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Existence
James Frey


The third thrilling digital prequel novella to Endgame: The Calling follows the lives of four of the twelve Players before they were chosen as the one to save their ancient bloodline - and win Endgame.Before the Calling . . . Twelve Players-in-training are tested to the very edge of their physical and mental abilities. The third Training Diaries follows Sarah, Jago, An and Hilal, as they prepare for the apocalyptic game.They must shed their normal lives and transform into the. Players they were meant to be. They must train, learn, prepare. To Play, survive, and solve. To kill or be killed.Endgame is real. Endgame is coming. And only one can win.






















Copyright (#ulink_f2353c1e-1c9e-5789-b78c-fd8c16135a78)


First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2015

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Endgame: The Training Diaries Volume 3: Existence © 2015 by Third Floor Fun, LLC

Cover design and logo by Rodrigo Corral Design

Conditions of Sale

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. All rights reserved.

Source ISBN: 9780062332691

EPub Edition © May 2015 ISBN 9780007585182

Version: 2015-06-03


CONTENTS

Cover (#u51530e1f-59f5-5ce4-b52d-a96fec01d3b2)

Title Page (#u977f846f-374e-5acc-9938-e490cb82982c)

Copyright (#u614f438d-c613-5ebe-9d2b-07742cd9f3c6)

Olmec Jago (#u84f7fc6a-2aaf-562b-9c76-0c399ff0764e)

Shang An (#litres_trial_promo)

Aksumite Hilal (#litres_trial_promo)

Cahokian Sarah (#litres_trial_promo)

Excerpt from Endgame: The Calling (#litres_trial_promo)

Marcus Loxias Megalos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chiyoko Takeda (#litres_trial_promo)

Excerpt from Endgame: The Training Diaries Volume 1: Origins (#litres_trial_promo)

Minoan Marcus (#litres_trial_promo)

Excerpt from Endgame: The Training Diaries Volume 2: Descendant (#litres_trial_promo)

La Tène Aisling (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Books in the Endgame Series (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)


Twelve thousand years ago, they came. They descended from the sky amid smoke and fire, and created humanity and gave us rules to live by. They needed gold and they built our earliest civilizations to mine it for them. When they had what they needed, they left. But before they left, they told us that someday they would come back, and that when they did, a game would be played. A game that would determine our future.

This is Endgame.

For 10,000 years the lines have existed in secret. The 12 original lines of humanity. Each has to have a Player prepared at all times. A Player becomes eligible at 13 and ages out at 19. Each bloodline has its own measure of who is worthy to be chosen. Who is worthy of saving their people. They have trained generation after generation after generation in weapons, languages, history, tactics, disguise, assassination. Together the Players are everything: strong, kind, ruthless, loyal, smart, stupid, ugly, lustful, mean, fickle, beautiful, calculating, lazy, exuberant, weak. They are good and evil. Like you. Like all.

This is Endgame.

When the game starts, the Players will have to find three keys. The keys are somewhere on Earth. The only rule of Endgame is that there are no rules. Whoever finds the keys first wins the game.

These are the stories of the Players before they were chosen—of how they shed their normal lives and transformed into the Players they were meant to be.

These are the Training Diaries.




OLMEC (#ulink_3d4f2f30-9adf-5e46-86af-d6cdc432d5ab)

JAGO (#ulink_3d4f2f30-9adf-5e46-86af-d6cdc432d5ab)







Jago falls in love with her at first sight. It’s like some cheesy movie cliché—it’s like every cheesy movie cliché. Their eyes meet across a crowded room. His heart skips a beat. Fireworks explode. The earth shakes. He hears music, smells flowers, sizzles with a lightning bolt of love.

The girl is lithe and lovely, whirling to the techno salsa beat as if her body is made of music. Hair like blond silk whips through the air; slender arms twirl overhead. A radiant smile lights up the room, and Jago’s heart.

Then the strobe lights flash and go dark, the song changes, dancers flood the club floor, and she disappears behind a sea of bodies.

Jago forgets her in a heartbeat.

It’s like that for him: love, girls, beauty. He loves to love, falls hard and fast, gets distracted just as quickly. Sometimes it takes a month, sometimes a week, sometimes, like tonight, only a few minutes. Nothing pleases him more than parading through the streets of Juliaca with a beautiful girl on his arm, lying beside a warm body on the shores of Lago Titicaca, stroking an exquisite face in the moonlight. And because he is Jago Tlaloc, every girl in the city is happy to be loved by him—because to be loved by Jago is to be showered with expensive gifts, to be admired and envied, to be on the arm of the scion of the most powerful organized-crime syndicate in Peru. He knows they love him only for his money and power, and he forgives it. To be loved by Jago is to be forgiven all sins.

To be loved by Jago is to be left by Jago, but ask any girl in Juliaca and she’ll tell you: it’s worth it.

He hasn’t come to the club tonight looking for love. He came to dance, to sweat away the week, to forget himself in a storm of noise and motion. To lose himself in a crowd. Thrashing at the heart of the dance floor, pressed body to body with the crush of strangers, this is the only way Jago can be anonymous, a stranger to himself. He’s spent the last several days doing odd jobs for his family, paying visits to those who thought to cross the mighty Tlalocs … and making them understand the consequences of their poor choices. Reminding them where their loyalties should lie.

The Tlaloc syndicate, of course, employs plenty of muscle—but some acts demand stronger reminders. Some unfortunate souls demand a visit from Jago himself, heir to the family business, Player of the Olmec line. Not everyone knows he’s the Player, of course, like so many eldest Tlaloc sons and daughters before him, or that if Endgame ever comes, he will bear the weight of all their lives. They don’t know they should be grateful to him.

But they know to fear him—and that’s enough.

Jago does what he has to do, hurts who he has to hurt. But sometimes, after, he needs to drink and dance and forget.

So he’s not looking for love, any more than he’s looking for trouble.

Both find him.

Her scream is nearly inaudible over the music and the noise of the crowd, but he’s spent years honing his senses.

There are three of them, muscled thugs in their midtwenties. They have the girl pinned in a dark corner, are laughing at her obvious fear. One of them pokes at her shoulder. Another threads his fingers through her blond hair, smoothing it over her face.

This is when Jago inserts himself into the situation. Three of them, one of him, and he is only 16.

But he is a Tlaloc—and a Player.

He is built like a mountain and could kill all three of them without breaking a sweat.

Instead he says, from behind them, “I think you’d all prefer to find a different club tonight, wouldn’t you?”

The men whirl about, ready to laugh, ready to fight—then they see his face.

They see the scar that cuts from his left eye down to his neck, souvenir of a childhood knife fight. He pulls back his lips in the gruesome imitation of a smile, and they see his teeth, gold-capped incisors studded with diamonds.

“Feo,” the biggest of the men breathes, and when he speaks Jago’s nickname, there’s terror on his tongue.

They know that scar; they know that smile; they know to back away quickly, with shallow bows of respect and apology, to leave this club and never be seen here again.

Jago waves them off with satisfaction, and only then does he turn to the girl.

She’s not hiding behind her curtain of hair or blinking back tears, not pressing herself into the shadows to make herself invisible, not shaken or stirred. She watches him intently, with fierce curiosity, and there’s something strange about her expression, something compelling, and it takes him a moment to understand what it is. Then it hits him.

She doesn’t know who he is.

She doesn’t know anything.

Jago closes his lips over his teeth; he claps a hand over his scar, and hopes the club is dark enough to smooth his pockmarked face. He wants to hide everything ugly about himself.

Something is happening to him.

Something he can’t name.

Not love, it can’t be that, he thinks, because he’s felt love, knows it well, in all its fleeting and shallow glory.

“Those men were afraid of you,” she says in English, her voice full of wonder.

He nods.

“Should I be afraid of you?” It comes out like a dare.

“Probably.” He wants to smile. He wants to laugh. But he doesn’t want to frighten her. For the first time in a long time, he doesn’t want to look like Jago Tlaloc. Maybe he doesn’t want to be Jago Tlaloc, not with this girl, not tonight.

“Good thing this is my summer of bad decisions,” she says, and laughs. “Dance with me?”

He takes her hand, and for a moment he can’t breathe.

“What’s your name?” she asks him, as they step onto the dance floor.

He touches his hand to his ear, cocks his head, as if to say, Too loud, can’t hear you. Then he leads her into the dancing throng. Tomorrow he will be Jago Tlaloc, scion, monster, savior. Tonight he will be just another body in the dark.

“You’re really not going to tell me your name?” she says as he walks her back to her dorm. She’s a British high school girl, on a summer study-abroad program in Peru, though she knows no Spanish. She’s from a place called Cornwall, and is a ballet dancer, or was, she says; she’s not sure which one. She’s been all over the world, she says, but has never seen anything, and though that doesn’t make any sense, Jago almost understands it.

He’s been everywhere too, traveled to every continent, sometimes on family business, sometimes for Player training, always for something ugly and brutal, always for a purpose, never simply to see.

She tells him many things, as they walk hand in hand through the empty Juliaca night, not about her life but about her dreams of a new one, how she wants passion and poetry and awe, she wants new experiences and wild adventures and terrifying risks and world-conquering triumphs.

“And love,” she adds, looking at him steadily. Her grip on his hand is warm and firm, unashamed. “I want earth-shattering, fireworks-exploding, heartbreaking love. Have you ever had that?”

Jago shrugs. “I’ve had girlfriends, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, I don’t mean ‘girlfriends.’” She imitates not just his accent, but the deliberately casual way he tossed off the word. “I mean a soul mate, a person who feels like your other half. A love that changes your life—that swallows it. A Pablo Neruda kind of love.”

“So you loved a man named Pablo?” he asks, confused.

She laughs gently, and links her arm through his. “I see we have some work to do.”

“I don’t know if I believe in that kind of love. A kind that could swallow my life, as you say.” He doesn’t know why he’s admitting this to her. Everything he knows about girls tells him this is the precise wrong thing to say. But there’s something about this one that makes him want to be honest. “My life is too crowded for such a love, I think.”

“Crowded with what?”

“Duty, for one,” he says. “Family.” He can’t tell her that he’s sworn his life to a single, all-important goal. That as long as Endgame looms on the horizon, he can never love anything as much as he loves the Olmec people. Even if it weren’t unthinkable, it would be forbidden.

“Duty?” She laughs again, a familiar song he wishes would go on forever. “You talk like you’re ancient.” Then she shakes her head. “Not me. I wasted too long on duty. I know what’s out there. What’s possible. And I’m going to have it.”

She sounds so much younger than him, but also, somehow, older—because she talks as if time is running out, as if she wants all these things now, here, in this summer, in this city. Tonight.

She stops abruptly beneath a streetlight and takes both of his hands in hers. “Do you want to know a secret?”

He nods.

“This is it. This summer. Everything changes. Everything I used to be, that’s over. I’m breaking free.”

“Of what?”

“Everything holding me back. All the people telling me what I have to do, who I have to be. All the obligations. All that duty. Haven’t you ever wanted to do that? Just shake it all off? Run for the hills? Scream into the night?”

“I—”

She tips back her head and hollers, “Freeeeeee!” The streetlight gives her a glow, like an aura, and Jago is almost afraid to blink—as if he’s imagined her, as if she might disappear.

Everything changes, she said, and he feels it, a buzz in the air, his skin bristling with electric charge. Everything changes tonight.

Tonight, for the first time, he can imagine wanting what she says. Freedom. Escape. Wild adventure with this strange, wild girl, the two of them flinging themselves into a great unknown.

She won’t tell him her name until he offers his.

Even after they kiss under the streetlight beside her dorm, even after she presses her body to his and lets him feel her heat, her need.

“Who are you?” he says in wonder, when they break, and he means, What are you? What kind of strange, enchanting, beautiful creature could make him feel this way, like she’s the first girl he’s ever touched, the first girl he’s ever wanted?

“You first,” she says.

He doesn’t want to offer his real name—this is the twenty-first century; the first thing she’ll do when she goes inside is Google him and his family, and she’ll discover all the things he doesn’t want her to know, the rumors and allegations that inevitably swirl around a crime syndicate even when the government declines to prosecute, or care.

“Most people call me Feo,” he says, offering his nickname instead. It has always felt right to him, as if naming his secret, fundamental truth.

“Feo?” She wrinkles her nose. “Does that mean something?”

Jago laughs. “You really don’t know any Spanish at all, do you?”

“Tell me what it means.”

Her combination of stubborn ferocity with wide-eyed innocence is addictive and irresistible. He can see it in her eyes: this girl is fearless.

“Guess.”

She appraises him carefully, narrows her eyes, smiles. “Mountain.”

He shakes his head.

She presses a finger to his lips, slips it through, taps one of his capped incisors. “Golden boy,” she guesses. “Diamond head.”

“Not even close.”

“Tell me,” she says, and kisses his neck.

“No.”

“Tell me.” She kisses the tip of his nose.

“No …”

“Tell me.” She kisses his palm, the inside of his wrist, works her way up his forearm, and he knows this girl will be trouble—this girl will take whatever she wants from him, and he has much to lose.

“Feo,” he says, giving in. “‘Ugly.’”

She flinches. “Who would call you that?”

He shrugs, smiles to show he doesn’t care, that it’s all a good joke to him. “Who wouldn’t?”

She grazes her fingertips down the length of his scar. “I wouldn’t,” she says softly.

He’s embarrassed, suddenly, not of the nickname, but of the fact that he allows it, and for an impossible moment feels a flicker of rage toward this girl, that she can make him burn with shame. One moment, one spark of anger; then it’s gone as if it never existed.

“Your name is so much better, I suppose?”

“It’s Alicia.” She rises up on her toes, gives him a quick peck on the lips, suddenly demure. “Think you can remember that for next time?”

“Next time?”

She retreats, carefully eases open the door to her girls’ dorm—it’s hours beyond her curfew, but she seems unconcerned, says she’s snuck out before, and anyway, what can they do to her, these overcautious nursemaids? He loves the way she talks.

“You know where to find me,” she says, before she disappears into the citadel. “Just make sure you’ve come up with a better name by the time you come back.”

The following night, Jago takes her to dinner at Los Gatos, an exclusive bastion of candlelit elegance where the waiters keep a bottle of their finest champagne on ice for him, just in case he happens by.

He orders every appetizer on the menu and four entrées, so they can have a taste of everything, and once they’ve sipped their champagne, he summons the waiter and requests a bottle of their most expensive wine.

As they drink the rich red, Jago puts a small velvet box on the white tablecloth. Alicia opens it up to find a small sapphire dangling from a delicate gold chain.

“Oh,” she says, then closes the box and digs into her meal.

It’s not exactly the reaction he was hoping for.

“You don’t like it? I thought it would bring out your eyes.”

“It’s gorgeous,” she says. “But, it’s so …”

“What?”

“Well, it looks crazy expensive, and we just met, so that’s kind of weird, don’t you think?”

“I think it’s beautiful, and you’re beautiful, so it seems like a perfect match.”

She shakes her head. “Well, um, okay. But I don’t really wear much jewelry. It would be wasted on me. So …”

It’s not like it was at the nightclub, or in the moonlight. It’s not easy between them, and he doesn’t know why. He excuses himself to the bathroom, and on his way slips some money into the palm of the maître d’ and makes a whispered request.

When he returns to the table, a violinist comes over to join them and begins a mournful rendition of a childhood lullaby. Jago waves over an old woman shuffling past the tables with an armful of roses, and buys a dozen, gives her a tip ten times their value. He offers them to Alicia—she takes them but doesn’t smile.

“I’m sorry, but …” She stops, turns to the violinist, and says, “That’s lovely, but I’ve got a bit of a headache, so …”

The violinist looks to Jago, who nods his assent, and the musician backs away, looking abashed, surely afraid he’s displeased the monster of Juliaca.

“I’m sorry,” Jago says quickly. He can feel the night slipping away from him, and if he doesn’t understand what he’s done, how is he supposed to fix it? He speaks eleven languages fluently, knows nineteen ways to kill a man with his bare hands, holds this city in the palm of his hands … yet somehow, he’s powerless to make this one girl smile. “I didn’t realize you had a headache.”

“I don’t, I just …”

“Is it a law, in England, not to finish your sentences?” he snaps—then instantly regrets the flare of temper. He’s simply not used to this kind of frustration.

She grins. “Aha! There you are.”

“What? Of course here I am.”

“No, I mean, you. Like, the real you, not this cheesy romance bullshit. The you from last night.”

“Excuse me, cheesy romance bullshit?”

“Flowers, candlelight, champagne, violin music? A necklace, for a girl you’ve just met? I don’t know what kind of girls you usually date, but …”

He dates girls who like “cheesy romance bullshit” and the rewards that come with it. These are the kinds of girls who want to date a Tlaloc—at least a Tlaloc who looks like him. These are the girls who won’t ask hard questions or make demands he prefers not to fulfill.

“And what kind of girl are you, Alicia? What would you prefer to do?”

“How about talk?” she says. “You could tell me about yourself.”

He shrugs. “There’s nothing to tell.”

“You go to school?”

“Sure,” he lies. “Who doesn’t? Junior year’s a bitch.”

“SATs, picking colleges, all that, right?” she says.

He nods like he knows what she’s talking about. Jago’s life doesn’t resemble that of the teenagers he sees on TV. He’s been homeschooled for his entire life, taught by tutors and physical trainers behind the walls of his family’s gated estate, trained not for a life of college and banal employment but for duty, sacrifice, courage, and, eventually, rule.

“I’m thinking about, uh, law school,” he says, wondering if that will impress her.

“Bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

She stands up. “Do you think I haven’t figured out who you are, Feo? You must think I’m pretty stupid. And I don’t date people who think I’m stupid.”

“Wait! Please!”

Jago stops. Composes himself. All over the restaurant, heads are turning. He can’t afford to be seen like this, begging. Tlalocs do not beg. When he speaks again, it’s with imperious scorn. “What is it you think you know about me?”

“I know you’re Jago Tlaloc, that you’re part of some kind of mob family, and you’re the heir to it all. I know this whole city’s scared of you.” Her voice softens, almost imperceptibly. “And I know you’re a terrible dancer.” She shrugs. “That’s about it. I came here tonight because I wanted to know more—not because I want expensive champagne and jewelry. You can’t buy me, Jago. Not with a fancy dinner, and definitely not with a bunch of crap lies about your life. That’s not who I am. I didn’t think that was who you were.”

“It’s not,” he protests.

“Then prove it,” she says. “Show me who Jago Tlaloc is. The real one. The one I fell for the first time I saw him.”

“You … you did?” He doesn’t understand. No one could fall for him, just from looking at him. His face is not designed to melt hearts; it’s designed to freeze them.

“Of course I did,” she says. “I told you: I’m not stupid.”

They ditch the restaurant. Jago takes Alicia to his favorite street vendor, an old man who grills up anticuchos and picarones just north of the city center. She tries a bite of everything, and the way her eyes light up at her first taste of choclo con queso makes the whole night worthwhile. They sit on the edge of a crumbling brick wall overlooking a vacant lot and stuff themselves, licking the grease off their fingers and kissing it off each other’s lips, passing back and forth a frothing bottle of Pilsen Callao, and all the while, they talk.

Jago tells Alicia about his life, his real life. He doesn’t speak of being the Olmec Player, of course—that secret is as sacred as the oath he swore to protect and serve his line. But he tells her what it’s like to be a Tlaloc, to grow up in privilege surrounded by poverty. To be loved and loathed in equal measure, to never know whether the people around you are freely giving of themselves or obeying out of fear. Jago has his parents and his siblings; he has José, Tiempo, and Chango, three boys he grew up with who he can trust to the ends of the earth. But beyond that, he has minions, underlings, hangers-on, colleagues, enemies.

Sometimes, Jago admits, his enemies feel like the truest thing in his life. At least he always knows where they stand; at least he knows the passion they feel for him is real.

Jago tells Alicia about working his way up, learning the ropes of the family business when he was just a child. Going out on protection runs, defending territory … He lets her believe that he would wait in the car, because to explain that he was a black belt in several martial arts by the time he was eight and spent far more childhood hours with guns, knives, and bombs than he did with cartoons and teddy bears—that would raise questions he can’t answer.

But he doesn’t lie to her.

When she asks if he’s broken the law, he says yes.

When she asks if he’s hurt someone, even killed someone, he hesitates … then says yes.

She doesn’t run away.

He tells her he doesn’t like it, hurting people—that he does it because it’s necessary. And she touches his scar again with those soft, careful fingers and says, “I believe you.”

When she asks if he’s ever imagined a different life for himself, turning away from what his family wants for him, choosing his own path, he doesn’t hesitate. “That’s not an option for me,” he says. Being a Tlaloc, being a criminal, being the Player, these things are inextricable for him, and none are choices, any more than breathing, or living. It’s a joy for him, serving his family and his people, living up to their expectations. To be the Olmec Player, to be the Tlaloc heir, these things define him, no matter how ugly or difficult they may sometimes be. “And even if it were … it’s not all pain and crime. My family does good things for Juliaca. We’ve built hospitals; we have several charity foundations. We make sure none of our people starve. We give to the poor. We only steal from—”

“The rich?” She laughs. “Okay, Robin Hood. You’re a hero of the people. I get it.”

If you only knew, he thinks, wishing that he could tell her the whole story, explain that he’s sworn to protect his people against an attack from the sky, against the end of the world, that he would sacrifice himself for the survival of the Olmec line—that he has already sacrificed so much.

And then he remembers that she is not Olmec. That if Endgame comes, he will not be fighting for her.

“I am who I am,” he says quietly. “Who my people, my family, need me to be. That’s all I can be. You wouldn’t understand.” He watches TV, he knows what life is like for people like her, who live sequestered from their own poor, who have infinite choices and no greater worries than alarm clocks and acne.

She threads her fingers through his, holds tight. “You’d be surprised.”

She tells him that she’s been taking ballet lessons since she learned how to walk—that her mother is a former prima ballerina who had to retire when she got pregnant, and who has never quite forgiven Alicia for ending her career. “She’s never forgiven me for being more talented than her either,” Alicia says, without modesty or bitterness, and Jago likes her all the more for it.

For thirteen years, Alicia has done almost nothing but dance. “Morning, afternoon, night,” she says. “I was homeschooled for a while; then I got into the academy, where classes are a joke—everyone knows nothing matters but dancing.”

“I bet you’re a beautiful ballerina,” he says.

“I was,” she says, again without modesty. He notes the tense.

It’s hard not to stare at the unfathomably long line of her neck, the graceful way her arms arc and wave as she makes her point. Every move is graceful, efficient, almost as if she were a fighter, like him. And maybe they’re not so different after all. The hard work, the oppressive training schedule, the tunnel vision for a life oriented around a single goal … he recognizes all of them, and wonders whether this is the magnetic field that draws them together, this singularity of purpose.

“I’ve been to Paris, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Cape Town—name a city, and I’ve danced there,” she says. “Danced, and nothing else. No sights, no culture, certainly no local foods. Nothing that would get in the way of the training regimen. No distractions whatsoever.” She peers at him through lowered lashes. “Definitely no boys.”

“It can’t be as bad as all that,” he says. “You’re here.”

“Exactly. Because I quit.”

“What? You said dancing was your life.”

“It was my life, and what kind of life is that?” She steals the rest of his anticuchos, gulping them down with relish. “I couldn’t handle it anymore. I just did one plié too many, you know?”

He shakes his head. Tries to imagine walking away from his life, from any of it. Declaring independence from everything he’s ever known. There’s such a thing as too much freedom, he thinks. Freedom from everything can leave you with nothing.

“My father was cool about it, but my mother?” She shakes her head. “Freaked. Out. I finally convinced them to send me down here for six weeks, kind of a trial separation from ballet, you know? I’m supposed to be ‘thinking about my options.’” She curls her fingers around the words, and it’s clear that she hopes to do very little thinking while in Peru. “I’ve basically missed out on the first sixteen years of life, Jago. I plan to make up for it, starting now.”

“That’s a lot to catch up on in six weeks.”

“I’m very efficient,” she says. “It only took me four days to find you, didn’t it? And about ten minutes to catch you?”

She’s so sure of herself—so sure of the two of them, even though they’ve spent less than a few hours in each other’s presence. “You think you caught me, huh?” he teases her. “I may be more slippery than you expect.”

She puts her arms around him, pulls herself onto his lap. “Just try to get away,” she whispers in his ear. “I dare you.”

Summer school isn’t like real school, especially in Juliaca. Alicia has plenty of friends to cover for her, and the teachers and guardians at the study-abroad program don’t require much covering. There’s no one to care if she spends all her time with Jago.

So she does.

It’s different than it’s been with other girls: she doesn’t want him to buy her anything; she doesn’t care about his power, or the things he can make people do. She likes to hear the details; she finds it fascinating, the contours of power, the things he knows, the strings he can pull. She likes to hear about corrupt officials—who gets paid off and how much—about how you can learn to attune yourself to the smell of weakness and cowardice, about how to sniff out an Achilles’ heel, and exploit it.

She likes it, but he doesn’t like telling her, because he can see the judgment in her eyes, hear it in her voice. She’s fascinated … but she’s also repulsed. “I just think there’s something better out there for you,” she says, whenever he talks about his family and what they do, or what they expect of him. Or, sometimes, “The police really just look the other way? No matter how many laws get broken? How many people get hurt?”

She always phrases it that way. Not “when you break the law.” Not “when you hurt people.” She thinks he’s different from the rest of his family, different from this entire city, perhaps, and he knows he should resent that.

She makes him ashamed of the things he’s always been most proud of, and he should probably resent that too.

But it’s not resentment, the thing that burns in him when he looks in her eyes, when he speaks her name.

It’s a thing that has no name, that’s too big and powerful for words.

But if he had to pick a word, it would be love.

He likes her because she doesn’t want anything from him, because she doesn’t want him for his power or his money or his family name. But the bigger feeling, the one that wakes him up in the middle of the night, sweating and gasping from a nightmare in which he’s lost her—the all-consuming feeling that, as she once put it, has swallowed his life—that’s not because of what she wants. It’s because of what she sees.

She looks at him and sees a person he didn’t know he could be. Not Feo, not the Player, not the heir to the Tlaloc fortune. She sees Jago, the boy she loves, and this boy feels both like a stranger and like the truest version of himself he has ever known. He loves her because she sees not simply what is, but what is possible.

She asks to hear the stories of his scars. She wants to know who’s hurt him, she says.

“You should see the other guy,” he said the first time she asked, but she didn’t laugh, and he knows she understands the meaning behind his words.

“It’s not like I enjoy it,” he added quickly. “I don’t hurt people for fun.”

“I would never think that. It’s just …” She kissed the scar on his face. “I don’t care what you’ve done in the past, Jago. What you’ve done doesn’t have to define you. What your parents want doesn’t have to define you. Who are you now? Who do you want to be?”

“You say that like I get to pick.”

“You think this ugly life is all you can have, Jago, but you’re wrong.”

He wishes he could tell her the truth. That his aunts and uncles train him for more than the family business. That the reason he spends so many hours in the gym or at the firing range, the reason he speaks so many languages and knows how to make a computer do whatever he asks of it, isn’t simply for commerce and brute force. For all his life, being a Tlaloc and being the Player have seemed two parts of the same whole. Yes, he divides his time between training for Endgame and helping the syndicate. Yes, sometimes he wields his weapons in defense of the Olmec people and sometimes to preserve his family’s turf. But he’s been taught that these are the same: that Playing is a sacred family duty. That in return for their centuries of Playing, for the sons and daughters they’ve sacrificed to the cause, the Tlaloc family deserves compensation—they deserve respect and power.

But now, he wonders.

Perhaps he’s mistaken two duties for one. His family, his business, his bloodline … is it possible these are extricable after all, that commitment to one doesn’t necessitate commitment to all?

Alicia doesn’t like what she knows of his duty, because she thinks it’s about intimidation and corruption, greed and crime.

If she knew who he was beneath that, the solemn oath he’s sworn, the harsh gods he serves, she might think differently.

Or, he considers, she might not. Endgame is still about violence—war and blood. Alicia has no love for such things, and doesn’t want them for him, in any form. She wants to make his life beautiful.

She introduces him to Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev and Stravinsky, to the love poems of Pablo Neruda and the folktales of nineteenth-century Russia, all beautiful things she’s learned to love through ballet. He asks her, “How can you say ballet has blinded you to the world when you’ve seen so much?” and she says, “I want more.”

He plays Mudra for her, and Almas Inmortales and Sanguinaria and Hand of Doom, all his favorite metal bands.

“Ugly,” she pronounces the music, her word for anything she doesn’t like.

But for love of him she listens, watches carefully the look on his face as he turns up the volume and thrashes to the beat of the noise. It is ugly, and full of rage, and this is what he likes about it. This is the music that plays in his head and heart; this is the sound of his life.

“There’s no room for bullshit in this music,” she muses. “Nowhere to hide.”

“Exactly.”

She gets it; she kisses him, and though he is supposed to have left for the gym twenty minutes ago, though he’s already missed his last three weight-training sessions, he kisses her back, and knows he’s not going anywhere, not anytime soon.

So what if he’s neglecting some of his duties? Alicia’s only in Peru until the end of the summer. Everything else can wait for three more weeks.

Even Endgame. He hopes.

No one approves.

“Look who’s coming—it’s the invisible man!” Tiempo crows, as Jago joins his friends for a game of dudo, which he hasn’t done since he met Alicia. She’s taking an exam in her Spanish class—he spent all night helping her study, but still, he misses her for the two hours she’s not at his side.

“We thought you disappeared on us, Feo,” Chango says, shaking his cup of dice. Everyone in Juliaca plays dudo, from the little kids on the street to Jago’s great-grandmother. Jago has been playing it with his buddies ever since they were young enough to be betting with chocolate coins. Now they use real ones, and Jago almost always cleans up.

Once in a while, he suspects his friends of letting him win. They’ve known each other for more than a decade, yes, but he’s still a Tlaloc; their parents work for his. He tries not to think about it.

“Finally ditch la gringa?” José teases.

Jago scowls at them. “Don’t call her that.”

José holds out a cup of dice for Jago. “You blind? That’s what she is, Feo.”

“She’s Alicia,” Jago says. “And I’m not ditching her.”

“She probably ditched him,” Chango says. “Or she’s getting ready to.”

Jago has been looking forward to this afternoon, imagining that he would tell his friends how everything looks different now, how the world has changed—but now that the moment is here, he doesn’t know what he was thinking.

Chango, Tiempo, and José have fought with him—they would die for him—but they’re not interested in hearing about his feelings.

“How come you never bring her around, Jago? She embarrass you?” José asks.

Chango elbows him. “We embarrass him.” Chango has always been the smartest of the three.

“No way is that true,” Tiempo says. He, on the other hand, has always been the most loyal. “Tell him that’s not true, Feo.”

“That’s not true, Chango.”

“So you’re keeping her your dirty little secret because …?”

“If you ever found a girl who could stand your ugly face, you’d know why Feo wants to keep her to herself,” Tiempo says. “See, little boy, when a man and a woman really like each other—”

Chango rears back. “Shut your mouth, cojudo, or I’ll ram these dice down your throat.”

Tiempo only laughs. This is how they talk to one another, this is how they have always talked to one another, and Jago never saw anything wrong with it, until now.

Or, not wrong, perhaps; just less than. They know one another so well, love one another so much—why can they only communicate in jokes and insults?

“So what does Mama Tlaloc think of your gringa—sorry, Alicia?” José asks.

Jago shifts uncomfortably. “She doesn’t know about her.”

Now they’re all laughing. “Your mother knows everything, amigo,” Tiempo reminds him. “She just takes her time. Remember when we broke her bathroom window and blamed it on the gardener? And she pretended to buy our story?”

Jago doesn’t like to think about that. What his friends don’t know is that before his mother fired the gardener, she had him beaten bloody. His pain is on your shoulders, she told Jago. This is what happens when you’re too cowardly to tell the truth.

“She bided her time,” José remembers, shaking his head in admiration. “Waits six months, then—”

Chango slaps his hand against the pavement. “Bam. The Tlaloc hammer comes down. At the worst possible moment. She makes us all cry in front of the Laredo sisters.”

José smiles, sighs. “Ah, the Laredo sisters …” He tuts his finger at Jago. “What I remember most about the Laredo sisters is that you kept both for yourself. Always so greedy, Feo.”

“My point,” Tiempo says loudly, “is that you can bet everything that your mama already knows about your gringa, and you might want to deal with it before she does.”

“Or get rid of the problem,” Chango says, with what could almost be genuine concern. “You know how these tourists work, Feo. You’ve dated enough of them.”

“You’ve dumped enough of them,” José puts in, laughing.

“She’s slumming it,” Tiempo insists. “This is her vacation, but it’s your life. Don’t be so blind you do something you’ll regret.”

The only thing Jago regrets is joining his friends today, imagining that they could be happy for him, that they could accept that he’s no longer the person he used to be. He’s different now.

Or at least he wants to be.

He takes her to the desert.

He takes her to see the Nazca lines, those ancient glyphs that, for more than a thousand years, have spoken their ancient truth to the sky. He shows her the lines from above, hovering in a Tlaloc helicopter that he pilots himself; then they land and hike to the lines themselves, so she can feel the ancient dirt beneath her feet.

He doesn’t tell her that the lines scraped into the earth are messages from the Sky, that they symbolize an oath between an ancient people and their gods.

He doesn’t tell her that he once stood on this sacred ground and pledged his life to his line, and to a game that might end the world. That he slipped a knife across his palm, let the blood drip into the ancient lines, became one with his past and his future.

These things are forbidden.

Bringing her here now, when the tourists have faded away and they can breathe in the silence of a starry night, is the closest he can come to revealing his secret. He says it without words: This place is my heart. This ground beneath us, this sky above us, these messages from the dead—this place is my soul.

They lie on a blanket side by side, their hands linked, their eyes on the stars.

“Do you think there’s anyone up there?” she asks him.

“Do you?”

“Are we talking about God or little green men?”

“It was your question,” he points out.

She sighs. “I think … all those millions of stars, all those planets, we probably can’t be alone. But I kind of hope we are.”

This isn’t the answer he expected. “Why?”

She turns onto her side to face him, and he rolls toward her.

“I don’t like the idea of someone up there watching,” she says. “Judging, or whatever. I like the idea that we get to choose for ourselves what it all means. Who we’re going to be. And I guess …”

“What?”

“I … I don’t really know how to say it. I never talk like this. Or I never did before.” She touches his face, so gently. “You turn me into someone new, Jago. Every day, you make me a stranger to myself.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good thing.”

“It’s the best thing,” she tells him, and then, for a time, there’s silence, as her lips meet his and they find a wordless way to speak.

It’s not until they’re nodding off to sleep beneath the stars, her delicate body folded into his sturdy arms, that she finishes her earlier thought. “I guess I don’t want to believe in UFOs or in, you know, some kind of higher power, because I think it’s beautiful that we’re the only ones. Billions of stars, and only us to see them. Like a single spark in the darkness, you know?”

He squeezes her, gently but tightly, to say, yes, he does know. And he wishes she were right.

“You never answered. What do you think?” she asks. Her breath is warm on his neck. Her head lies on his chest, and he wonders if she can hear his heart beat.

It’s strange—this is the place where he became the Player. It’s saturated with memories and blood. But he’s never felt less like Jago Tlaloc, Player of the Olmec line. He feels like just a boy, lying beside a girl. He feels like nothing matters here but the two of them, their even breathing, their beating hearts, their warm bodies, their dreams, and their love.

She asks him questions no one has ever bothered to ask.

She trusts him to be gentle, to be kind, to be so many things he never knew he could be.

She thinks him beautiful, and here in the dark, he can almost believe it’s possible.

“I don’t know if we really are alone,” he lies. Then he says something true, the kind of thing Jago Tlaloc, Player of the Olmec, would never admit. “But that’s how being with you makes me feel. Alone in the universe. Only the two of us.”

“A spark in the night,” she whispers.

“A bonfire.”

Jago takes his friends’ advice about one thing: He tells his mother about Alicia. She pretends to be surprised.

“Invite the girl over for dinner,” she says, and it is not a request.

He obeys.

He always obeys his mother.

Jago picks her up in one of the family’s bulletproof Blazers. Alicia draws in a sharp breath as they approach the first of the guard towers, then seems to hold it for the entire long, winding drive up to the hacienda. He tries to see it through her eyes, this castle on a hill, and wonders if she’s judging him for living like a king despite the teeming swarm of poverty below. The Tlalocs do a great deal for the poor of Juliaca, but they could do more—they could always do more.

“This is amazing,” Alicia breathes, as they pull up in front of the beautifully manicured grounds and he opens her door. There’s something new in her eyes when she looks at him, and he realizes she never thought of him growing up in a place like this. He’s told her so much about the Tlaloc power—less so about the money that enables and derives from it. Other than that disastrous first date, he’s refrained from giving her lavish gifts or taking her out for expensive meals. Alicia isn’t that kind of girl.

But there’s a radiant smile on her face that he hasn’t seen before. “What?” he asks.

She shakes her head. “I just … I didn’t know.”

Dinner is exactly the disaster he expects it to be, although Alicia has no idea. Jago’s mother, Hayu Marca, is expert at appearing sweet and nurturing—but beneath these layers of maternal fluff is impenetrable steel. This is what strangers never seem to see.

Alicia is intimidated by his father, Guitarrero Tlaloc, who she assumes is the head of the family. Jago’s mother, on the other hand, greets her at the edge of the property and immediately envelops her in a warm hug, and afterward Alicia whispers to Jago, “I don’t know what you were so worried about; she’s lovely.”

Jago murmurs a noncommittal response.

The kitchen staff has gone all out, preparing an opulent spread of lomo saltado, aji de gallina, pollo a la brasa—the best Peru has to offer. Alicia eats heartily, and doesn’t bat an eye at the roasted guinea pig served whole, on a spit. She takes a small bite and pronounces it “interesting.” This is her highest compliment.

“Jago says you’re a dancer.” His mother’s English is flawless. Like Alicia, she refuses to call him Feo, but not because she thinks the nickname doesn’t fit. Naming a son is a mother’s prerogative, she always says. She’s not about to abdicate that responsibility to the streets.

“Was a dancer,” Alicia corrects her.

Jago’s father raises an eyebrow. “You quit?”

“I think there might be something better out there for me. Or at least, I just want the chance to find out.”

“And what do your parents think of all this?” Jago’s mother asks pointedly.

Alicia shrugs. “They’re parents. They like what they know. You know?”

“Mmm.” Jago’s mother frowns.

“But in the end, they want me to be happy,” Alicia adds, perhaps sensing things are going awry. “I mean, isn’t that what you want for Jago? For him to find whatever makes him happy?”

“What makes Jago happy is fulfilling his duties,” Jago’s father says.

“There’s got to be more than that,” Alicia argues. “I know you have a lot of family traditions here, but don’t you want him to find his own way?”

Jago takes her hand under the table and squeezes gently, hoping she will understand the message: Stop, please.

She does, and the subject abruptly shifts to the movies, and the difference between Hollywood and South American heartthrobs, something Jago’s younger sister and mother can both discuss at length, and Alicia does an excellent job pretending to care.

He knows it’s too late; the damage has been done. He waits through dessert, through after-dinner drinks, through his mother’s extended good-bye rituals, the compliments and hair stroking and promises traded, to keep in touch, to be family, to love each other because they both love Jago. He can tell from Alicia’s radiant smile that she thinks she’s aced her test, and she kisses him good night in full view of both his parents, promising to meet him for breakfast first thing in the morning. Then she climbs into the bulletproof car with the red talon slashing across its shiny black paint. Jago’s men will see her safely home.

They’ve already arranged to meet long before breakfast—Jago will slip out later and rescue her from her dorm, “like my very own Prince Charming rescuing me from a tower,” she likes to say.

But for now, she leaves—and leaves him alone with his parents.

“No,” his mother says, reclining into her favorite leather armchair. “I don’t like this one.” This house is several generations old, but when his parents got married, his mother redecorated it from floor to ceiling. She chose furnishings and tapestries that would look ancient, as if they’d always been there—as if this were her ancestral home. The bloodred eagle claw that serves as a family crest is emblazoned on the archway over the door, and etched into each of the stone tiles beneath her feet. This estate is her domain, now. She may have married into the family, but sometimes Jago thinks his mother is more of a Tlaloc than any of them.

“I like her, Mamá. That seems somewhat more relevant.”

His father, as usual, remains silent on questions of love.

“She’s going to put ideas in your head,” his mother says.

“How do you know I’m not going to put ideas in her head?”

“Oh, Jago.” His mother leans forward and clasps his hands. “You think you’re such a strong man, but you’re still a soft boy. You’re weak, here.” She taps his chest. “You always have been.”

“What are you worried about, Mamá? That I’ll be happy?”

“This is a girl who doesn’t understand anything about your life or your responsibilities, Jago. If it were simply a distraction, if you were merely slacking off …” She stops him before he can object. “Yes, I know all about the training you’ve missed, and I don’t care. Boys will be boys, and all that. I want you to have your fun, Jago. But you can’t go thinking it’s anything more. This girl, she doesn’t fit into your life—not now, not ever. And you can’t afford to start thinking that the two of you are the same. What you do … you can’t just quit because you get bored.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” he snaps.

He’s thought about it plenty, what it would take to walk away, how much he would have to want it and how much he would be giving up.

“Watch your tone, Jago.”

“Alicia isn’t just some girl, Mother. She’s not a distraction, but she’s also not a bad influence. She’s … Alicia. She’s amazing. And you would see that, if you weren’t so judgmental.”

He’s the only person who dares talk to her this way, and often she likes it. Not tonight.

“I could forbid you from seeing her,” his mother muses, as if weighing the idea.

“Don’t do that,” he warns her. “Don’t make me choose.”

Her eyebrows shoot sky-high. “Oh?”

He can’t look at her.

“I see,” she says. “Then I suppose I’ll simply have to live with it, won’t I?”

She stands up with great dignity, turns her back on him, and strides out of the room. He’s won, he thinks. But he doesn’t feel that way. Maybe because she’s right about one thing. Alicia has put ideas in his head, made him wonder whether violence and duty are his destiny, or only one choice among many.

He could be the Player without being a criminal, he thinks. He could choose a different life without renouncing his obligations. Isn’t that possible? He could walk away from the family business, be a poet or a musician or some anonymous man selling fried meat in an alleyway … couldn’t he? The Tlaloc family’s rule over Puno has been inextricably linked with Endgame and the Players for as long as any of the Olmec can remember, but just because something once was, must it always be?

He could even walk away from Endgame altogether, renounce his status as the Player, hand the sacred duty over to someone else. He could be free of all the training, of having the fate of his line rest on every choice he makes.

Jago remembers the first time he truly felt like the Player. He was 13 years old, just months past swearing the oath, binding himself to this life and this duty. He had been on training missions before, of course, but this one was different. This wasn’t simply some exercise put to him by his uncles, an attempt to hone his skills. This was real. Meaningful.

He had scaled a skyscraper in Buenos Aires, disabled an alarm system, slipped past a security force armed with machine guns, cracked a safe owned by the richest man in Argentina, and taken an ancient Olmec knife that this man’s ancestors had stolen from Jago’s people long ago.

There have been so many missions since then that Jago barely remembers this one. He left some bodies behind, he remembers that. There was a bit of a mess on the way out—an alarm, an explosion, a hasty escape down the Rio de la Plata—but mostly, it’s a blur.

What he has never forgotten, what he will never forget, is how it felt to arrive home with the ceremonial knife in hand. How his uncle, a former Player himself, kissed his forehead, and said, “You have done well for your people.”

Jago had won victories for his family before; he had been fighting for Tlaloc honor in the streets since he was six years old. But this was different. This wasn’t for the Tlalocs; this was for the Olmec. This was noble; this was right.

That day, Jago didn’t feel like the monster of Juliaca, the ugly, scarred Feo who takes whatever he wants, whose face makes his people cower in fear.

Jago felt like a hero.

He could never give that up. Without Endgame, he’s nothing. He’s nobody.

But maybe he wouldn’t have to give it up. Maybe he could have Alicia, and the beautiful life she wants for both of them, and still be a hero.

Even thinking this way, even imagining, is a betrayal. That’s how his mother would see it, at least, and she would never let him speak to Alicia again. His mother loves him; he knows that. But her love is the opposite of Alicia’s: It comes with conditions. It comes with expectations. She loves her son, who is the heir to the family business, who is the Player, who is strong and ruthless and powerful. She couldn’t fathom the idea of a son who was none of those things, who was simply Jago, her boy. For his mother, love and power are inextricable. If he ever gave up the one, he would lose the other. He knows that.

But it doesn’t matter, he reminds himself. These are just idle thoughts, not acts, and thoughts are safe. No one can peer inside his head.

His mother will never have to know.

But thoughts do have consequences.

Even the act of thinking can have consequences.

This is one of the first lessons Jago learned as a child, as he mastered rudimentary hand-to-hand combat. Instinct is always faster than conscious thought, and in a combat situation almost always more accurate. When thinking drowns out instinct, when it makes you second-guess yourself or hesitate to do what must be done, that’s when it can be most deadly.

Jago should have known that; he should have known better.

But on that Friday afternoon, one week before Alicia is due to leave him behind, as he tracks his prey to a flophouse on the edge of the city and corners them in a seedy room rented by the hour, he’s not thinking about his childhood lessons.

He’s thinking about what Alicia said to him that morning: “Let’s run away together, just the two of us. Let’s see the world.”

Does she mean it?

Would she do it?

Would he?

He’s been tasked with hunting down two men, former employees foolish enough to steal from the Tlalocs and think they could get away with it. This is a crime that comes with a standard punishment: death.

He doesn’t want to be here, in this dark, crumbling motel with its fetid stink and suspicious stains. He doesn’t want to be creeping through a rat-infested hallway, locking the silencer onto his gun, preparing to assassinate two men who have stolen from a family so wealthy it barely noticed the loss—two men whose greatest crime is stupidity. Tiempo and Chango wanted to come along, but Jago insisted on going alone.

It’s one against two, maybe. But the one is a Player.

The two don’t know it yet, but they’re doomed.

Jago creeps up to the door. The manager, after a small bribe made its way into his pocket, gave him the room number and a tip: the lock is broken. There’s nothing standing in Jago’s way.

You think this ugly life is all you can have, but you’re wrong, he can almost hear Alicia saying as he eases open the door.

One of the men, Julio, is sprawled on the bed facedown, snoring. Alejandro is shaving, with his back to the door. Two bullets, one in each head, easy in, easy out—that’s what he’s been trained to do.

What you’ve done doesn’t have to define you. What your parents want doesn’t have to define you. She’s said it so many times. She wants so much for him.

Jago takes aim. Alejandro first, because at the sound of the shot it will take Julio a second to shake off sleep and get his bearings, and by the time he does, he’ll be dead.

I don’t care what you’ve done in the past. Who are you now? Who do you want to be?

His finger tightens on the trigger, as it has many times before. This is a simple calculation; these men are enemies of the family, of the line.

You can choose.

For the first time in his life, Jago hesitates.

Then fires.

Alejandro screams as the bullet blows off his ear. Jago has perfect aim. He knows how to kill—or how to wound. As Julio leaps out of bed, Jago pulls the trigger again, firing a second shot through Alejandro’s other ear, another through his hand, a third and fourth through each of his feet. A final shot to his gut, an inch above the intestines. By the time Julio has reached his weapon, Alejandro is writhing on the floor, screaming and bleeding, and Jago’s gun is aimed at Julio’s forehead.

Julio drops his weapon, raises his hands in the air.

“Take your friend, leave this city, and never return,” Jago says. “And tell everyone that the punishment for crossing the Tlalocs is swift and painful.”

Julio nods quickly, repeatedly, murmuring, “Sí, sí, whatever you say, Feo, anything, please,” and—with Jago’s permission—kneels at Alejandro’s side, trying his best to staunch the bleeding.

Jago wonders whether Julio will get the wounded man help, or simply abandon him. If the latter, it will be a very painful death. But it will not be on Jago’s shoulders.

This is what mercy looks like, he thinks, backing away from the men and out the door, down the hall, home to Alicia’s embrace. This is what mercy feels like.

He won’t tell Alicia.

It’s not good enough for her.

Not yet.

On the day everything changes, Alicia’s last day in the country, Jago thinks he has never been so miserable and so happy at the same time.

They have driven to the eastern beach to watch the sun set over Lake Titicaca. “Nice metaphor for our relationship,” Alicia says, with something adjacent to bitterness. She still wants him to run away with her. He says, day after day, he can’t … he might … he shouldn’t … he doesn’t know … he needs more time.

They’re running out of time.

She could go back home; they could email and text and do whatever it is normal teenagers do when an ocean gets in between them, but nothing about them is normal, and Jago fears that once she leaves, he’ll never see her again. She’ll run away without him—or she’ll go home, return to the dance studio and the life her parents want for her, forget she ever flirted with being a different kind of girl. They have this one last day together, and then either he leaves behind everything he’s ever known and loved, betrays his duty and generations upon generations of Tlaloc Players, shames his family, breaks his sacred oath, gives up all the certainties of his life and steps into the unknown—or he loses the only girl he’s ever loved, and all hope of a beautiful life.

Leaving is impossible. But so is the thought of losing her.

She hopes against hope he’ll change his mind and go with her; he hopes against hope she’ll decide to stay.

In the meantime, they try not to think of the future; he holds her hand, and, quietly, they watch the sun sink in the sky. Waves lap at the shore. The sky is streaked with gold. Clouds glow an angry pink. “It’s like fire,” Alicia murmurs. “Like the sky is on fire.”

Jago looks beyond her, to the east, where the sky is a flat, peaceful blue, cool and calm. This is what loving Alicia feels like: firestorm and tranquillity, all at once. He feels wild when he’s with her, his skin sparking, his brain spinning, his heart leaping with possibility—but at his center is something so quiet and sure. A peace he’s never known without her, and fears he will never know again.

They’re both looking at the sky, not at the waves, not at the sand, not at each other, and certainly not at the empty road that winds along the strip of beach. Not even when an engine roars in the distance and a car approaches do they turn; Jago is determined that this moment be perfect, that for once they be alone in their pocket universe, no obligations to anyone but each other. His heart is beating so loud it drowns out his instincts.

And so he doesn’t see the car slow, the window roll down, the tip of a Kalashnikov poke through. He doesn’t, until it’s too late, see Julio’s face at the wheel, the face of the man he spared.

When he does see it, he throws himself at Alicia, but even the speed of the Player is no match for a bullet, and the bullet has already been fired, and Alicia is already screaming, already falling; Alicia is in his arms, bleeding and pale and fading away.

Julio guns the engine and speeds off.

This is what mercy looks like.

This is what mercy looks like: a pool of blood, seeping into sand. Pale skin, limp body, tearstained cheeks. A balled-up T-shirt pressed to the wound, bleeding through.

“Please,” Jago says, and he’s talking to the man on the other end of the phone, a man who works for his family, who fixes problems, whatever they may be—and he’s talking to Alicia, who won’t stop bleeding.

Jago knows first aid, he knows how to dress a wound, how to triage, how to think clearly in a crisis—and also knows how little he can do, alone on this strip of sand. Maybe he should put her in the car, drive to a hospital himself, but the car is nearly a mile walk down the beach, and he doesn’t want to move her unless he has to. Help will come, he tells himself. Help will come in time.

He lays her on her back, lets her weight seal the makeshift bandage to the wound, holds her hand, hopes.

“Jago,” she whispers. “I can’t.”

“Tough luck,” he says. “You have to. Hang on. Someone’s coming.”

“No, I can’t …” She draws in a rasping breath.

“You don’t have to talk,” he says. For her, he tries to keep his voice steady, fearless. He is Jago Tlaloc—he’s supposed to be immune to fear.

She coughs blood. He wipes it away, gently as he can. Her skin is hot to the touch.

“Who were they?” she asks him. “Why did they?”

“I don’t know,” he lies again.

But she’s always able to see through his bullshit. Even now. “It’s because of you,” she says. There’s more strength in her voice now. There’s fire. “This is because of you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he assures her, and that’s the worst lie of all, because what could matter more?

“Someone shot me,” she says in wonder. “I got shot. What the hell?”

She’s laughing, suddenly, and he worries that this is delirium, that this is the beginning of the end, and the road is still empty; help is nowhere in sight.

“I’ll kill him for you,” Jago promises. “I’ll track him down, I’ll take him apart, piece by piece. I’ll make him hurt.”

“Oh God,” she gasps. “You.”

“What?”

“You … are just like them. Fucking monsters.”

He thought it couldn’t hurt any more than it already does. But this is worse. “No, Alicia—”

“You kill him, and then what? His family kills you? Is that where it stops? Does it ever stop? Or does it just keep going, pain and blood and blood and pain and pain and pain …”

She’s so pale. Her voice is thin and thready, the words floating away from her, like they belong to someone else. He tells himself that she’s feverish, in shock, that she doesn’t mean what she’s saying, that it doesn’t matter what she says, as long as she’s all right.

“Shhh. I know it hurts,” he whispers. “I know.”

“But it doesn’t.” She looks at him in childlike wonder, then coughs up another soft spray of blood. “It doesn’t hurt, Jago. I can’t … I can’t feel it. My legs. I can’t feel anything. …”

He stops breathing.

“Jago?”

Steady, he reminds himself. Calm. “That’s normal,” he lies. “Don’t worry.” He brushes her hair back from her sweaty face.

“Normal? This is normal?” She’s laughing again, laughing and crying and shaking, shuddering, her hand squeezing his as if of its own accord, all of her trembling. Except her legs—those are still. “What if I can’t dance again? What if I can’t … No. No. You. Get away from me.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Alicia.”

“You destroy everything. You make everything ugly, like you. I wish I never—”

“Don’t say that, Alicia.” She’s always seen the truth in him, the possibility. If all she sees is a monster … “Please.” If he were the monster she says he is, wouldn’t her words anger him? Wouldn’t he push her aside, tell her that she entered freely into this life, fooled herself into believing it couldn’t touch her, fooled him into believing that he had a choice?

He isn’t angry; he doesn’t push her aside. He wants to hold on to her forever, if she will only let him. “Please, Alicia, tell me you know I love you. That I will never let anyone hurt you again. That I can fix this. Please.”

She doesn’t say it.

She doesn’t say anything.

“Alicia?”

Her eyes are closed. Her face is as gray as the sunless sky. Sirens blare in the distance, so slow, so useless. Jago holds on to her, willing her to wake up, even if she wants to call him a monster, yell at him to let go. He never will.

She survives.

He knows this because he bribes a doctor to tell him.

She’ll recover; she’ll walk. It’s a medical miracle, the doctor says, and nothing more than that.

No one wants to tell him anything, not officially, because he’s not family.

And she won’t tell him herself, because when she wakes up, she refuses to see him. He could insist, of course. No one, certainly not the doctors working in the hospital’s brand-new state-of-the-art Tlaloc Memorial Wing, would dare tell Jago Tlaloc where he can and cannot go.

But he won’t violate her wishes, and she wishes to never see him again.

That’s what the kind nurse says, after he’s spent three days in a row in the waiting room, hoping she’ll change her mind.

“Go home,” the nurse suggests. “Get some rest. Get a hug from your mama. The girl will come around.”

Jago does go home; Alicia doesn’t come around.

Instead, she sends a letter.

Dear Feo, she writes, and that’s when he knows what kind of letter this will be. He’s Feo to her now. An ugly beast, and this is no fairy tale. There will be no third-act transformation. He is the monster, and she’s lucky to have escaped with her life.

The doctors say I’ll make a full recovery. Please don’t blame yourself. This isn’t your fault; it’s mine. You are who you are; your life is what it is. I never should have tried to turn you into someone else. I never should have let you believe this was anything more than a vacation for me—I guess I let myself believe it too. But when this happened … I know what I want now. Who I am. I’ve given my entire life to dancing, and I’m not going to turn my back on that. It’s my dream. My destiny, I guess you’d say. It took almost losing it to figure that out. I went a little crazy for a while, thinking it was so easy to just wish yourself into a different life. I’m going home, Feo. Thank you for helping me understand that I belong there. Just like you belong here. I’m sorry for ever suggesting otherwise.

Best wishes,

Alicia

Jago doesn’t understand. Has he done this to her? Broken her, convinced her to give up her dreams?

He’s the one who put her in harm’s way, by failing to live up to his responsibilities. If he’d only done his job, killed Alejandro and Julio, not fallen prey to this stupid delusion of kindness and mercy, then Alicia would have been safe.

His job, his entire life, is to protect his people. Maybe this is his punishment for imagining he could escape that, or want to.

Or maybe she means it, and this was, as she said, simply a vacation for her, a break from her cozy life.

Either way, this was inevitable. His mother was right: They’re too different. They’re too dangerous for each other. Alicia made him soft … and the consequences of that have made her heartbreakingly hard.

You are who you are, she wrote.

Best wishes, she wrote.

He doesn’t know which one hurts more.

Jago locks himself in his room for two days and two nights. He gives himself over completely to his anguish, letting it sweep over him, wash him out to sea; he drowns in it, drowns in memories of her. Jago has been taught how to withstand pain, how to retreat to a place in his mind where he doesn’t feel it, but he lets himself feel all of this: pain, guilt, betrayal, fury. He lets the fire rage inside of him, lets it burn everything away—and then, when he’s hollow and clean, burn itself out.

When he’s ready, when it’s done, he sets fire to the letter, drops it into the trash bin, and watches the flames consume what’s left of her.

He emerges from his room a different man.

A man who’s learned his lesson. Not to dream, not to wonder, not to love. Not to think he deserves anything more than what he has—not to think he’s anything but a monster. Feo, outside and in.

This is good. This is as it should be.

He will not forget himself again. He will not be tempted by mercy or beauty. He will not show weakness. He will find Julio, and punish him, as he will punish all enemies of the Tlaloc and the Olmec. But he won’t do it for Alicia, who ran away from him. He vows he will never again put some girl, some stranger from a foreign line, ahead of his own friends and family. He will never stop loving her; he will never forget her. But she is his past, and his past doesn’t have to define him. She taught him that.

A new future starts today. And from today on, he will act only for his line. He will care only for his own. They’re the only ones who can understand what he is, and love it.

They’re the only ones he can trust.

Hayu Marca Tlaloc steps out of the SUV and ventures into the abandoned alley, her high heels clicking against the cobblestones. She looks down in disgust, carefully stepping over a pile of drying dog shit. She’ll have to throw the shoes out when she gets home.

A small sacrifice to the cause.

At her side, she carries a small briefcase, filled with US$100,000.

Julio’s eyes light up when he sees it.

“You did a good job,” she tells him.

He bows his head. “Gracias, Señora Tlaloc.”

“But I’m surprised you’re not halfway to Brazil by now—my son’s sure to come looking for you, and I promise, he’s not very happy.”

He doesn’t dare meet her eyes. “I came for my payment.”

“Ah, yes. Your payment. Well worth it, I have to say.”

Her plan has worked out better than she could have imagined. Poor Jago will be heartbroken for a bit, she knows, but he’ll get over it. Every man needs a few dents in his heart—it’s how he learns to be hard. He’ll blame himself, of course, but he’ll forgive himself too. Men always do. It will be easier for him, believing that the girl made a full recovery, and Hayu has paid the doctors and nursing staff enough to ensure no one will ever say anything different.

As long as he never sees la gringa again, all will be well.

And la gringa has been taken care of.

“If you ever try to contact my son again, I will kill you,” Hayu told her in the hospital room. “Do you understand me?”

“I love him,” the girl said, as if that were allowed, and Hayu nearly smothered her with a pillow. “I said all these hateful things to him, and I have to tell him—”

“You will never speak to him. I don’t like to repeat myself, so I don’t want to have to say this again. Are we clear?”

The girl nodded.

“I’m sending you back home, but be sure: even there, I’ll have people watching you. For the rest of your life, I’ll be watching. I have that much power. And as for mercy … I’m expending all of it right here. This is the only chance you’ll have. Do you believe me?”

The girl nodded again, tears streaming down her face.

She was alone in a foreign country with a flimsy grasp of the native language and a bullet hole in her spine. She’d just been told she would never walk again. She’d lost all will to fight.

Once reality sank in, she would blame Jago. Hayu may have forged the letter to Jago, but she truly believes it’s what la gringa will want to say to him, once she understands the cold facts of her new life. The brilliant dancer, confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her days, and all because she made the mistake of loving the wrong boy. She will most certainly come to hate Jago, Hayu thinks. Almost as much as she’ll hate herself.

Maybe that’s why Hayu takes the risk of letting her live.

Transgressions like hers must be punished.

“Of course, my son can never know about this,” she tells Julio now. “Understood?”

He nods. “Claro, señora. Of course.”

“You know I don’t like to take risks of any kind.”

“I have heard that about you, sí.”

“So you’ll understand, then, why I have to do this.” Hayu slides a very small revolver from her purse and shoots him in the head.

Julio drops to the ground, a neat hole at the center of his forehead. Someone will find the body in a day or two, but the police won’t investigate very hard—not a man like that, in a neighborhood like this.

Not that it matters. The police are in her pocket. All of Juliaca is in her pocket. And now her son is there again too, right where he belongs.




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