Cole turned his head toward the dozen-odd flowers and shouted, "Destroy those flowers! All of them!""Dream on," the one-armed man snarled, swinging the broken blade to drive off the students rushing the buds.Cole's match came around; the man blocked it with the stub of his sword, fast as thought. There was a ringing clash, and from the point of impact a web of cracks raced down the broken steel — and it burst apart into fragments, useless."Destroy the flowers!" Cole roared.All but the two Reserves still cradling Mr. Reyes's body threw themselves into the flowerbed. Toby wrapped both hands around the stem of a rose and hauled. "I can't pull it! This thing's harder than rebar!"If the strongest of the students couldn't tear one loose, the rest had no hope.And at last Cole understood the unease that had never left him.This one-armed man's body was stronger than his own. He looked small and slight, but he was packed with hard, dense muscle — the kind no one became by turning Stowawa

Cole listened. Under the man's voice ran a thin, faint hiss — so quiet he'd have missed it if he weren't listening — and strange. Not wind, not leaves. It was the static crackle of an old black-and-white television, the kind he'd heard as a boy.Every screen on Earth had gone dead the day the game began. No one was running a television now, least of all an antique. Cole was eighty percent sure of what he was hearing anyway."The voice is inside your head?" the man said — answering nothing, asking instead.Cole was in no hurry. "Yes. Inside my head.""Probably because I reached you differently this time. I didn't knock the egg three times." The hiss sharpened, and under it now a faint ring of clashing metal, though the man's voice stayed level. "I want to use the egg. Mr. Mercer — I'm in a strange game of the Spire's. I won't go into it; I judge it isn't simple. So I want to use this item to lay myself a fallback."Cole already saw where this was going. His eyes narrowed — and the man

Once they'd left the school, Wes said, "Hey — you got back so late last night. Three, four in the morning? What were you doing out there all that time?""Thinking about life before the apocalypse," Cole said easily. "Took a walk." There was no telling Wes about the egg, and far less about Adrian Vance."Huh," said Wes. And as they walked toward his home he started talking, fast and bright, about his house — but the tail of every sentence shook a little, and his pace was slow.Cole watched him sidelong. The man was only pretending to be steady. He was afraid of what he'd find: an empty house, and himself the only one left.Wes's home was an hour's walk that stretched into two, and by six in the evening they reached a district of townhouses, and the closer they got the slower Wes went, until at last they stood before a three-story brownstone.Wes stood at the iron gate and couldn't make himself open it. He didn't know whether, on the other side of that door, he'd find his parents or an

The young woman who'd picked up the giant die and hugged it to her chest now started at let the game begin, and shoved it toward the young man beside her. "Brandon — I don't want to roll it, you — you go first.""Why me?" His face changed. "You're the one who picked it up."She dropped it like it was hot.A balding middle-aged man said, hesitant: "We need an order. Here's my proposal — eight of us, so we roll in reverse of the order we triggered the game. Last one in rolls first. Fair?"Every head swung to Cole — and only the old man scowled.Cole looked up at them, unruffled. "I've no problem going first. You all seem to be strangers to one another. What I'd rather know is — out there, just now, why did the lot of you work together to drag me into this?"That Cole had volunteered to roll first loosened everyone at once.A man with a beer belly said, "Brother — sorry about this, you don't know how foul this game is. The moment we touched that planter, the Spire told us we'd triggered

Linda clutched the giant die, trembling, her eyes gone red, and could not bring herself to throw."My sweet child," Mario asked, all concern, "whatever is the matter? Why don't you roll?"She stared at it in terror.Mario's voice dropped to ice. "Do you not want to play with Uncle Mario anymore? Hmm?!"She shrieked and flung the die on reflex. It spun three times and stopped on three. Sobbing, half-crawling, she scrambled to square 20 — where Cole already stood — and Mario roared with laughter at the comical sight of her scuttling across the floor. Cole was round four; no trigger.Then the bald man, Karl.He stood on 19, about to begin his fifth round, and it wasn't only Karl who was afraid — Linda was too. She'd just run onto 20, where Cole waited. If Karl rolled a one, he'd land on 20, and while Cole was immune, Karl and Linda would face the Level-7 square together.Sweat beaded on Karl's scalp. He wiped his streaming face on his sleeve, legs shaking like sieves, staring at the die.