The Immortal Game (book 1) (3 page)

He wore jeans and a black T-shirt, cowboy boots and dark sunglasses. She couldn’t see his eyes, but he didn’t waver from her direction. When he got to her table he set his palms flat on the surface and leaned toward her. “Good. You’re here.”

From the corner of her eye Ruby saw the three women turn their heads to stare, first at Ash, then at her. She wanted to feel smug but she was too stunned.

“What?” She blinked. She didn’t want him to think that he ruffled her.

“Let’s play.” He waited for her to respond, but it hadn’t been a question. He was telling her.

She shook her head. “Can’t. I’m studying.” Her curiosity about him was beat out by her annoyance. Who did he think he was, anyway? Just because everyone else treated him like some chess god didn’t mean she would.

He pulled out the chair across from her and sat without an invitation. “What’s so damn important anyway?” He swung her notebook around so he could see it.

“Hey!” She jolted forward to stop him.

“What is this?” He asked, turning pages, as if it had no bearing on anything important. He still wore the dark glasses and she wondered if he could even read with them on.

“Chemistry,” she said, relaxing slightly. “You know, the building blocks of the universe.”

His face tilted up to look at hers. He sat back in his seat and crossed his arms. Ruby’s eyes shot to his hand. She wanted confirmation the wound had healed, that she hadn’t imagined it, but both hands were tucked under the swells of his biceps. She looked away, hoping he, and the three women, hadn’t seen her looking at his body.

“Do you know all about chemistry, too?” she asked, deflecting her embarrassment. But she didn’t give him time to answer. She moved forward in her seat and tried to look him in the eye despite the glasses.

“How did you know all that stuff about the Battle of Hastings?” It seemed the least insane of the questions she had. Much better than asking how his hand healed overnight.

“How do I know about the Battle of Hastings?” He laughed a quick, humorless laugh. He leaned forward, matching her body movements. His hands were clasped loosely on the table. She glanced down, but he held the right hand over the left, barring her from seeing what lay beneath.

“It’s not a secret, Ruby.”

She flinched when he used her name, surprised he knew it.

“It’s in a lot of books.” He glanced around at the crowded shelves that encircled the room.

It was true, of course, but she didn’t buy it. She narrowed her eyes at him. “How do you
know
so much about the Battle of Hastings?” she asked again, going on instinct more than reason.

He looked away and shook his head like he was dealing with an inquisitive child who’d already asked too many questions.

When it became obvious he wasn’t going to answer she turned her chemistry notes back toward herself and left Ash to look at the top of her bent head. She wondered, briefly, if his trio of fans was still watching them, but she didn’t really care.

“When can we play?” he asked. His voice was less forceful than before.

“Are you dense?” she asked. “I told you: I have to study. I’m not going to play you again.”

He pulled the dark shades off his eyes and jabbed them at her. “I want a rematch.”

She sucked in her breath at what she saw. His right eye was swollen shut with a gash that split the eyebrow. His other hand, the one with the ring, still lay on the table. She glanced down. The skin was smooth and unblemished. The scar was completely gone now. She dropped her own hand down on top of his, a reflex. “My god. Are you okay?”

He started, as if her touch had given him a shock. He looked at her hand resting on his. His one good eye darted back up to hers. The eye was glassy, feverish.

Quickly, or maybe slowly, the rest of the world faded. Sounds were muted and distant. Her only coherent perceptions were through their touching hands and their locked eyes. Everything on the periphery was a blur. She felt a jumbled wave of energy come off him, but it soon smoothed out and lengthened to a steady beat that could have been a pulse at rest. Time stretched out. It was just them in a frozen moment—

“What did you do to yourself, Ash?” The poet, Langston, stood next to the table with a hand on Ash’s shoulder.

Startled, Ruby began to pull away. Her fingers trailed along Ash’s hand. A chill shot up her arm. Her heart beat a steady rhythm. She felt calm and rooted, and oddly at peace.

“It’s nothing,” Ash said. He held Ruby’s stare for another moment. His brow creased as if he might ask a question. Instead he put the glasses back on and got up from the table.

…

The next morning Ruby lay in bed with the empty house all around her. After her father died, she could have slept in the master bedroom, or in what had always been the nanny’s room, but she chose to stay in the room she had been in since the day she was born.

The dollhouse her father built for her when she was three stood in the corner, with its happy family of five busy around the kitchen. Above the dollhouse were three shelves of polished rocks, each with a display tag naming the specimen. The rocks were a collection Ruby started in third grade but had abandoned by middle school.

She looked at the pictures on her nightstand. There was one of her father with his sandy blond hair, wearing khaki pants and a field jacket. She couldn’t remember what country he had been in at the time. There were low scrub trees and a pale blue sky in the background.

The picture of Ruby’s mother was in the back. Her mother had brown hair, like Ruby’s, and she stood in the same room Ruby lay in now, but with a long-forgotten collection of stuffed animals in the background. She held an infant Ruby in her arms and smiled at the camera. A drunk driver had killed her soon after it was taken.

Ruby rolled over and tried to tempt herself out of bed with thoughts of coffee and Ambrosia Bars, of Athenaeum … and Ash.

No. Not today
.
She needed to concentrate.

She made drip coffee and ate takeout leftovers in the little yellow kitchen. Early sunlight filtered through the white lace curtains at the back door, making a filigreed pattern on the faded linoleum.

She studied for chemistry at the kitchen table and rode her bike to class. Thankfully, Dr. Reed reviewed for the exam in organic, and Ruby was ready when Dr. Garcia finally popped the quiz in western civ. She smiled as she wrote her answers about the Battle of Hastings and thought of how Ash helped her study for the test.

Mark offered a ride to the study group later that day but she thought biking would clear her mind and sharpen her focus. She headed out toward northeast Portland and rode down Fremont.

She was so much more agile and unrestricted on her bike than she would have been in a car and so much faster than she could have been on foot. She blew by long lines of traffic and paced herself so that she never had to stop for a red light. Dried leaves crackled under her tires. She got that feeling: like she was flying, like she could ride forever.

The stresses of school slid off her like oil off water. She floated on the top of it all, able to see it at a distance. Her grades: they
had
to be better. Medical School: applications were due in a few months. The war: she needed to help where she could.

Ash came into her mind too, sudden and unbidden. She pictured him sitting across from her, wanting to play chess. An emotion, huge and unnamed, caught in her throat. She began to push the image away, but then she pulled it back.

She tried to remember that feeling, her hand on his, and the way he looked at her. The way his eyes connected with hers. Yes, he was cute—
hot
one of the women at Athenaeum said. But there was more there, something that drew her in. A sense that—

She shook her head and pedaled faster. Who cared how Ash knew so much? Or why he always seemed to have just come from a bar fight? Or even why his hand healed too quickly? Who cared that he made her feel that way?

She rushed on into the clear autumn afternoon and let every thought slide past her mind like the ground that flew past her spinning tires.

…

Ruby’s normal route to the study group was blocked by several road closures. An officer redirecting traffic at one told her it was part of anti-terrorist maneuvers. “We’ll keep them guessing,” he said with a reassuring wink.

She turned down one residential street after another, looking for a main thoroughfare. The world here was silent, almost eerie. She didn’t know this part of town well. In the end she doubled back to Fremont and ended up close to where she had started.

Her stomach growled. She stopped in front of a coffeehouse and leaned the frame of her bike against her hip.

For the first time since the bombing she wished she had cell service. She could have called Mark to accept the ride he had offered earlier, or at least warn him that the roads were closed.

The traffic on Fremont was backing up further and further with new cars trying to enter the crowded roadway at every intersection. This was the only thoroughfare open in this part of town. It would be too dangerous to ride in that kind of gridlock.

She looked up at the coffeehouse’s minimalistic steel awnings and two walls of glass that came together in a sharp point at the corner. Her stomach growled again.

Inside, sleek wooden tables were spaced out on a grey concrete floor that reflected the sun coming in through the large windows. The menu board was written in stark neon marker. The earthy smell of coffee and the shriek of frothing milk made the austere coffeehouse feel familiar.

Ruby ordered a latte and a sandwich. She smiled awkwardly at the barista—a woman with purple hair and a face full of piercings—when her credit card was denied. She realized she had forgotten to pay the bill and she hadn’t transferred money from her trust account into checking either. She paid for her food with a fistful of crumpled bills she scrounged from the bottom of her bag.

“Iced vanilla latte?” called the barista, though Ruby was the only one waiting. The cool plastic cup felt refreshing under her warm palm. She took a long sip and savored the chilly sweetness.

She scanned the coffeehouse for a place to sit. A couple talked quietly in the middle of the room. Two teenage girls had their heads close together as they looked at a magazine near the back. A man sat alone by the wall-sized windows. His head was turned to the side, looking out. Her eye lingered, moved on, then shot back to him again. In slow motion her mind took in the curly black hair, the faded jeans, the dark sunglasses."

It was Ash.

THREE

Ruby’s heart was fixed, stuck on one long beat. Ash’s head swung slowly from looking out the window to looking at her. Her feet felt like lead weights. The cool plastic coffee cup vibrated in her hand. She managed a deep breath. She commanded her feet to move.

The dark shades he wore the day before still hid his eyes but she felt him staring at her as she walked. Under the table his foot pushed out the chair across from him.

She sat, still numb, and stared at him. “Ash, what are you doing here?” Her voice was less forceful than she wanted.

“You didn’t come to Athenaeum this morning.”

“No. I had …” She paused. “other things to do.”

He was quiet.

She didn’t know what to say.

Finally he leaned forward as though he were about to whisper a secret. “How did you beat me?”

“What?” She felt her eyes get wide. “This is still about a chess game?”

She saw her reflection in the dark lenses of his glasses. Her hair fell around her face from a loose ponytail. Her cheeks were tinged pink. “Can you take those off please?” She would rather look at his black eye than at her own reflection.

He sat back and looked to the street again.

She was ready to stand up and walk away in frustration when he took the glasses off, folded the arms, and placed them on the table without looking at her.

Her eyes ranged over his profile. He seemed to be something out of classical art. His features were angular and strong, almost sculpted.

“How’d you win with no queen?” he said. “How did you win with so few pieces?”

“Why won’t you look at me?” she demanded.

He closed his eyes and sighed, a gesture that seemed unnatural for him. His shoulders dropped as though his body was yielding to some unspoken, unhappy thought.

When he turned he looked her in the eye. Her lips tightened and she understood. Yesterday he wore the glasses to hide the black eye, the cut. Today he wore the glasses to hide the fact that there was no black eye, no cut. Today his eye was as perfect as the rest of him.

She shook her head in disbelief. “How …”

“… did you beat me?” His voice was forceful but not loud.

She looked into his eyes and saw his determination. She didn’t want to play this game anymore. “It’s just a game I know,” she said. “I memorized it when I was a kid.”

“A
book
game?” he said, almost under his breath.

“I guess. It’s been played before. That’s what that means, right? It’s not
novel
.” She dusted off the term her father used for the moment a chess game went
“
out of book,” the moment the first original move of the game was played. She could picture her father playing and laughing in the front room of their house.

“My father loved chess. I was never any good so he taught me this one game. His favorite. We played it over and over.” She smiled at the memory. “I always got to win.”

Ash stared at her in disbelief.

“It’s famous actually,” she said. “I mean, if you’re into that kind of thing. Two guys played it, in the 1800s. I think they were French, or maybe German. Dad said you could beat most people with it—”

Ash stiffened. “I’m not most people.”

Her eyes shot to his. He was dead serious.

“How did your eye—”

“I want to know about the game.” He cut her off. “The
moves
. You gave away so much material.” His eyes narrowed. “It … You
… seemed so ordinary.”

Ruby flinched at the insult, intended or not.

She knew “material” meant pieces in the chess world. Her father told her losing your most valuable material was the key to winning the game. “People see you gambit a pawn on your first few moves and they assume you’re an unskilled player.”