NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER •  This official Minecraft novel is an action-packed thriller! When a new virtual-reality version of the game brings her dreams—and doubts—to life, one player must face her fears. Bianca has never been good at following the plan. She’s more of an act-now, deal-with-the-consequences-later kind of person. But consequences can’t be put off forever, as Bianca learns when she and her best friend, Lonnie, are in a terrible car crash. Waking up in the hospital, almost paralyzed by her injuries, Bianca is faced with questions she’s not equipped to answer. She chooses instead to try a new virtual-reality version of Minecraft that responds to her every wish, giving her control over a world at the very moment she thought she’d lost it. As she explores this new realm, she encounters a mute, glitching avatar she believes to be Lonnie. Bianca teams up with Esme and Anton, two kids who are also playing on the hospital server, to save her friend. But the road to recovery isn’t without its own dangers. The kids are swarmed by mobs seemingly generated by their fears and insecurities, and now Bianca must deal with the uncertainties that have been plaguing her: Is Lonnie really in the game? And can Bianca help him return to reality? Collect all of the official Minecraft books: Minecraft: The Island Minecraft: The Crash Minecraft: The Lost Journals Minecraft: The Survivors’ Book of Secrets Minecraft: Exploded Builds: Medieval Fortress Minecraft: Guide to Exploration Minecraft: Guide to Creative Minecraft: Guide to the Nether & the End Minecraft: Guide to Redstone Minecraft: Mobestiary Minecraft: Guide to Enchantments & Potions Minecraft: Guide to PVP Minigames Minecraft: Guide to Farming Minecraft: Let’s Build! Theme Park Adventure Minecraft for Beginners Tracey Baptiste is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction for children including the Jumbies series and The Totally Gross History of Ancient Egypt . Baptiste volunteers with We Need Diverse Books, The Brown Bookshelf, and I, Too Arts Collective. She teaches in Lesley University’s creative writing MFA program, and runs the editorial company Fairy Godauthor. I was getting used to moving around in the game. There was one thing that I really wanted to try. Flying. From the top of the hill, I jumped twice, expecting my avatar to soar into the sky. Instead, I tumbled down a few blocks. Must be survival mode and not creative, I thought. I climbed back up and looked around. On the other side of the hill, in the distance, was a field of brown. A desert biome, I guessed. There didn’t seem to be any villagers or buildings, so I turned and went north, following the curve of the river. I ran past mobs of pigs and sheep, clumps of trees, and fields of flowers. Much farther away, things turned green. Swampy. I’d have time to explore all of that later. What I wanted was to check out the village on the other side of the river. So I turned my gaze, and the entire world turned beneath me, pointing me in the direction of the village near my home base. Running in the game felt amazing. The world whizzed by me, and the exhilaration of being able to sprint around was intoxicating. I could almost pretend that they were really my legs pumping beneath me, sending me flying through the Technicolor scenery. “Optical illusion,” I said out loud. I knew I was really lying in bed in a hospital room, and the entire world around me was a projection of light that extended only as far as the goggles did. It wasn’t real. None of it. It reminded me of a unit we did on optical illusions with my eighth‐grade art teacher, Mrs. Franklin. I loved it. There was the Necker cube—a cube drawn in two dimensions—that you could see two different ways depending on which plane you decided was “front” or “top,” and also the Hering illusion, which showed how a at illustration could appear to curve or even move with a series of strategically placed straight lines. But my favorite was the snake illusion, a circle of colors that only seemed to move when you weren’t looking directly at it. It seemed like magic, like the colors themselves had a mind that could read me, and know when I wasn’t looking, and prank me for its own pleasure. Even when we’d moved past the optical illusions unit, I was still making snake illusions, pretending that they were actively trying to interact with me, but only on their own terms. “Vision is one of the primary ways we process the world around us,” Mrs. Franklin had said. “But always remember, eyes can be tricked, which in turn can trick your brain.” I stopped near the edge of the river and batted a nearby flower, but nothing happened, so I went on my way. “Everything really is an illusion here.” At the water’s edge, cubes of blue indicated a narrow river, and cubes of brown and green on the other side told me there was land. If I wanted to, I could count up the squares and know exactly how many cubes made