The Fire by Katherine Neville Page A

in a daze, trying hard not to remember.
    But how could I forget?
    Ten years. Ten years had passed – ten years during which I’d believed I had managed to repress, to camouflage, to bury a feeling that had nearly buried me, a feeling that emerged in that splinter of a second just before it happened. That frozen fragment of a moment when you still think that you have all of your life, your future, your promise before you,when you can still imagine – how would my friend Key put it? – that ‘the world is your oyster.’ And that it will never snap shut.
    But then you see the hand with the gun. Then it happens. Then it’s finished. Then there is no present anymore – only the past and future, only before and after. Only the ‘then,’ and…then what?
    This was the thing we never spoke of. This was the thing I never thought about. Now that my mother, Cat, had vanished, now that she’d left that murderous message lodged in the bowels of her favorite piano, I understood her unspoken language, loud and clear: You must think about it.
    But here was my question: How do you think of your own small, eleven-year-old self, standing there on those cold, hard marble steps in that cold, hard foreign land? How do you think of yourself, trapped inside the stone walls of a Russian monastery, miles from Moscow and thousands of miles from anyplace or anyone you know? How do you think of your father, killed by a sniper’s bullet? A bullet that may have been intended for you ? A bullet that your mother always believed was intended for you?
    How do you think of your father, collapsing in a pool of blood – blood that you watch in a kind of horror, as it soaks into and mingles with the dirty Russian snow? How do you think of the body lying on the steps – the body of your father as his life slips away – with his gloved fingers still clinging to your own small, mittened hand?
    The truth of the matter was, my father wasn’t the only one who had lost his future and his life that day, ten years ago, on those steps in Russia. The truth was, I had lost mine, too. At the age of eleven, I’d been blindsided by life: Amaurosis Scacchistica – an occupational hazard.
    And now, I had to admit what that truth really was: It wasn’tmy father’s death or my mother’s fears that had caused me to give up the game. The truth was –
    Okay. Reality check!
    The truth was, I didn’t need the truth. The truth was, I couldn’t afford this self-examination right now. I tried to squash that instant rush of adrenaline that had always accompanied any glimpse, however brief, into my own past. The truth was: My father was dead and my mother was missing and a chess game that someone had set up inside our piano suggested it all had plenty to do with me.
    I knew this lethal game that still lurked there, still ticking away, was more than a gaggle of pawns and pieces. This was the game. The last game. The game that had killed my father.
    Whatever the implications of its mysterious appearance here today, this game would always remain etched with acid in my mind. If I’d won this game, back in Moscow, ten years ago, the Russian tournament would have been mine, I’d have made the grade, I would have been the youngest grandmaster in history – just as my father had always wanted. Just as he’d always expected of me.
    If I had won this Moscow game, we’d never have gone to Zagorsk for that one final round, that ‘overtime’ game – a game that, due to ‘tragic circumstances,’ was destined never to be played at all.
    Its presence here clearly carried some message, like my mother’s other clues, a message that I knew I must decipher before anyone else did.
    But there was one thing I knew, above all: Whatever this was, it was no game.
    I took a deep breath and stood up from the hearth, nearly conking my head on a hanging copper pot. I yanked it down and slapped it atop the nearby sideboard. Then I went to the parlor grand, unzipped the bench cushion,