EARTH ONLINE

Chapter 12 — One of Us

For a long moment no one breathed.

Then Ben took hold of himself, the way a man whose living is managing a room takes hold of himself. "Alright. Think. The mole said a Stowaway killed someone to log in, has an ability, and gives off a smell only those things can catch. We can't smell it. So we work the other two."

He turned to Cole. The strongest of them, plainly; the one with the match; the one who knew Mosaic. "You're a Registered Player, aren't you. You played one of the Spire's games and won. If you were a Stowaway, Mosaic's people would've sniffed you out long before you ever got here — you wouldn't have survived to lend that thing a match."

"I played a game of the Spire's," Cole said. "By its definition, that makes me Registered."

"There's nine-in-ten odds you're telling the truth," Ben said, and then, after a breath, stepped into the center of the group. "I'll be straight with all of you. I'm the second Registered Player."

He told it plainly. He'd been pulled into a game on the second day — a game called, of all things, Why Would You Eat Something as Cute as a Lamb? Four strangers in fuzzy sheep costumes, loose in a maze, hiding from a single wolf; get eaten or find the god-egg at the exit and win. They'd split up — one wolf, better odds apart — and he'd heard two of the others scream and die, and run, and the wolf had been nearly on him when the Spire announced the fourth player had found the egg, and somehow he'd stumbled out a winner, back at his office, half a day "late."

"I couldn't tell anyone," he said. "I tried — the words just wouldn't come, my voice cut out every time I reached the game. Everyone thought I'd overslept. Then the cull came, and here I am." He met Cole's eyes. "It was the same for you, wasn't it? You physically can't say it."

"My game ended right before the cull," Cole said. "So I never had the chance to try."

"But I am Registered." Ben spread his hands. "And here's the thing — I won't say what my ability is, but you'll believe that I have one. A Stowaway has an ability too. But a Stowaway hides it. I just stood up and admitted I have one. The man who hides his power is the Stowaway. So if a third person turns out to have an ability — when Cole and I are the two Registered Players — that third person is the one we're looking for."

Lucan pushed his glasses up his nose, and spoke for the first time in a while, voice cool and even. "There's a cleaner way. A normal person, told to his face that he is a killer, reacts — even a premeditated murderer. There are only two kinds who don't. The antisocial kind, who never believed killing was wrong to begin with. And the naive kind — too young, or too ignorant, to grasp what they've done." He let that sit. "When the mole explained what a Stowaway was, I was watching faces."

They went around the circle.

Lena had been a self-described Spire optimist — a survival-game obsessive who'd holed up in her dorm for three days playing, never taking the tower seriously, until the morning her three roommates were simply gone and the building was empty. Her father was dead; her mother away in another city. She'd never killed anyone. She told it shaky but straight, and her fear, when it broke through, was the ordinary fear of a girl who'd watched the world empty out.

Wes had spent three days with friends, mostly drunk, before crashing on the highway. He was so transparently a soft, clueless rich boy that no one even bothered to suspect him; Lena gave him a look of withering contempt when he tried to detail exactly what kind of partying it had been.

Zane the cook — awake now, sweating, standing rigid — had delivered food for three days, fewer orders than usual, nothing remarkable, until the third morning the street emptied and he fled home. He kept searching every face. "I never killed anyone. I swear. I'm not a— a Stowaway, I'm not!"

And Penny.

The frail fifteen-year-old stood close to Lena, looking timidly at the others. Lena squeezed her hand. "Don't be scared, Penny. Just tell them what you did those three days. The real Stowaway can't hide their tail."

Penny nodded and said, small: "I'm not a Stowaway either. I never killed anyone. Same as everyone — they cancelled school, my parents kept me home. My dad still went to work, but my mom's office told her to stay, so she stayed with me. She was worried I'd fall behind, so she tutored me. Language and math from seven to eleven, a nap, English from two, homework together at six, and she'd check it…" Her eyes reddened. "And then on the third day my mom just — vanished. I didn't know anything. She was just gone."

Lena pulled her into a hug.

Cole stood very still.

She said, "I'm not a Stowaway either."

He turned it over once and it held. Either. As in — like the people before me. Like the chef who'd spoken just ahead of her. But no one in this cavern could be certain the chef wasn't the Stowaway. Cole couldn't. Ben couldn't. Only one person in the world could know, for a fact, that Zane was innocent.

The person who knew, for a fact, who the Stowaway actually was.

And there was the second thing — the times. Seven to eleven, a nap, English from two, homework at six. Of all of them, only Penny had recited her three days with that kind of clean, rehearsed precision. The account of someone who'd built the story in advance, and practiced it, so it would come out smooth.

Lucan was already looking at her, and Cole knew they'd arrived at the same place. The man crossed to the two girls and bent down, gently, to the frightened child's level.

"Your very first sentence gave you away," Lucan said quietly. "But you're fifteen. Who could you have killed? Why would you have killed?"

"That's her," Ben said, loud. "The Stowaway's her — I saw it too."

Lena's arms went stiff around Penny. Then she let go and pulled away, fast, and put distance between them.

Penny's face was streaked with tears. She shrank back two steps, choking on the words. "I didn't — I'm not — I never killed anyone, I didn't, I — I—"

"You're the Stowaway," Cole said.

Calm. Final. The whole cavern fell still around the small, crying, frail-shouldered girl — and not one of them could understand how a fifteen-year-old came to have a body to bury.