text: Aaldia was a country of games. Anavha knew that well, but he had not expected this particular game to play such an important part in the end of the world. As the dusk settled, he walked out the back porch and had the other jistas form a circle. The night was cool, lit by the spinning satellites and triad of moons.
  
  Anavha raised his arms and carefully spun up the twinkling illusion that was the game of sphere. Hundreds of orbs twinkled to life in front of them. A whirling collection of spinning spheres formed in a myriad of colors. The smallest was no larger than his thumbnail, the largest as big as his head.
  
  "We move to the center," Anavha said, gesturing for Lilia and Luna.
  
  Both gaped at the game. Lilia recovered first and said. "You… They just have this map, the same one each time?"
  
  "Not always the same," Anavha said. "There are different end states."
  
  The three of them moved to the center of the spinning orbs, which moved lazily along their elliptical orbits.
  
  "Did it look like this?" Anavha asked. "What you saw in the temple?"
  
  "Something like this," Lilia said. "What's the purpose of the game?"
  
  "Each projected sphere is called a door," Anavha said. "Now you will see a second set of pieces come up." He gestured, and a sparkling net of additional spheres joined the first. Two hundred different pieces then, total. "These are the board pieces," he said. "The goal is to match the doors and the pieces."
  
  "But…" Luna said. "There's… I'm not seeing a difference between the board pieces and the door pieces."
  
  "This is the math part," Anavha said. "It has to do with geometry, and where they sit on the board."
  
  Lilia followed a series of spheres along their path. "A three-dimensional game board, then?"
  
  "Exactly," Anavha said.
  
  "How many ways are there to play?" she asked.
  
  "What do you mean?"
  
  "The doors and pieces… I have an idea of what the end game for that would be. Pairing like and like. Other worlds and their people, maybe. But what else? How else do you win?"
  
  Anavha considered that. "Well, there are other ways to play it, but they aren't very sporting."
  
  "Teach me those ways," Lilia said.
  
  Anavha said, "I'm not sure–"
  
  "Teach me," Lilia said. "Luna, are you taking notes?"
  
  "I… yes? This is just very similar to something I know."
  
  "What?" Lilia asked.
  
  Luna shook her head. "I'll tell you later."
  
  "Then let's begin."
  
  Anavha made a sweeping motion with his left arm, and all the board pieces furled toward him and collected in a great sphere above his head. He moved his right arm in the opposite direction, and the door pieces joined them, all whirling together in the massive sphere.
  
  "What was that?" Lilia asked. "What you just did?"
  
  "Oh, that was nothing," Anavha said. "That just resets the game."
  
  The twinkling spheres blinked back into their orbits.
  
  It was a beautiful little game. Anavha loved it.
  
  Three hours later, her mind spinning with glowing orbs and violet light, Lilia announced that she was done, and they could delay no longer. She had lost the game sixteen out of eighteen times. Namia had fallen asleep on the porch behind her.
  
  "We don't have time to go again," Lilia said, gazing at the moons as they began their descent.
  
  Luna shivered. The winking orrery went out.
  
  Saradyn and Roh still sat outside with them on the soft grass; Saradyn snoring like a great bear, Roh nodding in and out of sleep.
  
  Lilia wished for sleep, but knew she didn't have time for it. Two days, Luna had said, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less. How far had Kirana gotten already? Had she gotten into the fifth temple? Convinced the keepers to make one of her jistas a guide and worldbreaker? All she had to go on was this game and its various outcomes. Pull in the spheres, remake them, reshape them, put pieces back into the worlds they belonged. There had only been two hundred pieces here, though, and her memory of the orrery was that there were far more. And if they represented worlds, all these many versions of the worlds all colliding together… there could very well be millions. Trillions. She did not say that out loud, but it made her head ache: a pulsing pain behind her left eye.
  
  Anavha yawned. She didn't want to pause their plan for sleep, but realized it would be safer if he, at least, did so before opening a gate. Too much relied on the gates.
  
  Meyna had bedded down all of the Dhai in the surrounding fields, and a few scouts with flame fly lanterns kept watch on the hills around the farm. The Saiduan had claimed the barn, since there were fewer of them.
  
  But a few other Dhai were still up, and one came over to Lilia, catching her before she went inside.
  
  "Li?" Salifa said.
  
  "Ah!" Lilia said. "You're alive! I'm sorry. It's been–"
  
  "I know," Salifa said. "I wanted to say I was sorry I didn't go with you."
  
  "It was my fault," Lilia said. "I was embarrassed to tell you all that I burned out. And the rest, well… Meyna does not like me, does not like the white ribbons–"
  
  "I heard you need a jista."
  
  "I do," Lilia said.
  
  Salifa touched the ribbon at her throat. "Avosta won't speak to you. He says he hates you now. Harina never came back, and Mihina–"
  
  "Salifa, I'm not asking you to go with us. Death is–"
  
  "I know," Salifa said. "What I'm telling you is, they all died to get us here. It's foolish for me not to help now, here at the end."
  
  Tears wet Lilia's cheeks. She wiped at them.
  
  Namia yawned on the porch, rolled over, and came over to her, crooning to comfort her.
  
  "It's all right," Lilia said. "Thank you, Salifa. Two hours? Come inside and I'll have Maralah show you how this works."
  
  Lilia walked in and introduced Salifa to Maralah. "A tirajista," Lilia said. "Could you show her?"
  
  "You show her," Maralah said, turning her back on Lilia.
  
  Lilia sighed and went over the diagram with Salifa. "When we are in, this is where you will be. Me and Zezili, here. Taigan, that annoying sanisi, here. Maralah here. Anavha. And Kadaan, the Saiduan man, there."
  
  Salifa nodded. "If we don't survive this," she said, "I hope Sina takes our souls and does something very useful with them."
  
  "Me too," Lilia said.
  
  A scuffle from the hall caught her attention. Anavha leaned against the doorframe leading back to the bedrooms. "I'm afraid," he said.
  
  Lilia went back outside and woke Roh and Saradyn. "Roh, can you and Saradyn sleep in the room with Anavha?" Lilia asked. "There are six good rooms here, and three beds."
  
  When she went back into the house, she found Taigan already asleep in one of the back bedrooms, breathing contentedly, as if he didn't have a care in the world. Lilia noted that he slept with his boots on though.
  
  She entered his room. His eyes snapped open.
  
  "Two hours," Lilia said.
  
  He grunted and rolled over.
  
  When she returned, Salifa had gone, and Maralah stood over the kitchen table with Kadaan. They had wiped away the old diagrams and sketched out new ones. Roh skipped over to them on a little puff of Para's breath. Said something to them in Saiduan. Lilia could not help smiling at seeing him use his gift again.
  
  "You have everything sorted?" Lilia asked.
  
  "You have a tirajista?" Maralah countered.
  
  "I can have Salifa," Lilia said.
  
  "That's only one tirajista," Maralah said. "We need two."
  
  "That's what we have," Lilia said. "Anavha helped me send word to my contact in the temple earlier. My contact will meet you inside, in the Assembly Chamber, when the moons set."
  
  "That's in two hours," Maralah said.
  
  "That's what I said. We're out of time," Lilia said. "Kirana is ahead of us."
  
  Roh said, "We can trust your contact?"
  
  "Yes. She's the one who's given me all the information I have from Oma's Temple so far."
  
  "I'm worried about how fast this needs to happen," Roh said.
  
  "We have one chance," Lilia said. "If we don't take it now, we lose it forever. Or at least for the length of our own lives."
  
  "I think we should wait," Maralah said. "Roh is right. We are all tired. Tired people make mistakes."
  
  "We have to get our people into that fifth temple before Kirana does," Lilia said. "If her people end up taking those places… I don't know that we'll be able to get them out."
  
  "We know so little," Maralah muttered.
  
  "It's more than Kirana knows," Lilia said.
  
  "You can't guarantee that," Roh said.
  
  "I'm willing to take this risk," Lilia said. "I'm going to walk in the front with Taigan to buy you some time. With Kirana sleeping in the Kai quarters, surrounded by jistas… she could murder you all coming out of the wink in that Assembly Chamber. We have to call her down below. A distraction that rouses the whole temple. A spectacle."
  
  "We need sleep," Maralah said.
  
  "Then sleep," Lilia said, turning away so she didn't have to see Maralah's face. "Two hours."
  
  Roh came after her. "Li, listen."
  
  "I need to sleep," Lilia said. She paused at the door of the room she was going to share with Namia and Zezili.
  
  "Maralah made a good–"
  
  "We go in two hours or we don't go," Lilia said. "Those are the choices."
  
  "That's garbage, Li," he said. "There are more than two choices. It's not all good or evil, this or that. We have the power to find other choices. If I learned nothing else in Saiduan, it was that. I… You don't know what happened there. How I lived, and others… It was very bad. I thought I had two choices, always, but there were more than that, always. And I… made mistakes. Don't make those mistakes."
  
  "I'm not going to make any more mistakes," Lilia said, and closed the door.