James Frey: Sky Key

“What is it, Tarki?”

The bird pecks the dirt.

“What is it?”

The bird freezes like a statue, its head low but cocked, stares at the ground with one wide eye. Little Alice cranes forward. Something is there. Something small and round and dark.

The bird makes a horrible sound— Creeeeaaaaaak —and bolts toward the house. Little Alice is startled but doesn’t follow. She holds out her hands and pushes the waxy leaves aside and wriggles into the bush, puts her hands on the ground, finds.

A dark marble, half-buried. Perfectly round. Carved with strange markings. She touches it and it’s as cold as the void of space. She digs around it with her fingers, makes a small pile of dirt, pries the sphere free. She picks it up, turns it around and around, frowns. It is painfully cold. The light from the sky filters, changes, is suddenly bright bright beyond bright. Within seconds everything is white and the ground is shaking and a giant crash explodes over the hillsides, rattling the cliffs and the mountains, shaking the trees, the grass, the pebbles in the streams. The sound fills everything.

Little Alice wants to run, but can’t. It’s as if the little marble has frozen her to the spot. Through the light and the sound and the fury, she sees a figure drifting toward her. A woman, maybe. Young. Petite.

The figure draws closer. Its flesh is pale green and its eyes sunken, its lips curled. An undead corpse. Little Alice drops the marble but nothing changes. The ghost gets close enough so that Little Alice can smell its breath, which is excrement, burning rubber and sulfur. The air grows hot and the creature reaches for Little Alice. She wants to scream for her mama who can save her, for help, for safety, for salvation, but no sound comes, no sound comes.

Her eyes shoot open, and she is screaming. Awake now. Drenched in sweat, a two-year-old girl, and her mama is there, holding her, rocking her, saying, “It’s okay, meri jaan , it’s okay. It was just the dream. It was just the dream again.”

The dream that Little Alice has been having over and over every night since Earth Key was found.

Little Alice cries, and Shari wraps her in her arms and lifts her from her bedcovers.

“It’s okay, sweetheart. No one is going to hurt you. I will never let anyone hurt you.” And though she says it every time Little Alice has the dream, Shari doesn’t know if it’s actually true. “Nobody, sweet girl. Not now, not ever.”

ii

“How did you get it?” Sarah asks, running her finger over Jago’s jagged facial scar.

“Training,” Jago says, staring at her, watching for signs that she’s coming back to him.

It’s been four days since Sarah retrieved Earth Key from Stonehenge. Four days since Chiyoko died. Four days since Sarah shot An Liu in the head. Four days since the thing underneath the ancient stone monument sprang to life and revealed itself.

Four days since she, Sarah, killed Christopher Vanderkamp. Pulled the trigger and put a bullet in his head.

She has not been able to say his name since. Won’t even try. And no matter how many times she kisses Jago or wraps her legs around him, showers or cries or holds Earth Key in her hands, replays the message that kepler 22b broadcast over the television for the world to see, no matter how many times, Sarah can’t stop thinking of Christopher’s face. His blond hair, his beautiful green eyes, and the spark that was in them. The spark she took when she killed him.

Sarah has only spoken 27 words since Stonehenge, including these. Jago is worried about her. At the same time, he is encouraged by her.

“How exactly, Feo?” she asks, hoping that it’s a long story. Hoping that it will hold her attention, that Jago’s words will be as good a distraction as his body.

She needs to think of anything but what happened , anything but the bullet she put through his skull .

Jago obliges. “It was my third real knife fight. I was twelve, cocky. I’d won the other two easily. The first against a twenty-five-year-old ex-Player who’d lost a step, the second against one of Papi’s up-and-coming bag carriers, a giant nineteen-year-old we called Ladrillo.”

Sarah brushes her finger over the harsh rise of the scar where it dives under his jawline. “Ladrillo.” She pronounces it slowly, enjoys saying it. “What’s that mean?”

“‘Brick,’ which was exactly what he was. Heavy and hard and dumb. I feinted once and he moved. By the time he was ready to move again, the fight was over.”

Sarah lets out a halfhearted chuckle. Her first laugh since Stonehenge, her first smile. Jago continues. “My third fight was against a kid a little older than me but smaller. I’d never met him before. He’d come up from Rio. Wasn’t Peruvian. Wasn’t Olmec either.”

Jago knows that talking about himself is good for Sarah right now. Anything to get her mind away from what she did: killed her boyfriend, found Earth Key, and triggered the Event, sealing the deaths of billions. Playing, fighting, running, shooting—those would probably be better. Talking about them will have to do in the interim.

“He was a favela kid, skinny, muscles like cords wrapped around bones. Fast as an eyeblink. Didn’t say anything other than ‘Hi’ and ‘Better luck next time.’ Smart, though. A prodigy. Of blades and angles of attack. He’d been taught, but most of what he knew he was born with.”

“Sounds like you.”

“He was like me.” Jago smiles. “It was like fighting my reflection. I’d stab and he’d stab back. I’d swipe and he’d swipe back. That was how he parried, by counterattacking. He wasn’t like anyone else I’d trained against—ex-Players, Papi, no one. It was a little like fighting an animal. Quick, impeccable instincts, not so much thinking. They just attack. You ever gone toe to toe with an animal?”

“Yeah. Wolves. Those were the worst.”

“ A wolf or—”

“Wolves. Plural.”

“No guns?”

“No guns.”

“I’ve done dogs, never wolves. A mountain lion once.”

“I wish I could say I was impressed, Feo, but I’m not.”

“I already got in your pants, Alopay.” Jago tries some weak humor. “Don’t need to impress you.”

She smiles again and punches him under the sheet. Another good sign that maybe she’s coming around.

“Anyway, I couldn’t hit him. The rule was first blood and the fight’s over. See red and stop. Simple.”

“But the scar—that cut was deep.”

“ Sí . I was stupid, stepped right into it. Honestly, I was lucky. If he hadn’t got me on the face like this—it nearly took my eye, you know—he probably would have killed me.”

Sarah nods. “So—blood, red, stop. He says ‘Better luck next time’ and leaves and that’s it?”

“I had to get stitched up, but yeah. And of course, since I was training, there was no anesthesia.”

“Ha. Anesthesia. What’s that?”

Jago smiles big this time. “Exactly. Fucking Endgame.”

“Fucking Endgame is right,” Sarah says, her face betraying no emotion. She rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling. “ Was there a next time?”