EARTH ONLINE

Chapter 9 — Thank You, Adrian Vance~!

The roads to New York were a graveyard of cars. Twice before he even reached the interstate Cole had to get out and shove wreckage aside to clear a lane.

By himself. He moved them all by himself.

Since the cull he'd known it for certain: along with the ability, his body and his nerve had both been turned up past human. His strength, his eyesight, his healing — all sharper. His skin had gone hard as iron. He'd tested it deliberately on the trunk latch back at the station, the softest skin of his palm against a cruel edge, and come away without a cut; that was why he'd moved on Quill without hesitation, and why Quill's knife to his shin had only scratched him.

And his nerve. Cole had never earned a single good-citizen ribbon as a boy, and never done a wrong thing either — no shoplifting, no cheating, he hadn't even bothered to copy a test.

This was the first time he'd killed a man.

Self-defense, an accident, a slip of the hand — but he had killed. And after one heartbeat of shock he'd gone cold and clear and started thinking about what came next. He didn't know whether the change had made him this way, or whether he'd always been this way underneath.

He let his eyes flick to the book on the passenger seat, looked away, and kept driving.

The sky was going gray at the edges by the time he crossed into the city's outer reach, still on the highway. Two miles short of a toll plaza, a seven-car pileup had welded the road shut. The front four were crushed flat as tin, the median rail bent and scattered. Cole got out and started shoving cars, working front from back, until at last he reached the first one.

"A supercar, too." He huffed a small laugh.

It was a Maserati, the red body smashed to pieces, though the tires had held. The cold wind cut across the empty highway as Cole set his shoulder and heaved it aside — and as he reached for his own door he froze, and turned, and frowned. "Who's there?"

The wind answered.

He didn't open the door. He stood by the car, a finger resting on the match-tattoo at his wrist, and asked again, cold: "Who's there?"

No one came.

He wasn't in a hurry. He walked, soft-footed and ready, toward the wrecked Maserati, laid a hand on its ruined frame — and a shaking voice cut in. "Don't— I'll come out. I'll come out myself. I don't mean any harm."

A young man edged out from behind the car with his hands up.

Twenty-five or so, maybe six feet, in a thin white button-down and jeans, both torn and bloodied — but the cuts had already scabbed and stopped. His lips were blue. He looked at Cole in open terror.

"This is my car. I swear I'm not a threat. I watched you push those cars — if I wanted to jump you I'd have done it then, right?"

Cole studied him. "How did I not see you while I was clearing the road?"

"I was down the embankment. It's warmer in the grass. I drove up from down south yesterday morning, almost into the city, and the cars behind me just — slammed into me, all at once. I woke up thrown halfway out the window, and somehow I wasn't dead, and then I found—" his face shivered with the memory "—I found there was nobody in any of those cars. Not even blood."

"They vanished," Cole said evenly, not relaxing an inch. "When the Spire announced the game, you were probably unconscious from the crash. There are fewer than five hundred million people left on Earth now. Everyone else—" he gestured at the pileup "—went like them."

The young man's eyes went huge; he shuddered in the wind. He looked at the cars, then at Cole, and said, small: "My family's in the city. You're headed there, right? Could you— could you take me? I'll pay you when we get there, whatever you want."

Cole laughed softly.

The young man looked at him, lost.

"I'm headed in," Cole said. "I can take you. But do you really think money's worth anything now?"

He went white, slowly, as the shape of the world he was about to live in finally settled on him.

Cole got in; the young man climbed into the passenger seat. Cole quietly moved the book to the inside of his own seat — and, the moment he set it down, it faded away. He let the small surprise pass and pulled back onto the road.

"I'm Wes." He pulled the coat Cole had lent him tight and shivered. "Thank you. Really. I woke up maybe two hours ago, walked to the toll plaza — nobody. Came back to my car and didn't know what to do, and then there you were. You're strong. My overcoat's in the car but the thing's flattened, I couldn't get it out. Nearly froze."

"Cole," Cole said, and then, mild: "You're not strong, then?"

Wes shook his head. "Not really. Couldn't budge those cars. Couldn't get my own coat out."

"But you're not dead."

Wes turned and looked at him, blank.

"A crash like that," Cole said, one hand on the wheel, "and you walk away whole, not a limb out of place. Doesn't that strike you as wrong?"

He said no more. Wes dropped his head, thinking, and his face gave all of it away — the dawning, frightened arithmetic of a man realizing his own body had changed. Cole drove easy and watched him the whole time. A companion was useful, in a world like this; Wes had clearly survived some game of the Spire's, same as him, and that was reason enough not to drop his guard. But everything about the kid said harmless rich boy, soft and clueless. And honestly — left alone on that highway, the idiot would probably have found a way to die.

"Cole," Wes ventured. "Can you tell me what the Spire actually announced while I was out?"

Cole gave him the short version.

"You're going in to find family? I know the city cold — need a hand?"

Cole had been to New York, but he wasn't a local, and finding one girl would be hard. "I need to find a kid. A middle-schooler in Manhattan. I only have her name. I figured I'd check the school's records first, then her home." If she was at neither, there was nothing more he could do. It was the one thing he could still do for Hale.

He didn't mention the friend. Everyone kept something back, and he and Wes were not yet friends.

"Manhattan? I grew up there — I know the schools. I'll come with you, it's easier." Wes brightened. "Do you know her grade? Makes the records faster."

"Seventh," Cole said. "I only have her name."

Wes nodded along, warming up now that he was warm, talking more. Then, after a hesitation he couldn't quite swallow: "Can I ask — do you know what the Spire is? Why some people vanished and some didn't?"

All that talk, and this was the question underneath it. Wes had lost a whole day unconscious, and a whole day of information; he was helping Cole partly out of thanks and partly to learn where he now stood. And the fact that he had to ask meant he very likely hadn't played a game of the Spire's at all.

Cole frowned faintly. People who never played a game survived too? He pressed his lips together, working out how to answer —

— and a bright, rollicking carol burst out over the whole of the city.

> Thank you, thank you, thank you,

> let's all say thank you,

> we will all say thank you

> on this special day!

A clear woman's voice, and then a choir of children under it, the cheerful thing wildly wrong against the dead streets and singing anyway. Cole hit the brakes. Wes jerked his head up in alarm toward the vast black tower hanging over midtown.

The Thanksgiving carol finished; the color guttering across the Spire went dark. Cole held his breath and watched it.

And then —

> [ Ding-dong! Stowaway Adrian Vance has successfully opened the First Floor of the Spire. In three minutes, all players on the NA-1 Server begin the assault! ]

> [ Ding-dong! Stowaway Adrian Vance has successfully opened the First Floor of the Spire… ]

> [ Ding-dong! Stowaway Adrian Vance… ]

For the first time, the Spire spoke its message three times over.

The name meant nothing to Cole — Adrian Vance, a stranger's name, sliding past him unremarked. It was the other words that caught: begin the assault. His eyes went wide on them.

And the next moment the world dropped out from under him, black, and Cole was falling.