EARTH ONLINE

Chapter 2 — Who Stole My Book? / Mom Will Kill Me!

Across the whole world, in that instant, everyone stopped moving and looked at the nearest tower.

They had never understood how enormous the Spires were. No matter how far away you stood, you could see them now — tiny blue points of light surfacing on the black faces, swarming, blinking, streaming upward like characters scrolling across a crashed machine, until they gathered at the center of each tower into a single line of glowing blue text:

> [ Ding-dong! Within three days, all Players must eliminate one Player. Any method is permitted, in-game or otherwise. ]

The child's voice read it aloud, gentle and delighted, at the same moment.

Cole stood on his balcony and did not blink. The cold autumn wind scraped his face; a single bead of sweat slid down from his hairline. He stared until the blue letters faded and the voice was gone and the Spire sat there, placid, exactly as it had for six months — as if nothing had happened at all.

He did not make the eight o'clock bus.

By the time he reached the library, downtown was a solid wall of people. The crowd pressed up against the barrier the tower threw, spilled back through the financial district, and choked the street in front of the doors. Cole watched it for a while, then went inside.

Ten minutes later Walsh came to the desk. "Go home, everyone. We're closed. Wait for word at home."

Zoe crowded in, electric. "It's the tower, isn't it? It talked this morning — you heard it, the whole world heard it. Online, it said. Eliminate. Is this — is this actually it? The end of the world?"

Walsh's face went flat and hard. "Nobody said anything about the end of the world. Don't go feeding each other nonsense — you young people and your nonsense."

But after Walsh left, Zoe turned back to Cole, round eyes bright with a fear that was almost entirely excitement. "You heard it too. It said online. It said eliminate a Player. Cole — what if it turns us into zombies?"

"I wasn't paying attention," Cole said, gathering his things.

He wasn't being honest. Ever since he had heard the child's voice with his own ears, since he had watched that blue line of text assemble itself on the face of the tower, his heart had not slowed down.

A normal adult's heart runs sixty to a hundred beats a minute. While Zoe was talking, Cole had counted his.

A hundred and thirty.

Nothing hurt. He felt no illness. He only felt wrong, a wrongness with no source, his pulse hammering like his body had understood something his mind had not yet been told.

"I'm going to go look at it," Zoe said, slinging her bag. "Come with me? Half the city's already there. We're on the way."

"I'm going home," Cole said, too fast.

She didn't get her look. By the time Cole stepped outside, military police were piling out of trucks and pushing the crowd back from the tower, walling it off behind white plastic panels — a fence that ran all the way up to the library doors and sealed the Spire away. People stood at the barrier and held their phones up over it.

Cole took one photo and got in a cab.

---

The tower was the only headline on Earth.

He lay on his bed and scrolled. A college friend studying in Tokyo had posted pictures: the same blue text, but not in English now — in Japanese. A second friend in California had replied a dozen times in a row.

> no it's not in chinese or whatever, it spoke ENGLISH, i nearly died. classes are cancelled, half the school's marching on city hall demanding answers.

> flights are impossible. cant get one out. my roommate's rich, she's gone by this afternoon.

> it was night here when it happened. played a nursery rhyme too — different song. my friend got it on video, posting it.

Cole tapped the clip. A Spire he didn't recognize hung beside a floodlit monument in the dark, blazing through its colors, and when the music ended the same high, ringing, child's voice said, in English this time:

"Ding-dong. November fifteenth. Earth has gone online."

He dropped the phone on the bed.

No government had released real numbers, but the towers were too many to hide, and people had done the math long ago: roughly one Spire for every ten thousand square kilometers of the planet. Land. Ocean. Everywhere.

Cole got up and paced. His heart would not come down. He walked the length of the room and back, again, again, and on the hundred-and-sixtieth turn he stopped dead.

This isn't like me.

He didn't pace. He didn't sweat through a morning. He didn't lie awake over a falling bird. Whatever this agitation was, it wasn't his — it had been poured into him from outside and it would not drain.

He went to the bathroom, bent over the sink, and ran the cold tap straight over his head, not caring if he caught a chill. It helped, a little. He carried a glass of cold water back, sat down at the laptop, and opened the bridge client.

He needed to think. He thought best inside a game.

It took ten minutes to find a table — almost nobody felt like playing bridge on the day the world went online. But the hand started, and his mind began to turn, and slowly, card by card, his heart came back down to something near his own.

He had three days to eliminate another Player.

He didn't yet know he already was one.

---

For two days Cole played bridge.

He told himself it was to think, and that was half true. The other half was that the wrongness in his chest would not let him stop. Sit still and his pulse climbed; deal a hand and it eased. So he dealt hands. He played from morning into the dark, slept face-down at the desk, woke with the agitation already waiting for him, and played again, until his eyes were red and his hands were dealing cards in his sleep.

On the second night the chat blinked.

Victor: You've been playing all day.

MeltSugar: Yeah. Not feeling great.

Victor: Play that long and you won't. Get some rest.

MeltSugar: Mm.

Victor: Stay away from the Spire.

Cole had already fallen asleep over the keyboard, and didn't see it.

When he woke the next morning the message was sitting there, and Victor was gone offline before he could answer. He stretched. Strangely, he felt better — his heart still ran fast, but the formless dread had drained out of him completely, the way a fever breaks.

That was the third day.

He didn't know yet that the dread had been a clock.

---

The library group chat had gone off in the afternoon.

Walsh: URGENT. Starting the day after tomorrow the branch is being requisitioned as a temporary research center. Collect personal belongings today or tomorrow. Repeat — day after tomorrow the branch is being—

It detonated. The old hands wanted to know where they were supposed to work now; the young ones joked that the world was ending and who cared about work. Cole looked at the Spire out the window for a long moment, picked up his bag, and got on the bus downtown.

It was the third day since Earth has gone online, and nothing had happened. People had decided, mostly, that nothing would. The bus driver had a full ashtray on the dash and a cigarette in his mouth and snapped at a woman who complained. Two college girls in the next seat played rock-paper-scissors to see who'd "eliminated" whom, and laughed themselves breathless. The whole rolling box of them was made of the people who hadn't believed, and so were calm.

The people who had believed were downtown.

Thousands of them, packed against the white barrier wall around the Spire, holding signs, shouting at a thin line of riot police. What is a game. What is eliminate. We want an answer. Their chant rolled down the street and shook the library windows.

Cole went around to the back. A basement vent window on the east side was the staff shortcut; he let himself in that way. Inside, the building was empty — it seemed he was the only one in a hurry to come back for his things. He found his locker, took out his books, and was turning to leave when a dull thump came from the southeast corner of the third floor.

He stopped.

He should have left. Instead — and he could not afterward say why — he took a security baton from the guard's locker, went up, and crept toward the corner, rising onto the balls of his feet.

"Who's there?"

A scuffling. Someone shoving a book back onto a shelf, fumbling, dropping another.

Cole came around the end of the stack and snapped, "Who's there."

A young man with a wild head of hair flinched and spun, a book still in his hands.

Cole's grip on the baton went slack. "You— Mr. Hale?"

Daniel Hale gave him a stiff, sick little laugh and pushed the dropped book back into place.

"How did you get in?"

"East window. The low one. Wasn't latched. I just— wanted to look. To look at—"

Cole frowned. The east window was the basement vent, flush with the ground. He climbed in through the vent? He scanned the shelf the prophet had been hovering over. Nothing missing. Same as it had been three days ago.

"Mr. Hale. This is theft. You understand that we—"

"I didn't take anything!" the man said quickly.

And he hadn't. That was the strange part. The books were all there. Cole opened his mouth to ask what, exactly, the man had broken in to do —

> [ Ding-dong! The confrontation game "Who Stole My Book?" has begun. ]

> [ 5:52 PM. Players Cole Mercer and Daniel Hale have safely entered. Players loaded into sandbox. Map construction complete. Data load complete… ]

Outside, the roar of ten thousand people cut off as if a wire had been pulled.

In the silence — the total, ringing silence of an empty library that should not have been silent — a child's voice rose out of nowhere and sang a nursery rhyme that no one on Earth had ever heard.

> La la la, la la la.

> One little stick to tap-tap-tap,

> Two little players in mommy's trap.

> Three dark nights and not a word,

> Angels and devils want the third.

> Hush now—

> who stole my book?

The last note hung in the air and would not stop hanging, thin and bright and circling the high ceiling long after a real voice would have died.

"Did you hear that," Cole said. He had to push the words out between his teeth.

Daniel Hale had already gone to the floor. His ruined hair hid his face; all Cole could see of him were two eyes shaking with terror. He couldn't speak. He scrabbled backward until his spine hit the wall and curled there, arms over his head. "What is that," he whispered. "What is that—"

Cole had no idea.

The rhyme did not come again. The library held its breath.

And, slowly, Cole steadied.

Some people fall apart in a crisis. Cole had always been the opposite. Five years ago a car had taken both his parents in the same night, three weeks into his freshman year, and where another kid would have broken, Cole had buried them in good order, settled every account, and only when it was all finished had he gone somewhere alone and cried, once, and then started planning the rest of his life. He was, by nature, ruthlessly calm.

And since the agitation had set into his chest two days ago, he'd been more calm, not less — as if something had filed his mind down to a colder edge.

He set the baton in his right hand and pulled a fat, heavy art book off the G shelf with his left, holding it like a shield, and went to the window.

Outside the window was an endless, edgeless white.

This was the east window. On any normal day it looked out over the main avenue, the old gardens, the gray bones of the city. Now there was nothing — not fog, not sky. White, the way a page is white before anyone writes on it.

He walked the third floor, north window, south, west, checking each, never letting a stack at his back go unwatched, ready to swing at every turn. Then he came back to the prophet.

"We're not in Boston anymore," he said.

Hale stared up at him in horror.

Cole did not want to say it, but he said it. "We're surrounded by blank space — but this is still the library. As if someone lifted the building out of the city and set it down in a very large empty room. I've worked here a year. I passed the desk on the way up. Zoe's water glass is exactly where she left it. It's all here. It's just… here."

Having someone to talk to seemed to put a little iron back in the prophet's spine. He got to his feet, looked around — and suddenly pointed. "That— that's my book. I hid it there last week."

Cole followed his finger to a gap between two shelves.

"I didn't want anyone borrowing it before I finished. So I put it in the crack where no one would look."

Cole looked at him for a long second.

So that was all you. Every single time.

But it settled the last doubt: the prophet knew this building's hiding places, and Cole was its keeper, and they both agreed — this was the library. Whole. Real. Moved.

He took Hale back down to the guard's locker and put a second baton in the man's hands. Everything ahead was unknown; a weapon would keep the prophet alive, and if something went wrong, two sets of hands beat one.

They had just reached the front desk when a sound came skittering out of the deep stacks.

Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.

Hale's eyes blew wide. Cole's back went cold.

He had just walked those stacks. There had been no one. So whose footsteps were these — light, uneven, skipping, the gait of a small child hopping from tile to tile?

They pressed their backs to the wall and watched the dark between the shelves. The sound came closer, and closer, and then, thirty feet off, a small black shape stepped out from behind the stacks.

A little girl. Pigtails. A red dress, in the dead of November. Bright red patent shoes — the tap-tap-tap had been the shoes. A pink Minnie Mouse backpack, perfect down to the stitching, no different from a real child's.

Except her face.

She had no eyebrows. No eyes. No nose. No mouth.

Where her face should have been there was a thick, crawling blur of mosaic — a censored square hung on the front of a little girl's head, walking toward them on shiny red shoes.

Cole locked his jaw against the sudden, primal urge to close the distance and cave that blur in with the baton.

The girl tilted her head.

"Big brother," she said, in a voice like a small silver bell. "Have you seen my book?"