LITMIR.BIZ

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

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       Other Books in the Endgame series

       About the Publisher

       CHAPTER 1

       Boone

      The town we are walking into isn’t on any map.

      All around us, volcanic rock formations tower to the skies, many of them ending in rounded points, like giant stone mushrooms growing out of the earth. The surrounding landscape is harsh but beautiful, rocky and treeless, covered in a thin blanket of snow that crunches beneath our boots as we ascend a hill. It feels like we’re walking on the moon.

      “What’s the name of this place?” I ask Oswald Brecht. The scientist is walking ahead of me, humming to himself. After years spent in a Soviet prison, he is now a free man, thanks to me and Ariadne, and he seems excited to be out of there.

      “It has no name,” he says. “Not officially. The people who showed it to us call it yildiz erkekler şehir, the city of the star men.”

      Hearing him say yildiz, the woman who is leading us turns and flashes a smile. Her name is also Yildiz. She’s very old. Ancient. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody told me that she’d helped Noah load the animals onto his ark. Her face is a nest of wrinkles, her eyes cloudy, her mouth toothless. Her hair is white and her body is bent. Yet she walks as quickly as any of us.

      “Yildiz,” she says. She points to the sky, which like her eyes is also gray and cloudy. “Star.”

      Ahead of her is a girl of 12 or 13. Her name is Kelebek, and she’s skinny as a laundry line and serious as Warren Spahn standing on the pitcher’s mound facing a batter. Her dark eyes watch everything, and I haven’t seen her smile once since we met her six hours ago. She’s related to Yildiz in some way that I haven’t quite figured out yet. She calls her “grandmother,” but this doesn’t seem likely given the great difference in their ages.

      “I was surprised to find her still living,” Brecht says to me in a low voice, nodding at Yildiz. “She was one of the guides when we first came here, in the summer of 1944. I did not expect to find her again. We are lucky.”

      We found Yildiz in a Turkish city called Malatya, where Brecht had directed us so that we could look for a guide who knew this part of Cappadocia. Too much time had passed since his last visit here for him to remember how to find this place again on his own, and anyway he had been brought here and returned by an SS military escort, and so had only a vague recollection of where it was. When he admitted this, I worried we might not find the city at all. But then he discovered Yildiz sitting in the same shop where he had last seen her, selling cups of tea. Kelebek was with her. The girl spoke English well enough that, between that and the Turkish that we know, negotiations were undertaken and an agreement reached for them to escort us here.

      “Have you ever seen anything like this?” I ask Ari, who is walking beside me. I really want to take her hand and hold it, but we’ve decided it’s best to keep our feelings for each other to ourselves. Well, Ari has decided, and I’m going along with her, although really I would kiss her right in front of everyone and not care what any of them think about it.

      She shakes her head. “It’s beautiful. It reminds me of the wildest parts of Greece, but even stranger.”

      “It’s kind of like the badlands of North Dakota,” I tell her. “We did a session there when I was training. I felt like I was on another planet.”

      “The landscape was formed by volcanos,” Brecht tells us. “Over the centuries, wind and rain wore away the deposits, leaving these towers behind.”

      “It is not the only place like it,” Ott says, as if he’s seen a million of these cities. I shoot him a look, but he’s too busy drinking from the flask of water he’s carrying to notice.

      “That is so,” says Brecht. “There are a number of these underground cities scattered throughout Cappadocia.”

      “Underground?” I say, looking at the rock towers that go up.

      “These so-called fairy towers are spectacular,” says Brecht. “But the truly remarkable parts are underground. The rock is fairly easy to dig away, and the cities extend to great depths beneath the surface, in some instances hundreds of meters.”

      “Who built them?” I ask.

      Brecht smiles. “That depends who you ask. Most archaeologists will tell you they were built by early Christians, to be used as places of refuge from persecution. And many of the underground cities do feature churches, some with beautiful frescoes painted inside them. But this place is different.”

      “Different how?” Ari asks.

      Brecht raises his eyebrows and grins like an excited kid. “It’s best to show you.”

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