Читать книгу Descendant - Джеймс Фрей, James Frey, Nils Johnson-Shelton - Страница 6

This is the story Aisling Kopp, Player of the 3rd line, does not know.

This is the story Aisling Kopp will never know, because the only one who could tell it is dead.

This is the story of her life and her line—the story of how she began and how the world will end.

This is the story of a hero and a traitor, neither of them certain which is which.

This is the story before the story.

Before Aisling.

The end:

Declan Kopp stands at the mouth of the cave, a 2,500-year-old sword in his hand. The heft of it calms him. The familiar grip reminds him of a time when the Falcata was rightfully his to wield, a simpler time, when he could lay its blade against flesh and enjoy the kill.

A time before Aisling was alive, a time before Lorelei was dead, a time when he was young and foolish and the sword was a symbol of all things just and good.

Now it’s nothing but a symbol of the lines he’s crossed.

The people he’s betrayed.

The home he’s left behind and the family to which he can never return.

The ancient sword, like the polished stone in his pocket, like the baby whimpering in the dark depths of the cave, is a precious stolen good.

Not his to take—but taken nonetheless.

That’s what they would say, at least.

They: the High Council. The La Tène Player. His father.

Everyone who matters to him, or once did.

Once, he had so much in his life. Family, love, hope—the belief that his life’s mission was just and his future was fated. Once, he had certainty.

Now he has only his stolen child, and her birthright.

He has the Falcata, whose razor-sharp blade has taken 3,890 lives and awaits its next kill.

And he has a few precious hours, or maybe minutes, before they come for him and try to reclaim what he’s stolen—before he and the sword make their last stand.

The child’s cries echo through the dark.

“Peace, Aisling,” he calls to her. “Daddy’s here. Daddy will protect you, I promise.”

She’s too young to understand—and too young to recognize the lie. He can’t promise to protect her. Only to try.

He’s given up everything, trying to save his daughter from her fate—but still it’s not enough. The cave is surrounded. There’s no way out. No way down the mountain, not for him. The final battle is coming, and he will not survive it. He knows that.

He’s lured them here, knowing that.

They will pursue him wherever he goes. He finally understands: There is no safe place for him and his daughter, not in this world. He fought; he lost. Letting them follow him here is his last, final, desperate effort to make them see the truth.

If they see it—if he can make them see it—everything he’s given up will be worth it. Even his life.

The child cries and cries.

Declan can’t stand the sound of it.

He turns his back to the cave opening, even though he knows never to turn your back on the enemy.

He retreats into the dark, following the sound of his daughter’s cries, and lifts the squirming child into his arms.

At his touch, she quiets. He kisses her forehead, makes soothing noises, inhales the scent of her soft red hair, wonders if she will remember him.

If she will ever know how she came to be here on this lonely mountain, or why.

If she will ever forgive him for what he’s done, and the things he has wrought.

Aisling is still in his arms when they come for him.

Two of them, their headlamps sweeping across the dank cave walls. He could hide in the shadows, for just a little longer, but there’s no point. He’s come here to face them.

To try, one last time, to show them the truth.

“We know you’re in here, Declan.” It’s a young woman’s voice—Molly, his niece, who he’s known since she was born. The La Tène Player. He knows exactly how deadly she is; he trained her himself. “Show yourself.”

Declan does as he’s told, steps into the beam of light. Aisling squints and, recognizing Molly and the gray-haired man by her side, giggles and waves.

“We don’t want to hurt you,” Declan’s father says, lifting a rifle to his shoulder. “Just give us the child.”

The beginning:

Sometimes, Declan thinks, it began the day his inbox pinged with the strange anonymous message. You’ve been lied to, it said, no more than that, and he felt only a mild twinge of curiosity before sending it to the trash. Thinking spammers got more inventive every day. Thinking he was too clever to believe anyone’s lies.

Maybe it began the day his curiosity got the better of him, and he finally responded to one of the strange messages.

Or the day he stood in dark woods, met the eyes of a cloaked stranger who told him everything he’d ever believed in was a lie. Don’t you ever want to know why you fight, what you fight for? the woman asked, before melting back into the shadows, and for the first time, Declan did.

Maybe, he sometimes thinks, it began long before, on the day he first took his father’s rifle into his scrawny young arms, aimed at a paper target, pulled the trigger. “You will make a fine Player,” his father said, ruffling the fire-red hair that marked him as a Kopp. “You’ll make me proud.”

But maybe it didn’t really begin until he was a father himself. Until he understood what it meant to love unconditionally, with his whole self, to know he would give his life for his daughter. Until the High Council decreed that his infant daughter would be the Player once she came of age. Then he knew the time for waiting, for questioning, was over.

It was the time to act.

He managed to keep it together until the end of the High Council’s meeting, knowing there was no point in arguing. He’s aware of what they think of him: that he’s bitter and washed up, that he was warped by his tenure as a Player, by the fact that Endgame never happened. Some of them—his father among them—think he’s mad. So he smiled and nodded as if he were happy they wanted to turn his daughter into their puppet, an agent of needless death.

Then he hailed a taxi he couldn’t afford and held his breath as it sped down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, until the towers of Downtown Brooklyn came into sight and with them the dingy brownstone where his wife was waiting.

Now here he is, standing before the door of his apartment, taking a deep breath and preparing to change their lives forever. Thinking, How did I get here?

But he knows exactly how he got here.

And he knows what has to happen next.

Declan bursts into the apartment and finally lets his panic off the leash. “Pack everything!” he booms, into the tiny bedroom, where his money and passports are stashed, and his wife and little Aisling are sound asleep.

“Declan?” Lorelei blinks groggily on the bed, baby napping on her chest. She sleeps whenever the baby sleeps, which is never enough for either of them. “Quiet, hon. You’ll wake her.”

“We’ve got to go,” Declan says, in a quieter voice. He’s ripping through their tiny closet, throwing shirts and dresses haphazardly into a suitcase. “Now.”

“Go? Go where? It’s nearly midnight.” Gently, Lorelei settles Aisling into her crib. She goes to her husband, stands behind him, and wraps her arms around his waist, lets him feel her slow, steady breathing, the rhythm of her heartbeat. “Take a breath, Declan.”

Declan breathes.

“Now, tell me what happened.”

Declan turns to face Lorelei, the love of his life, the outsider who, for love of him, adopted his traditions and his people as her own. She did it because he asked her to—and now, because of that, because of him, their daughter is in danger.

This is all his fault, he thinks, panic blooming again.

“Declan.” She can always tell when he’s spinning out of control.

She’s always been the only one who can stop him.

She fixes her gaze on him, and, for just a moment, he lets himself get lost in her sea-gray eyes.

“It’s going to be okay,” she says, in soft, measured tones.

He knows he’s no longer the man she fell in love with, the man she married.

That man was full of righteous conviction, strong and proud; that man had been raised to believe he could save the world.

“Whatever it is this time, we can handle it,” she says, pressing a smooth palm to his stubbled cheek.

She married that Declan—and got saddled with this one instead, till death do they part. Erratic, paranoid, afraid of shadows, consumed by guilt. Shamed. Obsessed. Broken.

“Now, tell me what happened,” she says, once his breathing finally draws even with hers and his panic temporarily abates.

When he met her, he thought Lorelei was the miracle of his life.

Now he knows that the true miracle is that she still loves him, even now. But that might change when he answers her question. When she understands what loving him means for Aisling.

“The High Council has named the next generation’s Player,” Declan says. He takes his wife’s hand in his own, holds tight. “They’ve named our Aisling.”

She doesn’t gasp.

She doesn’t scream.

She doesn’t yank her hand away and castigate him for drawing her into his nightmare.

She only nods and says, “Okay. So what does that mean?”

“What does it mean?” He’s raging again. He needs to make her understand. “It means we have to get out of here, now. Disappear—go somewhere they can never find us.”

“Isn’t that a little dramatic, Declan?”

“Lor, are you hearing me? They want her to be the Player. They want to turn her into a soldier, brainwash her into this Endgame madness, just as they did me.”

“I’m not saying I want that either,” she says. “But can’t we just say no?”

Declan sighs. Were it only that easy. “It’s not like this is a game of tag and they decided she’s it,” he says. “This isn’t a game you can just decide not to play.”

The High Council doesn’t ask; the High Council commands.

Declan knew it was a possibility, of course. The Player has always been a Kopp, for as long as anyone can remember. But there are so many of them now, little Kopp children running around Queens, so many cousins he can’t remember all their names. What were the odds they would choose Aisling? They thought Declan an apostate, a madman—what were the odds they would name his daughter the Player?

“We don’t like it any more than you do,” the High Council’s leader told him at the meeting. “But the stones have spoken.”

“Screw the stones!” he shouted.

The High Council looked scandalized, all of them but his father, who simply looked tired. Pop was the first to give up on him, the first to accept that Declan had turned his back on his people. Or at least that was how Pop saw it. The move to Brooklyn from Queens, the railing against Endgame, the marriage to an outsider, the trips all over the world in search of answers to questions he wasn’t supposed to ask—Pop thinks Declan has rejected his family, his line, his sacred duties. Pop doesn’t understand, none of them do, that Declan loves his family and his people fiercely. He’s too old to be their Player, but he still sees himself as their warrior, charged with their protection. That’s why he fights them so hard: not because he’s a traitor, but because he’s loyal.

“The High Council has made its decision,” Pop said. “We journeyed to Stonehenge and asked our question. The stones gave us their answer, and the answer is Aisling.”

A gaggle of old men measuring angles of light and lengths of shadow, their protractors consigning Declan’s daughter to a useless life of blood. He wanted to scream, to overturn the table, to seize the Falcata from its place of honor on the council wall and slash off their heads—but none of that would help Aisling. So instead he pretended to accept it, and came home to do what needed to be done.

“If they want her to Play, she’ll Play,” Declan tells Lorelei. “Whatever we want, whatever she wants, they won’t care. They’ll turn her into a killer. They’ll make her help the gods with their genocide. And if she dies, they’ll shrug and pretend to care, and then they’ll throw another poor child to the wolves.”

What he doesn’t tell Lorelei, has never told Lorelei, is what being the Player really means: how much blood has been spilled, even without Endgame. So much death, all of it justified as “necessary to protect the line,” necessary to prepare for Endgame. Declan has killed 23 people, and he remembers every single one of their faces. Just as vividly, he remembers the face of the current Player when Declan helped her make her first kill—the face of a 13-year-old who has learned what she’s capable of, who’s drawn blood and murdered her childhood and is equal parts terrified and proud. These are the faces he sees in his dreams every night; this is the fate—guilt, sorrow, regret, obsession—he wants to spare his daughter. Terrible to imagine that she too will someday be tortured by the faces of those she’s killed.

Even worse to imagine that she won’t be.

“Declan, that’s your family you’re talking about,” Lorelei says. She loves his family, always has; she has none of her own. “Surely, if we just tell them how we feel, they’ll understand—”

He shakes his head.

He met Lorelei when they were both 22 years old. She was freshly out of college; he was adjusting to post-Player life, trying to decide what to do with himself for the next 50 years. He told her stories of his life before they met, but he spared her most of the gory details. He didn’t want her to see that side of him, the soldier who would do whatever was necessary to survive. He regrets that now.

“Fine, Declan,” she says. “If you say that this is a problem, then I trust you—but why is it a problem we need to solve now? Aisling is still a baby—that gives us more than twelve years to figure this out.”

“No. No!” As soon as the stones choose their Player, the training begins. Everything begins. They’ll mold Aisling into what they want her to be—and they will always be watching.

“We can’t risk waiting,” he says. “We’ve got a small window of opportunity here, maybe. They won’t expect us to make a move this quickly. That’s our only chance.”

“So what are we supposed to do, Declan?” She’s starting to sound irritated. “You want me to quit my job, abandon our family, take off with you for god-knows-where? Where will we go? How will we support ourselves? How long do we have to stay away? Have you thought any of this through?”

“We’ll figure it out as we go,” he says. Another thing Lorelei doesn’t know: he has plenty of money, enough to support them for the rest of their lives. When he disavowed Endgame, he also disavowed the money he’d been gifted for serving his line all those years as the Player. Blood money, he thought. He and Lorelei have been raising their daughter in near poverty, but that was by choice, not necessity. Declan’s choice, one of many he made without telling his wife. He regrets that now. He regrets so much. “We always figure it out.”

She shakes her head. “Pop was right,” she says. “I’ve let this all go too far. I’ve let you get carried away.”

“You talked to Pop about me? About this?”

“He’s worried about you, Declan. He thought maybe you needed some time away, a rest—”

“I know what he thinks,” Declan snaps. His father wants to send him back to the old country, for what he calls rehabilitation. But Declan has heard stories of the isolated camp in the Alps where faithless members of the line are sent. None of them ever come back. “He thinks I’ve lost my mind.”

“You’re not exactly sounding like a beacon of sanity right now, honey.”

“Endgame is a lie, Lorelei. You know that.”

“I know you believe that.”

With those words, he knows he’s lost her.

“Can we take a little time?” she asks. “Sleep on it, maybe talk more in the morning?”

Declan gazes at her, this woman to whom he’s sworn his lifelong love. The woman he fell in love with the first time he saw her, hunched over a book in an uptown branch of the New York Public Library, strands of hair curling over her face. “Of course we can,” he tells her. “We can talk about it as much as you want. You’re right, we shouldn’t make a rash decision. We won’t do anything until we both agree it’s the right thing to do.”

“You promise?”

He kisses her, takes her in his arms, and holds on like she’s a buoy in rough seas, the only thing that can keep him from drowning. “I promise,” he tells her.

Then he waits for her to fall back asleep, and kidnaps their daughter.

He tells himself it can’t be kidnapping, because Aisling belongs to him as much as she belongs to her mother.

But he knows better.

Declan drives all night with Aisling sleeping in the backseat. They can’t leave the country yet, not until he puts together a fake passport for the baby. But he can at least put as much distance as possible between himself and his family. He hears the Amber Alert on the radio, but by that time he’s ditched the car for a hot-wired Pontiac and is halfway to North Carolina. When he’s too exhausted to keep his eyes open, he checks them into a motel, paying in cash. He’s taken $5,000 from the safe at the back of the closet, which should get them through the first few hurdles of the journey. Declan has accounts in banks all over the world, accounts that Lorelei doesn’t know about, and he supposes he should feel proud of himself that he’s so prepared. But he’s not proud, only profoundly sad that he’s so good at keeping secrets from the woman he loves. This is exactly the life he doesn’t want for Aisling.

He never wants her to learn not to trust.

He plays with Aisling on the dingy motel carpet while the press conference plays on TV in the background. Lorelei has wasted no time calling the cops on him. He can’t blame her.

He’s glad of it, actually, because he knows the High Council would prefer to conduct their search in secret. Having police bumbling around and getting in their way will only help Declan.

Still, he can’t stand to hear the pain in Lorelei’s voice.

“Please, Declan, bring her home,” she says, before a crowd of eager reporters. Aisling looks up at the sound of her mother’s voice, reaching eagerly for the TV screen. “We can figure this out together, if you just bring her home.”

He wonders what she’s told the police. Probably that her husband’s gone off his rocker.

He hasn’t given up on her yet. Now that she knows he’s serious, maybe she can still be convinced.

Declan gathers Aisling to his chest, trying to soothe her to sleep. He lets his eyes close, and he dreams of Lorelei’s tears.

His training taught him to get by on only a few hours of sleep, so it’s not long before they’re on the road again. Declan has a contact in West Virginia who’s more than happy to make the baby a new passport, for the right price. While he’s waiting for it to be ready, he and Aisling duck into a drugstore. He buys a pink stuffed bunny nearly as big as her head for her and a cheap burner phone for himself.

It’s a risk, but it’s one he has to take.

He dials Lorelei’s number.

“Declan.” She breathes his name into the phone, as if she’s afraid to scare him away. “Declan, what have you done?”

“I’m sorry.” He swallows hard, fights back the tears, presses his lips to Aisling’s forehead, reminding himself why he’s doing this, why he must. “I’m so sorry.”

“Is she okay?” Lorelei asks. “Please, just tell me that.”

“She’s fine. Of course she’s fine. You know I would never let anyone hurt her.”

“I don’t know anything anymore.”

“I can’t come home, Lorelei. I can’t bring her back. It’s too dangerous.”

“Then tell me where you are.”

“So you can send the cops for me? Or Pop?”

“So I can come to you,” Lorelei says. “I know you, Declan. If you want to take Aisling away, hide her where no one will ever find her, you can do it. So you win, okay? I can’t be away from her. Tell me where you are, and I’ll come with you. Wherever you want to go, whatever you need to do. I’ll go. I’ll do it. Just tell me. Trust me.”

Her voice is full of pain—and love.

“What do you think?” Declan whispers to Aisling, ruffling her red hair. “Can we trust Mommy?”

At the word, Aisling bursts into tears. It’s the only answer he needs.

“Okay,” Declan tells Lorelei, hoping he’s not making the biggest mistake of his life. “Get a pen and paper, and I’ll tell you where to find us.”

He trusts his wife.

But he also knows his wife.

“Stay quiet, little girl,” he murmurs to Aisling as he nestles her carrier beneath a tree. She sucks at her pacifier and, he hopes, dreams of happier days. Declan has stationed them on an overlook that gives him a perfect sight line into the valley. Down there, in a deserted stretch of field in the heart of the Ozarks, Lorelei will come for her daughter. He lies flat on his stomach, camouflaged by the weeds, and raises the binoculars.

He’s been careful.

He chose a place he knows like the back of his hand, an open field easily surveilled from the surrounding hillside.

This oasis of wilderness is special to him; it’s where Le Fond first made face-to-face contact with him. Le Fond is his own name for the network of shadow warriors, a small joke with himself: La Tène means “the shallows,” so he thinks of these strange messages from the dark as “the deep.” With few exceptions, they exist for him as whispers, anonymous texts, faces hidden by cloaks and masks.

The young woman who met him here wouldn’t reveal her name or background, wouldn’t explain how she’d come to know about Endgame or why she’d chosen Declan to recruit. “We watch all the Players,” she said. “We saw something in you.”

At the time, he’d taken it as an insult. Had Le Fond seen some fault in him that he didn’t even know was there, some evidence that his faith was weak, that he would be willing to betray his cause?

It’s only slowly, as he follows the bread-crumb trail around the world, that he begins to see. As he searches through artifacts, discovers long-lost documents by long-dead Players of the La Tène line, as he follows their questioning and their clues back and back through the ages, as he finds, finally, the secret cave with its astonishing paintings, he understands. What Le Fond saw in him wasn’t weakness; it was strength—the strength of loyalty and conviction that would drive him straight back to Queens, send him marching into the High Council chambers, desperate to share what he learned. To open their eyes to the truth: that Endgame is a cruel joke of the gods, that the Player’s true role is to kick-start the apocalypse, that this is an endless cycle that the lines can only end by choosing not to Play. That the power is in their hands, if only they decide to use it.

It didn’t occur to him that he’d be laughed out of the room.

Or that when they stopped laughing, they would strip him of his duties in the line and brand him as a heretic.

It’s not just what they want to do to Aisling that scares him.

It’s the worry that, fearing his influence, they’ll never let her see him again.

This patch of overgrown wilderness has lodged itself into his heart; this was where his eyes were first opened. Maybe, he thinks, it will be a lucky spot, and he can open Lorelei’s eyes too.

He holds the binoculars steady.

He waits.

And he sighs with disappointment, but not surprise, when Lorelei arrives at the coordinates—flanked by his father and the La Tène Player. She’s betrayed him, just as he knew she would, and he can’t even hold it against her.

She’s doing what she believes is best for her daughter.

He loves her all the more for that.

Declan’s set up a listening relay, a bug in the meadow so he can hear what’s said down in the valley and speak if need be. He can hear his wife’s confusion.

“Where is he?” she says, panic in her voice. “He said he’d be here. I don’t understand. He wouldn’t lie to me. Not about this.”

“Oh, he’s here somewhere,” Pop says, gazing into the hills. His eyes seem to alight on Declan’s hiding spot, and though Declan knows it’s impossible, he can’t shake the feeling that his father sees straight through the brush, is glaring straight at him.

“You are, aren’t you?” Pop says. “I know you, son. You’re watching us. Listening to us. Don’t blame Lorelei for wanting what’s best for you. We all want what’s best for you.”

“Declan, if you can hear me . . .” Lorelei sounds hesitant, like she’s starting to wonder whether Pop has gone as crazy as his son. “Stop hiding and come deal with this like a grown-up. If you’ll just be reasonable—”

She gasps as the Player seizes her. A gun materializes in the Player’s hand, its muzzle pressed to Lorelei’s head.

Declan stops breathing.

Molly is only 17 years old, and she’s known Lorelei since she was a child. Lorelei once babysat for her, and Molly in turn has babysat for Aisling. Molly and Lorelei have gone shopping together; they’ve ridden the carousel in Central Park together; they’ve sipped frozen hot chocolate and dunked churros into caramel sauce; they’ve watched terrible movies on rainy days; they’ve been the best kind of family to each other. And Declan has no doubt that if Molly thought it was necessary, she would pull the trigger without hesitation.

“You know I’ll do it, Declan,” Molly says calmly. The listening device is sensitive: he can hear Lorelei’s rapid and frightened breathing. “You’re the one who taught me how to be ruthless.”

Declan trained her to shoot. Declan was with her for her first kill. He steadied her, whispered in her ear all the lies he once believed, about how Playing called for blood, how killing could be righteous when in service to the line and the game. He created her, as his father had created him. Thousands of years of cruel lies, all come down to this: A killer he made. A woman he loves. A daughter he’s sworn to protect. A gun.

“I’m sorry, Declan,” his father says. Declan’s heart breaks at the sound of his voice, so disappointed—so hard. “You’ve left us no choice.”

“You want her to live, show yourself,” Molly adds in a hard voice. “Now.”

“Please,” Lorelei murmurs. “Please, Molly, don’t.”

He spent so many years learning how to shut down his feelings, to do what needs to be done. But now, when it matters most, his love and fear threaten to overwhelm him.

He tries to clear his head. Aisling and Lorelei need him focused.

They need him.

He swaddles the pink bunny in Aisling’s blanket and presses it to his chest. He kisses his daughter good-bye. “I’ll be back,” he says, but he doesn’t promise. He tries never to make promises he can’t keep.

“Don’t hurt her,” he says into his comm. Then, just in case, shouts it as loud as he can, his voice booming across the green. “We’re coming!”

Then he descends into the valley, taking a circuitous, untraceable route down.

“Give me the child,” Pop says as soon as he comes into view.

Just seeing his father makes Declan nearly lose his grip on his emotions again. For so many years, Declan has excused the man’s obstinance, telling himself that his father is trying to do the right thing. That Pop believes his stubbornness is in service to a higher cause, and that even wrong, there is virtue in loyalty and steadfastness, in Pop’s commitment to his people and their beliefs. But no more. Here is the man who raised him, swore to love him—the man who is willing to put Lorelei’s life at risk, to sacrifice his beloved granddaughter, all for a lie. “No.”

“You’d risk your wife for this insane delusion of yours?”

“Endgame is a lie,” Declan says, fury rising. How many times has he tried to force his father to face the truth, and how many times has his father refused to listen? “If you would just hear me for once—”

“I’ve listened to enough of your bullshit!” Pop snaps. “We all have, and I can’t let you humiliate yourself anymore.”

“You mean humiliate you—”

“I mean disgrace your family and your line and yourself!”

Lorelei is murmuring something, soft and urgent, trying to convince them all to calm down, to lay down their arms, but Declan and his father are too focused on each other, too angry, both of them too determined to finally win this argument they’ve been waging for years, both of them so certain, both of them so hurt, both of them so lost without each other, neither of them hearing Molly when she snaps, “Enough!” and makes a move to reach for Declan’s bundled blanket and Lorelei won’t let her lay hands on the child and fights free of her grip and there’s a struggle and a shout and then instincts kick in, a mother lunging for her child, a Player fighting for her line, and a trigger is pulled and a shot echoes, and only then do Declan and his father fall silent, and see.

Lorelei, on the ground.

Lorelei, bleeding.

Lorelei, eyes open to the sky, unseeing.

Lorelei, gone.

Molly drops to her side, screaming. “I didn’t mean to,” she says, over and over again. “It wasn’t supposed to go like that.”

Declan lets the blanket drop from his arms. The bunny rolls in the grass, lands a few feet away from the pool of blood.

Pop looks back and forth between his son and his daughter-in-law, between the living and the dead, frozen in between. “Son,” he says. “I’m—”

But Declan will never know what he is: Sorry. Not sorry. Tired of blood. Thirsty for more.

Declan no longer cares.

Declan cares for nothing now but his daughter.

He turns his back on his father. His Player. His lovely, raven-haired miracle bleeding into the grass.

He runs.

Declan doesn’t know how to tell Aisling what happened to her mother. Not now, when she’s too young to understand—and not later, when she will have questions that he can’t answer. Questions about the choices he’s made, and the mistakes.

He doesn’t know who to blame.

He can’t help blaming himself.

He spirits Aisling away from the Ozarks and drives her into the heart of the Mississippi delta. Deep in the swampland, miles from civilization, an old woman lives in a shack, like a fairytale crone. She speaks with the thick accent of the old world, and wraps him and Aisling in gnarled arms when she finds him on the doorstep.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she says. Her name is Agatha, and she claims to have the Sight. Declan doesn’t believe in such things, but there’s a fire roaring in the hearth and stew boiling on the stove, and the couch is made up as a bed. He stumbles in gratefully, allowing Agatha to take the child from his arms.

He feels empty without her weight.

“It’s happened, then?” Agatha says, her voice a rough croak. “They’ve designated her as a Player, and you took her away?”

“The Sight?” Declan says, skeptically.

“The evening news,” Agatha says. “I extrapolated.”

Agatha is La Tène, like him, which is why he is allowed to know her name, see her face. And like him, Agatha is an apostate, a traitor, a nonbeliever. He grew up hearing tales of her, a bogeyman invented to scare the children: ask too many questions, the wrong kind of questions, and you’ll be sent into the wilderness, where Agatha the witch will find you and gobble you up. Agatha has been with Le Fond for longer than Declan has been alive.

She’s lived in hiding for decades, because the La Tène have never stopped hunting for her and the ancient scriptures that she stole from the archive.

Agatha blazed the beginning of the trail that Declan has been following.

She discovered the first clues that Endgame wasn’t what it seemed, in the words of their very own forebears—and as a reward she will live out the rest of her days in lonely exile.

She can be trusted.

“She’s gone,” Declan says. It hurts to speak the words aloud. “Lorelei. They killed her.”

Agatha says nothing for a long moment. Her expression never changes. Then, though he hasn’t asked yet: “Yes, you can leave the child here with me for as long as you need. Until it’s safe. Do what you need to do.”

What he needs to do.

Go north.

North as far as Canada, where he can slip across the New York border unseen, then south again as far as the city, his city, where he found the happiness he will never have again.

Dye his hair, turn telltale red into mousy brown.

Disguise his face with false nose and beard.

Return to Queens.

Watch his people from the crowds and the shadows. Watch his father. Watch his Player.

Simmer with rage.

Burn.

Burn.

He could kill them, all of them, easily. They’re not expecting him to return. They’re not on guard. He could slip through Pop’s window in the dark of night, slit his throat while the old man snores in his Barcalounger, Honeymooners reruns droning on the ancient TV. He could break into the deli across the street from Molly’s apartment, aim his sniper rifle at her window, send a bullet into her head while she sips her morning tea. Or he could nestle an explosive in the brakes of Molly’s mother’s car, turn her into a ball of fire on the Queensboro Bridge. He could assassinate the High Council one by one. But first take out everyone they love, make them watch. Spatter them with blood.

An eye for an eye.

A loss for a loss.

Declan’s blood is ice; his heart is a stone. He could do it. He could do anything.

But he holds himself back.

Not for the La Tène line or for the dying embers of family loyalty, not for the sake of his humanity.

They robbed him of that, his father, his trainers. They made him a killer, and it’s only justice that they reap the benefits.

He holds back for Aisling.

Someday she will be old enough to know him.

He will be a man she deserves to love. He’s come back here partly to prove to himself that he can be. That in the face of the greatest temptation, he can show restraint. That he’s not simply a soldier and a killer.

Still, he burns.

And now they will burn.

They’ve posted guards in front of his old apartment; he knocks one out with an efficient choke hold and the other with a blow to the head, then lets himself in to retrieve what he needs: a bottle of Lorelei’s perfume, so he can breathe her in when he needs to remember. His journal, a record of every step of his journey from ignorance to acceptance, which he’d left behind in hopes that Pop and Lorelei might come to understand. A photo of Lorelei, so that Aisling will never forget her mother’s face. Then he sets the incendiary device and watches his past bloom into flame.

Next stop: the High Council chamber. Hidden in the basement of what looks, from the outside, to be a dilapidated veterans’ hall.

Declan disables the security system with a few simple clips of the wire cutters, picks the complicated locks on the chamber door, and lets himself in.

It’s easy.

They gave him all the tools he needs to betray them.

The Falcata is hanging in its place of honor over the long council table. He takes it in his hands, presses his lips to the cool metal, a sign of respect for its deadly blade.

Sitting in an ancient brass bowl in the center of the table is a small, polished stone.

This is the mark of the Player. The symbol of responsibility and commitment to the line, of the promise made to the gods and to the coming apocalypse.

Once, his birthright.

Now, Molly’s.

Soon, Aisling’s, unless he can stop them.

He pockets the stone.

Then he places the second incendiary device.

Slips out into the night with the ancient sword, activates the device.

Stands in the shadows, watching the heart of the La Tène line burn to the ground.

It’s only a symbol. A message. Meant to remind them that he is out there, that he will destroy everything they have and everything they are if that’s what it takes to stop them, to prevent Endgame, to save Aisling.

Destroying what’s precious to them doesn’t make up for what he’s lost.

But it feels good.

When he returns to the delta, the shack is gone.

Razed to the ground.

No Agatha. No Aisling.

Declan turns his face to the sky and shrieks his pain to the heavens. His scream shreds the silence of the swamp. Birds scatter into the clouds. Coyotes sing back to him, and together they howl at the moon.

Then, from the trees, another sound. Faint, but familiar.

A child’s cry.

He follows the sound, his heart thumping, lips moving in time with the drumbeat of his pulse, please, please, please.

He finds them curled up together in the hollow of a fallen tree, Aisling tearstained and screaming, Agatha bleeding from too many wounds.

“I don’t know how they found me,” she whispers, as Declan frantically tries to staunch the blood. “But they don’t know the swamp.”

“Where are they?” Declan asks, panic flooding him. Has he just walked into an ambush?

“They looked for a while, then gave up,” Agatha croaks. “Took their guns and their helicopters away. Outsmarted by old Agatha. Again.” When she laughs, blood froths at her lips.

“You saved Aisling,” Declan says in wonder.

“No more children should be sacrificed to this bloody game,” she says, gasping at his touch. Her forehead burns.

“How long have you been hiding out here?”

“I held on until you came back.”

“We’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

He can’t risk it, but for her, after what she’s done, he will.

“No,” she croaks. Then: “No point.”

When he was the Player, Declan learned how to kill, but he also learned how to save. And he learned how to know when people are beyond the point of saving. How to recognize the absence of hope.

She wraps her fingers around his wrist. “Save her from this life,” she says.

He nods. Promises. “Tell me what I can do for you,” he says. “Anything.”

“Save me too,” she says, her gaze feverish but fierce. “Make the pain stop. Please.”

He uses the Falcata, because she is a hero and deserves an honorable blade.

An honorable death.

Declan runs; the La Tène give chase. The line has spent a millennium sowing a global network of allies and informants—there is nowhere beyond their reach, nowhere to hide. He creates a labyrinth of dummy accounts, uses cash whenever possible, invents several fictional personae and sends them off on planes and trains to the ends of the earth. He lays careful bread-crumb trails leading to dead, and sometimes deadly, ends; he sets traps, drawing on his own networks and on mercenaries whose loyalty he can afford to leave in his wake, faceless men and women who alert him whenever the La Tène catch his scent and close in.

As they always do.

Sometimes he and Aisling are gone long before they show up, leaving behind hotel rooms scoured of prints, dingy apartments stuffed with a stranger’s belongings. Sometimes the two of them only just make it. He’s a former Player; he knows never to set up camp without formulating an escape plan, and so everywhere they squat, whether it’s for hours or weeks, he devises a hiding place for Aisling, somewhere she will be safe if he has to fight their way out.

Most of the La Tène won’t dare attack if he has the baby in his arms—she’s too precious to them. But Molly, a Player herself, doesn’t see any Player’s—or future Player’s—life as sacred, and she’s all too confident in her own aim. She comes at him no matter who might get caught in the crossfire.

They have been on the run for two months when they slip across the French border and make their way to Paris. Declan finds them a small garret on the Left Bank, a few blocks from the Seine, and as weeks pass uneventfully, he begins to relax. Aisling falls in love with the city, or at least her small corner of it—they spend hours every day in the large children’s playground in the Jardin du Luxembourg. She becomes snobbish about croissants, only favoring the ones from the boulangerie down the street, and has already started chatting with the pigeons in her own pidgin French. Declan wonders whether it’s possible that they have found a new home.

They’re sitting in Place Dauphine, dipping croissants in a steaming mug of hot chocolate, when it happens. Nothing major, nothing he can put his finger on, just a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye that sets his heart racing.

As Aisling nibbles on the soggy croissant, and Declan keeps a smile fixed on his face, he scans the plaza—and gasps.

There it is, in the northern corner of the square, nearly hidden behind a rack of secondhand books, that familiar head of black hair.

Molly.

Swiftly but casually, Declan straps Aisling into the pouch on his chest that he uses when they need to make a quick getaway, and stands from his chair. If he can just get her safely out of the square and into a crowd—

Aisling screams as something whistles past her ear.

Then, suddenly, there’s a hail of tranquilizer darts and a puff of tear gas and the square erupts into chaos.

Declan runs.

He holds tight to Aisling and takes off toward the Seine, vaulting onto the Pont Neuf and kicking his nearest pursuer over the rail, sending him tumbling into the murky river. He pushes through crowds on the Quai des Grands Augustins, racing for Notre Dame and its swarm of oblivious tourists. Past bridges and bouquinistes, knocking over carts and crepe trucks, anything that will stall them in their chase, across the Petit Pont, until finally the gray, gargoyled edifice looms over them and Declan melts into the crowd, hundreds of parents holding squirming babies to their chests, just like him. He allows himself a heartbeat of relief, but this is only a temporary escape. He lets the throng push him across the square, then slips into one of the apartment lobbies with an entry code he’s memorized for just such an emergency. He waits in the lobby as the hours pass and the shadows deepen, Aisling miraculously calm in his arms, as if she understands exactly what’s going on and trusts him to deal with it. He wishes he trusted himself that much. There’s relief in this escape—but not much of it, because Molly is still out there, somewhere. Maybe Molly will always be out there.

When night falls, he decides it’s time to risk it—they slip out of the building, and his enemies are nowhere to be found. The search has moved on, for now, leaving Declan space to flee the country and seek out yet another new home.

He knows better this time than to imagine that he’ll find anywhere they can stay for long. No matter how far they go, no matter how safe it seems, he’s always expecting Molly to find them.

And she always does.

It happens again in Mexico, this time an ambush in the plaza outside San Miguel de Allende’s Parroquia, and he loses them in that pink monstrosity, holding a mask to Aisling’s face as the tear gas drifts over them and they make for a back exit leading to the Cuna de Allende and, beyond it, freedom.

He always has an escape plan, and he always needs to use it. Dangriga, Belize; Mzuzu, Malawi; Stockholm, Sweden; Bn Tre, Vietnam. Six months pass, then a year, and still there is no safe haven for them, no home, no rest, and no end—not unless the impossible happens, and the La Tène give up.

Or he does.

“This is no way for you to live,” Declan tells his daughter. “Your mother would hate this. And hate me for it.”

They’re sitting on the eastern bank of the Rhine River. Aisling plays happily in the mud along the shore. She’s just starting to walk now, and can say a small handful of words. Soon she’ll be old enough to ask questions Declan can’t answer.

“You see that giant rock, Aisling?” He points across the river, to the jagged stone jutting hundreds of feet into the air.

She claps her hands. “Mountain!”

Declan brushes her hair away from her face. It’s a tangled nest of red curls. He should be taking better care of it. He should be taking better care of everything.

“Sort of a mountain,” he agrees. “Do you know what its name is?”

Aisling shakes her head.

“It’s called the Lorelei,” he tells her.

Aisling shouts happily, “Mama!”

He’s taught her well.

He shows her Lorelei’s picture every night, tells her stories of the mother she’s already started to forget. Lorelei has been dead for one year, three months, and four days. Aisling doesn’t cry about her mama anymore, or ask for her. Declan doesn’t know whether this is tragedy or relief.

“Yes, your mama was named after this Lorelei,” he says. It’s not precisely true. The German poet Heinrich Heine wrote a poem about the Lorelei, and her parents named her after that.

“Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, Daß ich so traurig bin,” he recites for his daughter now, as he so often recited for his wife. He loved this about Lorelei, that she was born inside a poem. She didn’t speak German, but he does, of course—he speaks almost every language—and she liked to hear the words in their original language, in his voice. He translates for Aisling, now: “‘I don’t know what it should mean that I am so sad.’”

But he does know what it means.

He knows why he’s brought her here, to this deserted spot near Saint Goarshausen, where he feels like his wife is watching over them both. He and Lorelei came here on their honeymoon—she wanted to show him her rock. It’s not every woman who has her own mountain, she told him then.

They were so happy.

“We can’t keep running forever,” he says. He’s talking to himself; he’s talking to Lorelei. He takes Aisling into his arms. She squirms for a moment, then settles happily onto his lap. “We can’t keep living like this. You can’t keep living like this.”

He came here so he could find the strength to admit it.

He was the Player; he was trained to give everything to the fight. To believe he could win until his dying breath.

But running isn’t winning. Even if they could run from the line forever, that’s no way for Aisling to grow up.

That’s no way to carry out the promise he made to himself, that he would do everything he could to stop Endgame, to persuade his line that they’ve made a terrible mistake.

He’s done with running away.

He’s going to do what he’s been trained to do, and fight.

Maybe he will lose.

Probably he will lose.

But either way, Aisling will have a place to grow up, people who love her, a home. Either way, Lorelei will be avenged and Declan will know he’s done everything he can to make things right.

“That’s it, Aisling. No more running.” The thick clouds blow open for a moment, and a splash of sun lights up the Lorelei. “Now we make our last stand.”

The climb is more difficult than Declan remembers. Of course, the last time he was here, he didn’t have a small toddler strapped to his chest.

The last time he was here: it was six years ago, the culmination of many months of searching. For clues, for artifacts, for answers.

“None of this is ours to know,” Pop told him, when Declan explained why he was traveling the globe, why he was so desperate to track down the evidence of his forebears, the Players of the La Tène line stretching back for hundreds and thousands of years.

“How can it not be?” he asked Pop. “We’re supposed to give our lives up to a cause we don’t even understand? What sense does that make?”

“It made perfect sense to you until last year,” Pop said, irritable. They’d had the conversation one too many times. “What changed?”

“Nothing,” Declan said, because he’d promised Le Fond never to breathe a word of them. “I just started asking questions, that’s all. That’s not a crime.”

“Be careful,” Pop warned him. And when Declan said that there was no need to be careful, that he could climb a 1,500-meter mountain in his sleep, Pop said, “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

Six years ago, Declan summited a peak in the Italian Alps, high above the Lago Beluiso, and picked his way into the darkness of an ancient cave. He aimed his headlamp at a wall covered in primitive paintings. They looked as old as time itself.

There was the painting of 12 humans standing amongst tall stones—Stonehenge, he’d realized almost immediately. The sacred place.

That understanding had come easily. The others had taken time. Days of fasting and meditation to clear his head, hollow it out so he would hear the gods speak.

What did it all mean, the picture of the strange creature descending to Earth with a stolen star? The six men and six women screaming into the skies? The woman in the boat, so alone on a desolate sea?

He stared at the images until he was half mad with hunger and solitude, and only then did truth cut through the fog. He saw what he was meant to see.

He saw Endgame for what it really was: the vicious cycle, the evil joke.

The end of days.

Now he returns with his child. He returns to wait for someone to come for him, to kill him and take her away. Six years ago, he returned to Queens bursting with his nightmare truth—and no one would hear it. His father refused to listen. The High Council commanded his silence.

Now they will come for him, to this place where he found those unwanted answers.

Maybe they will finally listen.

Maybe they will see what he saw.

It would be worth it, giving up his life, giving up his daughter, if there’s even a chance that he can make them hear the truth.

He hopes it won’t come to that. But if it does, he’s prepared.

He lights a fire, he roasts some meat, he feeds Aisling and himself, he sings his daughter to sleep, and he waits.

He waits for two days and two nights.

Then they come for him.

“We know you’re in here, Declan.” Molly shouts. “Show yourself.”

Declan holds on to Aisling as he steps into the light. She giggles and waves at her older cousin and her grandfather. It warms him, that she still recognizes her family. It means she hasn’t forgotten everything yet. Some part of her must still remember her mother.

“We don’t want to hurt you,” Declan’s father says; he takes aim with the rifle. “Just give us the child.”

“You won’t shoot me while I’m holding her,” Declan says, hopes. “You won’t risk it.”

“It’s over,” Pop says. “Give us Aisling. Come home with us. We’ll work this out.”

“There’s nothing to work out,” Declan says. “Look around you—simply open your eyes and see. Why do you think I brought you here?”

Pop sighs heavily. “I don’t know why you do anything you do, Declan.”

“We have to break the cycle, pop. We have to. We can stop this now. Look at the paintings, Pop.” Declan shines his flashlight at the cave wall. “You see those twelve figures, those have got to be Players, and I’m certain that the figure in the center—”

“You will stop this nonsense or I will shoot you where you stand,” his father snaps.

So that’s it. Even now he won’t listen. He won’t see. Declan’s given his father all the chances he can. “I tried,” he says, then slips a hand into his pocket and presses a small switch.

The cave mouth explodes in a hail of shattered stone. Molly dives out of the way, lightning fast, but Pop’s body is no longer as quick as his instincts. He takes a rock to the head and goes down.

Somewhere, in the back of Declan’s mind, where he’s still capable of rational thought, he feels sorry to see it.

There’s no time for regret, not as long as Molly’s still alive. She’s fast, but she’s still been caught off guard—as soon as he sets off the device, Declan is in motion before Molly has regained her footing. Declan leaps over his father’s body and launches himself toward her, swinging the Falcata at her neck. Molly dodges the blow, comes at him low and hard with the knife, slashing at his knees, trying to knock him off balance so she can get a clear shot at his jugular. He stabs the sword through her foot.

First blood.

She shrieks with rage and lashes out with the blade. Metal bites into his flesh—cheek, shoulder, side, collarbone, but all of them flesh wounds, because he is always one step ahead of her, knows what she’s going to do before she does, because, of course, he trained her.

He was her, once. He understands how she thinks—but she will never understand him. What it’s like to fight for your child, and the memory of your wife.

He is motion; he is fire; he is a being of light and fury. Everything he’s taught her not to be. He taught her control and dispassion. He taught her to be cold and rational. To think through every strike, to form a strategy and follow through.

She’s no match for the wild creature he’s become.

No match for the Falcata, which whistles through the dark, then stops short, hitting flesh, hitting bone.

There’s a soft moan, and then Molly drops to the ground.

“I didn’t mean to kill her,” Molly says, blood pouring from a gaping wound on her abdomen, bubbling at her lips as she tries to speak. “I loved her.” Declan tells himself that there’s no joy in this, no vengeance. There’s only necessity, safety for him and his daughter. There’s only a 17-year-old girl that he once loved, lying in the dirt. Then she says, “It’s your fault that she’s dead, you know. You killed her.” And he brings down the sword again, this time to her throat.

She will never speak again.

“You’ve killed the Player.”

It’s his father’s voice.

Declan turns around, slowly. His father stands behind him, bloody and unsteady. He holds Aisling in one arm.

It’s over.

“I’ll never understand how it came to this,” Pop says. Aisling has wrapped her chubby arms around her grandfather’s neck. She burrows her face into his shoulder.

Propped on his other shoulder is the rifle.

“Is there another way?” Pop asks. “Please tell me there’s another way.”

The other way is surrender. Declan could raise his hands, palms out, agree to return to Queens with his father. Allow his Pop to raise Aisling in his own image, turn her into a warrior. Try his best to be a voice of sanity, keep asking unwanted questions, forcing their faces into disturbing truths, bide his time until Aisling is ready to listen.

Except that he’s killed Molly; he’s killed the Player. Even if Pop can forgive that, the High Council won’t.

Even if they could, Declan couldn’t forgive himself.

For losing Lorelei, for losing Aisling, for losing everything.

Declan can’t stand by and watch as they turn his daughter against him.

“I’ll never stop trying,” Declan says honestly. “Not as long as I’m alive. There is no other way.”

Declan’s father nods. He knows when his son is speaking the truth. He strokes Aisling’s hair and levels the rifle.

“Promise me something?” Declan asks.

“If I can.”

“Tell her about me?”

“Of course.”

“No,” Declan says. “Not that easy. Not your version of me. Not just the parts you approve of. Tell her what happened here. What I tried to do for her, what I believed—whether you agree with it or not.”

Pop doesn’t say yes or no, so Declan presses on.

“There’s a small notebook, tucked into her carrier. It’s my journal. Everything I’ve learned about Endgame over the last few years, everything I’ve been trying to tell you. It’s in there. Even if you refuse to look at it—someday, let her make her own choice. I need her to understand why her parents left her alone.”

“She’ll never be alone, son. I promise you that.”

“She deserves to make her own choices someday, Pop. She deserves answers.”

“She’ll get them,” he says. “When she’s old enough. When she’s ready. I can promise you that.”

“Okay, then. Do what you have to do. I’m ready.” Declan drops his head. He thinks about the day Pop taught him how to fire that rifle, and how much he wanted to please his father and strike the bull’s-eye. He thinks about the first night he kissed Lorelei, his fingers threaded in her long, black hair, the street falling still around them, the stars shining impossibly bright, such a rare thing in New York. He thinks about Aisling, the sweet, clean smell of her scalp, the pressure of her little fingers curling around his thumb, the musical chime of her laughter, the delight she takes in squirrels and birds, chasing them through the trees.