All That Lives Must Die Read Online Free Page B

little.”
    Henry’s smile cooled a few degrees, but his gaze did not lift from the board. “You know, old woman, that you can win in six turns? Here.” He reached over and slid two cubes at once to flank Audrey’s collapsed tower.
    “That’s not a legitimate move,” Cecilia told him.
    “It is,” Henry said. “Just one that you, in your too-long years, have failed to learn. Or perhaps senility has settled upon your once-keen mind?”
    Audrey saw that her captured pieces could be used to build additional Towers on Cecilia’s side in three moves—and her own border defenses after that would be insufficient. While she could still get to the center, Henry’s new strategy had her losing her entire backcourt . . . and then the game.
    She locked eyes with him. There was no more emotion or additional truths, however, behind his sparkling empty eyes.
    “One must practice to keep one’s defenses sharpened, no?” he asked.
    “The Council?”
    “Meeting today,” Henry replied. “They require our presence. I thought that I would offer you a ride.”
    “Always and never the gentleman,” Audrey said, and stood. “I accept your offer.”
    “Splendid,” Henry cooed. He turned to Cecilia, and his slender hand reached out to caress her face. Cecilia recoiled before this gesture. “Ah, I would bring you as well, my lovely,” he said, “but there are some on the Council who would love to part your head from your shoulders should you cross their path.”
    Cecilia gripped a butter knife.
    Henry spared a glance at its edge. “Perhaps another time you and I will dance.” He moved to the stairs. “Today, regrettably, we have business to attend to: The Council wishes to discuss its newest members, and provided they are allowed to live . . . we shall discuss how to avert the end of the world.”
    Audrey gathered her courage and followed. “I expected no less.”
    4 . Fragments of one Towers set were found in the Neolithic hunter-gatherer settlement, Göbekli Tepe (southeast Turkey c. 9000 B.C.E.). This makes Towers the oldest (nontrivial) game, predating Chinese Go and Egyptian Senet by more than four thousand years. A Towers board is circular. Lines radiate outward to make thirty-two spaces of alternating color on the circumference, a second tier closer of sixteen spaces, a third tier with eight spaces, and a single circular space in the center. Placed on the board are sixteen white cubes and sixteen black. A simple checkers mechanism was assumed, but in 1753, a set was discovered in Pompeii preserved in the middle of a game. Cubes were stacked into towers (of increasing size) on the inner circles, while others remained as single stones, indicating a complexity of rules that experts agree no Neolithic hunter-gathers could have developed. Gods of the First and Twenty-first Century, Volume 1, Earliest Myths.

               3               
    ENTRANCE EXAM
    Eliot had this creepy feeling he and Fiona were being watched. Fog and shafts of sunlight swirled around them on the sidewalk. He glanced up at their new house.
    He liked it. It wasn’t “home.” That had been their apartment in Del Sombra. This place, though, made up for it by at least having more than one bathroom.
    It was a modern Victorian squished on all sides so it towered three stories tall on their lot. The trim was green and gold geometric art deco lines. Three scalloped balconies cupped the sides of the house like bracket mushrooms. A gold solar system weather vane topped the highest spire. It was an odd melding of styles . . . but it somehow worked, like something a mad genius architect might have sketched.
    Every building was tall and quirky on their street—stacked at least three stories tall. Most had been built with so little room, they actually touched their neighbors. Cee said it was the high cost of real estate that made every home tiny and built this way.
    That feeling of being watched, however, was still there.