EARTH ONLINE

Chapter 15 — Sugar / Sugar~

Cole did not know it, but elsewhere — on the First Floor of the Spire, in the nest of a turkey the size of a tiger — the egg's twin had just changed hands.

The giant turkey lay dying in a spreading pool of its own blood, claws still red with a man's, gabbling weakly, unable to rise; one more blow would finish it. It was lucky only in that the man who'd gutted it had no strength left to stand either.

The turkey ground out, "Gobble… Stowaway… eat you…"

A man in black, one leg torn away by the bird, drenched in his own blood, his left arm punched through with holes, his right arm ending in no hand at all — instead, from the wrist, a vast black spike had grown, a brutal awl of black-violet metal. He coughed red, flicked the arm, and the terrible spike vanished, the wrist becoming a battered ordinary hand again. On both arms he crawled into the nest, reached into the heart of the straw, and lifted out the white egg the turkey had hidden there.

"Put my egg down!" the turkey howled.

"You kept clear of this egg the whole fight," the man said, wiping the blood from his mouth, calm, concluding. "It's a treasure."

The turkey thrashed and could not stand. For the first time it regretted ever wanting to eat the Stowaway — if it hadn't, it would never have fought him, and never come to this; who could have known one Stowaway would be strong enough to claw his way clear through the First Floor?

It found its feet on the last of its strength, lurching for the man — and as its beak came down for the egg the Spire's clear-message sounded, and the man's shape blinked out, and the turkey crashed into empty straw.

"Gobble… my egg… gobble…"

Across the whole server, every player left the First Floor in the same instant.

Adrian Vance dragged himself free of the nest with one leg gone, lost to the bird, and lay in an abandoned construction lot under an empty sky. A faint sizzling came from the stump of his right leg; he looked, and the flesh was, very slowly, growing back.

When the new muscle had crept up to the knee, he opened his eyes and took the white egg from his pocket.

He looked at it for a while. The sun sank, and the light caught the shell, and a line of small gold characters bloomed across the white.

> 【 Item: Sugar 】

> 【 Owner: Adrian Vance 】

> 【 Quality: Rare 】

> 【 Level: 2 (upgradeable) 】

> 【 Attack: Average 】

> 【 Function: save the current game's progress 】

> 【 Restriction: usable once every seven days; saves a one-hour window 】

> 【 Note: A grown man in this day and age — you know perfectly well what Sugar is, don't you? 】

Adrian Vance looked at it, and said nothing.

In the same moment, two hundred miles north, Cole was turning the impossibly hard egg over in his hands, knocking it now and then, and once, when curiosity got the better of him, hitting it with the book.

He'd learned nothing, and he had no time to waste. He set the egg aside and drove on toward Manhattan. He propped it against the dash, and as a shaft of sun crossed it, gold characters surfaced, a piece at a time.

Cole hit the brakes and watched.

> 【 Item: #@$%2 (corrupted) 】

> 【 Owner: Cole Mercer 】

> 【 Quality: Rare 】

> 【 Level: @#¥@ (upgradeable) 】

> 【 Attack: Average 】

> 【 Func@$#: save game #%^@$@# 】

> 【 Restriction: @#$#%@$@!# 】

> 【 Note: As a @$@$%@#$!@# 】

Cole stared. What is this thing?

He crooked a finger and rapped the egg. On the third knock, a low man's voice came out of it.

"…Sugar?"

Cole went rigid.

So the egg was alive too — clever enough to know his name? Except no one called him Sugar — no one but a stranger across a card table, a year ago, who'd known him only as a handle: MeltSugar. The echo of it ran down his spine before he could place why.

And — Sugar was an awfully intimate thing for a hunk of eggshell to call him.

He weighed it a moment, then hummed, low. "Mm." A thought. "Are you the turkey, or the egg?"

The voice in the egg stopped dead.

A second later it came back, cold and hard as a drawn blade.

"Who are you?"

Cole's mind turned, fast, and in almost no time he had it: the thing he was talking to was no egg and no turkey. It was something in the Spire, maybe — or, more likely —

"Are you human?" he asked.

The voice was quiet a moment. "…Yes. I'm human. Are you?"

"Yes," Cole said.

And across two hundred miles of dead, silent country, with no idea on either end who sat at the other, the two of them held the line — the strongest player on the server, and the librarian who'd once played him for a slam at bridge — and neither hung up.

---

Neither said anything for a while.

The car sat on the shoulder, the low sun pouring in and turning the white egg gold. Words surfaced and sank on its shell — a few legible characters in a sea of garbage — but Cole cared more, now, about the man on the other end.

He thought it through, and decided that before he asked anything he'd offer something first, to set a tone. "Right now I'm holding a white egg. Your voice is coming out of it. Are you trapped inside it, or is it something else?"

The man's voice was level and unhurried. "I'm not trapped in anything. I'm holding an egg too — your voice comes out of mine." A beat. "A turkey egg."

Cole's mind moved. "Then you're on the NA server, and you just came off the First Floor. Mine came from a Spire creature. A turkey egg."

"Same. A white turkey egg, from one of the Spire's things."

So that settled it: the eggs were a kind of phone, a way for two strangers who'd never met to talk. Which meant the next question was how far the phone reached.

"Where are you—"

"What city are you—"

They said it on top of each other, and both stopped.

The man recovered first. "The capital."

The capital. Better than two hundred miles south of New York. That far, and the egg connected clean — so it really did work like a phone.

"Near New York," Cole said.

He looked down at the egg in his hand, an idea taking shape. For some reason his egg seemed to be damaged — and he didn't believe his idle knocking had done it; the thing had cracked his steering wheel, not the other way around. A Spire artifact didn't break that easily. Two-in-ten odds he'd damaged it. Eight-in-ten it had come to him broken.

Because it was damaged, he had no idea what it actually did. Only three lines on the shell were free of garbage, and one of them read:

> 【 Quality: Rare 】

A rare item. If the Spire really was running a game, then handing out items made sense, and a rare item was precious in any game. He didn't know whether his broken egg would ever work — but he might pry its true purpose out of the man in the capital. A rare item couldn't exist just to make phone calls; humans had managed video across the planet before the Spire ever arrived. Two identical eggs, alike, able to talk — the odds were overwhelming they did the same thing.

"When I was clearing the First Floor," Cole said, "a giant mole in there handed me this egg as a reward. It's extraordinarily hard. I tried it against my steering wheel, a rock, a few other things — it cracked the wheel, but didn't break itself." Lay out your own cards first; make him feel they were trading. "The mole said humans can't hatch a turkey egg. I assumed I was the only one with mine — that I could just use it — and then you turned up with yours. My side gave no instructions about needing a second person, or about being able to talk. Did yours?"

The low voice answered without hesitation. "No."

Cole said nothing.

Is that any way to have a conversation?

The man hadn't given up one single thing. When two people are talking pleasantly, isn't the polite thing to volunteer something of your own?

Cole let the silence sit, then tried again. "How did you reach me? I heard your voice first — then I answered."

That wasn't even intel. If the man wouldn't part with that, Cole would give up on drawing him out entirely.

"A few lines came up on the shell. I studied it. On the third knock of my finger, it flared gold." The man finally surrendered a scrap. "It's giving off a faint gold light while I speak."

Cole remembered his own third knock — how the egg had seemed about to glow, and then the man's voice had come through and the light had died.

"Do you know how to end the call?"

"I'll try."

They both worked at it for a while. Then the line cut. Ten seconds later the voice returned: "I closed both hands around it. That stopped it."

Three knocks to open, both hands to close. Cole tested it himself, opening and ending at will, and after several rounds they had it pinned: either party could open by knocking three times, and either could end it by gripping the egg.

Through the whole experiment the two of them were seamless — not a wasted word, each sharing exactly what the test required and nothing more. And somewhere in it Cole felt the strangest thing: the man on the other egg moved with him as if they'd drilled it a hundred times. It bred a reluctant kind of kinship, an admiration almost — a pity the man was so impossible to pump for information, or Cole might have liked him outright.

Because he hadn't surrendered a single thing that mattered. He was plainly hiding something. Cole knew he was hiding it. And Cole knew that the man knew Cole was fishing.

They'd said everything that could be said without either one giving up real ground. Cole wasn't about to admit his egg was broken — that would put him under. The man wouldn't reveal what the egg was for — guarding himself against a stranger of unknown depth. Stalemate.

The man's voice stayed even, and — annoyingly — pleasant. "Anything else?"

"…One last question," Cole said.

"Why was the first thing out of your mouth not hello, not hey, but — Sugar?"

The air went still. Cole had the dim sense he'd stepped wrong somewhere, without being able to say where — until a low laugh came out of the egg, the first warmth the man had let slip. "You really don't even know what this egg is called?"

Cole said nothing.

Some things you can keep to yourself. Leave a man his dignity.

He'd known all along the man was holding back, and known the man knew Cole had gaps in his information. But to have it stated, plainly, out loud — it stung, a little, the sense of having lost the exchange. And yet the two of them, cold and guarded the whole call, felt fractionally closer for the admission.

At least they weren't enemies.

"The egg is named Sugar," the man said. "When it lit up, I said the name without thinking."

"My name is Cole," Cole said, flat. "And you?"

"…" The man went abruptly silent — only now, it seemed, doing the math on how many times he'd purred so intimate a word at a total stranger. After a long moment: "Vance."

"That's all, then?"

"Mm. Goodnight."

The line ended. Cole slid the egg back into his pocket and drummed his fingers on the wheel.

One: the egg was named Sugar. Surely nothing to do with him — a coincidence, that was all. (Surely.) The echo of an old handle nagged at the back of his skull and he set it down.

Two: this Mr. Vance, in the capital, was very sharp and very careful. The odds of prying anything out of him were thin to none — and very possibly this was the first and last time they'd ever speak. The call had profited neither of them; both had clocked the other as a hard mark. No reason to call again unless something forced it.

Put another way: in Vance's place, Cole wouldn't share a word about a rare item with a stranger either. You held a thing like that close, told no one, kept the edge of surprise. He wasn't naive enough to give that away.

Cole sighed, and drove on, looking for the school.

By the time he reached the dense part of the city the wrecks on the streets had thickened into a single welded snarl, and driving stopped making sense. He left the car and went on foot, hugging the edge of the road, ducking behind every barrier and stalled truck.

On the fourth day after Earth went online, Manhattan was a ruin in a glittering shell.

The light was failing, but storefronts still glowed up and down the avenues. He passed a KFC with cold fries and a packet of ketchup abandoned on a window table, the place empty as a tomb. The closer he got to the core of the city, the more careful he moved — because here there were people. He rounded a corner and saw a young woman in a tracksuit inside a bodega, working through bags of chips and instant noodles; she clocked him without surprise, watched him a wary second, and went back to clearing the shelves of food and water.

Cole carried a heavy pack — flashlight, food, water. All along the way he passed others scavenging, and tight little knots of survivors who eyed every passerby; many were spattered with dried blood, and a few lay at the roadside missing limbs, moaning. A city this size had kept far more of its people through the cull than anywhere small. By his rough count, the core of Manhattan held maybe four souls to the square kilometer, most of them eating now, at dinnertime. Cole's remade body needed far less; he hadn't eaten in a day and a night and wasn't hungry.

He didn't ask the scavengers for directions. He let himself into a derelict newsstand, dug through it, and came up with a detailed city map.

"Manhattan… Eldridge Middle School… here."

He shouldered the pack and walked on.

And then, with no warning at all, the bright, lilting voice rang out.

> [ Ding-dong! EU-2 Registered Player Mathilde Roy has opened the First Floor of the Spire. In three minutes, all players on the EU-2 Server begin the assault! ]

Cole stopped. So did the two people eating down the block, heads turning toward the distant Spire. He glanced at a clock still ticking on the newsstand wall.

7:18 p.m. Game hours are six to eighteen, local — our server's done for the day. Europe… hours apart, on their own clock. And it still broadcasts worldwide.

He walked on. This announcement didn't repeat three times the way the one for Adrian Vance had; it sounded once and stopped. Because this time the player who'd cracked a floor wasn't on Cole's server — was a world away. Somewhere down the street a blood-soaked man, half-dead, dragged in great ragged breaths and laughed and laughed. "Die," he gasped, gleeful. "All of you, die… die…"

By eleven that night Cole finally reached the school's district, having clambered over wreck after wreck, his pace dragging, having lost his way once in the dark. And in the dead silence of the late hour, the clear child's voice rang out again —

> [ Ding-dong! AP-2 Registered Player Kenji Sato has cleared the First Floor of the Spire! ]

— while Cole stood at the gates of Eldridge Middle School, and went looking for a dead man's daughter.