The Shipwreck: An Official Minecraft Novel Read online

  “No, I mean—yeah, it would be useful but, like, the village itself. This whole world. Someone built it!” Jake’s voice rises with excitement.

  “Oh, like they left their old buildings and bases here? I mean, we are playing in someone else’s server. What’d they make?” Tank asks.

  “No, not like—not like someone was playing here. Someone built this server as a game for someone else to play. There’s, like, all these riddles and things.”

  Emily utterly destroys the last skeleton, looks at her achingly slow experience gain and tries not to sigh. This is going to take forever. She glances at Jake, who, sitting in the lab, seems to be twitching with excitement. “This why you were sneaking into the lab?”

  “Yeah,” Jake admits. “It’s really cool. I mean, we’re really close to where I first saw that shipwreck, I think. There were mermaids and I found this riddle that led me to these coordinates with a new riddle to solve.”

  “Mermaids?” Emily asks. “That’s not a thing.”

  “I know!” Jake says. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. This server is special. Someone programmed and modded all these things and I’ve been trying to figure it out.”

  Hm. That does sound interesting. “All right, let’s see this shipwreck,” Emily says.

  Jake breaks into a smile so wide Emily’s kind of concerned for his face. It’s a good look for him, though, transforming him from the meek kid she thought he was into a delighted ball of energy.

  They follow Jake out of the cavern, and Jake leads them through forests and plains and doubles back several times before Emily starts to get annoyed.

  “It was here, I know it was,” Jake mutters. “Come on!”

  He leads Emily and Tank down the mountain, carefully placing blocks or digging footholds to make his way down.

  Emily leaps from block to block without fear, taking fall damage. It’s an easy way to level up in acrobatics at least.

  “Hey, watch out!” Tank calls out as Emily tumbles down the slope, bouncing as she goes.

  “Got plenty of health, don’t worry!” Emily munches on some steak, watching her health go back up after she maxes her hunger meter.

  “Not for long you won’t,” Tank says, following Jake at a safe pace. “So, are you sure you even saw mermaids?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Tank turns to Emily. “Mermaids aren’t a part of any new updates or anything, right?”

  Next to him, Emily shakes her head. “It must be a mod.”

  “Yeah. This whole world—whoever built it, all of these structures and the signs—I think it’s part of something they were planning.” Jake forges ahead toward the sparkling shoreline, avoiding a squid playfully dipping after him as he goes. “Yeah. You know, all of those versions in that notebook, there were a few versions of this on the computer I’m using. The creator must have been working forever on making this perfect, and this multiplayer server is the latest version. Bella Beta 7.”

  “Hm,” Emily says. A beta version of someone’s special project, huh. Could be interesting.

  “Maybe it’s around the other hill? No, that patch of cut sugar cane looks familiar. We’re definitely going the right way. Come on!”

  Emily spots the rooftops of a few buildings in the distance, but Jake doesn’t lead them there. Instead he keeps going, running past the village along the shoreline, looking carefully for something.

  Jake takes off from the shore, swimming farther out toward the horizon.

  He dives.

  The water gets darker the deeper they go, and Emily’s health is slowly declining.

  She pauses to go back up for air. Sea turtles. If they could make helmets out of turtleshells, that would help. Or a Potion of Water Breathing. How far down is this place anyway?

  “There! The shipwreck!”

  Emily can just see the bulk of it far below them, but the outline is too rigidly defined to be anything natural. The mast of the ship, the bow, and the stern are clearly visible in the depths.

  “You see it?”

  “It’s neat,” Emily says. “I don’t know why you’re all worked up about these mermaids, though—could it be you just saw a fish?” She doesn’t see anything, but a shipwreck isn’t new at all to her.

  “No, it was definitely the size of a person, except with a tail—”

  Tank shrugs. “Shipwrecks do happen—”

  Something swims past her.

  Emily startles. “What was that?”

  It’s a dark shadow, swimming around the shipwreck amidst the schools of fish. Emily dives closer, trying to get another look. Fishes swim away, but the large shape is farther down, deeper by the shipwreck, gliding through the water almost in a teasing, playful manner—

  “I’m gonna die, guys, I’m going back up,” Tank says.

  Emily presses on, closer to the shipwreck, and then she sees it—the mermaid.

  Jake was right.

  She can’t believe it.

  The mermaid is swimming around the ship. Her body is covered in green and gold scales, her unmistakable tail swishing back and forth as she swims. This is so new and strange and completely out of the realm of what she’s used to that she can’t help staring.

  RoxXStarRedStone drowned

  MCExplorerJake drowned

  Jake jabs his keyboard in frustration.

  Tank groans. “Come on, really? I don’t have room for all of your stuff.”

  “Keep the ore, toss that, toss that, Tank, why are you holding on to so many flowers?” Emily almost laughs.

  “It’s really hard to find the blue ones, okay?” Tank mumbles. “But fine. Where did you respawn?”

  Emily’s back at the start point. It looks like Jake’s in a basic dirt shack with a bed and nothing else.

  “It’s okay, let’s regroup. Tank, where’s your camp at?”

  New coordinates light up the screen.

  “I hope it was worth it,” Tank says. “You both owe me a stack of cornflowers.”

  “It was,” Jake says, pausing the game to minimize the screen. “I got a screengrab. Look!”

  He throws up the frozen image, and there it is.

  Undeniable proof that what they saw was real. The mermaid is real.

  “Whoa,” Tank breathes.

  Up until now Emily had thought this was just a random world that Jake had seen some remnants of other players’ builds in, but seeing the mermaid swim around like that is clear evidence of advanced programming, that this isn’t just a vanilla Minecraft server.

  She’d started playing because she figured it would be more fun than cleaning, but now to her surprise she wants to keep playing to figure out why the mermaids are here.

  “Do you think it’s like a friendly mob?” she asks. “Do you think they’d attack us?”

  “Hm. There were more, I think. We could brew some underwater breathing potions and go back.”

  Emily shakes her head. They’re going to have to work a lot harder to get everything they’ll need to get down there and find out. The challenge sparks something inside of her: a new determination to see this quest through.

  “They might be guarding something,” Emily says. “I think there was a sign with stuff written on it on the shipwreck. You said there was a treasure map?”

  “Yeah.”

  Something creaks outside.

  The three of them swivel their heads toward the door, and Emily realizes that they’ve been playing Minecraft for almost two hours. She stands up hastily, her legs prickling with the fuzzy pins and needles that come with sitting for too long. The computers are facing the door so it’s fine, it’s fine—

  “Quick! Look busy!” She gestures frantically.

  Jake freezes. Tank grabs a dust rag and starts mopping at a random monitor. Emily hops into the second row and
shuffles some old keyboards into a box.

  “Hello?” Mrs. Jenkins opens the door. “How are you all doing?”

  She gives a sweeping look at the cluttered computer lab and narrows her eyes. “Looks like you’ve been hard at work. You know, the point of character-building through work is that it doesn’t get done if the work isn’t being done.”

  “Oh, we’re doing work,” Jake says quickly. “I mean, we made really good progress in the other room! Why don’t you take a look?”

  Jake leads Mrs. Jenkins out the door before mouthing turn it off at them.

  Emily saves and quits, does the same for Jake. She follows Tank out of the computer lab and listens in on Jake and Mrs. Jenkins’s conversation.

  “Not bad for your first day,” Mrs. Jenkins says.

  “The community center looks like it was really cool back in the day,” Jake says. “How come you don’t do activities and stuff like that anymore?”

  Mrs. Jenkins’s mouth hardens. “Things change, young man.”

  “Oh, okay,” Jake says in a small voice.

  “We have a few boxes all done and sorted, where do you want them, Mrs. J?” Tank asks.

  “You can bring them to my apartment at the end of the week,” she says gruffly.

  “Oh, we can start moving them earlier if you want,” Emily says. She grabs the first full box she sees. It’s heavier than it looks; the photo frames inside it slide forward, and she loses her balance. The file folder on top of the frames falls flat to the floor, scattering news article clippings everywhere in a grayscale flutter.

  A shadow falls over Mrs. Jenkins’s face. “That’s just trash. You can take that to the curb. The rest of the stuff you can bring to me on Friday.”

  She sweeps out of the door without another look at the rest of them.

  Emily picks up a scrap of paper from the floor, carefully placing it back in the file. “Come on, help me.”

  “She just said it was trash?” Tank looks confused, but starts helping her anyway.

  Emily shakes her head. After picking apart social cues and body language forever, she knows that this stuff is important from the way Mrs. Jenkins’s eyes widened when she saw the box, the sad shadow that came over her. “Listen, Pattie took this quiz once that defines, like, your color palette, and she was convinced for a hot second that she was a Spring and not a Summer. So she was going to throw out all her pastels, even though she loved this specific pink sundress. And she was all ready to throw it out, and said she hated all pastel colors, but I knew that dress was her favorite, and that she didn’t want to throw it out. She just thought she did.”

  Jake picks up the last newspaper clipping and places it in the folder solemnly. “You’re right, I think it’s important, too. Let’s hang on to it.”

  Tank rearranges the photo frames in the box, stacking them neatly by size. “Here.” He takes the folder and closes the box, taping it shut. “We’ll put this here for now.” He hefts the box and shifts it to the corner. He looks down at Emily and smiles, a soft and easy one, a little shy.

  There’s something unspoken in the air among the three of them now, something shared with this secret, with the mermaids and the mysterious server and the way they’re holding on to this box of memories for an old lady who pretends that they aren’t important. It feels like the start of something new. Something different.

  Emily smiles back at the two of them. “I’ll see you both tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  TANK

  Tank finds Shark waiting for him at the bottom of the stairwell on his way to the community center the next day.

  “You haven’t texted me back,” Shark accuses. “AJ and Gus are terrible at mini golf. Come on, you expect me to hang out just with those losers?”

  “I can’t today,” Tank says.

  “Okay, well, when can you hang out? My older brother is gonna go check out the hill that all of his dumb friends swear is haunted if you wanna come. He said this time the spirits or ghosts or whatever will definitely show up, move things around and stuff.”

  “Sounds cool,” Tank says. It definitely does not sound cool. He doesn’t like haunted things or the idea of ghosts at all. “I got in trouble and I have to do this community service thing. Every day. So I probably can’t for a while.”

  “Oh man,” Shark says, his eyes widening. “What’d you do?”

  Tank shrugs.

  “Strong and silent, man, that’s what I like about you.” Shark claps Tank on the shoulder. “I’ll tell them you got juvie.” He winks. “Will help with your rep.”

  “Thanks.” Tank isn’t sure how that would help, but if Shark says so, then it must. He walks across the courtyard and pretends to go back to the West Tower, and waits until he sees Shark walking down the street, away from his building, before he returns to the community center.

  Jake and Emily are already at work. Emily’s wearing the mask Jake brought for her—a patterned floral one that matches the one in Tank’s pocket. She matched her T-shirt and sneakers to the mask as well, and Tank is pleased to see she’s actually dusting properly, picking up the knickknacks and setting them aside before wiping down the shelf.

  “I brought a speaker,” Jake says. “What kind of music do you like?”

  “Electronic,” Tank says.

  Emily folds her arms. “Rock.”

  “Uh, okay, well, I like folk music but I listen to everything. Wanna switch off with playlists?”

  “Sounds good,” Emily says. “I think we can finish this room today.”

  They start with one of Jake’s playlists, which mixes pop and some interesting acoustic guitar sounds and is actually really nice and relaxing. Meditative. Tank isn’t sure they would have enough work to last a week, actually.

  “So, what’s up with the riddles in that server?”

  Jake brightens, like he’s been waiting for Tank to ask this all morning.

  “So, the first one I found was in the middle of this village and the sign said Riddle the Seventeenth, and then when I solved it, it led me to another one. I think there’s, like, a whole hidden underwater city at the end.”

  Emily pauses. “That’s so cool.”

  “Have you ever gone to the End? Of the game?” Tank and Viv have before, in one of their older games. It had taken them forever to build up to it and be able to defeat the ender dragon. Viv had planned it for months.

  “Got there, but I kept dying. That dragon is gnarly,” Emily says.

  “It’s not really something you’re supposed to do by yourself,” Jake says. “I mean, I’ve tried, but I’ve never succeeded, either.”

  Emily shrugs. “Well, everyone knows what it looks like. I want to see something I’ve never seen before. There’s treasure, right?”

  “Yeah. There’s this huge mural I found that shows what I think is at the end of this game.”

  Emily tosses her dusting rag into an empty bucket, whooping when it lands squarely inside. “Great. I’m tired of dusting already anyways. Let’s go!”

  “We’ve only been working for ten minutes,” Tank says. “But I guess we did make a lot of progress yesterday. Before we started playing.”

  Jake grins at him. “That’s the spirit!”

  Tank coughs as he follows Jake and Emily into the computer lab. “Can we at least finish dusting the stuff in this room before we play, though? I’ve got allergies.”

  “Sure. We do have to clean it anyways.”

  Tank’s glad Jake and Emily agree, and they get to work. Tank starts unplugging and taking apart the other rows, and spots a folded sheet of notebook paper on the floor. Oh! Viv’s coordinates. The whole reason why he got caught in the first place.

  He pockets it to give to her later.

  It takes only about an hour to sort all the electronic clutter into boxes. They leave the thr
ee working computers set up and push all the boxes into a clean corner. Once they’ve organized everything, the place looks and feels completely different. Tank even opens the window, letting fresh air flow in. The trees from the courtyard flutter gently in the breeze, and the patch of green is a nice respite from the faded gray wallpaper.

  Minecraft’s soothing music welcomes them back to the world, and Tank finds himself grinning, his heart pounding faster with anticipation. He’d always found Viv’s endless energy for quests rather tiring, but he did it because she liked to and he liked spending time with her. He’d much rather spend time building more hedge mazes and epic gardens, and find new ways to create greenhouses.

  This mystery of the mermaids feels completely different, like a puzzle to solve. And Tank loves puzzles.

  * * *

  —

  “This way to the mural,” Jake says, minimizing a Word document.

  “What else do you know about this server?” Tank asks.

  Jake opens up a folder on his computer and shows them a series of screenshots: stunning vistas, a seaside village with a square, an icy cave. A treasure map. A shipwreck. A document filled with coordinates and notes.

  “It’s some sort of game. I feel like by riddle number seventeen the designer expected the players to be more advanced already, there’s some stuff that has been difficult, but I wanna show you what I found so far.”

  Jake leads them west. “Here’s a blank map. Let’s fill in this corner of the world while we’re at it.”

  Tank gingerly places the map in his other hand, watching the color fill in as they cross mountains and grassy plains.

  “Hey, wait up!” Tank can barely see Emily and Jake ahead through the thickness of the brush. The open plains have given way to dense jungle, and he can barely move without crashing into overgrown vines. He keeps getting trapped in thick leaves and he can barely keep up. “How are you moving so fast?”

  “I’m just hacking my way through,” Emily says.

  “Hold up,” Jake says. “We gotta stick together.”

  Tank exhales in relief—he can see Emily ahead, her armor a quick flash of gray against the thick green jungle. He can see the path now, if you could call it that. Leaves float above, vines trail down and disappear where Emily’s blazed through the jungle in a winding, almost zigzag fashion, leaving blocks in her wake. Tank collects the wood—jungle logs, he notes with interest—carefully. One can always use building materials.