EARTH ONLINE

Chapter 4 — Found It, Didn't I?

The Mosaic Girl skipped away and left her clues behind, each stranger than the last.

Cole breathed in deep and swallowed the urge to brain her with the baton.

It was "day" now; the Demon was gone and the Angels could move freely. After hours in the place, neither of them flinched as much. They walked to the burned shelf and Cole crouched over the ashes.

Twenty-three shelves on floor three. The one that had burned was the ninth from the desk — Section I, geography and travel and a shelf of religion, all of it gone to a black hill of ash on charred wood. Cole pushed his fingers into the ash.

"Not hot?" Hale said.

"No. By the voice's clock a whole night passed since it burned, so cold ash makes sense. But by our clock it's been half an hour. Never mind how you reduce a shelf and twelve thousand books to powder in half an hour — the ash isn't even warm. There's no version of human physics that covers this."

"It's a Demon's fire," Hale said reasonably. "Of course there's no science for it."

Fair enough. Once you were already living past the edge of the possible, one more impossibility didn't itch.

Hale, though, only cared about the book. "When the girl said the Angel knows the book — she means it's a book you'd know. Cole. Is there a book you'd know?" He wet his lips. "I've read half this floor myself, mind you. A year of it."

"I run acquisitions for floor three," Cole said, unbothered. "I'd know better than you."

A bead of sweat rolled off Hale's temple. "Then what do we do? It's the second day already."

Cole didn't answer. He walked a slow circle around the ash, while Hale muttered the girl's lines over and over and found nothing in them. "Cole. What do we do?"

"Don't rush." Cole stayed crouched at the ashes and looked up, the false sunlight on his face, and smiled faintly. "The better question is — why did the Demon burn this shelf?"

Hale froze.

Twenty-three shelves. By the odds, the Demon's chance of torching the right one was three in twenty-three — assuming the Angel hadn't found the book first. "The voice said the Demon can't remember which shelf he hid it on," Hale offered. "So he's just burning at random."

"Maybe," Cole said lightly. Then, as if it had only now surfaced: "I did reorganize a couple of shelves recently, come to think of it. Three days ago. Walsh had me redo Section H."

Hale's pacing stopped dead. "Three days ago? That's recent — maybe that's it!"

But standing in front of Section H, they both deflated.

"Section H holds about twelve thousand books," Cole said.

Hale, oddly calm now, asked: "What counts as finding it? If we pull every book off Section H, and the right one's among the ones we pulled — does that count?"

The rules hadn't said. They only said the Angel got a clue by day and the Demon burned a shelf by night. Handing the right book to Mosaic would surely clear it — but maybe simply pulling it from the shelf counted too.

Cole hadn't considered that angle. "Twelve thousand books. If we hurry, two hours might be enough to pull them all once."

They split to either side of the stacks and pulled. Time bled away. And just as Cole drew out a volume of colonial history and reached for the next, the book would not come off the shelf.

The dark slammed down.

"I can't pull the books," Hale said, terrified.

"Neither can I."

They felt their way back to the desk and lit the one lamp that worked, and sat with their backs to it, staring into the dark toward Section H. They couldn't see a thing. But they knew: within two hours, a shelf would burn, and the fire would light up the whole library, and they'd see.

The clock on the wall ticked toward midnight. Time crawled.

"We've known each other about a year, haven't we," Cole said into the dark.

Hale jerked like a startled animal.

After a long moment his shoulders eased. "…Thirty-some days short of a year," he said softly.

"Your library card's a one-year card. Looks like you won't be needing to renew it." Cole's mouth curved. "But you've finished off floor three's occult and religion sections by now, surely?"

"Almost. Couple more days and I'd have had them."

"Shame."

Neither spoke again. And in the last ten minutes of the night, with a roar, a shelf went up in flame and threw the ceiling into red.

Cole's eyes narrowed.

Hale leapt to his feet. "Section H! That's Section H!"

---

The third day, the girl came skipping out in a little black dress. No backpack this time — a basket, full of treats. She didn't so much as glance at the two burned shelves as she passed them.

"Where's my book?" she huffed.

"No school today?" Cole asked.

Her joy gave her away even through the blur. "Field trip! I love field trips. There's a great big meadow with little lambs and little bunnies and little kangaroos, and they're this big—" she flung her arms wide "—and lamb thigh is the best, and bunny eyes are like gumdrops, and kangaroo's gross but Mommy likes it so I'm bringing some home roasted for her."

Hale, already bloodless, shuddered.

The girl's voice snapped flat. "Where's my BOOK?"

"Remember anything about it today?" Cole asked.

She didn't bother with Mosaic's Disdain this time. She just gave him, through the mosaic, the long-suffering look you give an idiot.

"Why's the Angel as dumb as the Demon? Oh — I get it, you want my book for yourself, don't you? That rotten Demon knew my book was worth a fortune. It was Mommy's birthday present to me! He stole it on purpose. You don't want to help me at all, do you?"

She pulled a match the size of her forearm out of the basket.

"You don't want to find my book at all!"

> [ Ding-dong! Angel obtains Clue Three: "Aren't you going to find the book, friend? You're going to die, friend." ]

She flung the basket down and came at them, step by step, the giant match in her fist.

Cole looked down at her, and when she was close, said in a strange voice: "This is why I hate children. Especially children who play pranks."

Her feet stopped. He'd struck a nerve. "I never play pranks!" she said quickly. "I hate pranks! Who — who said I play pranks? I never do, that wasn't me, none of it was me. I'm a good, obedient little girl!"

Cole said nothing.

Hale looked at him in alarm. Cole — why would you provoke her?

The girl repeated I never play pranks, I'm a good girl ten times over, then lifted that mosaic face and raised the match again: "You won't help me find my book!"

By the time she finished saying it, Cole had walked to Section G. He slid a single book from the shelf and looked at her.

"Right," he said. "You never play pranks. You just set fires and murder people."

The girl whipped the match behind her back.

Cole held up The Vanishing of the Maya.

"Found it, didn't I?"