There’s one man still alive in the alley. His back is to me. Before he can turn, I walk up behind him and snap his neck. As I lay his body on the snowy ground, I look at the two bodies already in the alley. They were shot, and the white snow is turning pink from their blood. If the snow continues to fall as it is now, all three bodies will be covered within a few hours. Not that it will matter when someone finds them. If all goes well, I won’t be here.
The other two dead are a man and a woman. Who they are, I have no idea. There’s nothing in their pockets to identify them. As for the man I killed, a search of him turns up an identification card in Russian. I assume it’s a forgery.
I leave the dead and go after the living. There’s no time for stealth. I take the direct route through the front of the building and up the stairs. I see no one in the halls, and I hope that I’m correct about which apartment I think Diana has taken Sauer and Lottie to.
I arrive on the fourth floor and see that one of the doors is ajar. I was right—it belongs to the apartment I identified. But before I can reach it, the door shuts. I pause, listening, and hear voices coming from behind the wood.
“I think we will have a little fun with her before we kill her,” a man says.
I don’t know if he means Lottie or Diana. And I don’t care. The excitement in his voice enrages me. I’ve done some things in my short life that I would rather not have done, but it’s always been out of necessity. I would never hurt someone just for fun. Not even during Endgame. And this, what he’s suggesting, is unthinkable.
I test the door. It’s unlocked, which is a surprising but welcome piece of luck. I open it a crack to peer inside and draw my gun, ready in case anyone is waiting there. The first thing I see is the body of an old woman. Then another one. And then I see Lottie, tied to a chair and looking at me with frantic eyes.
My first instinct is to untie her, find Sauer, and get them out of there. That’s what a Player should do. But I’m not just a Player. I’m a brother, and a son, and when I think about what I heard the men say, it makes me think of my sisters and my mother. Lottie isn’t going anywhere, and although the girl in the other room might be my enemy, she doesn’t deserve what those men have planned for her. So even though I hear my trainers yelling at me to get the prize and get out, I choose to make a detour.
Lottie struggles, scraping her chair against the floor. I wish I could untie her, but that’s a bad idea. She could escape, or run into more thugs. At least tied up, she’s out of harm’s way. I put my finger to my lips to keep her quiet and move down the hall.
I follow the sound of voices in the back of the apartment. There are three doorways. When I reach the first one, I look inside and see Sauer tied to a chair. He’s wearing a gag, but he gives me the same frantic look that Lottie gave me. But he’s safer here tied up, so I put a finger to my lips and back out of the room. The second door is to an empty bathroom. I take a deep breath outside the third room, steady my gun, and push open the door. Diana is lying unconscious on a bed. The three men are standing around her, arguing in Russian about who is going to go first.
I shoot the biggest guy through the forehead. He’s a giant of a man, and I want him out of the way. He falls across the girl with a heavy smack. One of the others pulls a gun, but I shoot him quickly as well. The last guy fumbles for his gun—I’m quicker. But when I fire at him, the Soviet pistol jams, and nothing happens. I try again, and this time a gun explodes—but it’s not mine. Pain rips through my arm. I don’t know how he’s missed so badly, at such close range, but I don’t stop to think about it. I throw myself at him and knock the gun from his hand.
We fight with our hands. We’re evenly matched, but my opponent keeps punching me where I’ve been shot. It hurts like hell, but it’s not the first time I’ve battled through this kind of pain. I grit my teeth, ignore it, and fight. This thug isn’t going to stand in the way of my mission.
The room is small, and we keep crashing into furniture as we grapple with each other. A lamp tumbles from a bedside table and shatters. A bureau is overturned. We slip in the blood of the dead men as we perform a dance in which we keep changing positions.
Then my opponent pulls a knife from his boot. The next thing I know it’s being thrust at my stomach. I turn to the side, and it slides across my thigh instead. The fabric of my pants splits neatly, and blood begins to flow. It’s not a mortal wound, but it hurts like the devil, even more than the bullet graze on my arm, because it goes deeper.
I can feel my strength waning, and I know I have to finish this. So when my opponent attempts once again to push his knife into my gut, I grab him by the back of the neck and use his forward momentum to slam his head down on one of the metal knobs that decorate the footboard of the bed. The first blow stuns him, but he still attempts to break away from me, so I repeat the motion, over and over, until his face is a bloody mess and he’s no longer moving. It’s not a pretty victory, but I’ll take it.
I toss his body to the floor. Then I pull the dead brute from atop Diana and make sure she’s still breathing. She is. I leave her snoring peacefully on the bed and I go to check on Sauer and Lottie.
But when I check the second bedroom, I find it empty. An empty chair sits in the middle of the living room, rope coiled around it on the floor.
They’re gone.
I rush to the windows and look out. The street is empty. I check the hallway, but I know it will be deserted as well. It is.
Damn it. If I hadn’t chosen to help Diana, I’d have them in my custody now. I think about running down to the street and trying to find them, but they could be anywhere—and what am I going to do, run after them with a bullet wound and a bleeding leg? Besides, Diana is still unconscious in the bedroom. As much as it angers me to lose Sauer and Lottie yet again, I have a feeling that the girl in the bedroom might have information that will help me find them again. I make the decision to stay in the apartment.
I shut the apartment door and lock it, then tend to my own wounds. The bullet seems to have only grazed me, so I clean the abrasion with soap and water and tie a strip of towel around it. The cut on my leg is another matter. I’m going to need to stitch it up. For now, I tear off another strip of towel and tie it tight to stop the bleeding. Then I return to the bedroom.
I drag the three bodies into the living room, where I lay them next to the bodies of the old women. I feel bad about making them keep company with their murderers, but there’s not really anything else I can do with them.
Despite the ruined furniture and the blood splatter, Diana looks like some kind of enchanted princess asleep in a tower, waiting for a prince to wake her with true love’s kiss. Her hands are resting at her sides, and her lips are parted slightly as she breathes.
I sit down on the end of the bed, watching her and thinking about my next step. Finding Sauer is my main objective, one I’ve already ignored in order to save this girl. I hope I made the right choice and that she really will have some information that will make helping her worth jeopardizing my mission. Then her eyes flutter open. She looks at me, frowns, and starts to rise up with a roar. I grab her wrists and hold them.
“It’s all right,” I say as she thrashes. “You’re safe.”
It sounds so stupid to say that. Of course she’s not safe. Neither of us is safe. We need to get out of this place, and soon. But I don’t know how else to calm her down.
“Let me go!” she says, her voice still heavy from whatever sedative she’s been given.
I do. I wait for her to attack me, but she pulls back. I see her trying to focus her eyes.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I tell her.
This makes her laugh. I want to be angry, but I can’t be. I laugh with her. She shakes her head, as if shaking off the last of the drug, and looks around the room. “Is that mine or yours?” she says.
“The blood?” I say. “Most of it belonged to the men who were going to kill you.”
Her face hardens, and I know she’s rememberi
ng everything now. “Where are Sauer and Lottie?” she asks me.
I shake my head. “Gone. While I was dealing with our Soviet friends.”
“What!” she exclaims. “You should have watched them!”
“And let you die?”
“Yes,” she says, and I know she means it. The look she’s giving me makes it clear what she thinks of my decision. “If they escaped on foot, we could still catch them.” She tries to get up, but she’s still a little groggy, and lies back, an expression of frustration on her face.
“You really are an Amazon, aren’t you?” I remark.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I say, embarrassed to tell her how I’ve been thinking about her.
“Maybe Theron and Cilla took them,” she says hopefully.
“Colleagues of yours?”
She nods.
“I wouldn’t count on that,” I say, and tell her about the bodies I saw in the alley downstairs.
She looks furious. “I don’t know how they found us.” She looks at me. “How did you find us?”
“Sauer left a trail of candies.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t notice,” she says.
I ask the question I’ve been wondering about since we met. “Why did you want them anyway? And who is this us you keep talking about?”
She stiffens. I know she still doesn’t trust me. I need to give her a reason to.
“My name is Sam Boone,” I tell her. “But everyone calls me Boone.”
She looks into my eyes. “Do you like to Play, Boone?” she asks.
She says it just like that. I can hear the capital P in her voice. I also feel a shiver of excitement running through me. I decide to take a risk, a big one. “I do,” I tell her. “And I think you do too.”
“Cahokian?” she asks.
“How did you know?”
She points to my uniform. “Your American accent,” she says. “It’s obvious under your German and Russian.”
I ignore the insult. “And you?” I say. “Minoan?”
She nods. “My name is Ariadne Calligaris.”
Now I know her real name. I’m in shock. I’ve never met any other Player. Has she? But there are more important things to discuss. “Why do the Minoans want Sauer? And don’t give me the art historian bullshit.”
“The Minoans want him for the same reason the Cahokians do,” she says.
I know she’s testing me to see what I know. And I don’t know much. Obviously, this is about Endgame. Apart from that, I’m in the dark.
She lifts an eyebrow. “You really don’t know about the weapon, do you?”
It’s too late to pretend that I do, so I tell her the truth. “All I know is that I’m supposed to get Sauer and take him out of Berlin.”
She hesitates. “Never mind,” she says. “I shouldn’t say anything.”
“I saved your life,” I said. “I think you owe me for that. I could easily have let them kill you,” I remind her. “Or killed you myself.”
She waits another minute before she talks. I know exactly what she’s doing, because I do it too—weighing the benefits and risks of telling me what she knows. It’s strange to see someone else doing what I would do myself. I wait to see if she would make the same choice I would. It’s strangely exciting.
“Sauer is an engineer,” she says. “He was working with the Nazis during the war. They discovered something.” She hesitates. Makes more calculations. Comes to another decision. “Alien technology. A weapon of some kind. Sauer was brought in to help them build it. Or rebuild it. We don’t know if they found any actual parts, or just plans.”
I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut. Alien technology. A weapon. Is she talking about the Cahokian weapon, the one that could be used to defeat the Makers? If so, this is bigger than I ever imagined. Much bigger. But how much does she know? I can’t show her how surprised I am. “How did the Minoans find out about it?”
“We have spies,” she says. “I assume you do too.”
Of course we do. My brother Jackson was working as a Cahokian spy in Germany when he was killed three years ago. Now I wonder if Jackson is how my council knew about Sauer. If so, then why did they wait so long to do anything about it?
The Cahokian weapon. I can’t quite believe that’s what this is all about, or that my council didn’t tell me. Unless they don’t know either. And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just a weapon, and not the weapon. More important right now is my worry that if the Minoans know about the weapon, other lines may know about it too. It’s time to get going. And for right now, anyway, it looks as if the Minoan will be part of my plans.
“So, Ariadne Calligaris,” I say. “What do we do next?”
She bites her lip. Then she points to the bandage on my leg, which has turned red with blood. “First, we sew you up,” she says.
CHAPTER SIX
Ariadne
As I pass the needle through Boone’s skin, he says, “It looks like you’ve done this before.”
“I have,” I tell him. “Many times. When I was little, I learned to do it on dead pigs because their skin is so similar to human skin. Then, in training, we practiced on one another. Sometimes after we’d inflicted the wounds ourselves.”
“They had you stab one another?” he asks.
I nod. “Not on purpose. We didn’t try for lethal blows, but sometimes there were accidents.”
I smile a little, thinking of one or two occasions when I “accidentally” gave one of the boys in my training group a lesson in underestimating me. Boone sees this.
“Goddamn,” he says, laughing. “Sorry.”
I pull the thread taut, closing the wound on his thigh. “We’re sitting in a room painted with the blood of a man whose head you beat to a pulp,” I remind him. “And you’re apologizing for using a curse word?”
Boone laughs. “I guess you’re right,” he says. “But my mother always says you should never swear in front of a girl.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’m not a girl,” I tell him. “I’m a woman.”
Boone grins. I poke him again with the needle, and the grin turns into a frown. “Ouch!” he yelps, and I laugh.
“That’s what hurts?” I say. “After you’ve been shot and stabbed?”
He grimaces. “I wasn’t expecting it.”
I smile. I want him to think I’m helping him because I’m grateful to him for saving my life. Which I am, even if I think it was a mistake on his part. Truthfully, I’m only sewing up his wound because it gives me an opportunity to find out more about him.
“So what kind of training do Cahokians do?” I ask him.
“Lots of wilderness survival skills,” he says. “Living off the land. When I was eleven, my trainers took me to a forest I’d never been to before, in the middle of a blizzard, and left me there. Naked. With nothing. I had to find my way out.”
For a moment, I picture him naked in a forest. Not when he was younger, but as he is now. The fact that he’s sitting next to me in just his boxer shorts and a T-shirt makes it not that hard. Unexpectedly, I feel heat flash across my cheeks. If he sees it, he does not give any sign. “Well,” I say as I tie off the last stitch. “You apparently made it out.”
“Barely,” he says, inspecting my handiwork. “I just about froze to death.”
“Two in my training group died,” I say as I gather up the things I’ve used to treat his wound. “One was killed diving from a cliff into the sea. The other was poisoned.”
“Poisoned?” Boone says. “How?”
“He chose the wrong date during a test,” I say. “I suppose he wasn’t paying attention when they taught us how to recognize food that has been tainted. He was always talking too much.”
“Your trainers just let him eat it and die?” says Boone. He sounds shocked, and maybe a little disgusted.
“Would your trainers have let you die in the woods if you hadn’t made it out on your own?” I ask him.
He looks away. I can tel
l that he has never considered this question. I’ve never met a Player from another line, and part of me finds it fun to compare notes. I’ve never been able to talk about this with anyone before, except for my trainers.
“You trained alone?” I ask him.
“Mostly,” he says. “But my brother was our Player before me, and I saw a lot of what he did and participated in some of his training.”
“Minoans train as a group,” I explain. “Starting when we are very young. After several years, one is chosen to be the Player and receives the golden horns.”
“Golden horns?” says Boone. “What are those?”
“A symbol,” I say. “Of King Minos, the first king of Crete. There’s a ceremony where the new Player is presented to the people and the horns are placed on her head.”
“Minos,” says Boone. “Like the legend of the Minotaur.” He snaps his fingers. “That’s where I’ve heard your name before. Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos. She helped Theseus kill the Minotaur and escape from the maze under the palace.”
I nod. Of course I have heard the story of the bull-headed Minotaur and the Athenian youths sent to him every nine years as sacrifices many, many times. I’m impressed that he knows it. “You know mythology,” I remark.
Boone nods. “I like stories about gods and heroes,” he admits. “Sometimes, when training got really tough, I pretended I was Hercules or Jason, trying to prove myself to the gods. It helped.”
“It’s very close to the truth, isn’t it?” I say. “Isn’t that what Endgame will be, a battle to prove to our gods which of us is the greatest?”
“They’re not my gods,” Boone says as he puts his shirt back on and buttons it up. “I don’t know what they are, but they’re not gods.”
I say nothing. I don’t want to argue about this with him. Besides, my feelings are my own.
“Anyway, in a year, it’s the next Player’s problem,” Boone says.
I’m surprised. “You sound like you don’t want to Play,” I say.