Sky Key

Because of Endgame.

He exits onto Cromwell Road and pulls his hood over his head. Cromwell, Jago thinks. The hated puritanical lord protector of the English Commonwealth, the terror of the interregnum. A man so loathed and reviled that King Charles II had his body exhumed so it could be killed all over again. The body was beheaded and the head placed on a pole outside Westminster Hall, where it stayed for years, getting picked at and spat on and cursed until there was nothing but a skull. That head rotted away not more than a couple kilometers from where Jago walks on this night. On this road named after the usurper.

This is what they’re fighting for. To keep devils like Cromwell and libertine kings like Charles II and hate and power and politics alive and well on Earth.

He’s begun to wonder if it’s even worth it.

But he can’t wonder. Not allowed to. “Jugadores no se preguntan,” Papi would say if he could hear Jago’s thoughts. “Jugadores juegan.”

Sí.

Jugadores juegan.

Jago sticks his hands in his pockets and walks toward Gloucester Road. A man 15 centimeters taller and 20 kilograms heavier than him wheels around the corner and slams into Jago’s shoulder. Jago does a half spin, keeps his hands in his pockets, barely looks up.

“Oi, watch it!” the man says. He smells like beer and anger. He’s having a bad night and looking for a fight.

“Sorry, mate,” Jago replies, imitating the South London accent, moving on.

“You havin’ a laugh?” the man asks. “Tryna be hard?”

Without warning, the man swings a fist the size of a toaster at Jago’s face. Jago leans backward, the fist breezes past his nose. The man swings again, but Jago sidesteps.

“A right fast little twat,” the man blurts. “Take your hands out your pockets, mate. Stop fuckin’ about.”

Jago smiles, flashes his diamond-studded teeth instead. “Don’t need to.”

The man steps forward and Jago dances toward him, slamming his heel onto one of the man’s feet. The man cries out and tries to grab him, but Jago kicks the man’s stomach. The man doubles over. Jago’s hands are still in his pockets. He turns to walk away, toward the all-night Burger King down the street, to get a couple of bacon cheeseburgers. Players need to eat. Even if one of them claims to be done with Playing. Jago hears the man quickly pull something out of his pocket. Without turning to look Jago says, “You should put that knife away.”

The man freezes. “How’d ya know I got a knife?”

“Heard it. Smelled it.”

“Bollocks,” the man whispers, surging forward.

Jago still doesn’t bother to take his hands out of his pockets. The silver metal flashes in the lamplight. Jago lifts a leg and kicks straight back, hitting the man in the ribs. The knife misses Jago as he folds forward and lifts his foot and cracks the man in the chin. Then Jago brings his foot down on the man’s knife hand. His wrist slams into the ground, the instep of Jago’s shoe on top of it. The knife comes free. Jago flicks it away with the toe of his shoe. It falls over the edge of the curb and clatters down a drain. The man moans. This skinny shit beat him without even taking his hands out of his pockets.

Jago smiles, spins, crosses the street.

Burger King.

Sí.

Jugadores juegan.

But they also need to eat.

Odem Pit’dah Bareket

Nofekh Sapir Yahalom

Leshem Shevo Ahlamah

Tarshish Shoham Yashfeh

(#u9a339b8b-ac7f-5cd0-a9d0-0182246976df)

Hilal moans while he sleeps. Whimpers and shakes. His head, face, right shoulder, and arm are burned from the incendiary grenade the Nabataean lobbed at him as he retreated underground.

Eben pulled him to safety. Threw blankets on him, snuffed out the flames, tried to calm him, injected him with morphine.

Hilal stopped screaming.

The power was out when the attack came, despite the backup systems. Eben called Nabril in Addis on a hand-crank radio, and Nabril said the power failure was the result of a solar flare. A huge one. One like he’d never seen before. The strange thing was that it was concentrated there, on Aksum, just at the moment that Hilal was writing his message to the other Players. Just as the Donghu and the Nabataean knocked on the hut’s door. All of which was impossible. Solar flares disrupt wide areas, entire continents. They don’t have pinpoint accuracy. They aren’t aimed.

Impossible.

Impossible, except for the Makers.

Eben considered this in the immediate aftermath of the ambush as he attended Hilal by lamplight. Eben had two Nethinim assistants, both mutes. They placed Hilal on a stretcher, hooked him up to an IV, took him seven levels beneath the surface of the ancient church. Eben and the Nethinim bathed Hilal in goat’s milk. The white liquid turned pink. Charred flecks of skin floated to the surface.

They prayed silently as they worked. As they tended. As they saved. Bubbling skin. The crisp, sulfuric smell of disintegrated hair. The creamy waft of the milk-and-blood mixture underneath.

Eben cried quietly. Hilal had been the most beautiful of any Aksumite Player in 1,000 years, since the legendary female Player Elin Bakhara-al-Poru. Hilal had the blue eyes, the perfect, smooth complexion, the straight white teeth, the high cheekbones, the flat nose and perfectly round nostrils, the square chin, and the tightly curled hair that framed his smooth boyish face. He looked like a god. All gone now. Burned away. Hilal ibn Isa al-Salt would never be beautiful again.

Eben sent for a surgeon from Cairo to perform three skin grafts. An eye doctor came from Tunis to try to save Hilal’s right eye. The grafts were successful from a medical standpoint, but Hilal will always be gruesome. A patchwork of the formerly beautiful boy. The right eye was saved, but his vision will surely be affected. And it is no longer blue. Now it is red. All of it save the pupil, which is milky white.

“It will never go back,” the eye doctor said.

He was so beautiful. A king for angels. But now. Now he appears to be half a devil.

Eben thinks: But he is our devil.

It’s been nearly a week since the attack. Eben kneels next to Hilal in a plain stone bedchamber. A small wooden cross over the bed frame. A white porcelain sink against one wall. Some pegs for robes. A small chest containing fresh sheets and bandages. A hook on the headboard for the IV. There is a small cart with a heart rate monitor, wire leads, and electrodes. The Nethinim—both of them tall and strong, one a man, one a woman—stand attendant, silent, armed, just outside the door.

Hilal has slept the entire time. He occasionally moans, whimpers, shakes. He is still on morphine, but Eben is already weaning him. Hilal has learned to live with pain, and while this pain will be more intense and permanent than what has come before, if Hilal is to continue with Endgame, then he is going to have to acclimate.

To more pain. To disfigurement. To his new body.

If he is not going to continue, then Eben needs to know. And for that, Hilal needs his mind to be clear.

So he is being weaned.

While Hilal has slept, Eben has prayed. Meditated. Remembered Hilal’s words: I could be wrong, Hilal said before the morphine took him. The Event could be inevitable.

Eben knows this is not the case. Not after what the being said on the television. Not after the solar flare that pinpointed Aksum. The Makers are intervening. The only other possibility is that the Corrupted One somehow did it. The being that the Aksumites have been searching for all these centuries. Searching for in vain. The one called Ea.

But even the Corrupted One does not have the power to control the sun.