The wall fell and sealed them, and on the far side, where Cole could not see or hear, the old man finally said aloud the thing he had worked out.Cole did not need to hear it. He had watched the old man's face in the half-second before the white came down, and he could read the next ten minutes off it the way he read an overdue notice."He's got it," Cole said.Brendan, still rattled, still recalibrating everything he'd thought about the quiet man beside him: "Got what?""Us. The line between me and the man in black. He spent this whole game thinking his only problem was a Stowaway too strong to kill. Now he knows the Stowaway has a partner on the other team, and that the partner is the one running our side." Cole looked at the white wall, and the cold machine in his head ran the old man's hand for him, card by card, the way he'd once run a stranger named Victor's. "He can't beat the man in black. He can't beat me — he just watched what's at my wrist. So he stops trying to beat either

"Three," said the old man.It was the first time he'd raised his voice above the dry murmur, and it cut the warm thing between Cole and Adrian like a wire. "You said two cards each, librarian. You have two. I have three." He spread his thin hands, and his smile had gone, and what sat under it was older and colder than the smile had ever let on. "Let's be honest children. Isn't that the house we're in?""Three, then," Cole agreed, mild. "It doesn't change the shape of it. You can't make either of us fight. Every duel you trigger jams. Every round you burn brings the puppet's bet closer to lost. You can count better than that — you've been counting all game." He let the cold show now, since the warmth had bought him nothing with this one. "You've lost. The only question left is whether you walk out of it."The old man looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at Adrian — at the man in black standing at the librarian's shoulder, on the wrong side of a wall that had stopped meaning

They went north and east through the bones of the city, and they did not talk about the blue box, because there was nothing yet to say about it that wasn't a guess, and neither of them spent words on guesses.New York after the three days was a quieter ruin than Cole had expected the first time he'd walked into it, and it had not gotten louder since. Half a billion people, gone in a morning; what was left did not crowd. They moved down the center of avenues because the center of an avenue let you see what was coming, past cars stopped eight months ago and never moved, past a deli with its security gate half-down and its shelves licked clean, past a school bus on its side that Cole had long ago stopped letting himself look into. The Spire hung over all of it, patient, casting its cold light that threw no shadow.Adrian walked the way he did everything — without hurry and without waste, a half-step off Cole's shoulder, on the side the wind came from. Cole noticed that and filed it and d

They gave Adrian the long table in the back of the basement, the one Lucan used for what was left of science, and by the second hour of him talking the room had quietly filled up.It filled the way a room fills when word gets around that the man who opened the First Floor is describing what's on the other side of it. Registered players drifted in and leaned on the salvaged shelving. Jax stood in the doorway with his arms crossed, pretending he wasn't listening. Toby — sixteen, all elbows, the boy who'd cut the arm off an electric Stowaway and then decided he'd rather be at a base than a graveyard — sat on an overturned crate near the front, openly rapt. Tara stood at the back with her arms folded and her ponytail and her coroner's eyes, the one survivor of the trio that had first tried to recruit Cole, and she watched Adrian the way she watched everything, like she was already reading how he'd die.Cole sat off to the side, where he could see the door and the room and the man both, an

> [ Ding-dong! ]The whole basement froze — fifty players and eight hundred Reserves above them, an entire mall full of human beings, every one of them hearing the same child's voice fall into their heads at once, the way they'd all heard it the morning the world ended.But it wasn't for all of them. Cole felt that immediately, the way you feel a hand on your shoulder in a crowd. The voice had a direction this time. It was looking at him.> [ Player MeltSugar has reached the threshold of the Spire's Second Floor. ]> [ Player Adrian Vance has reached the threshold of the Spire's Second Floor. ]Across the room, Cole saw Adrian go still — saw the same words land behind the hawk-dark eyes — and around them the Attack players who'd been close enough to overhear began, slowly, to understand that something was happening that the rules did not have a page for.> [ In ten days, the Second Floor assault will open. ]> [ Note: by long-standing protocol, the assault is a solitary trial. One Pla