it. For a minute I’d thought we had her.
“We’re supposed to stop you,” Kat said. “That’s all. Stop.”
“You think it will be that easy? You underestimate me. I know some of the other lines,” Raakel said. “We watch each other. The Harappan. You will not ‘stop’ him. And the Mu. And probably many others. You will fail. And then what will you do?”
“We will stop them,” I said. “We will.”
My heart rate was skyrocketing, and I felt sick to my stomach. We were going to have to kill her. One of us had to draw our gun and fire it before Raakel could swing her vicious sword.
I hadn’t shot anyone since I killed the sheriff back in California. That seemed so long ago, but so present. I still saw that man’s face down the sights of a gun, no matter how many rounds I had fired down the shooting range.
“Stop us how?”
Neither Kat nor I said anything. We sat, tense, staring at Raakel and the sword in her hand. This was not how this discussion was supposed to go. She was supposed to see reason. She was supposed to know that the game didn’t have to be Played. But I saw now how naïve we were being.
One of us is going to die.
Raakel was going to swing her sword and kill one of us, and if we were lucky, the other one would draw their gun and shoot before she turned on them. And that was the best case. The worst was that neither Kat nor I would make it out of here alive. We were going up against people who had been trained by mentors like Walter. The Players were too good for us. And they had been indoctrinated from birth. They weren’t going to be convinced in a 20-minute conversation. They weren’t going to give up on everything they’d been raised to believe.
“There’s more to this book from the Brotherhood of the Snake,” I said, trying to get Raakel to think about something other than killing us, and the meaning of “stop.”
“What else is in there?” she said, but she was smiling, toying with us. This was the start of the game for her. She was enjoying it. Two easy kills before moving on to the real Calling.
“It gives the history of the game,” I said. “It explains how the Makers started Endgame as just that: a game.”
Kat jumped in. “You don’t have to fight. The Makers started all of this as sport for themselves—initially they just hunted us themselves.
Then they turned us on each other.”
As I sat there and watched her, I realized something: this was real.
I had had my doubts all summer, while we were at the ranch and hearing John and Walter talk to us every night about the Players, the Calling, Endgame itself. Even while we were delivering invitations, there was a voice in the back of my mind that said that Agatha, Walter, and all the others were delusional. That aliens weren’t real. But now I had to face the facts. There really were Players. They really had responded to our bizarre invitations. They didn’t just have to Play. They were eager to.
Raakel stood up, and we did the same. I felt the gun heavy and cold against my back.
“We are done,” she said.
“Here,” I begged. “Read the pages.” I pushed the papers to her. If she took them and looked down, we could get the jump on her.
She glanced down at the papers, laughing. “I don’t care what your book says. I don’t know where it came from, and there’s no reason I should believe it. Like I said: maybe you’re from another line? Maybe you’re trying to get rid of your competition.”
“Just read the pages,” I said again. “Please.”
She laughed and took them from me, and immediately Kat and I both grabbed our guns.
There was a flash of movement, the papers dropping from her hands.
She changed the sword back to her right hand—she wasn’t ready; she had been too cocky.
I saw the Beretta in Kat’s hand before I could draw my gun.
Raakel swung the sword just as Kat fired.
The sword hit Kat in the arm, and she screamed. Raakel grunted loudly, reminding me of a tennis player whose racket had just connected with a hard serve.
My gun was out and I fired. We were too close for me to miss her, but I was scared, trembling, and my shots were off target: my first hit her in the thigh; then I hit her stomach three times.
Kat dropped the Beretta from her injured hand, and Raakel dropped the sword.
“Aman tanrım,” Raakel said, as she stumbled back and sat on the bed. There was blood everywhere—spatters all across the blankets, a sure sign that the bullets I’d fired had exited her back. She had her hands on her abdomen.
“Aman tanrım,” she said again, sucking in air as the blood flowed.
“Bok. What did you do?”
“We had to stop you,” I said.
Next to me, Kat ran for the bathroom.
“Kat?” I called.
“I need a towel,” she said. There was a trail of her blood on the carpet.
“We have to get out of here!”
“You’re fools,” Raakel said with a wince. “You can’t stop everyone. You can’t stop the Makers.”
“You should have listened,” I said.
“Someone will take my place.” Raakel’s voice was weak. “Don’t you know that? And someone will take their place. And it will continue.
There’s no way to stop us.”
“We’re going to stop everyone,” I said.
She grimaced, hunching over. “Kill me,” she said. “You want to stop me, so just do it. I’m going to bleed out.”
I held the gun to her head.
There was the sheriff. There was Tommy. Staring back at me with lifeless eyes over the barrel of my gun.
Kat came back. “We have to get out of here.” She had a white hand towel wrapped around her arm. “I need you to tie this.”
“Just do it,” Raakel repeated.
I couldn’t force myself to look at her.
“Do it,” Kat said.
I closed my eyes and fired two bullets into Raakel’s head. When I looked again, Raakel was slumped over, sliding off the bed and onto the floor in front of me.
“You tried, Mike,” Kat said, gritting her own teeth against the pain.
“We both tried as hard as we could.”
“Did
