EARTH ONLINE

Chapter 5 — The Little Match Girl

"My book!"

The girl crossed the room at a speed no human could and snatched The Vanishing of the Maya to her chest. Match in one hand, book in the other, she confirmed it was hers, plopped down against a shelf, and began to read.

"Mommy's testing me on this tomorrow. I'd better study."

In the vast, bright, empty library, the soft shff, shff of turning pages was the only sound.

Daniel Hale had gone the color of a corpse. His lips were violet. He stared at Mosaic and the book in her hands, and in the space of a few minutes the sweat soaked his hair through. He looked at Cole and laughed, bitter. "So it was that book. When did you know?"

Cole looked down at the back of Hale's right hand. There, the white angel wings were darkening, feather by feather, into the black wings of a Demon.

"From the moment I saw you," Cole said evenly.

Hale's eyes blew wide. "Impossible."

The girl read on, deaf to them. The game was over. They went to the reading area and pulled out chairs and sat.

Cole glanced at Mosaic — in the whole library she was the only one with the calm to sit and read. Hale's fear had drained out of him, and what was left was almost dignified. He sat across from Cole and started telling the truth.

"I pulled you into the game."

That, Cole hadn't expected.

"Breaking into the library was an accident — I was already inside before you came back. You know how it is; men like me kill the daylight in libraries, and your guards sweep us out at closing, except your branch sits right under the Spire, so when it said Earth has gone online, I picked this place to watch it from. And on the third day, while I was reading, I happened to hear it speak to me."

He lifted his face, and his eyes burned with that old fervor — looking not at Cole but at something vast behind him.

"It said the game was about to begin." He stared into the air and said it again, rapturous: "I was chosen."

Cole didn't answer.

Hale was a fanatic, not a madman — every soul on staff knew the difference — so he composed himself soon enough, only a sick flush left on his face. "The game it picked for me needs two. I couldn't open it alone. I was deciding whether to leave and find someone when you walked in. We sort of knew each other. So I made a noise on purpose and drew you over." He paused. "It was the worst decision I've ever made."

"What's the penalty for losing?" Cole asked. "What does eliminate mean?"

Hale shook his head. "I don't know. It didn't say. The voice I heard was the same one you heard — it never wastes a word. It told me the opponent was mine to choose, but the contents of the game would be decided by you. That was the fairness of it. Even I didn't know it would be a book-hunt until it began. I expect it became one because you're the librarian — it fit you." He looked hard at Cole. "How did you find me out?"

The truth was simple. "You're not a madman, and you're not a fool. Your reason for being in the library didn't hold up, and from the second we met, every move you made was pure terror." Cole tilted his head. "Mr. Hale — I know a fanatic when I meet one. If a man tells me the Spire is God, then when his God reaches down and chooses him for a game, I'd expect him to be overjoyed. Not shaking like a leaf."

Hale slumped against the chair-back. "…Ah. Of course."

"That was only suspicion," Cole added. "I couldn't be sure you weren't just a coward who loved the idea of dragons until a real one showed up."

"Then how did you know it was me?"

"Because the game has to be fair."

Hale looked at him, lost.

Cole touched the wing-mark fading on his own hand. "I play games too. One of mine is among the fairest card games in the world. In some games skill beats luck — bridge, the one I play. In others luck beats skill — stud poker. But they share one thing: they're perfectly fair to both sides. Once the game begins, luck is a kind of skill. Whoever runs hot, whoever runs cold — that's the gap between players. The game itself is fair."

"And that matters here how?"

Cole met his eyes. "Don't you think this game is wildly unfair?"

"Three rules. One: no violence — there's meaning in that, set it aside. Two: the Angel gets one message a day. Three: the Demon burns one shelf a night. It looks like the Angel has to find one book among hundreds of thousands — brutal — while the Demon strolls in with a three-in-twenty-three shot at winning."

Hale caught up. "You're saying it's unfair to the Angel."

"No." Cole shook his head, smiling. "It's unfair to the Demon."

Hale stared.

"For the Angel, this is a puzzle. Follow the clues, find the book, done. For the Demon, there are no clues at all — nobody tells him where the book is, nobody hints. All he can do is burn and pray. So the Angel plays a solvable mystery with skill and luck; the Demon plays pure roulette with nothing but luck. And the no violence rule? It strangles the Demon's one way of forcing a clue out of someone. Which means the Demon has to get his information somewhere else."

Hale's face went through every color it had. At last he let out a long breath and laughed, rueful. "I haven't played enough games. Is that bridge of yours any fun? Maybe I should take it up."

"If we get the chance," Cole said, "I'll teach you."

Hale nodded, smiling.

Cole's eyes narrowed by degrees. "If the man across from me had been him," he said, half to himself, "this game might have ended very differently."

"Who?"

Cole smiled. "A friend I play bridge with. He's good. If it had been him, he'd have thought through everything I just said — and then built me a flawless lie out of it. He wouldn't have handed me the mistakes you did."

Hale took no offense; he leaned in, humble. "I made mistakes? I thought I played it well. I acted terrified the moment I saw you, so you wouldn't look too closely. Then I kept quiet, did little, and let you give the orders."

"You still slipped. When I said there was no one else in the building, that the Demon could be anywhere — you said, he's hiding. The natural read, with two of us Angels, is to assume two Demons. You'd have said they. You said he. You already knew there was exactly one Demon."

Hale's mouth twitched. "I'm suddenly very interested in bridge."

"I meant to expose you the first night. Then the shelf actually burned, and I thought you had a partner — except that's not possible. Two Demons against one Angel would be unfair to the Angel." Unless the Spire decided the two of you together were worth one of me, Cole thought, and coughed, and didn't say it. "So all of the second day I wondered who set your fire for you. Two answers. One: you only have to want it and it burns, no help needed. Two: someone burns it for you. The only ones in this library are you, me, and the girl. And the only one who'd light a fire for you—"

"But even I didn't know she set it," Hale said.

"Easy enough. She hates books, remember. You want a shelf burned? She'd be thrilled to help. And when she came by earlier—" Cole's gaze flicked toward Mosaic "—the ends of her hair were singed. From the last fire, I'd guess."

Hale sagged into the chair. "I lose. Fair and square."

Cole opened his mouth, then looked at the wrecked man and only shook his head, and let the rest go unsaid — the H-section bait he'd dangled to make the Demon burn the wrong shelf; the way the three clues, stripped of their nonsense, had spelled it out from the start. The Demon lies and hides among you. The Angel knows the book. The Demon knows it too. A book they both knew best — and the most memorable book the two of them had ever discussed was the one Hale had shoved at him on a quiet morning before the world went online. The Vanishing of the Maya.

If it had been Victor, Cole thought, he'd have seized the initiative the instant we both stepped in. He'd never have let himself play from weakness the way Hale did.

If it had been Victor — how would he have played it?

---

The clock read 3:42 a.m. Four hours and change until the three-day window closed.

Tap-tap-tap. The girl came skipping back, book under her arm, and stopped in front of Cole. She thrust the giant match at him, chest puffed out, delight leaking through her voice.

"You've got some tricks for an Angel. Since you found my book, you can have this."

Cole took the absurd thing, and asked, on reflex, "…The Little Match Girl?"

The thick mosaic over her face split open — just at the eyes. Two huge, dull, dead-fish eyes stared out of the static at him, and the rest of her face stayed a censored blur, and the contempt in that stare was almost a physical weight.

"Mister," she said — he had been promoted, somewhere along the way, from big brother to mister — "didn't you ever grow up? You ever seen a Little Match Girl this cute?"

The mosaic sealed shut. She turned and bounced off into the dark between the stacks, pigtails swinging, and was gone.

> [ Ding-dong! The confrontation game "Who Stole My Book?" is complete. Settling rewards… ]

> [ Player Cole Mercer — Victory. Rewards: "Giant Match," "Mosaic's Disdain." ]

> [ Player Daniel Hale — Failure. ]

The voice rang sweet through the empty library and faded. Hale sat very still, and somewhere under the calm a small voice was asking what, exactly, a man lost when he lost one of these games — and the Spire, this time, did not say.

---

Two thousand miles away, in the capital, a tall man in a crisp dress uniform walked into a conference room.

He pulled out a chair at the far corner of the table and sat, hawk-eyed, watching the scientist at the podium and the words crawling across the big screen.

"Three days ago the Spires were insubstantial — what we'd classed as a Type-A mirage. Over the past six months we ran every test we could on them—"

The scientists argued. At last the man at the head of the table cut through them, his voice a low roll: "So. It's the third day. What have you concluded?"

The room went silent.

The youngest and lowest-ranking officer present let his gaze drift, quietly, to the window.

Out in the black sky hung a tower, sharp as a blade, suspended over the sleeping capital and every soul beneath it.

Major Adrian Vance watched it, and said nothing.