Nabila Kassab had been walking for six hours across the Bonneville Salt Flats when she first noticed that the white ground beneath her boots was marked with flags. They were small orange pennants on thin steel rods, planted about every quarter mile in a line that ran straight toward the Silver Island Mountains. She had told herself the flags were left over from some racing event, because the flats hosted speed trials every summer and the organizers marked courses with all sorts of things. But the flags were too fresh, the orange too bright, and each one had a number stamped on a small tin tag that rattled in the wind. She was at flag number thirty-one. She had not started counting at one. She had started counting when she realized she was counting.
Across the flats, nearly two miles behind her and well off the line of flags, a figure in a faded gray jacket stood perfectly still and watched. The watcher held no binoculars. The distance on the salt was deceptive, and a person in a dark coat could be seen from a long way off if you knew where to look. The watcher had been standing there for most of the morning, and the watcher’s own shadow had barely shifted. A notebook sat open in one gloved hand. In it, in neat block letters, were written the times at which the woman ahead had stopped, turned, and looked back. There had been four stops so far. The watcher wrote a fifth. Beneath it, in smaller letters, the watcher added a single word: still choosing.
Nabila’s truck was gone. That was the fact she kept circling back to, the way a tongue circles a missing tooth. She had parked it at the edge of the salt near Wendover, a rented white pickup with a cracked dashboard, and walked out to photograph the horizon for a magazine piece about geometric landscapes. When she returned to the spot an hour later, the truck had vanished, and in its place, driven into the crust, was the first orange flag. Number one. A card was zip-tied to the pole, printed in plain black type. It said: THE FLATS ARE FORTY MILES ACROSS. FOLLOW THE FLAGS TO THE END. THE GAME IS FAIR. She had laughed at it then, an ugly dry laugh, and tried her phone, which showed no signal, and then she had started walking because standing still in that kind of whiteness felt like being erased.
The man who caught up to her at flag thirty-four introduced himself as Conall MacKinnon, and he came out of the shimmer on the horizon like something poured from the heat itself. He was tall, sunburned across the nose, carrying a canvas pack and wearing the dazed relief of someone who had been alone too long. He said he had found a flag with his name on the card, which was not how it had gone for her, and he showed her the card. It read: CONALL, YOU ARE NOT ALONE OUT HERE. IT MAY BE WISER TO BE. Nabila read it twice and handed it back without a word. He said he had been walking since dawn and that he had water to share. He said he was a surveyor, which she doubted because his hands were too soft. She said nothing about the doubt. They walked on together, side by side, the tin tags clicking in the wind like small distant applause.
The afternoon was long and strange and almost peaceful. The salt hissed under their boots. The mountains did not seem to get any closer, and the sky was a flat enormous blue with no bird in it. Conall told a story about a sister in Glasgow and a dog he’d had as a boy, and Nabila found, to her own surprise, that she was telling him about her father, who had driven a taxi in Amman and who had taught her to read a horizon before he taught her to read a map. The watcher, far behind and drifting slowly closer, saw them talking and wrote another line. Two walkers now. The watcher paused over the page. Then, carefully, the watcher drew a small circle around the second one and underlined it twice.
At flag number fifty-two, the pattern broke. Conall stopped so suddenly that Nabila walked a step past him before she noticed. The flag stood in the salt as all the others had, but beneath it was a folding card table, and on the table was a chessboard made of white and black salt crystals, already set mid-game, the pieces carved from something pale and glassy. There was a chair on either side. There was a third card. It said: ONE OF YOU PLAYS. THE OTHER WALKS ON ALONE. LOSE, AND THE FLAGS END FOR YOU. Nabila read it aloud in a voice she did not recognize. Conall had gone very quiet. The wind picked up and the tin tags along the whole line of flags began to chatter at once, and she felt, for the first time all day, that something enormous was paying attention.
She wanted to refuse. She said so. She said they could simply walk around the table, that it was a trick, that nothing here could make them play. But Conall was already looking at the board in a way that made her stomach turn cold. He studied it a little too long, a little too knowingly. His finger hovered over a knight and did not tremble. He said he had played a great deal of chess. He said it so casually that she understood it was the first thing he had told her all day that was entirely true. She looked at his soft hands again and then at the board, and she saw that the pieces had been arranged in a position that only a person who already knew it could have studied.
So she sat. If he knew the position, then he had been told about this table, and if he had been told about this table, then the card with his name on it had not been a gift. It had been a briefing. She moved a pawn she had no intention of defending and waited to see what he would do with the opening. He took it at once, too quickly, and she felt something inside her settle into place like a latch dropping. She played slowly, badly, deliberately, and he answered every move before the last one had finished landing on the board. Behind them, almost out of earshot, she thought she heard the faint scratch of a pencil on paper, a sound that had no business existing on an empty salt pan. She did not turn around.
The game lasted forty minutes. At the end of it she lost, cleanly, exactly as she had meant to, and Conall sat back with a small tight breath of triumph that he could not quite hide. The wind dropped. The flags went still. For a long moment nothing happened at all. Then he stood, gathered his pack, and said she should stay and rest, that it would be easier this way, that the flags were his to follow now. He did not look at her as he said it. He walked toward flag fifty-three with the brisk steps of a man who believed he had won something.
He was forty paces out when the salt beneath him gave a low hollow note, like a drum struck underwater, and the surface did not break but simply stopped being solid. He stood in place a moment, puzzled, then sank to his knees in white that moved like cloth. He did not scream. He looked back at her with an expression of genuine confusion, as if he had followed the rules and could not understand which one he had missed. Nabila had not moved from the chair. She had noticed, somewhere around the thirtieth move, that the card said the flags would end for the loser, and that she had read the word LOSE and never once asked who the cards were truly written for.
The watcher had come close by then, close enough that Nabila could finally see the gray jacket, the gloved hand, the open notebook. The figure stood at the edge of the table without speaking. Nabila said, quietly, that she had thrown the game on purpose. The watcher nodded once, slowly, and turned the notebook around so she could read the last line. It said: she chooses the lie. Beneath it, in the same neat block letters, were dozens of earlier entries, each with a date, each with a name, going back years. Her own name was not the first. It was not the last either. The last name on the page had been left blank, and the pencil was already lifted to fill it in.
She looked out across the flats. Conall was gone, and the surface where he had stood was smooth and white and unmarked, as if nothing had ever walked there. Flag fifty-three still stood in the distance, bright orange against the pale sky. Beyond it was flag fifty-four. Beyond that, a long line of them, running on toward the mountains. The watcher closed the notebook and began, without a word, to walk away across the salt, leaving Nabila alone at the little table with the glass pieces and the wind and a single question she could not answer. She did not know whether she had won, or whether the game had only ever wanted to see what kind of person would let another one lose in her place.
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