Endgame Novella #2 by James Frey

she corrects him.
    â€œYes, of course. Ekaterina. I trust your flight over was smooth.”
    â€œWe aren’t here for small talk, my Player,” she snaps.
    â€œOf course,” he says again. He has been wondering whether perhaps there is no important mission; perhaps it’s just been long enough that she wanted to see him, made an excuse.
    But he should have known better.
    A waiter silently materializes at their table, handing Maccabee a wine list. “Will you have something to drink, sir?”
    Maccabee suppresses a smile and orders two glasses of their most expensive wine. Six feet five, more than 200 pounds of raw muscle, with a fine dusting of stubble across his tan chin, he looks at least a decade older than his age. It comes in handy. He catches the waiter glancing back and forth between him and his mother, brow subtly furrowed, and knows what the man assumes. That this is an intimate rendezvous, that this woman must be very wealthy to entice such a handsome younger man.
    They make quite a mismatched pair, Maccabee and Ekaterina. Like the restaurant, with its fine china and antique chandeliers, its tuxedoed waiters moving in elegant sync, Maccabee oozes wealth and good breeding. He speaks fluent German with a perfect Swiss accent (one of 13 languages he can speak like a native). His nails are manicured and buffed, his bespoke suit worth thousands and his A. Lange & Söhne watch worth exponentially more. He makes himself the center of every room he steps into.
    Ekaterina taught him how.
    She taught him everything: how to dress like a gentleman, to speak like he owns the world, to infuse his chilly smile with warmth when required, to charm the most beautiful of women into giving him what he wants, to woo and entice and persuade, to carry himself like a man of power with enough conviction that it becomes the truth.
    Not that anyone would guess it to look at her.
    In her youth, Ekaterina possessed legendary beauty and knew how to use it. She wielded her appearance as a weapon—hardly the only one in her arsenal, but often the most dangerous. But Ekaterina has no vanity. Invisibility carries a power of its own, she taught Maccabee. Especially for a woman of her age: Men want to underestimate her, to ignore her. She helps them do so, wearing frumpy dresses two decades out of fashion and two sizes too big, spraying her hair into a tangled and graying nest, letting her caterpillar eyebrows creep across her face.
    Tonight she is wearing a fanny pack.
    She looks like nothing so much as a hapless tourist who stumbled upon this Michelin-starred restaurant while in search of a McDonald’s. And this, Maccabee knows, is exactly the way she likes it.
    â€œYou still share a room with Jason Porter?” his mother asks. Their shared native language is Polish, but she speaks in the ancient Nabataean dialect, a long-dead language closely related to Aramaic. They are the only two on the continent who speak it.
    This place is not your home, she told him about Warsaw, as soon as he was old enough to understand.
    This language is not your language.
    These people are not your people.
    He was three years old when she told him of their Nabataean heritage, four years old when she told him of Endgame and promised that she would make him the Player.
    Nine years later, the promise came true.
    Maccabee has spent years studying the Players of the other lines—his competition. He knows most of them have been chosen for the honor through prophecy or competition. Children pitted against children in demonstrations of brute force, children trusted with the fate of their people because some alignment of the stars or the tea leaves suggested it would be so.
    It is, in Maccabee’s opinion, foolish. Worse than foolish: naïve. Moronic. Fatal. To leave such a crucial choice to fate or accident? To imagine that because an eight-year-old could win a wrestling competition or a baby happened to be born in the shadow of