale clouds of steam, and gossamer threads of cooled lava weave eerie orange spiderwebs in the rising updraft. From Marcus’s perch on the rim, the lake of lava several hundred meters below is almost completely obscured by thick ash and smoke, but the red glow is unmistakable, like a second sun. The noise is thunderous, earsplitting, an engine roar that drowns out everything else. This is an alien place; humans are not meant to survive here.
Marcus loves every inch of it.
“Remind me again why I let you talk me into this?” Xander shouts over the noise as they hoist themselves over the lip of the volcano. It’s what he says every time. And every time, Marcus responds with Because you can’t say no to me.
But that’s no longer true, of course. Xander is the Player: he can say no to anyone and anything he wants. It’s Marcus who’s obligated to serve Xander’s whims.
So instead he says, “You don’t want to come, just wait here.” Then propels himself over the lip of the volcano without waiting to see whether Xander will follow.
It’s like traveling back in time, into an age of tectonic creation and primordial ooze.
It’s like descending into the mouth of hell.
Hot air closes in with a pressure that makes his ears pop. Every breath is scalding poison. The walls are rainbowed with color, chemicals glazing the rock—orange iron, green manganese, white chlorine, cheerfully yellow sulfur. The sky above disappears behind a thick cloud, and there is only the cavernous volcano, and the sea of magma below.
Marcus stares into the frothing, sparking abyss. It’s easy to imagine he’s staring into the molten center of the earth.
Legend says it was a volcano that erased the ancient Minoan civilization from the face of the earth, and Marcus can believe it. His people spend so much time worrying about destruction coming from the stars—but if they knew what it was like down here, they would fear the earth just as much, its destructive power immense enough to consume itself.
That’s how Marcus feels now, too: bent on destruction. Consuming himself.
He swings himself down the cable and howls into the steaming pit. All his envy and despair, his rage and frustration, his disappointment in himself and his terror of what’s to come, he flings it out of himself and into the churning magma below.
It feels good.
Good enough that he looks up to the lip of the opening, where Xander still perches hesitantly on the edge, and shouts, “What are you waiting for, slowpoke?”
Xander waves, then leaps off the edge, hurtling into the air. The cable stretches taut and he swings back toward the inner wall of the volcano—and that’s when it happens.
Without warning. Without reason.
The line snaps.
“Xander!” Marcus screams. There’s nothing he can do but watch.
Watch his best friend plummet down and down.
Watch the broken cable dangle uselessly, too many meters overhead.
Watch Xander fling out his arms, reach blindly and desperately for purchase, for something that will slow his fall.
Watch, and hope.
Xander does it. The impossible. Catches his fingertips on a jutting rock, halts his descent. He can’t stop his momentum, and his body smashes into the volcano wall with such impact that Marcus can nearly hear the crunch of bone.
“Xander,” he whispers, panic stealing away his breath.
Xander is dangling by his fingertips, nothing saving him from a drop to his death but vanishing strength and sheer will. It’s crazy that things could turn so wrong so quickly. But the craziest thing of all: Xander is grinning.
“Little help up here?” he calls down to Marcus, barely audible over the volcano’s roar. There’s a lilt in his voice, and Marcus recognizes it, that adrenaline shot of pure joy that comes from facing death and surviving. “Or you going to leave me hanging?”
It’s a joke, of course. It would never occur to Xander that Marcus would just leave him there.
It wouldn’t have occurred to Marcus either.
Not until Xander put the idea in his head.
It will be easy for Marcus to save him. He need only climb up to where Xander is dangling and clip him on to the intact cable. So why would Xander look worried? He assumes Marcus will do exactly what he’s supposed to do. He assumes everything will work out.
Because for Xander, everything always works out.
Marcus works hard, Marcus tries, Marcus needs—while Xander just hangs around, waiting for good luck to drop into his lap. Expecting it.
What if this time, things go differently?
What if this time, Xander’s luck turns sour?
Marcus doesn’t climb up the cable. He doesn’t do anything. He watches.
He watches Xander’s arm muscles straining, his fingers turning white as the blood leaches out of him.
Now you know how it feels to want, Marcus thinks. How it feels to be desperate.
How do you like it?
The desperation is painted across Xander’s face. “Marcus!” he shouts, no longer kidding around. “What are you waiting for?”
There’s probably panic in his voice, but it’s hard to tell, over the noise.
Marcus still doesn’t move.
He tells himself: Just a few more seconds. Just enough to give Xander a taste of need. Just enough to scare him a little and remind him that he can’t always expect the world to fall at his feet, cater to his desires.
“What the hell are you doing, Marcus!” Xander screams. “Marcus!”
He’s losing his cool.
Marcus has always been able to make Xander lose his cool.
But what does that say? If Marcus can so easily throw Xander off his game, then how can anyone think Xander is the strong one? If Marcus can defeat him this easily, how can Xander expect to stand up to any of the other Players? How can he carry the fate of the Minoan people on his shoulders?
It’s a mistake. Even Xander admitted that much.
Letting him continue would mean risking all their lives.
I should let him fall, Marcus thinks. I’d be doing everyone a favor.
It’s just another joke, though.
It has to be.
Because surely he’s not serious about doing nothing, watching his best friend’s fingers slip from the rock, watching Xander frantically try to hang on.
Even though the thought is in his head now—and the thought makes the deed possible.
It would be that easy.
To do nothing.
To let gravity take its course.
Let Xander save himself, if he can. What could be wrong with forcing the new Player to face one simple test? To prove that he’s the right man to protect his people? Or give way to the one who can?
Marcus isn’t doing anything wrong.
He’s just not doing anything.
Xander sees it in his face—knows what Marcus is going to do before Marcus knows it himself. It’s always been this way between them.
“You’re better than this,” Xander pleads.
But it turns out he’s not.
After, in his nightmares, he sees it again and again.
Xander’s fingers slipping, giving way.
Xander falling.
The fall seems to take forever.
It takes enough time for Marcus to realize what he’s done.
To regret.
To scream Xander’s name.
To watch helplessly as Xander plunges into t
he lake of fire.
The churning molten rock sucks him under. Marcus doesn’t see the burning lava strip away his flesh, flood his lungs, melt his bones, turn him to ash. Not in real life, at least.
In his nightmares, he sees every detail.
“I don’t know what happened,” Marcus tells people, and this part of the lie is easy, because it’s true. “He was there—and then he wasn’t.”
He tells the same story to everyone: The ground crew that greets him when he staggers off the helicopter. Elias Cassadine, who collects him from the airfield, patting him on the shoulder in some sorry approximation of comfort. The other kids from camp, who gossip about every gruesome detail. Xander’s parents, who will not stop crying.
“His line snapped, and I tried to help him, but I couldn’t,” Marcus says, over and over again. “I couldn’t get there in time.”
And everyone—even Xander’s mother, through her tears—says, “Don’t blame yourself.”
He acts like a zombie, shuffling through one day and the next. It’s not just for show. He feels dead inside. Hollowed out. He has to force himself to go through the motions of life. Put one foot in front of the other. Remember to eat. Remember to breathe. Do not tell the truth.
Do not.
He wants to shout it to the world, the truth of what he’s done.
But maybe that’s a lie too. Because if he really wanted to, he would.
Instead he lies, and keeps lying. He misses Xander and blames himself, and every night as he falls asleep, he whispers a plea for forgiveness and swears that in the morning, he’ll turn himself in.
Then morning comes, and he lies. And every time he does, it’s like killing Xander all over again.
He is chosen to be the Player in Xander’s place.
“Think of it as a tribute to your friend,” Elias says. Marcus tries.
There is no ceremony this time around. No amphitheater filled with screaming hordes, no long speech about his impressive accomplishments and glorious future.
There is only a quiet conversation in Elias’s office, an offer extended and accepted.
Of course Marcus will take Xander’s place, Marcus says. Of course he will do his friend, and his people, proud.
He will keep the golden horns in a safe place, and try not to wonder whether they weighed this heavily on Xander’s head.
Before Marcus can slink out of the office, Elias opens a steel safe and withdraws a clay disk, about the size of an outstretched palm. Carved with a spiraling formation of strange symbols, the artifact looks ancient. Elias places it gently in Marcus’s hands. The hardened clay seems to warm to his touch.
“Do you know what this is?” Elias asks.
Marcus shakes his head.
“A century ago, archaeologists found a disk in the ruins of the Minoan palace at Phaistos,” Elias explains. “It was stamped with two hundred forty-one symbols, in a language never before seen and, to this day, never deciphered. No one knows what it was for or what it might mean. It’s on display in a museum in Heraklion, where historians and tourists alike can puzzle over its significance. Or”—he pauses, tapping the disk in Marcus’s hands—“so we would have them believe.”
“The one in the museum is a copy,” Marcus guesses.
Elias nods. “The Phaistos Disk, this disk, belongs to the Minoan people. It is the most sacred talisman of our line. This language you see here is the language of the gods—those beings from the stars who birthed our civilization and will one day return to put it to the test. The disk’s message spells out a challenge and a promise.”
“Endgame,” Marcus says in a hushed voice, awed by the thought of a message echoing through three millennia.
“Endgame,” Elias agrees. “The gods love the Minoans over all peoples. The starry god King Minos descended from great heights to rule our society, to help us flourish and reign. Endgame will be our chance to prove ourselves worthy of that love. It will be your chance. So I ask you now, Marcus Loxias Megalos, do you swear on these sacred words that you will live up to the challenge? That you will forsake all, in the name of Endgame? That from now and ever on, you will live for the game, and for your people?”
Marcus doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t have to.
He has already forsaken the only person who matters to him. He has nothing left but this.
“I do,” Marcus says. “I swear.”
“Then so it shall be,” Elias says.
And so it is.
It turns out that supersecret Player training is pretty much like the training he got before, except that now he has to do it alone. There are no other campers—there’s no Xander. No one to challenge him, to push him to greater and greater heights, no one to beat. No one to celebrate his victories or console him through his losses. Only Elias, who has taken over all his training and who spends most of his time droning about what life was like back when he was a Player. Which is almost worse than being alone.
Marcus is kept busy, jetting halfway across the world to pit his survival skills against the Amazon jungle, infiltrating Middle Eastern warlord encampments, studying ancient scrolls with a cloistered sect of Tibetan monks, building his strength, testing his limits, trying never to stop and think, never to remember. Never to regret.
He doesn’t climb anymore, not unless he has to. Whatever joy he took in it is gone.
He gets by.
More than that, he excels.
“It’s like you were born to be the Player,” Elias says, more than once. Words that a younger Marcus would have killed to hear. The worst part is that Marcus knows he’s right.
In a way, it’s Elias’s fault—if he’d only realized Marcus’s greatness sooner, if he’d named Marcus the Player in the first place, then everything would have been fine. Xander would still be here. Marcus tries his best to hate Elias for this, but it’s hard, because Elias Cassadine is now the closest thing he has to a friend.
Imagine how hard Xander would laugh at that.
“You need a rest,” Elias says one day, after Marcus fumbles with the bomb he’s disarming and nearly blows them both up.
“No way,” Marcus says. “I’ll get it the next time. I just need one more shot.”
“You need some time off,” Elias says. “Take a week. Hang out with your friends. You deserve it.”
There’s no arguing with Elias—and certainly no admitting that he has no friends anymore, which is exactly what he deserves. He knows the other kids from camp hang out together sometimes now that they are off living their regular lives, telling stories of better days. But Marcus wouldn’t go, even if he were invited. He knows he would make them uncomfortable, a living reminder of their failure, and of the dead. Just as they would make him uncomfortable, pretending to be impressed by his triumph when they all know he was really a runner-up. It’s better for all of them if he stays away.
So the week stretches on, endless and empty. Marcus stares at the football posters on his wall and the picture of Xander on his desk, and in the silence, the stillness, everything he’s tried not to think about is impossible to escape.
One night after another, he doesn’t sleep. Can’t sleep.
He stays up all night, staring at the ceiling.
The last day, he visits Xander’s grave for the first time.
He stands before the gravestone, shivering in the sticky summer air. It’s a simple marker, bearing only Xander’s name and the dates of his birth and death.
So close together.
There was a funeral, but Marcus wasn’t there. He was too busy with his new training regimen.
He was too afraid.
In his hand, Marcus holds the golden horns, the official marker of his selection as a Player. It’s such a silly thing, a flimsy band of fake bull horns that no one in his right mind would actually wear—but for so long, it was everything. A symbol of the life he wanted so desperately. And then it was a symbol of everything Xander had taken from him. The band fit so comfortably on Xander’s head. Even though it didn
’t belong there.
Marcus sets the golden horns on the stone.
“I did what I had to do,” he says. “What a champion would do. That’s all.”
Elias teaches that winning at all costs is more than just a phrase. That Endgame is not football, and it’s not war—it’s not a place for rules or for honor, for loyalty or mercy. Winning means doing whatever it takes, without hesitation or regret.
Marcus is working very hard to believe it.
“I thought you might be here,” a voice says behind him.
Marcus turns around. Elias is leaning against a gravestone, a strange, knowing smile on his face. He gestures toward the horns. “I hope you’re not planning to leave those here. They belong to you.”
Marcus shrugs, hoping Elias can’t see all the emotions, the pain, churning just beneath his surface. He’s supposed to be stronger than that now. He’s supposed to be invulnerable. “They were his first. All of this was.”
“Until you took it from him.”
Marcus has trained in relaxation and control. He knows how to master his breathing and his heart rate, how to tamp down his body’s reaction to stimuli and remain physiologically unmoved by panic. There may be fireworks going off in his head, but outwardly, he’s perfectly calm. Elias, he has learned, always has an agenda. Marcus waits for him to reveal it.
“What happened on that volcano, Marcus?” Elias says.
“I told you what happened.”
“And now I’m asking again.”
“His cable snapped,” Marcus says—Marcus always says. “I tried to help him, but I couldn’t.” He’s gotten used to lying about it—he’s gotten good at lying about it—but it feels especially wrong to do so here, in the shadow of the grave. “I couldn’t get there in time.”
“You’re an excellent liar,” Elias says. “That will come in handy.”
Marcus stops breathing.
Elias bursts into laughter. “Oh, wipe that deer-in-the-headlights look off your face, Marcus, you’re better than that.”
Marcus tries to remember what he’s been taught, remember his breathing, but it’s hard to find his calm center when every nerve ending in his body is screaming.
Elias knows the truth.
He knows.
He knows.
“We’re both men here,” Elias says. “It’s time to be honest.”