Énouement

Chapter Sixty Three

This is the playlist for the story. Songs I think of when writing this or just ones I listen to that relate to the story.

https://open.spotify.com/user/1264543267/playlist/1auK3Ugc6Z3HmxBcJ1gRvt?si=lGBEN3vqSoyGAJ0za4gnYw

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Steadily the pace increased. There were usually two battles a day now, and Ender held practices to a minimum. He would use the time while the others rested to pore over the replays of past games, trying to spot his own weaknesses, trying to guess what would happen next. Sometimes he was fully prepared for the enemy's innovations; sometimes he was not.

"I think you're cheating,"
Ender told Mazer one day, "Oh?"

"You can observe my practice sessions. You can see what I'm working on. You seem to be ready for everything I do."
"Most of what you see is computer simulations," Mazer said.

"The computer I programmed to respond to your innovations only after you use them once in battle."

"Then the computer is cheating."
"You need to get more sleep, Ender."

But he couldn't sleep. He lay awake longer and longer each night, and his sleep was less restful. He woke too often in the night. Whether he was waking up to think more about the game or to escape from his dreams, he wasn't sure. It was as if someone rode him in his sleep, forcing him to wander through his worst memories, to live in them again as if they were real. Nights were so real that days began to seem dreamlike to him.

He began to worry that he would not think clearly enough, that he would be too tired when he played. Always when the game began, the intensity of it awoke him, but if his mental abilities began to slip, he wondered, would he notice it? And he seemed to be slipping. He never had a battle anymore in which he did not lose at least a few fighters.

Several times the enemy was able to trick him into exposing more weakness than he meant to; other times the enemy was able to wear him down by attrition until his victory was as much a matter of luck as strategy. Mazer would go over the game with a look of contempt on his face.

"Look at this," he would say. "You didn't have to do this."

And Ender would return to practice with his leaders, trying to keep up their morale, but sometimes letting slip his disappointment with their weaknesses, the fact that they made mistakes. One day he came down on Petra.

"Sometimes we make mistakes," Torie whispered to him, defending her. It was also a plea for help.

"And sometimes we don't," Ender answered her. If she or Petra or anyone else got help, it would not be from him. He would teach; let them find friends among the others. Then came a battle that nearly ended in disaster.

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I didn't know when the battles blended into one another, I couldn't remember not battling.

As the pressure became more and more intense, as we became wearier and wearier, more irritable with each other, less generous in our assessment of each other's work, Bean watched closer.

While Dink and I argued over a course of action, with Ender's attention elsewhere, it was Bean who looked over us, to curb our errors.

But even if Bean saw everything, even if we all tried our hardest, tried to do more than we were capable, we all had a limit.

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Our next battle came only hours since our last. We had all only gotten maybe a few hours of sleep before they had come to get us.