And with that thought, her laughter vanishes, because she realizes: This is real. Jamal is asking her to marry him.
And everything in her wants to say yes.
Jamal’s mood shifts back to serious right along with her. “I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve thought it through. I know what I want, and it’s you, Shari. It’s always been you, even before I met you. How’s that for romantic? I always thought that kind of thing was cheesy garbage, the sort of thing you said to get girls to like you, but it’s actually true. I want you now, I want you forever, and I don’t want to wait. Especially now that I know about this Player thing—if you’re going to be running around the world risking your life, I want you to have a reason to survive. To come back.”
“Not wanting to die isn’t reason enough?” she says, but the joke falls flat.
Jamal’s not laughing anymore. “I know what you’re going to say,” he says. “That we should wait until we’re older. Until you’re not the Player anymore, and you’re ready to start the rest of your life. But why shouldn’t the rest of your life start now? Why shouldn’t you be a Player with a husband, with a family—”
“You mean . . . ?”
“Yeah, I mean kids,” he says. “I mean, if you think you want that?”
“Of course I do,” she says, and it’s true, even if it has always seemed impossibly out of reach. The Harrapan often marry young. Many of her siblings married when they were 14 or 15, and had children quickly after. But Shari’s never considered the possibility of that kind of life. For her, a husband, children, they’re all part of some unimaginable future, after she lapses, and something else she suddenly realizes: there’s a part of her that doesn’t believe in a life after. Her time as a Player is like Mount Kanchenjunga—a towering reality that’s always been there, looming over her life. Too large to see beyond.
“I can’t stand the idea of you sacrificing yourself for the Harrapan, or for this stupid game, or for anything,” Jamal says. “I want you to have something to live for.”
“I live for myself and my people,” she points out. “That’s always been enough.”
“Don’t you want more? Don’t you want . . .” He rests his hands on the table, palms up, and she appreciates that he doesn’t reach for her. He waits for her to lay her hands on his. She does. They’re warm, and she can feel his pulse beating at his wrist. “Don’t you want me?”
What she wants is to fling herself across the table and into his arms. She wants to slip on the ring and never take it off.
She wants Jamal, but she also wants to be the Player that her people deserve, and she doesn’t see how she can have both.
“I have to think,” Shari says. “I need some time. Is that okay?”
“Of course it’s okay. But can I ask one more thing?”
She squeezes his hands, holds tight. “Anything.”
“Don’t do all your thinking alone?” He smiles. She missed that smile. She wants to wrap herself up in its warmth and fall asleep. “I missed you.”
They spend the rest of the evening together. They spend every minute they can find with each other, and it’s as if nothing has changed. Except that he knows the truth about her now. And he loves her anyway.
A week passes, and another, and Jamal doesn’t pressure her for an answer. She can’t give him one. The answer she wants to give doesn’t make any sense, and the answer that makes sense is the opposite of what she wants. So she meditates, and asks the Makers what to do, and breathes, and waits for clarity.
It comes to her in a dream.
She dreams of a child.
A toddler with dark hair and bright eyes—Shari’s eyes.
The little girl has Shari’s hair, Shari’s laugh, and Jamal’s smile.
She stands in a field of golden grass, her head tipped back and her arms open wide, as if to embrace the sky.
Mama, she says, in a voice like a flute. It makes Shari’s heart flutter. Mama, I’m waiting for you.
“Why?” Jamal says, after he’s managed to stop kissing her, after he’s slipped the ring onto her finger, after he’s swung her off her feet and through the air and thanked the gods for his fortune. “What made you so sure all of a sudden?”
It was the dream, and it wasn’t.
It was the little girl, their daughter—Shari knows as surely as she’s known everything that the girl is out there somewhere, waiting to be born—but not just their daughter.
It was Pravheet’s prescient reminder that every Player must forge her own path.
It was Jamal. It has always been Jamal.
“I love you,” Shari says. “I simply decided that was enough.”
Other than the decision itself, there’s nothing simple about it. They marry in secret, so no one can stop them. Jamal continues to live with his mother, Shari with her parents, even after they’ve been joined in holy matrimony. She wears her ring on a chain around her neck, keeping it beneath her clothes, close to her heart. They steal time with each other in grassy knolls and the backseat of Jamal’s rusting Honda, which barely runs but has wonderfully soft leather seats. Shari continues to train, to wait for the current Player to lapse, to study and meditate and let her elders believe her life is empty of anything but thoughts of Endgame.
Jamal, at least, stops flirting.
They keep the secret between them until the marriage becomes something no one can question, until they’ve passed a point of no return—until Shari finds out she’s pregnant.
“You did what?”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“How could you?”
The questions are fired at her like artillery, each angrier than the last. Shari and Jamal called the Harrapan elders to her family’s house to hear the news. Her parents sit quietly beside her as the room explodes. They don’t agree with her choice, but they will not argue with her now that it’s been made.
The others have no such compunction.
“This is extremely irregular,” says Jovinderpihainu, the eldest among them.
“Shari has always been irregular,” says Pravheet, giving her a wink so she knows it’s meant as a compliment.
“I know it’s irregular,” Shari says. “But it’s happening. There’s nothing to be done about it now.” She will have the baby two months before she’s due to become the Player. There has never, at least in recorded Harrapan history, been a Player with a husband and child. It is unheard of, perhaps unthinkable.
There are some who think it unacceptable.
“I can think of something,” Peetee says angrily. “We can find someone else to be our Player. Because you’ve proved you don’t care enough to do it.” There’s a roar of support for this sentiment.
“She’s proved no such thing,” Helena snaps, and the room falls silent.
Even Shari is shocked.
Helena was a Player herself, more than 40 years ago. She is the second most respected of the last two centuries, and she has never had much respect for Shari. It was Helena who called Shari a coward for not wanting to learn to kill, Helena who time and again has questioned Shari’s readiness and commitment to the cause. She is a fearsome woman, still strong enough at 64 to fend off almost any enemy single-handed—if anyone would dare attack her.
She also, Shari now remembers, married her husband at midnight on the day she lapsed. Shari has always known this, but never gave much thought to what it implies: that Helena was once young and in love, that she spent her years as a Player waiting for her time to come, waiting until she could finally put her duties aside and give herself to Boort.
“We are a line that values tradition, but we need not be imprisoned by it,” Helena says. “Simply because a thing has never happened before, does that mean it may never happen? Simply because a woman has a family, does that mean she cannot serve her people, fulfill her obligation to the greater good?”
“Doesn’t mean she can either,” Peetee mutters.
“The Makers chose Shari for a reason,” Pravheet reminds t
he assembled Harrapan. “Perhaps this was the reason. Perhaps this was all meant to be.”
Jamal has stayed silent throughout the meeting, tensing when Shari came under attack but keeping his mouth shut. Now he rises. “Meant to be, not meant to be?” He waves the question away. “This is what is. What will be.”
Shari rises to her feet beside her husband, who, for the first time, seems less like the boy she knows and more like a man who will be father to her child. “My husband speaks true,” she says. “I asked you here not to gain your permission, but to tell you what will come. Thank you for listening.”
She takes Jamal’s hand, and together they stride out of the common room and back into the private bedchambers of the house, without looking back.
“So, that went well,” Jamal says wryly, once they’re alone.
Shari is about to answer when a swell of nausea surges over her. She drops Jamal’s hand, runs for the nearest bathroom, and slams herself inside just in time to heave up her breakfast. She sits on the cold tile, head hanging over the toilet, sweat dripping down her face, and breathes, waiting for the nausea to pass.
This is morning sickness, yes.
But this is also defiance—of her people and her traditions, and perhaps her common sense.
This, Shari thinks, is how it feels to know there’s no turning back.
There’s a soft knock at the door. “I’m fine, Jamal,” she says, pressing a palm to the door, like she can draw his strength right through it. “I’ll be out in a moment.”
It’s not Jamal.
“I said you could do it,” Helena’s sharp voice says. “I didn’t say it would be easy. Don’t disappoint me.”
No part of it is easy. Not the morning sickness (which lasts well into the afternoon and twilight), not the swollen ankles or the sore feet, not the compressed bladder or the heartburn, not the fatigue, not the headaches, not the acne, not the way that she’s come to think of the baby—this thing she’s looked forward to for so long—as a rapidly growing parasite that is colonizing her body from the inside out. Shari has always thought of herself as a Player of the mind, not the body, but for more than a decade she’s maintained rigorous control over both. She’s worked hard to transform her body into a graceful and powerful machine, all coordination and ropy muscle. Now, after only a few months, all her efforts have been erased. Her balance is gone, her limbs clumsy; her lungs heave and her heart pounds after only a few flights of stairs. She once heard her sister-in-law say that being pregnant made her feel like a hippopotamus, but Shari now thinks that’s an understatement. She feels like an elephant. A whale. Maybe even a brontosaurus, some lumbering prehistoric creature out of sync with the modern world. She feels ancient and impossible—and many nights, lying in bed, cramping with the kicks of the thing inside her, listening to Jamal sleep peacefully and hating him for it, she wonders if she’ll feel this way forever.
If she’s made a terrible mistake.
Jamal senses her hesitation, her regrets, and resents her for it, and they’ve started fighting—tentatively at first, two people afraid of hurting what they love most, but then full-throated, no-holds-barred screaming matches. He accuses her of loving Endgame more than she loves their family; she accuses him of dismissing everything she holds sacred, of not knowing her at all. She accuses him—though only in secret, in her mind, because this is a line she fears to cross—of suckering her into making the worst decision of her life.
Then she argues with herself, and remembers that she loves Jamal, and that she loves their child, or will, and the joy that feeling brings her is worth lumbering around like an elephant.
At night, in bed, Jamal tells her stories of what their lives will be like soon, and strokes her hair, and she pretends to be strong and doesn’t admit that she is afraid.
Maybe, she sometimes thinks, she was wrong and everyone else was right. How could she have been so arrogant to think that she could be both the Player and a mother? She loves Jamal, she loves her line, she loves her duty—but what’s to say love is enough? What’s to say the love of one won’t destroy the others?
As the days skid downhill toward her delivery date, it’s as if she can feel a clock ticking from her swollen stomach.
She wakes one night to a stab of fear, alarm bells ringing in her mind, a nightmare already fading but the urgency of it still sharp: explosions in the sky, blood on the ground, and Shari, too clumsy and slow and big to do anything but watch.
“I can’t do this,” she whispers, and then gasps as there’s another stab—it’s not fear after all, it’s pain, and the mattress beneath her is wet with her broken water and the baby is writhing and kicking and this is labor.
This is happening—whether she can do it or not.
The pain splits her wide open.
The pain screams through her, a wild sound of monsters tearing each other to shreds.
The pain is a creature of its own, devouring her.
The pain is an ocean, tossing her on its waves.
Somewhere, in the foggy distance, is her mother’s soothing voice, the urgent pressure of Jamal’s hand, but these things seem irrelevant, almost imagined; there is nothing real but her body and the baby and the pain that fuses them together into one.
Shari retreats into herself, as she’s been taught to do, finds the eye of calm at the heart of the pain.
Finds clarity.
Finds strength.
There is pain like never before, and the tidal wave crashes down on her with such force that the old Shari might have broken, but this new Shari, strong and sure and ready, bears it and endures . . . and then? An absence. An emptiness. A wave washing out to sea. A hollow inside, where once she was full.
A soft weight in her arms.
A baby’s cry.
A new life.
Jamal brushes her hair back from her sweaty forehead. Shari holds the child.
Her daughter.
Shari smiles down at her child and finally understands how very wrong she was to doubt this. To imagine that she should, that she could, deny herself this moment—that she could not Play and love all at once. That she had to choose.
There is no choice.
There is no weighing of priorities, no danger of distractions, no question of which matters more, Endgame or her family, her duty or her love.
There is only this child. There is only love in her.
Playing, fighting, preserving tradition, protecting the line, all of that is a part of loving her, all of that will be better for loving her, because as Shari fights for the Harrapan and for herself and Jamal, she fights for her daughter. When Endgame comes, if it comes for her, she will triumph over the other Players. She must. Because what they will want, she will need.
Shari will Play for this small, precious girl; Shari will do anything and everything to save her world.
“What do we name her?” Jamal asks, and Shari loves him more than she ever has, because look what they have created together. It seems impossible that they have found each other, but impossible to imagine a world where they didn’t. She remembers the first time he confessed himself to her, the first time she took him in her arms, and how strange it was for something to feel so right, so fated, understanding now that it was fate, guiding them here. To her.
They will name her Alice.
And she will save the world.
NABATAEAN
MACCABEE
When the phone rings, Maccabee Adlai is dreaming of soft hands massaging cold skin, nails scraping across flesh, lips parting in a pleasurable gasp of pain. Satin sheets shimmer in the warm glow of candlelight, and beyond the window ocean waves lap at a tropical shore.
He wakes with a sigh to the phone’s shrill ring, his girlfriend’s snores, and the cheap, scratchy cotton that passes for bedding around here. Part of him is inclined to silence the phone and slip back into the warm embrace of the dream. If it were anyone else on the other end of the line, he would.
But he knows that ring.
His caller will not be silenced.
Maccabee feigns a yawn and groans, just in case the girl is awake after all and observing him. The average 16-year-old boy would take seconds, maybe minutes, to ease into alertness at four a.m., especially one who’d only fallen asleep a couple of hours before, after consuming a bathtub’s worth of gin (or at least appearing to). And his mission here depends on seeming like a normal teenage boy.
The yawn is fake, but the groan is real. Maccabee is anything but average, and there’s little he hates more than feigning it.
He slips out of bed, snatches the phone, and silently retreats to the tiny closet he shares with his roommate. Maccabee has been stuck in this hellhole of a boarding school for six months, and he still hasn’t adjusted to its indignities. It isn’t just the thin, overstarched sheets or the limp, bland meals masquerading as food. It’s the rooms the size of prison cells and the privacy they deny him, the communal bathrooms filled with the stink and stains of oafish adolescents. It’s the need to pretend that the homework isn’t beneath him, that the teachers aren’t borderline illiterate, that he cares about grades or football scores or who is screwing who and why. The Baden Akademie is meant to be an elite educational institution, its student body drawn exclusively from the 1 percent. It claims to afford every advantage to the children of the rich and powerful, who will one day grow up to be masters of the universe. For Maccabee, that’s motivation enough to endure its daily tedium. He just didn’t realize it would all be so depressingly ordinary. He’s tired of pretending to be anything but himself: Exceptional.
“What is it?” he whispers into the phone as quietly as he can. His roommate imbibed enough vodka and Klonopin last night to knock himself out for a week, and his girlfriend once slept through not only a fire alarm but an actual fire, but Maccabee doesn’t believe in taking chances.
“Kalla bhajat niboot scree.” It’s a woman’s voice, speaking in a language nearly as old as time itself. Only 10 people on the planet understand these words, and Maccabee is one of them. Direct translation is impossible: they’re an expression of trust and security, alerting him that she can speak frankly, asking if he can do the same.