EARTH ONLINE

Chapter 3 — Mosaic's Disdain

Cole kept his face cold and said nothing.

The girl asked again. "Big brother, have you seen my book?"

She looked fragile enough that he could have pinned her with one hand. But the place was wrong, and the blur where her face should be was very wrong, and nothing that walked on red shoes with a censored square for a head was a real child. He didn't dare move. So he played along, and dredged up what he hoped was a kindly smile. "What book did you lose, sweetheart?"

"Big brother, you smile really ugly."

Cole stopped smiling.

"My book's gone and I need you to find it. Mommy's the worst. I hate reading, but she bought me a whole bunch of books, and they're so boring, and if one's missing she gets so mad. If the book's gone, Mommy will kill me." The pigtails swung. "So you'll find it. Right?"

"Who's Mommy?" Cole asked.

"Mommy's Mommy. Big brother, you're weird."

From behind him Daniel Hale managed, shaking, "If you don't find the book — your mother will actually kill you?"

"Uh-huh. Mommy gets really mad. Mommy mad is really scary."

"That's— surely she wouldn't kill you."

The girl tipped her head. The right pigtail swung down across the mosaic, and somehow Cole was certain that under the blur she was smiling. Two black, wet eyes regarded them out of the static. "Hee hee. But if you don't find my book, big brother, then I'll kill you, too."

Ice down his spine. Cole pressed his lips flat and stared at the blur.

After a moment he said, evenly, "Do you remember what the book was? I'll look for it."

"Ummm." The head wagged, the pigtails swung, a great show of thinking. It went on a long time. "Nope! Can't remember!"

He'd expected that.

"Oh no — school! If I'm late the teacher will kill me. Bye, big brother. Find my book!" And she shouldered the little pink pack and skipped back into the dark between the stacks.

She was gone. The game was not.

The instant she vanished, the monitor at Cole's desk woke on its own. The two of them went to it. On the blue screen, lines of text surfaced — a child's diary.

Cole read aloud. "November 15th, sunny. I lost the book Mommy bought me! Mommy's going to kill me!"

The words dissolved and reformed. Hale read the next, voice unsteady. "November 16th, cloudy. I fooled Mommy, she doesn't know yet. Where's the book, where's the book. Mommy's really going to kill me!"

It shifted again.

"November 17th, cloudy. I think Mommy figured it out. Did she figure it out?" — and then — "November 18th, rain. Hee hee. Mommy really did kill me."

They were both quiet.

"…Are we actually going to die?" Hale whispered.

The screen changed once more, into something longer, and Cole read it because reading it was better than thinking about the question.

"As a good and obedient girl, Mosaic has only one flaw: she does not like to read. And Mommy hates a little girl who won't read — especially a little girl who throws her own book away and then lies that someone stole it. But Mommy doesn't know. Mosaic didn't lie. She didn't throw the book away. A Demon stole it.

"Demons hate books. Demons are all illiterate — why would a Demon read? Only the bird-men with the wings read books. And when the unlucky Demon stole the book, an Angel caught him, and the Demon didn't dare burn the wicked thing, so he hid it in a library. But every shelf in the library looked exactly the same, and once the Angel left, the stupid Demon stared and stared and couldn't find it again, and he roared in fury—"

"These DAMNED books!"

As Cole read the last line aloud, the child's voice rang out bright in the empty library.

> [ Ding-dong! The confrontation game "Who Stole My Book?" is now in session. During play— ]

> [ One: No violence. ]

> [ Two: Each day, the Angel receives one clue about the book. ]

> [ Three: Each night, the Demon may burn any one shelf. ]

> [ Kind, clever Angel — in three days, the furious Mommy will kill little Mosaic. Could you bear to watch so sweet a girl die? ]

Sweet my ass, Cole thought.

---

He looked around the silent stacks. No angels. No demons. Just the two of them.

"Mr. Hale, do me a favor — switch off the computer. I'll see whether we can still pull books from the shelves."

Hale nodded and reached for the mouse.

Cole's gaze slid, unhurried, across the back of the man's right hand, and away. He crossed to a shelf, drew out a book, slid it back. "Looks like we can still take any book we want. Good. First, let me confirm something. Mr. Hale — you heard that voice. About the clues."

"You mean the one telling us to find the girl's book or she dies?"

Cole nodded. They sat. "For now, we're on the Angel side." He held out the back of his right hand.

Hale leaned in, then startled and thrust out his own. On the back of it, plain as ink, was the same mark: a pair of folded angel's wings.

"Oh — I've got it too."

The mark had surfaced on Cole's hand the instant the voice said Angel. That part was obvious. What wasn't obvious was why he'd needed Hale at the keyboard — most people are right-handed, and asking the man to close the computer had let Cole read his right hand without tipping him off which faction he was checking.

But if Hale was an Angel too, the problem got worse.

Hale had reached it himself. "If we're both Angels… then who's the Demon?"

The library was a perfect copy of Cole's. He opened his own drawer, found a stick of gum, gave one to Hale, and chewed slowly, fingers drumming a steady rhythm on the desk.

"Possibility one," he said. "The Demon isn't like us. The Demon isn't human at all — just something the tower made to be our opponent. In which case there's no one else in this building, which fits: we searched, and it's only us."

Hale could follow that. "So the Demon doesn't exist. Not as a person."

"That's the good case." Cole's eyes drifted, idle, over the baton in Hale's grip. "Possibility two. The Demon is human."

Hale's hand tightened on the weapon. "And he's hiding?"

Cole smiled faintly. "Could be."

An unknown enemy is always worse than a known one.

They split up — Hale, the broader of the two, to sweep the floor for anything hiding; Cole to try the stairs down to two and one. Hale balked at going alone until Cole reminded him: the voice said no violence. It didn't make the man's knees any steadier.

Cole was back in under a minute, and his face had changed. "I can't get downstairs."

"There are two ways off three — the staff elevator and the stairs. The stairwell has an invisible wall across it. The elevator won't move. We're sealed on this floor."

Hale's mind turned. "Then the book has to be on this floor."

It did. And that meant the search was bounded — by the twenty-three shelves on floor three.

Hale's face went stiff. "How many shelves does your third floor have?"

"Twenty-three."

"Why so few?"

Cole spread his hands. It wasn't his call. Months ago Walsh had gotten it into her head to "modernize like the European libraries," and floor three had gone first — out came the hundred-odd old stacks, in came twenty-three big connected units that everyone hated and that she'd already planned to rip out next year. She would not, it seemed, get the chance.

Fewer shelves was good for them: Cole worked floor three, and Hale's beloved occult and religion sections lived on floor three, so between them they knew it better than anyone.

But fewer shelves was also good for the Demon. Twenty-three was a lot easier to burn through than a hundred. The odds of torching the right one went way up.

---

The tap-tap-tap came again. Cole had stopped wondering where she materialized from. This time the Mosaic Girl came puffing up with a little rice bowl in her hands and a piggy bib around her neck.

"Did you find my book yet?"

Hale shook his head, miserable. "We haven't started."

"You haven't even started?!" She was furious. "I snuck out at lunch when the teacher wasn't looking just to check on you! The first day's almost over, and after afternoon classes I have to go home, and if Mommy finds out it's all over!"

"Do you have anything for us?" Cole said. "Any clue? Anything you remember about the book?"

The pigtails wagged. "Can't remember."

"You said you'd give us a clue," Hale pressed.

"Oh! I remember now — I found this feather in my room this morning. It's a Demon's feather! See, I knew I didn't lose the book, the rotten Demon stole it, Demons are the biggest liars, I hate Demons, I'm going to catch him and break off his wings and put them in the popcorn machine and pop them into my favorite popcorn!"

She pressed a single black feather into Cole's hand and skipped away.

> [ Ding-dong! Angel obtains Clue One: "A Demon's Feather." ]

Cole looked at it.

Hale looked at it.

"…This is our clue?" Cole said.

He turned the feather over, flicked it through the air. An ordinary black feather. No heat, no hum, no hidden power — it sat in his fingers and offered nothing but a kind of silent contempt.

Then the light went out.

Hale screamed. The whole library dropped into black between one breath and the next. Cole's heart skipped; his hand was already by the desk and he snapped on the old brass reading lamp — click — a weak yellow circle a meter wide, the two of them inside it, the twenty-three shelves out there in the dark.

Nothing else would light. They sat with their backs to the desk.

Cole thought of the rhyme. Three dark nights and not a word. Angels and devils want the third. Day, the Angel gets a clue; night, the Demon burns a shelf. "Day and night here don't run at our speed," he said. "Two hours each."

"You— how do you know?"

"The game started at 5:52. It's 7:58 now. Two hours is one day." He'd remembered the time without trying. He'd also remembered that the Minnie on the girl's backpack wore a yellow bow and held a pink lollipop — details he'd had no reason to keep, and had kept anyway. His memory had never been this sharp. There was no time to wonder why.

So: two-hour nights too. And on each night, the Demon burned a shelf.

They watched the dark shelves until their eyes ached, batons gripped tight — useless against a fire, but the hands wanted something to hold. An hour and a half passed. No one came. Nothing burned.

"Is there even a Demon?" Hale whispered.

Cole's eyes moved over him. "There should be."

"Then why hasn't he burned anything?"

Cole leaned back against the desk and said, slowly, with weight, "That's what I'd like to know. Why hasn't he burned a shelf yet." He turned his head, baton in hand, and looked at Hale, his gaze gone deep and dark. "Mr. Hale. Why do you think the Demon hasn't—"

The explosion tore through the library.

Fire swallowed the seventh shelf, a tower of flame throwing every shadow up the walls, and the two of them stared straight at it from first spark to last ember — and never once saw anyone step out of the blaze.

---

The second day, the girl skipped over with her Minnie pack.

"You still haven't found my book? Mommy went to visit Uncle Mole today, so I hid it from her again, but I can't keep hiding it. She'll find out. When are you going to find it?"

Cole's face was pale. He rubbed his temple. "Did you remember anything about the book today?"

"I told you," she snapped, "I don't remember I don't remember I don't remember!"

"It's the second day," Cole said quietly.

That stopped her. She said nothing — but under all those layers of mosaic he could feel her looking at him strangely. Then: "You're the Angel. You've read so many books, so of course you know which one it is. I'm not an Angel, and I hate reading — how would I know anything about a book? You're the one who knows!"

> [ Ding-dong! Angel obtains Clue Two: "Mosaic's Disdain." ]

Cole stood very still.

She hates reading. The Demon can't read. And the one who's supposed to know exactly which book it is —

is the one who's spent a year shelving every book on this floor.

The clue had never been the feather. The clue was him.

He turned his head, slowly, and looked at Daniel Hale — at the man who haunted floor three every single day, who knew its hiding places better than the staff, whose right hand had not stopped trembling since the dark came down.