He said games aren't important, he said you wouldn't have time for games now, but you know he lied. Because you're still playing, you never stopped. Checkmate is supposed to end the game but taking his king was just the first round, the first match. The opening move.

There's a game you played with your brother - used to play, before they were all taken away. Colored bricks stacked into a tower, and you take turns pulling them out, one by one, as the tower becomes increasingly unstable. The one who takes the piece that brings the whole thing tumbling down loses the game.

You used to play for fun. To pass the time. Now games are time, every minute another round. Some of these games you've never played before, you're just a beginner, but you'll win all the same, because you can't ever lose.

He takes a piece, you take a piece. One at a time, cautiously drawing it out and tossing it aside. Walk around the tower and consider every angle. Which is the invisible keystone, that when removed will topple everything? Which pieces are unimportant, can be yanked from the wall and the tower doesn't even sway?

He lies to you, but that isn't cheating. There is no cheating. Just strategy and tactics and it doesn't matter how you play. As long as you win.

The strategy is first to select the pieces that are a risk. The colorful, worthless pieces that make the tower top-heavy, and take them first, so it will be light enough to stand even when the base is undermined.

This is the book about the Egyptians' ancient games that fascinates you so, that the woman at the orphanage said was yours to keep the day you left. There's no method in it, no education. Anything physical can be taken from you. It's only a book and you've read most of it. Throw it away.

This is the silly game you play with your brother, under the covers counting score with coins. You shouldn't spend time with him, shouldn't call attention to him, not in this house, where attention is dangerous. And you don't have time for those games anyway; you should be studying. Forget about it.

This is your childish temper, that makes you talk back when it's smarter to stay silent. Pluck it out. An adult's anger is useful, tapped when needed, when it has effect. Wait until you're stronger. Your pride is a cornerstone in the tower's foundation. Load-bearing. Everything around it is useless.

This is the letter from the relatives who turned you away, the family you were born into, handwritten and personal, tossed into the fire, unopened. You don't share their name anymore anyway. Mokuba cries and you shake him until he stops. Before he's made to stop by someone else.

These are the tears you cry when you're hit, that will only earn you another blow. It doesn't hurt that much. You don't need them.

This is the piece of you that likes ice cream.

But if you have a strategy, then so does he. And he's played this game before, knows how carefully brutal he can be, ripping out one piece after another, and the tower teeters, but doesn't fall. With every block removed, the solid wall becomes a latticework, the tower as delicate as a house of cards, an unstable, empty construction. When your turn comes you fear to touch it, holding your breath less the air set it swaying. And he smiles at you, so sickeningly confident.

This is your deck of cards, taken away with the board games. You can buy new ones someday. Those you'll never get back, except the few you've hidden. But you can't take them out anyway. Can't let him see.

This is your lazy Sunday morning, sleeping in with the sun warm in your face, until your brother jumps up and down on the bed to wake you up. He's not allowed in your bedroom now. Your tutor wakes you instead, clapping his hands sharply at 7 AM, on the mark, every day, until you always snap wide awake on your own, no matter how many hours past midnight it was when you went to sleep.

This is the memory of your real father's cool, soft hand on your forehead, soothing your fever. The doctor's hands are hard, an impersonal prodding examination as you shiver and cough, and then he leaves you in your room alone with the curtains drawn. In the morning a servant brings you a bowl of soup on a tray, with medicine, and two books. There's an exam tomorrow.

This is how you loved to learn, and the teachers used to smile and congratulate you. But maybe you imagined their pride, were too young to see the falseness of their smiles.

These are the childish games that weren't important, the games that were all thrown away, the games that it didn't matter if you lost.

There has to be a way to win. Even now. He knows the way, how to keep the tower standing, or else he wouldn't be so calmly confident in his destruction.

You need to support it somehow. Fill all those hollow spaces, but the pieces once removed are lost, cannot be replaced. Against the rules.

Another way. You have to win.

He didn't plant the darkness; that seed was always there. He just drew out enough pieces to give it room to grow, encouraged it. Like watering a plant, like breathing on embers.

The first time you were there when he fired someone, the man started to cry. Standing there on the carpet before his desk, with tears and snot dripping down his red face. Saying he knew a mistake had been made, he had been told it would be put right. Saying it wouldn't happen again and that he needed this job, that he had been distracted with his daughter in the hospital and it would never happen again and please, please, please.

No second chances, he says, and the man knew the rules. But you still feel your stomach twist uncomfortably as the man leaves with his head bowed and his nose swollen, ugly and pitiful.

He turns in his chair to look at your face and laughs out loud. Don't be scared of losers, he tells you. That's no way to win. You're not a loser, boy. Don't pretend you can sympathize with them.

Next time, I'll let you do it, he tells you. There's a lot of weeding to be done, after that last debacle. And you need the practice. And he laughs again.

It's hard the first time, looking the man in the eye, telling him to get out. At least that man doesn't cry.

By the fifth, you've learned to picture him standing there before the desk, and you smile when you say the words. Remembering in time to twist it into false sympathy. Laughing aloud only after the door closes tight, and he looks at you thoughtfully, not knowing precisely why you're laughing. Not knowing how you've won.

You thought his strategy was to knock the pieces out from the inside, the foundation buckling under the pressure of that increasing darkness. But you can use it, too. Let it grow, let it swell up, curling around the tower, weaving through the holes. Filling gaps, and what is there is as black as the shadows of the empty spaces, but the tower stands without swaying.

Until it doesn't matter what piece you take out, because that darkness can expand to fill any breach.

You used to smile, nii-sama, Mokuba said, and now you can again. Closed-mouth, so the dark space behind your teeth can't spill out, stays trapped behind your eyes, in the deep holes of your pupils.

You're winning. You always win.

Maybe you wouldn't know if you weren't. You've forgotten what it feels like to lose.

You've known he was using you, you've known from the start, but when you finally find out how deep the betrayal goes, what murderous tools your designs have been twisted into, it hurts more than you thought you could be hurt anymore. But that's useful. You've learned to transmute pain to anger, and anger you can use. That's when you decide not to wait any longer. It's been long enough.

It's supposed to be a new challenge to you, and he didn't expect you to pick it up so quickly. But money is such an easy game, as simple as memorizing the patterns in an arcade fighter, as obvious as calculating the odds at a blackjack table. There's numbers and there's people and they're both so easy to manipulate. So easy to win. As long as you're willing to do what it takes.

Mokuba is outside the door, calling to you, Nii-sama, Nii-sama, sobbing, and there used to be a piece of you that would attack anyone who would dare hurt your little brother--but who can hurt him as badly as you can--there used to be a piece of you that would wrap your arms around him and hold him and not let go--but this is how to win.

There used to be a piece of you that shattered like glass every time your brother cried and spontaneously reformed with his laughter, but it was thrown away long ago and you can't remember whether he pulled it out or you did, and when you look you can't find the hole where it used to go, amid the darkness.

But you've won.

This is what it means to lose--to lose is to die, and he had taught you that already, a long time ago. But you still smile and thank him for the lesson, with glass shards glittering on the carpet around the broken window and his footprint on the ledge.

This is what it means to win.

Except you're still playing, because the game isn't over until the tower topples, and he lost, but it's still standing. So now you're playing solitaire, against yourself, one piece at a time, picking them out and tossing them down.

It's mostly darkness now, pieces planted in the black that once grew behind the pieces. You don't have to be careful, choosing which to take. You can't tell which ones used to be important, the ones which used to be the cornerstones, the ones everything used to be built on. Those foundations don't bear any weight anymore. None of them matter.

You play in the tournaments because it's expected, because you staked much on your reputation when you needed chips to play. Your old cards have long since been lost, forgotten wherever they were hidden, but you've spent enough to guarantee your cards now are as strong as your tactics require. You never take out your deck outside of the competitions, ignore the kids playing on desks after school. Boring games. Meaningless games.

Someday, after the tower falls, you're going to rebuild it, taking those most important pieces and putting them in the center, at the core where they will support everything. Hidden deep inside where no one will be able to see them and no one will be able to pull them out.

But rebuilding is a loser's thought, a loser's wish, pathetic, worthless comfort in the face of a winner's triumph. Winners have no need of hope; they have victory instead.

If the tower falls, you will have lost, because you're the only one playing now. But it can't fall. A single solid darkness, a tower strong as a mountain. You'll never lose.

And then one day, impossible day, impossible game, you do.

Your pride, that's one piece you still have left. It's only pride that drives you, using all the power you've gathered, all the strategy you've learned, until you hold the other three in your deck, until you have power enough to bring them to life. Until you've captured nightmares for your new game and when your brother asks you to let him help, asks you to let him play, you nearly say no, because it's your game to win. But it doesn't matter anyway; he'll lose. He always lost to you before and never learned from it, always just insisted on trying again, and maybe there was once a piece of you that believed that meant something, but you've thrown all the useless unnecessary pieces away.

It's your pride that makes you challenge him again, standing in the tower you had always dreamed of building--a piece of you had dreamed, and maybe you threw that piece away, or maybe it's just too dark to see it anymore. It doesn't matter. There's only this game, the game you have to win.

The game you lose.

And then he points at you, with his eyes terrible, and the third eye glowing on his forehead most terrible of all. His lips are moving but you can't hear the words, because he's playing against you still, he's taking the final turn. Picking his piece.

Picking the darkness itself. He points his finger and the shadow, the blackness that stands and supports and is everything you have left, the darkness shatters, and the last remaining pieces, suspended in clean empty space, tumble down. The tower falls.

The tower has fallen. And his was the last move, he took the final piece. So he lost.

So you won, as you always do.

You won, and you're standing in a blank void that slowly recedes, like night curling back before morning, and in the dawning light you see all the glittering pieces scattered at your feet, all the thousands and more pieces that were drawn out and tossed away, and maybe some broke when they were thrown, but all the fragments are here.

And you don't remember what the tower looked like before, and you don't remember how to put things together, when for so long all you've done is take them apart. But you kneel and pick up one piece, and pick up another, and turn them around until their edges fit together.

The click as they slide into place is perfect, the absolute success of two parts of a whole again matched. The most important sound, in this game that matters, like all games matter.

And you smile.