Fallout (Lois Lane) (10 page)

I needed more intel.

“You getting out?” the cabbie asked.

I also needed to get Anavi clear of them before I did anything else. “No,” I said. “I changed my mind about the extra credit. I’ll do it later.” He opened his mouth to protest, and I said, “That tip is getting bigger by the second. Take me to the Daily Planet Building and your day is made.”

He grumbled, but put the car in drive. Good thing I was frugal with my allowance for times like this.

I peered out the window as we passed the van. The driver was Ms. Johnson, the tightly-wound-and-coiffed comp sci teacher.

So the school really
was
in this up to its eyeballs. Given how little Ms. Johnson had seemed to care for her charges, I assumed Butler’s policy of “this is what I want, deal with it” was responsible for her presence.

I had more digging to do into the lab, but I had quotes enough to ensure that Butler and his fancypants suits were taken to the cleaners and hung out to dry on the front webpage of the
Scoop
. More than enough to make sure he’d have to order the Warheads to leave Anavi alone.

All I had to do now was write the story.

CHAPTER 12

I let the story unfurl from my fingertips,
waiting for the others to arrive as I banged away at the keyboard of my laptop.

The red-headed guard at the front desk had given me a skeptical eyebrow raise when I claimed I was allowed to be here so early in the afternoon. Around me, the Morgue was quiet as a, well, morgue. The smell of old newspapers, with their musty dead print, was almost comforting as I wrote.

I included my trip into the game, and what I’d witnessed the Warheads doing there—it was a story of cyber-bullying bleeding back into the real world, of jerks targeting an excellent student, Anavi Singh, and making her unable to work or even focus when her whole future, in the form of her Galaxy spelling champ scholarship, was on the line. The story of a principal who claimed bullying was hardly ever a problem, was always overblown, and who refused to help his own stellar student, undeniably the target of harassment, at the end of fake automatic weapons and real-world insults and insinuations.

I left out any mention of possible mind control, of course. Or of SmallvilleGuy.

Tabbing over to the chat program, I checked to see if he was logged in. He hardly ever did during the day, but sometimes he would show if I pinged him.

As expected, he wasn’t there. And I was too afraid to send him a message to join.

But I left the window open, staying logged in.

Typing up the story had helped me calm down some. That was when I started to worry more about how the two of us had left things the night before. How
I
had left them, closing my laptop without even really saying goodbye. He must have assumed I was mad at him. When all he’d done was have my back.

He couldn’t be mad at me, could he? He had no reason to be. After all, he hadn’t been shot in the shoulder. And I wasn’t the one who kept so many secrets. He knew exactly who I was, and what I’d seen that night in Kansas. He’d never told me what happened to convince him the world was filled with impossible things, why he was so certain about it.

I tabbed back over to the chat screen.

Advanced Research Laboratories,
I typed in.
What do you know about them?
and hit send. He should receive the message the next time he signed on.

I clicked over to the Strange Skies boards, where it had been a slow week. Not too many updates, and most of the stories I scanned through seemed like flights of freaky fancy:

Posted by
Conspirator13
,
3:30 a.m.
: The visitors returned last night. In fact, they just brought me home a little while ago. There were three Greys, the usual alien scouting party, and they appeared at my bedside at exactly 1:02 a.m.—I looked at the clock when I woke. They took me outside and into their ship and that’s where the rest gets blurry . . . But they must be taking me for a reason. I am beginning to think I’m special.

Aliens would travel all the way to Planet Earth to take sleeping people onto their spaceships? Really? Next.

Oh, here was a better one.

Posted by
QueenofStrange
,
8:10 a.m.
: I was working at the diner last night and a woman who came in told me a story that may sound familiar to some of you here (SkepticGirl1, at least). She had pulled off the road driving at night and saw what she swore was a young man flying through the air. She only got a glimpse of him, a silhouette against the full moon. She was rattled and said she was only telling me about it because I was someone she’d never meet again. And as a waitress out here I must hear all kinds of stories. I told her not to be so sure her eyes were playing tricks . . .

This one might be real, and not just because she’d also seen a flying person.

There was a sense you developed, hanging out on the boards, for which reports were legitimate—or at least, which were made in good faith—and which were the product of someone who wanted to poke fun at the crazies who believed in conspiracies and aliens and fringe science. But the ones that felt like the truth, they gave me that shivery sense that I’d had in front of the rock tower that night with my dad, the knowledge that there was far more going on in the world than most people knew. And now I’d happened on what I was increasingly sure was an example, right here in real life, at my school.

Would the others at the
Scoop
think I was crazy if I told them that the bullying was only one part of the story?

Probably.

Probably they’d look at me differently, distantly.

I jumped at the
beep
of a chat and tabbed over to see SmallvilleGuy’s name beside the cursor.

SmallvilleGuy:
I’m glad you wrote.

SkepticGirl1:
Do you know something about that company?

No immediate response, but then . . .

SmallvilleGuy:
Not that. I thought maybe you were too mad to want to talk.

SkepticGirl1:
Oh.

Part of me wanted to type “Well, I wasn’t, sap,” and play it off. But I made myself give a more honest response. My pulse raced like I was in the game being pursued by a missile-carrying dragon.

SkepticGirl1:
I wasn’t mad at you. I was mad at them.

SmallvilleGuy:
Oh.

SmallvilleGuy:
I thought maybe it was because I didn’t keep you from getting shot. I know that must have hurt.

I laid my hands against my face, then lowered them to type.

SkepticGirl1:
Don’t worry about that. You helped make sure Anavi got out okay. We’re the same.

SkepticGirl1:
You and me, I mean. We’re the same.

SmallvilleGuy:
How?

It was what I’d realized in the middle of the night, when I woke up from that nightmare. I searched for the right words, and they came, as easily as the words to tell Anavi’s story. Because they were the truth.

SkepticGirl1:
We protect people, see what other people miss. We don’t need anyone to look after us.

He didn’t respond right away. I was blushing, like I had when I’d thought of the night before as a date.

Had this been our first fight?

We’re just friends
, I reminded myself.

But then he posted a new message. I put my hands over my heart.

It was another photo of baby cow Nellie Bly, who was even more adorable this time. Because this time, Nellie wasn’t alone in making big eyes at the camera. There was a golden retriever snuggled up against her, the dog’s grinning face right beside her moony calf one.

That message was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen.

SmallvilleGuy:
My way of saying sorry, anyway. Meet Shelby, wonder dog. He’s taken a liking to Nellie Bly. And Bess likes Shelby better than anyone else in the world, so she lets him.

I didn’t know what to type. Nothing seemed right. He’d never mentioned that the farm had a dog before.

SkepticGirl1:
Shelby made my day.

It was as close as I could get to telling him that
he’d
made it. By taking that picture. By being worried that we’d had a fight, just like I had been.

By caring at all.

SmallvilleGuy:
I’ll do some digging on ARLabs, see if anyone’s posted about them before on Skies or elsewhere. And I can also ask TheInventor, my techie friend from the boards, the one who made our software. He’s unearthed dirt on lots of high tech companies behaving badly—and this one doesn’t sound like the kind that can be up to anything good.

I couldn’t help being a little disappointed he hadn’t responded to what I said. But I’d give him a break this time. Not ask him to tell me who he was, a way of saying thanks for being here.

SmallvilleGuy:
Lois . . .

I waited, not typing anything. Not sure what to say.

SmallvilleGuy:
You’re right. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to protect you anyway.

I smiled and sent a one-word response.

SkepticGirl1:
Barbarian.

SmallvilleGuy:
No, I was an alien, remember?

I rolled my eyes.

SkepticGirl1:
Funny. And if you call me an elf, I’ll . . . do something.

SmallvilleGuy:
Talk to you tonight, Princess.

His name disappeared and I said, to the empty Morgue, “I hate it when he gets the last word.”

“Who?” Devin asked. He and Maddy stood in the doorway, watching me like I was crazy.

I knew I was blushing, because my cheeks felt as hot as the scene of a five-alarm fire.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, closing the chat window.

“You have got to know saying that kind of thing only makes me want to know more,” Maddy said. She shot a glance at Devin then back to me, as if maybe he was the reason I wasn’t spilling the details. “We’ll discuss later.”

“Thank you for sparing me the gossip session,” Devin said. “I guess this is where you rushed off to after lunch?”

I deflected. “How’s Anavi?”

“Not herself,” Devin said. “But you noticed that.”

“Did Butler summon me again?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

“Not that we heard,” Maddy said. She walked over to my desk and put a tiny MP3 player down on the edge. “It’s that playlist.” She backed away, toward her own desk.

“Oh,” I said, snatching it up. “I can’t wait to listen to it.”

Maddy sat down and stared at her computer screen. Her shoulders were board-stiff.

Devin’s gaze ping-ponged between us. “Maddy is giving you music,” he said. “Maddy, whose taste is superior to all? You better hope you like it.”

“Shut up,” Maddy grumbled.

“I know I will. I asked her for it,” I said, and Maddy’s shoulders relaxed. “She always has the best band T-shirts. Never anyone I’ve heard of.”

“She does,” he said, before changing the subject. “Want to tell us where you really went when you cut?”

I did want to tell them—about the principal’s office, and the Warheads, and about the lab and the fact I was becoming more and more convinced the gamers’ odd behavior and their ability to get
into
Anavi’s head had something to do with whatever their independent study really was, whatever was happening in the afternoons at Advanced Research Laboratories.

But I wasn’t ready to spin out my still-developing crazy-mad-science theory for them. I liked having Maddy and Devin as partners in journalism, and I definitely wanted them to be my friends.

What I did not want was to drive them away before there was any way to prove something beyond the norm was going on. Even if I got something more solid, I’d have to think over the best way to share it. They didn’t know the true extent of what was happening to Anavi.

“I’ve been here,” I said. “I was ready to write my story. I got Butler on the record saying that bullying is no big thing.”

Devin whistled, low. “No one will ever call you a coward, that’s for sure.”

I took a half bow at my desk. “I’m glad people will know. For Anavi’s sake. She gave me permission to name her.”

Devin said, “I don’t know how to explain the way she’s acting. Stress, sure, but it’s weirder than that.”

He had no idea how right he was.

“If only you could give her a healing potion,” Maddy said. “A glowing orb of health or something.”

Devin opened his mouth to respond, but then shut it and went to his desk.

“What?” Maddy asked.

“There are no healing potions in
Worlds
, and only one glowing orb,” was all he said, slinging his bag onto his giant desk and himself into his seat in front of the enormous computer monitors. I was glad he’d been distracted from his line of thinking about Anavi, for now.

“So,” I said, “I figured even though I’m writing the story, we should all get credit. I want to put that you guys also contributed to the report at the end.”

They both attempted to play it casual, but their reactions were too happy.

“Ooh,” Maddy said.

“Perry will have to eat his words, hm?” I asked, before remembering their reactions when Perry had told them they should learn from me. I’d put my foot in my mouth. Again.

“Sort of,” Devin said, letting me off the hook. “But I’ll get started on designing a splashy layout for the piece.”

“The
Scoop
’s first scoop,” I said, grinning.

James came in at that moment.

“The Third,” I said, feeling my grin turn dark, “did you tell Butler anything you shouldn’t have?”

James ignored my question, striding to his desk with a holier-than-thou-mere-mortals air.

I cleared my throat.

“First off,” James said, “I don’t care enough about getting you in trouble to do that. But more importantly, I believe in protecting sources, and in journalistic integrity. Not that I’m sure breaking into the school’s backend system counts . . . ”

“For a minute, I almost liked you,” I joked.

“But, no, I did not say a word, even though Butler brought you up. He knows I work here. He’s convinced that Dad will one day get his political muscle back and those tiny donations that my father doesn’t even remember will buy him a seat at the big kids’ table.”

“Oh,” I said.

Maddy sighed. Then sat up straighter in her chair again, as if noticing she might have done it out loud.

I needed to mend the moment. I had been unfair in assuming James had sold us out. Devin and Maddy both liked him. I should give him more of a chance—even if his perfect teeth and hair and the family moneybags that went with them did make it hard for me to trust him.

“So, James,” I asked, “you want an ‘also contributed’ on this story? Or not?”

“No, because I haven’t,” he said.

Well, I had made an attempt. “Okay with me,” I said, and went back to typing, letting my fingers fly across the keys.

I couldn’t wait until the piece went live.