Free Endgame Novella #1 by James Frey Page B

rabbit hole and wouldn’t notice if a freight train blasted through the gate.
    Kala and Alad are a little more subtle.
    It takes no more than a snip of the right wire to disarm the electrified gate. From there, it’s easy. They can scale barbed-wire fences in their sleep. Alad goes first, flinging himself up and safely over the barbs like a gymnast on the uneven bars. He snatches hold of the other side of the fence to break his fall, then climbs down the rest of the way. Safe. Free.
    She loves to watch him move, watch his muscles ripple and flex. Even now, when a wrong move could set the sirens blaring and the guards running, she allows herself a moment of wonder. Impossible to believe that he belongs to her—that they belong to each other.
    Then it’s her turn. She climbs halfway up the fence, pushes off with her legs, vaults her body up and over the barbed-wire rim, tumbling head over heels, then makes a blind grab and wraps her fingers tightly around chain link. She dangles midway up, six feet from the ground. This close to freedom, climbing is too slow. She pushes off again, sailing through the night air. This is how it feels to be free , she thinks.
    Like flying.
    She lands gracefully, the force of impact vibrating through her bones, and without pause they are both running, across the desert, into the night, eager to put miles between them and the camp before anyone notices they’re gone. This is the plan: Run until dawn, then find a suitable hiding spot, a cave or a dried creek bed, somewhere they can wait out the searchers who will come with the sun.
    They don’t speak, or even look at each other. Instead Kala falls into step behind Alad, watching his smooth, even gait, the steady pumping of his arms, the sweat dripping down that familiar curve of neck, thinking of the first time she really saw him, and how little she knew, before that, of what it meant to be alive.
    These are the rumors—this, they say, is what happens when you shirk your duty, foolishly try to escape:
    They come for you.
    They find you, wherever you hide.
    They blindfold you, tie you up, toss you into an unmarked van, hold you at a secluded location until you’ve learned the errors of your ways.
    Learning comes through brainwashing.
    Or through starvation.
    Or through torture.
    They cut off fingers; they pry out teeth. They waterboard and electrocute. If they suspect you’ve given away the secrets of your training, that you’ve spilled dangerous information to the wrong party, they cut out your tongue.
    At least, these are the stories.
    All the stories concern Players-in-training, children who are of little value to the big picture. There are no stories of what happens to Players gone rogue. It is simply not done.
    Or if it is done, the penalties are too awful to speak of.
    Kala believes none of it. These are bedtime stories, used to scare children who might otherwise contemplate running from the closest they have to a home.
    But she does believe they will come for her. So it’s a good thing they’ve taught her so well how to hide.
    And, if it comes to that, how to fight.
    Her family lives in Abyaneh, one of the oldest villages in Iran, home to fewer than 200 families—and on many days even more tourists, looking to commune with a Persian past. It is in the center of that country, more than 1,500 kilometers away, and will require crossing north across the Yemeni/Saudi Arabian border, finding passage across the Persian Gulf, and then making their way into the heart of Iran.
    She knows these facts about her family, and many others: She knows her mother’s name is Roshan Jahandar and her father is Parham. She has a nine-year-old sister, Mina. She knows her own name, her name at birth—Simin, which means “delicate” and surely was meant for some other girl. She whispers it to herself sometimes, at night, trying to imagine who that girl might have been, whether somewhere inside Kala she still exists. She knows her father is a doctor and