EARTH ONLINE

Chapter 16 — What Exactly Is a Reserve?

> [ Ding-dong! On November 19th, two players worldwide have cleared the First Floor of the Spire. 416,230,000 players remain. Please strive to climb the Spire! ]

Cole's foot stopped mid-step. He looked up, disbelieving, at the black shape hanging in the dark over the city.

He remembered it precisely: yesterday morning, just over four hundred and ninety-eight million players had loaded into the game. Now — eighty million fewer. Was that the cost of the assaults on two servers? Or were there other ways for players to die?

Eighty million people, gone again, in a single day.

His face went hard, and he put his head down and walked on. The streetlamps up ahead guttered; he took the flashlight from his pack and lit the map. Three corners, four streets, no wasted words to himself, and soon a traffic sign loomed at the roadside — SCHOOL ZONE, REDUCE SPEED. He was close.

Crunch.

Glass shattered under his shoe. He looked down at a spray of fine fragments, then up: the streetlamp over his head had broken somehow, scattering glass across the pavement.

It was the first broken lamp. It was not the last.

The road to the school gate ran on ahead of him, lit by only two surviving lamps casting a sickly glow, the ground beneath them carpeted with broken glass. The late-autumn wind howled through and set the trees on both sides hissing and tossing, their black shadows swaying like silent ghosts. Cole walked through them without expression, glass crunching under each step, the wind lifting the hem of his coat. His eyes stayed calm, as if he'd noticed nothing at all.

Then he lifted his foot and flicked two quick steps to the left. In the spot he'd just left, a nail the thickness of a finger had appeared out of nowhere, point up. Had he set his weight down, it would have gone clean through his foot.

He raised his head, watching the dark all around.

He knew this flavor of thing. Lights that shattered for no reason. Nails that surfaced underfoot. Misfortune, arriving precisely — the exact signature of the garbage ability now sitting in his own book, the one he'd taken off Ben. Somewhere ahead, someone was working a curse on him.

He was a hundred meters from the gate. It was one in the morning, the wind needling cold, not a soul in sight. He went on, and the strange nail came twice more — once hanging brazenly in the air before his face, set to drive into his eye if he'd taken one careless stride. His reflexes carried him aside each time.

It had all begun the moment he neared the school. Ten-odd meters to the gate now; eighty-some back to the corner.

He hesitated a beat, and decided to go in and see.

"Don't come any closer!" a voice cried — young, ringing, the dryness of a voice not quite done changing.

"You're a student here?" Cole answered at once.

"Don't come near — who — who are you?"

"I mean no harm. I'm looking for a student. My friend's daughter."

The nail hanging before his face dropped to the ground, the path no longer barred. He walked on unhindered to the gate, looked through the iron bars — and saw no one. The boy who'd spoken was nowhere in sight.

He frowned and raised his voice. "Where are you?"

"You— you're really not a bad person?" the boy quavered.

"I'm not. Are you in trouble? Do you need help? I've got water and food."

"I'm— I'm in the guard booth by the gate. Leave the water and food at the door, and don't come in—"

Cole took a bottle and a packet of hardtack from his pack and walked toward the booth, unhurried. Halfway there, he stopped.

"You— why'd you stop?" the boy said.

Cole smiled and kept walking. The yard was silent; the boy went quiet; Cole said nothing, only walked, easy and slow, and when he reached the steps of the booth — he surged forward, twisted past the door, and threw himself bodily through the side window instead, crashing into the little room in a burst of glass.

The shards rained onto the step he'd been about to climb, and the step collapsed in an instant into a pit seven or eight meters deep, its floor bristling with knives, edges up.

"Mr. Reyes — he figured it out! Mr. Reyes, help!"

Plain glass couldn't so much as scratch Cole's skin now, and his speed had outrun most of what was human. A plump boy took one look at him and bolted, shrieking; Cole was faster, caught his arm, pulled him in, and pinned both arms behind his back.

"Don't move! Who are you? What do you want?" — a frantic male voice.

Cole looked up: a young man in a white shirt, hair a mess, eyes red, plainly just hauled from sleep, charging into the booth.

"Why lure me in," Cole said, mild. "To kill me?"

"Put him down — don't hurt him! Whatever you want, we'll give it, anything—"

Something was off here. Cole was framing the question to get it straight when another voice cut across the room:

"Cole?! You finally made it! Hey — hey, let go of him. Mr. Reyes, he's not a bad guy, that's Cole, the friend I told you about. He came to Eldridge looking for someone — we got split up on the way, so I came here hoping I'd run into him."

Cole turned.

Wes came striding in behind the teacher, with four middle-schoolers trailing him. Cole released the plump boy, who shot behind the teacher's legs.

"You finally got here," Wes said. "When the assault ended today I opened my eyes and I was just — dumped on a street. We'd only gotten as far as the edge of town when the game pulled us under, and I woke up over here. Figured I'd come to Eldridge — it's my old middle school, I know the way — and maybe wait for you."

Cole glanced at the wary teacher and students, then back at Wes. "What time did you get here?"

"Around seven." Noticing how silent the teacher and kids had gone, Wes hurried on: "Mr. Reyes, this is Cole. The guy I told you about. He's not dangerous, and he's definitely not a Stowaway, don't worry."

Cole's brow rose a fraction at how pointedly Wes vouched he was not a Stowaway.

"I'm looking for Cassie Hale," he said. "Seventh grade."

"…Cassie?" "He's here for Cassie?"

And before Cole could wonder at it, a short-haired girl of about five-foot-three stepped out of the cluster of students. Her face was blank, her eyes cold on him. "I'm Cassie Hale. I'm the only Cassie in seventh grade at Eldridge. What do you want with me? What are you after?"

This is some coincidence.

Even Wes was startled. "Cassie's who you were looking for? If you'd just told me the name I'd have found her hours ago."

Cole looked down at the unnervingly composed girl. "I'm a friend of your father's. His name is Daniel Hale. I work at a library; he came to read, often. He asked me to come to New York and see that you were safe."

"That is my father's name. Do you have any proof you knew him?"

"Cassie?" Wes and the teacher both frowned. Wes trusted Cole without reservation; Mr. Reyes had heard enough to believe him. And the girl was still doubting?

Cole smiled, and something more careful came into his eyes as he looked at her. "Your father's about five-eleven. Out of work nearly a year. He told me his own father — your grandfather — was a doctor, and that he himself was a, let's say, devout man. And he always wore a string of red agate beads on his wrist." He paused. "Which only proves I knew him. It doesn't prove I came for nothing but his sake."

"His sake," the girl said. "Or his last wish?"

The smile thinned on Cole's mouth, and went out. "His last wish."

For one instant the girl's composure broke. Then she turned hard on her heel and walked back into the knot of students. "I believe you."

Wes let out a breath. "Did it have to be so complicated? I already told them — I met Cole on the highway between cities. If he were dangerous, he'd hardly drive to a whole other city to hurt a kid he's never met. He's not a Stowaway."

"So," Cole said. "What happened here?"

Mr. Reyes shook his head. "This isn't the place. Toby, Owen — see to it the trap's reset. The rest of us will talk inside."

The plump boy nodded and stayed at the gate with a taller boy to rebuild the pit the broken glass had sprung. Cole followed the teacher in under the tall trees, and the others came with them — and the short-haired girl walked in the middle of the group with her head down, saying nothing, while a boy and another girl murmured to her, low, and would not leave her side.

Because whatever else Cole had done tonight, he had just told a thirteen-year-old that her father was dead. She had not cried. But she was only a child, and she could not hide all of it, and she did not try to walk it off alone.