By the time I got down the corridor, the music had stopped.
That was worse. The steel drums and the ukulele had been ridiculous, and ridiculous I could handle. The silence afterward was the kind you get in a server room when every fan quits at once.
I pushed through the glass doors of the sales floor at 9:04.
Forty-two desks. Coffee on most of them, still steaming. A bagel with one bite out of it. A headset swinging from its cord on the corner of a monitor, back and forth, slower each time, like somebody had just stood up and walked away from it.
Nobody had walked away from it.
There was no one in the chairs. There was no one under the desks or in the aisles or at the windows. On Dana Whitcomb's desk, by the door, a phone was ringing, and nobody was there to pick it up.
I picked it up. I'm not sure why. It was the closest thing to me that was still asking for something.
"Dana?" said a woman's voice. "Babe, did you take the lunch I left on the counter, or did you leave it there again on purpose?"
I looked at Dana's chair. Her cardigan was over the back of it. Her coffee had a lipstick print on the lid.
"This is Owen, in IT," I said. "Dana's in a meeting. I'll tell her you called."
"Oh. Sorry. Tell her the lunch is in the fridge, and I love her, and she's an idiot."
"I'll tell her," I said, and hung up and stood there with my hand on the phone. It was the first lie of the morning. It wasn't going to be the last, and I already hated it.
Every laptop on the floor showed the same picture. A sea so blue it looked fake, a white beach, and a sky full of pink-and-gold confetti. Across the top, in the cheerful bubble font I'd hoped never to see again: SEASON TWO.
In the middle of it all stood Brick.
He had a coffee in each hand. One of them had TYLER written on the lid in Sharpie. He was holding them out a little, the way you hold something for a person who's about to take it.
"They were right here, Pryce," he said.
His face was the color of printer paper.
"They were right here. I said good morning. Tyler said, 'Where's my coffee, big man,' and I was walking it over, and the music started, and I looked at you, and when I looked back." He stopped and looked down at the two cups. "When I looked back."
I didn't have an answer, so I didn't give him one.
"Forty people, man."
"Forty," I said.
I did the only thing my hands knew how to do. I went to the nearest desk, which was Mike's, and I pulled the network cable out of the back of his laptop.
The beach stayed on the screen. The confetti kept falling.
I knew it would. It had been on every machine in the building since four in the morning, and it hadn't needed a cable then either. I pulled the power cord too. The battery icon didn't even blink. I did it anyway, because I'm the IT guy, and that's what the IT guy does when the world ends. He unplugs something.
"Pryce?"
"It doesn't need the network," I said. "It never did."
I took my phone out and opened the security console. The long gray table had gone amber, all forty rows. At the bottom, where the counter had been, there was a new line in small type.
SEASON TWO: MATCHMAKING COMPLETE. PLAYERS: 40.
Behind me, the stairwell door banged open.
Rafaela came onto the floor at a near-run with two paper cups from the café downstairs. She'd gone down to get coffee for us, I found out later. For her and me. A peace offering, or a celebration, or both, after she'd stood at my desk and asked me out.
She stopped three steps inside the door.
I watched her see it. The empty chairs. The swinging headset. Brick in the middle of the floor like a statue somebody had left behind. She didn't scream and she didn't drop the cups. She went very still, the way she went still on the court right before a serve she didn't like.
Her eyes went to her own desk at the far end.
Her laptop was open beside the travel mug she'd left there. The screen was pink and gold. The chair in front of it was empty, because she'd been standing at my desk at 8:59, asking me to the lakefront on Friday.
"O-wen," she said. Not teasing. Very quietly.
I nodded.
"Is that." She stopped. She started again. "Is that the thing? From the weekend?"
"Yes."
She set both cups down on the nearest desk, carefully, side by side. Her thumb went to her lower lip and stayed there.
Catherine arrived four minutes later.
She came through the glass doors in her navy suit with her reading glasses on their cord and her phone in her hand. Behind her came Gary from building management, a heavy man in a lanyard who'd been chasing her down the corridor and losing.
She looked at the floor once. One long sweep, left to right, the way she read a balance sheet. Then she turned around, and I watched the CFO of Halvane Logistics take the building in four sentences, the way other people take a breath.
"Gary, lock this floor. No one in or out without my badge or Mr. Pryce's," she said. "Tell the front desk it's a contained IT incident and that I'm handling it personally. HR hears nothing until noon. And nobody calls the police until I say so."
Gary opened his mouth.
"Until I say so, Gary."
Gary closed his mouth and went to lock the floor.
She turned back to us. Her face didn't move, but her hand went to her throat, to the single pearl on its gold chain, and held it for a second.
"Mr. Pryce," she said. "With me."
I went with her. Rafaela and Brick stayed with the coffee cups. We walked out to the elevators, and Catherine pressed the button for her floor and stood very straight beside me, watching the numbers.
The doors closed.
"Owen," she said.
Her hand found mine and held on, hard. For two floors she never glanced at me and I didn't look at her, and her fingers were cold.
"How many?" she said.
"Forty."
"Forty." She said it the way she said every number, as if she were writing it down. Then she said it again, and it came out different. "Forty."
The doors opened on her floor. She released my hand and walked out first, and by the time she reached her office she was the CFO again, all the way down.
Madison and Hana arrived at a run at 9:31.
They'd come up from the intern desks on three, Madison first, ponytail flying, Hana two steps behind with her notebook already open. Madison saw the sales floor past the glass doors and swore, loudly and creatively, in a way that made Gary, at the doors, look at his shoes.
"Okay but no," said Madison. "No. No, no. It's Monday."
"It's Monday," I agreed.
"It's literally Monday. They were going to have a kickoff. There were bagels."
Hana said nothing. She walked past Madison onto the floor and down the first aisle, touching the back of each chair as she passed it, as if she were taking a register.
She came back up the second aisle the same way and stopped in front of me.
"Forty-two desks," said Hana. "Forty empty chairs. Two people left." She looked at Brick, then at Rafaela. "You two."
"I was getting coffee," said Rafaela.
"I was carrying coffee," said Brick.
"Coffee saved you," said Hana, and wrote it down.
Madison laughed, a short shocked sound, and then laid her hand over her mouth as if she'd done something terrible. Her other hand went to her wrist and turned the dead sports watch around and around.
"It's not funny," she said through her fingers. "Why is it funny."
"It's a little funny," said Rafaela, and her voice cracked in the middle.
Brick had gone to the whiteboard at the front of the floor, the one where the sales leaderboard lived. His own name was at the top of it, the way it had been at the top for three years. He looked at it for a second. Then he picked up the eraser and wiped the whole board clean, his name and all.
He uncapped a marker and started writing.
Tyler Reyes. Mike Okafor. Dana Whitcomb. Marcus Bell. Kevin Park. He never glanced at the seating chart. He didn't look at anything. He wrote them down one after another, forty names, in his big blocky salesman's handwriting, and after some of them he wrote a coffee order, small, in brackets: oat latte, no foam. Black. Whatever's free.
When he was done, he stood back and looked at it with the marker still in his hand.
"I know all their names," he said, to nobody. "I know how everybody takes their coffee. That's what I'm good at." He capped the marker. "That's not going to help, is it."
"It might," I said.
I meant it. Forty people who'd wake up somewhere they didn't understand, and the first thing they'd want was someone who knew their name. I'd seen it on a beach in the Isles, the day Brick fell out of the sky. Nobody had been happier to see a familiar face, and nobody had been less useful in a fight. Both things were true. I had no idea yet which one would matter more.
Rafaela caught me in the corridor on the way to Catherine's office. She had one of the café cups in her hand, the second one, and she held it out to me silently.
I took it. It was a flat white, the way I drink it on the one day a month I drink anything fancy. I had no idea how she knew.
"You said yes this morning," she said.
"I did."
"I'm not taking it back. In case you were thinking it's off, because of." She waved a hand at the glass doors, the empty floor, the whole morning. "It's not off."
"I wasn't thinking that."
"Good." She looked past me, through the glass, at Tyler's desk. His jacket was on the back of his chair. His phone was face down next to his keyboard with a photo of a dog taped to the back of it. "He laughed, you know. At the coffee machine. When Brick told that story about me, Tyler laughed the loudest. He said 'ice cold.' Everybody heard it."
"I was there."
"You were there." Her jaw set. "I still want him out of there. I want all of them out. Isn't that stupid?"
"No," I said. "That's the least stupid thing anybody's said today."
She looked at me for a long second. Then her thumb went to her lower lip, and she turned and walked ahead of me down the corridor. I followed her with the coffee she'd bought me, feeling like a man who has just been handed something much more important than coffee.
We set up in Catherine's office. It had a door that locked, a conference table, and a view of the river that made the whole thing look less like the end of the world.
Catherine had pulled the TeamTide contract up on her monitor. She read it standing up, with her glasses on the end of her nose. She scrolled with one finger, the way I'd seen her read the guestbook clause at the Welcome Inn while the rest of us panicked. She didn't panic now either. She got to the last page and stopped.
I came around the desk to see. It was the signature page. For Halvane Logistics: Catherine Vale, Chief Financial Officer. Her name in her own neat hand, scanned in, dated this quarter.
"I signed this," she said.
"You signed a vendor contract for a team-building app."
"I signed this." She took her glasses off, folded them very precisely and set them down on the keyboard. "I read it twice, Owen. There's nothing in it. No clause about pulling forty people into a sea. I looked for one this weekend. I looked again this morning, and there's nothing." She touched the pearl. "That's what frightens me. A trap I can read, I can fight."
I didn't have anything to say to that. I laid my hand flat on the desk beside hers without touching it. After a moment she moved her hand over until our little fingers were side by side. Her assistant had been sent home with a one-line note. Gary had been told it was a network intrusion. Dave Kessler, my boss, had been told I was "on special assignment to Finance," and had looked at me like a man who suspects he's being promoted and doesn't want to be.
Madison sat on the floor in the corner with her back against the wall and her phone in her two hands. She typed something, deleted it, typed it again.
"My mom thinks I'm at work," she said, without looking up. "Which I am. Technically. I'm literally at work."
"Are you going to tell her?" said Hana.
"Tell her what? 'Hi Mom, the sales team got sucked into a video game, I might be late for dinner, love you'?" Madison put the phone face down on the carpet. "She'd send me to a doctor. She'd be right to."
Hana sat down beside her without touching and opened her notebook on her knees. After a while Madison leaned over until her shoulder was against Hana's. Hana kept writing and didn't move away.
At 10:00 my laptop chimed with a video call.
It was Cel.
She was at her desk in the Manila office, and it was eleven at night there. The office lights behind her were off. Only her desk lamp was on, and her monitor. The blue glow from it was on her face. She had her headset on, the real one, and her hair was tied up the way she wore it for work.
"Good morning, sir," said Cel. "Ma'am. Everyone."
"Cel," said Catherine. "You saw?"
"I saw the alert. I'm still logged into the console from the handover." Cel tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. It fell out again. She tucked it again, faster. "Forty sales-floor accounts. All at nine o'clock your time. I tried to call Tyler. It rang on his desk."
"It's still ringing on Dana's," said Brick.
"I can hear it on the dashboard." Cel took a breath. "There's something else, sir. I opened a ticket."
"A ticket," I said.
"In the game. Last weekend. Before you found me, when I was alone, I opened tickets at the support kiosk. Most of the time a machine answered. Sometimes." She stopped. "Sometimes someone answered."
The room went quiet.
"I opened one just now," said Cel. "From here. From my real computer. To the game's support address that's in the contract, the one Ma'am signed. I asked where the forty went." She looked down at something on her desk, then back up into the camera. "Someone answered."
"What did they say?" said Catherine.
"They said, 'Thank you for your patience.'" Cel's mouth did something that wasn't a smile. "That's what I say. It's what I say when I don't know the answer yet."
Nobody said anything for a while.
Out the window, a tour boat went by on the river with its little flags snapping. Somewhere below us, three hundred people were having an ordinary Monday.
Brick broke first. He'd been standing by the window with his hands in his pockets, the two coffees forgotten on Catherine's credenza.
"We're going in, right?" he said. "Coach? We're going in."
I looked at him.
"Tyler's in there," said Brick. "Mike. Dana. Marcus, God help everyone. That new kid, Kevin, who keeps calling me sir. They don't know anything. They don't know about Marks or Mend or that the guide lies or any of it. They're going to try to fight a crab, Pryce. They're going to lose to a crab." His voice wobbled. "I lost to a crab."
"I know you did."
"So we're going in."
I didn't answer him. I looked around the table instead: Catherine with her pearl, Madison with her dead watch, Hana with her notebook and the pencil stopped above the page, Cel on the screen, eleven at night, a world away.
And Rafaela.
She was sitting across from me with her elbows on Catherine's conference table, her chin on her laced fingers, looking right at me. Under the table I could hear her anklet clicking against the leg of her chair, a small gold sound, over and over.
I'd been in fourteen months of rooms with her. I'd never been close enough to hear it before. I'd never been close enough, either, to see the tiny charm on the anklet. It was a gold volleyball no bigger than a grain of rice, worn smooth on one side by her thumb.
"Then we go get them," said Rafaela.
One eyebrow rose. A whole conversation, the way they always were.
"Our date's Friday," she said. "Don't be late."
Before I could answer, my phone buzzed on the table.
All six of them looked at it, and so did I. It lay face up between Catherine's coffee and Hana's notebook, and as we watched, the screen lit up on its own. No notification. No sound. Just the pink and the gold and the cheerful bubble font, opening by itself the way it had opened on Catherine's laptop one Friday night a lifetime ago.
SEASON TWO.
Then, under it, a smaller line, and a list.
LATE REGISTRATION.
Owen Pryce. Catherine Vale. Maricel Dela Cruz. Madison Hale. Hana Takeda. Rafaela Costa. Brock Bannister.
Seven names, ours, already filled in.
And under the names, a countdown, in cheerful pink.
01:20:00.
01:19:59.
