James Frey - The Calling

They have no idea how much time has elapsed when the air begins to clear and smaller sounds begin to return. People are wailing in pain. Names are being called. One of them is hers.

Her father.

“Sarah. SARAH!”

“Here!” she yells. Her voice sounds muffled and distant, even to herself.

Her ears are still ringing. “I’m here!”

Her father emerges from the dust cloud. His face is covered in blood and ash. Against the filth on his face, she can see the whites of his eyes, brilliant and clear. He knows what she knows.

Endgame.

“Sarah!” Her dad stumbles toward them and falls to his knees, wrapping both of them in his arms. They cry. Their bodies heave. People scream in every direction. Sarah opens her eyes for a second and sees Reena in front of her, dazed, in shock. Her best friend’s left arm is gone above the elbow; all that remains is blood and shredded skin and jagged bone. The graduation gown has been torn from her body, but somehow her cap has stayed on. She’s covered in soot. Sarah calls, “Reena! Reena!” but Reena doesn’t hear. She disappears back into the dust, and Sarah knows that she’ll never see Reena again.

“Where’s Mom?” she whispers, her lips on her dad’s ear.

“I was with her. I don’t know.”

“The stone, it … it …”

“I know.”

“Sarah?” her mom calls out.

“Here!” the three say together.

Sarah’s mom crawls toward them. All the hair on the right side of her head is gone. Her face is burned but not too badly. When she sees them she looks so happy. Her look is different from the one she gave Sarah when she walked onto the stage.

I was giving a speech, Sarah thinks. I was giving a speech at graduation. People were happy. So happy.

“Olowa,” Simon says quietly, reaching for his wife. “Tate?” Olowa shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

An explosion in the distance.

The air starts to clear, the carnage becoming more evident. There are bodies everywhere. The Alopays and Christopher are the lucky ones. Sarah sees a head. A leg. A torso. A cap falls to the ground near them. “Sarah, it’s on. It’s on for real.”

It’s Tate, walking toward them, his arms extended. One hand is in a fist; the other holds a grapefruit-sized hunk of gold-and-green rock streaked with black veins of metal.

He is amazingly clean, as if the whole thing passed him over. He smiles. His mouth is full of blood. Tate was a Player once, but no longer. Now he looks almost excited for his sister, in spite of all that’s happened around them. All the death, all the destruction, all that they know is coming.

“I found them!” Tate is 10 feet away now. Another small explosion from somewhere. He opens his fist and puts the small piece of stone that was around her neck into the bigger multicolored rock. “It fits perfectly.”

“Nukumi,” Simon says reverently.

“Nukumi,” Sarah says, much less reverently.

“What?” Christopher asks.

Sarah says, “Nothing—”

But she is cut short as an explosion sends shards of metal flying through the air. A six-foot-long piece of steel embeds itself into the middle of Tate’s chest. He is dead. Gone. Killed in an instant. He falls backward, Sarah’s stone pendant and the piece of green-veined rock still in his hand. Her mother screams; her father yells, “No!”

Sarah cannot speak. Christopher stares in shock. Blood oozes out of Tate’s chest. His eyes are open and staring, lifeless, to the sky. His feet twitch, the last bits of life leaving him. But the stone and the pendant, they are safe.

This is not accidental.

The stones have meaning.

Carry a message.

This is Endgame.

Jago Tlaloc’s sneakers crunch across broken glass. It is night and the streetlights are out. Sirens wail in the distance, but otherwise Juliaca is quiet. It was chaos before, when Jago first headed for the crater in the city center to claim what had been sent for him. In the madness, survivors poured into the streets, shattering shop windows, taking whatever they wanted.

The looting will not sit well with Jago’s father, who runs protection for many of the local businesses. But Jago does not blame his people. Let them enjoy some comforts now, while there is still time. Jago has a treasure of his own: the stone, still warm, wrapped in his satchel and tossed over his shoulder.

A hot wind rushes through the buildings, carrying ash and the smell of fire. They call Juliaca the Windy City of Peru for good reason. Unlike many of his people, Jago has traveled well beyond the city limits. He has killed at least twice on every continent, and still he finds it strange to visit a place where the wind is missing.

Jago is the Player of the 21st line. Born to Guitarrero and Hayu Marca just over 19 years ago. Once Players themselves, several years apart, his parents now run this part of the city. From the legitimate businesses to the illicit materials that flow through the neighborhood’s back alleys, his parents take a cut of everything. They are also philanthropists, in a way, turning around their often ill-gotten money to open schools and maintain hospitals. The law does not touch them, refuses to come near them; the Tlaloc family is too much of a resource. In just a few more months, Jago would have become ineligible and joined his parents in the family business. Yet all empires must crumble.

A trio of shadows peels from the mouth of a nearby alley. The figures block the sidewalk in front of Jago, looking wolfish and dangerous. “What you got there, my friend?” hisses one of the shadows, nodding at Jago’s satchel.

In response, Jago flashes his teeth, which are perfectly straight and white. His maxillary lateral incisors are each capped with gold, and each inset with a small diamond. These gems glint in the moonlight. The three scavengers shrink back. “Sorry, Feo,” says the leader, “we didn’t recognize you.”

They should be scared, but not of Jago or the power of his family, though Jago is strong and merciless, and his family more so. They should be scared of what is to come. They don’t know it, but Jago is the only hope these people have. Once, the power of his family was enough to keep this neighborhood and its people alive and happy. Now that responsibility falls to Jago.

He passes by the thugs without a word. He is lost in thoughts of the 11 other Players, scattered around the world, each with a meteor of their own. He wonders what they will be like, what lines they come from. For the lines do not know the other lines. They cannot know. Not until the Calling.

And the Calling is coming.

Will some be stronger than him? Smarter? Will one even be uglier? Perhaps, but it is no matter.

Because Jago knows that he can, and will, kill them all.

Not the first not the last. vii

Baitsakhan wants it, and he’s going to get it.

He rides hard south into the Gobi Desert with his twin cousins, Bat and Bold, both 12.5, and his brother, Jalair, 24.55.

Baitsakhan has been 13 for 7.23456 days and is just eligible for Endgame.

He is happy about this.

Very happy.

The meteor fell in the middle of the night two days ago in the vast central nothingness of the Mongolian steppe. A small group of old yak herders saw it, and they called it in to Baitsakhan’s grandfather Suhkbataar, who told them to leave it alone or they would be sorry. The herders listened. Everyone in the steppe knows to listen to Suhkbataar in strange matters like these.