Fallout (Lois Lane) (7 page)

At least a million years seemed to creep past before James the Third got up and went out to the hall, presumably to hit the bathroom. But when I glanced over at the Morgue’s ancient Roman-numeraled clock, it had been less than ten minutes. “And we’re clear,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Now, what’s the plan?”

Devin put a finger to his lips for me to not just be quiet, but silent. He typed something into his keyboard, and I nearly jumped out of my chair when the
Scoop
computer on my desk made a beep. I hadn’t touched it yet, but I moved my laptop aside and squinted at the IM box that had popped up on the other computer’s screen.

DevTheMighty:
Stay put. I can’t let you have mine.

I hit the reply button and my username popped up. It was apparently tied to my
Scoop
email account, which I was just discovering I had. And so my username was the boringly straightforward
LoisLane
. Why did Devin get a cool name?

Right. Because he’s an expert with computers.

LoisLane:
But . . .

That was all I got out of my intended attempt to tell Devin that he
had
to loan me his, that there was no other way, before he wheeled his chair away from his desk. He pedaled over to James’s, checking to make sure Maddy didn’t look up. She didn’t.

Devin pulled out James’s side desk drawer and lifted a holoset out of it. He shut the drawer gently and wheeled toward me. “You lost me a life the other day. I don’t go around losing lives in there.”

Maddy remained absorbed, the tinny music a soundtrack to this cloak-and-dagger.

“James won’t loan that to me,” I whispered.

“Plan B. I set this up for James the first week we were working here. I think it’s something his dad taught him, find out what new people you meet are good at, and ask them for a favor. They’ll say yes and like you more for needing them. Pretty sure he does it with everyone.”

“Not me.”

“Even James isn’t dense enough to think he can
make
you like him.” Devin slid his chair close to mine, hooking James’s holoset over his ear. “Don’t worry about it. It’s good for him to run up against someone who isn’t falling all over him. He’ll never even notice this is gone—he hasn’t used it since I set it up for him. Or even taken it back out of his desk.”

“You don’t seem at all pissed that he wasted your time,” I said.

Devin shrugged and hit a couple of buttons. No holo appeared in front of him. He said, “I’m in the audio menu, setting your character up on here. I created it online.” Then he muttered a few things that did in fact sound like menu selections. He took off the holoset and pressed it into my hand. He didn’t move back right away.

“What?” I asked.

“James has had a rough couple of years. I know how that sucks. I figure we understand each other enough that I don’t need to rub it in. And look how handy this is coming in. Maybe cut him a break?”

“I’ll consider it,” I told him.

Devin was more like me than the others. I liked him as much as I did Maddy. Another genuine friend possibility.

Metropolis was all right.

“You should be good to go,” he said. “It’ll spit you out near my territory in the game . . . which is also a place Anavi and the Warheads hang out. I play solo, like she does now. They’re in a team, and so a lot stronger than you’ll be as a solo newbie. I gave your character an alliance that should help.” Devin hesitated again. Then, “Do you want me to meet you in there? For backup?”

It was a generous offer, and if I hadn’t already had an ally on tap, one that I would have taken.

“Not necessary,” I said. “I have a friend inside already. He said to get the coordinates from you. And we might need you later since you’re better at the game and all the computer stuff. Better for you not to get in their faces yet. Keep you in reserve.”

Getting the same kind of target on Devin’s back—or mind—that Anavi had was the last thing I wanted. I didn’t know how dangerous the Warheads might be, but I did know they had a pattern of targeting people who played
Worlds War Three
.

I wasn’t going to tell him that, though. Boys didn’t like being protected—at least not when they knew about it.

“Let me know if you change your mind. Now or later,” he said.

James came back into the room, but Devin still didn’t move away yet. I jammed the borrowed holoset in my bag. Not that it sounded like James would have recognized it.

“Whatever you do,” Devin whispered, “try not to leave the game in crisis. Go out calm. Otherwise, you can get hurt for real. And that’s the other thing: it will feel real. Be prepared for that.” He raised his voice, “And that’s how your
Scoop
account works.”

With that, he wheeled away, back to his own desk, more nonchalantly than I could have managed. Like he hadn’t been up to anything but showing me how to work my office computer.

I wondered if his cautionary notes were overblown. Sure, I’d been a little woozy that morning when Lucy took her holoset off me, and there were all those warnings online. But even if the holoset was a revolutionary innovation,
Worlds War Three
and the rest were only games, and ones that millions of people played voluntarily. How dangerous could they be?

Not nearly as dangerous as the Warheads when they were outside it, from what I’d seen. Games couldn’t make people doubt their own sanity. And it didn’t matter.

The Warheads’ reign of terror, Hydra or no Hydra, was about to come to an end.

CHAPTER 8

I settled down on my bed
at the appointed hour of ten o’clock. After locking the door. My parents had gone to bed, earlier than most people as always, a habit Dad claimed he’d picked up way back in boot camp.

I hooked the shell of the holoset over my ear. I was unusually jumpy, but I didn’t want to dwell on whether that was because of my worry about what might happen between Anavi and the Warheads, or my anticipation of “seeing” SmallvilleGuy in a new context. Devin had said the game would seem like it was real.

It’s not a date. Don’t think of it as one.

That didn’t mean it didn’t
feel
like a date, though, at least a little. Not that I had been on many, but there’d been a few coffees (Tulsa, Birmingham) and even a movie (Louisville). The guys always drifted away afterward, which never came as that much of a surprise.

I knew I could be intense. And since we were always moving around, it wasn’t like I could let anyone get too close. I’d learned that the hard way when I made a best friend in fourth grade, a girl named Rory who read as many magazines as I did and liked watching CNN. We met in the waiting room of a dentist’s office, both of us trying to find an issue of
TIME
we hadn’t already seen.

But it was too hard to keep up via postcards and email, after the move. I had kept looking for another friend like Rory. I’d missed her. For years.

And today SmallvilleGuy had spent his prized savings
just in case
he needed to join me in the game. It was hard not to feel like we were coming to mean something more to each other.

But I didn’t know if he felt the same.

He
was
my friend. That was all I knew for sure.

So don’t think of it as a date.

I took a deep breath and told myself that I’d settled my nerves, though my heart was beating as fast as if I really was heading into a battle.

People from all over the globe played
Worlds War Three
and could go to any area they chose. But if you let the settings default, it put you in the vicinity of people who were also close to your actual physical locale. I hoped SmallvilleGuy didn’t have any trouble changing his settings to the coordinates I’d passed on from Devin.

I reached up to switch on the covertly borrowed holoset. In an instant, the world around me fell away and the game landscape rose to meet me.

Without others around and ambient noise for distraction it was spooky how quickly the game replaced reality. And how real it felt.

My research on
Worlds
had confirmed that, just like it had worked in Lucy’s game, I could give voice commands if I wanted, but the game was sophisticated at reading pupil cues and translating them into movement. You could also move your limbs, and it would read the motion and translate that into action, but people rarely played that way. Apparently it was because it was hard to keep track of what you were doing outside the game.

“Look around,” I murmured.

Like that, I turned in a slow circle, taking in my surroundings.

Night, but not full dark yet. Or maybe it was and the two giant moons that hung over the landscape, one tinged red and the other pale white, made enough light that it never truly was dark. There was also a large alien spaceship, round and ringed with glowing lights that made a pattern almost like visual music. The ground beneath my feet was covered in overgrown grass, and it tickled the bare skin of my ankles and feet.

I looked down to check that. Yes, I was definitely barefoot.

In a war game? Thanks, Devin. I wonder if you actually are good at playing this.

My clothing was some sort of leather dress, not cut low enough to bare too much of my character’s ample (sigh) cleavage—so I wouldn’t have to kill him—but with a short skirt. Despite not wearing shoes, my feet didn’t feel the least bit tender. Weird.

My immediate area was less flame-riddled than the holo-scape I’d seen the other day, though there were wild puffs of smoke streaking through the sky up ahead. There was also the far-away sound of heavy artillery, something I could easily identify—I’d heard it enough times in tests and training exercises on base. The eerie flashing light patterns on the silvery spaceship repeated in a loop.

I faced the opposite direction of how I’d come in. Above me was an enormous castle. A banner flew off a turreted tower, and if I wasn’t mistaken . . . was that? . . . yes, it appeared to feature a silhouette of Devin himself as viewed from the side.

A red dragon landed on one of the castle’s turrets, and I wondered if it was about to shoot another missile at me. Tense already, when a hand touched my shoulder, I jumped. In the game and, I was pretty sure, up off the bed in my room.

It was disconcerting how I couldn’t be entirely certain whether I’d moved in here
and
out there. What was happening around me in the game felt
more
real at the moment than reality. Devin hadn’t been exaggerating.

“Sorry,” a deep male voice said, and I turned to see the hand’s owner. SmallvilleGuy.

He was a character here, like I was. But I still recognized him somehow. My cheeks warmed, and I couldn’t help thinking of this as a first meeting.

Of sorts.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” he said, at almost the same time.

I squinted at him like the instructions online had said to and lines of text popped into being and hovered beside his head. They gave his name—the same one he used in chat—and the type of character he was: alien, friendly. There was nothing else. But what had I expected?

Still, he’d designed this character. That had to reveal something.

His appearance wasn’t so alien, only a hint of a green tinge to his skin, and he’d chosen a tall, slender form rather than a muscle-bound one like those usually featured in the game’s commercials. Short, wavy black hair, thick-framed glasses. A little nerdy, maybe? But more appealing than he had any right to be despite that.

I was definitely blushing, which was silly. It wasn’t like he could read my thoughts. I reached up to smooth my hair back behind my long, pointy ears . . .

Wait a second. What long, pointy ears?

I looked down at the leather dress again, then reached up to touch the points. Of my ears. “What am I?” I asked.

He grinned at me.

I pretended my heart didn’t leap in response.

We are characters in a game. That’s all.

Get it together.

“How much trouble will your friend be in if I tell you?” he asked.

“What. Am. I?” I crossed my arms. “Tell me, and I’ll probably let you
and
Devin live.”

He laughed, and I wished I knew what his laugh sounded like in real life. If this was it. I sounded like myself
to
myself, so maybe it was. It was a good laugh.

Still smiling at me, he squinted to read my stats and answered my question. “You are an elvish princess named Lo, inhabitant of the Realm of Ye Old Troy, ruled over by . . . ” His grin widened. I hadn’t expected the character graphics to make reactions seem so real, either.

“You said your friend’s name is Devin?” he asked.

I nodded.

“This is his castle, apparently,” he said. “King Devin.”

“I will try not to kill him, since he’s royalty and all.”

“He did make you a princess,” SmallvilleGuy said. “Could be worse. You know they have harem girls and serving wenches in here.”

“Okay, okay.” I—or was it Princess Lo, elvish lady?—said. I rolled my eyes. “Did he give me any other ridiculous traits to go with the bare feet?”

SmallvilleGuy’s head tilted to one side. “I don’t know if it’s ridiculous, but your eyes are bright purple. Probably not out there, huh?”

I blinked, self-consciously wanting to close my eyes to hide them. As far as I knew, he’d never seen a photo of me, and certainly not a close-up. “Um, actually, they’re violet out there too. I know it’s crazy, like some color in a bad novel.”

If he was surprised, he hid it. “They’re
beautiful
bright purple, I should have said. The sovereign king made your character accurate—except for the ears.”

“And the wardrobe. But I guess I’ll give him a pass, as long as he’s a benevolent ruler. Why’d you choose to be an alien?”

“That’s what I feel like most of the time,” he said, and I almost melted. But then he added, “
Or
, it was first on the list.”

“Where do you think we should go from here?”

“We’re looking for Anavi, right?” he asked. Before I could answer, he grabbed my arm and towed me toward a broad-trunked tree. But we had to stop at the discovery it had a grimacing wooden face filled with disturbingly long teeth.

“Over there,” he said. He pointed out past the shadow of the tree. It hardly concealed us from the squadron.

The Warheads.

They were military characters in the game. Steroid human physiques, dressed in all black gear, and armed to the teeth.

They didn’t seem to have spotted SmallvilleGuy and me yet. So I squinted to see what the game would tell me about them, a second before SmallvilleGuy said, “Don’t try to look at their stats or they’ll—”

A hail of fiery bullets sprayed in our direction. I pulled him back toward the toothy side of the tree for cover.

“—know we’re here?” I finished. “Oops.”

The tree snapped at us, and we were forced to back away again. “We need to find Anavi.”

“Will she come anywhere near them?” he asked.

“Hard to say. She knows I wanted to see them interact with her, but she didn’t make any promises.”

One of the soldiers in the Warhead pack called out to the others, “We can pursue the unknown elf—”

Another chimed in, calling out, “But we just found our real target. This way.”

They hesitated briefly before heading in the opposite direction of us. SmallvilleGuy took my arm, and I swore I could feel the pressure of his fingers against my skin. It was . . . nice.

Clearly, elvish senses caused you to turn into a princess in the silliest possible sense of the word.

“It has to be her,” I said. “Let’s go.”

He followed my cue as we loped along after the Warheads.

We didn’t get too close, just near enough to keep them in sight. The squad was having a blast, calling out to each other in that creepy overlapping way, moving like they did at school, like they were all part of the same entity.

Or like a Hydra, a monster with many heads
.

“See what I mean about them?” I asked.

“It is weird. Do you think they can do something to her mind outside the game? You talked to her today, didn’t you?”

“I know they can,” I said.

SmallvilleGuy stopped cold, his light green hand on my arm gently pulling me to a halt too. “Lois,” he said, “did they do something to you?”

“It was no big deal.” I shrugged. “But it confirmed what she’s saying. It proved to me that it’s true. They can do things they shouldn’t be able to. I just can’t figure out how or why. They’re getting away, we should—”

“We’ll catch up to them. What did they do to you?” he insisted.

“I felt them . . . push me. Away. My mind, not me,” I clarified. His alien expression darkened. “But I was fine. I am fine.”

“Time for us to catch them,” he said in response.

I wished I had a secret decoder ring that would explain his reaction. Was he mad they’d done something to me? Or concerned in general that they could act outside the game?

We caught up to the Warheads without any trouble, watching as they spread out in a silent circle around a girl grappling with what appeared to be a giant troll. The hunch-backed monster stood three times the girl’s height, and when it shoved her with a hand nearly as big as she was, she backed off, as if to rethink her strategy.

She was a soldier too, though not like the Warheads. She had on camouflage instead of black, and wore a crisscrossing belt filled with grenades. I took a closer look—yes, the grenades had words printed on them. They curled around the sides of the weaponry. I could make out
nirvana and karma and viscera.

“That’s her,” I said.

“She’s holding her own,” SmallvilleGuy said.

Unfortunately, the troll meant Anavi was too occupied to notice the Warheads. But if I called out to warn her, then the troll would almost certainly be able to best her. And the other thing that had started to worry me was how real everything in the game felt.

I didn’t want to find out whether getting hurt would too.

But Anavi had decided she was tired of troll fighting. She backed up a few more steps—the Warheads behind her doing the same, again, so she wouldn’t see them yet—and then took a running start before—

“Is she really . . .” I started, but left off, gaping.

“I did not see that coming,” SmallvilleGuy said. “And neither did the troll.”

He was right. Anavi was stabbing into the monster’s clothing with some kind of tool for leverage, climbing right up its arm. When she reached his shoulder, she stood and yelled out: “
Sic semper tyrannis,
troll!”

And she jabbed the small tool she’d used on the way up there into the creature’s massive neck.

“That was a tranq dart. Look out,” SmallvilleGuy said and pulled me out of the way as the troll swayed and then fell forward like a tree crashing down in a forest.

It hit with enough force that the ground shook beneath our feet. I leaned into SmallvilleGuy, trying to make out what had happened to Anavi.

I spotted the proud warrior at the exact same moment as the Warheads did. And vice versa.

The three of them nearest Anavi, where she’d landed on the ground in a fearless warrior’s crouch, began to clap, balancing machine guns and other heavy artillery against their chests.

“Well done . . .”

“We could use . . .”

“A fighter like you on our side . . .”

The ring of them advanced on her, so that even in their appreciation, the sinister intent was clear. They had her surrounded.

Which was the kind of thing I needed to witness for the story, but now that I had, that was enough.

“Yo, boys and girls,” I said, striding away from SmallvilleGuy, “give the lady some space.” Anavi’s character was wide-eyed at having been cornered, but she visibly breathed easier at the sight of me. Ironic, because after watching her take down that beast, I didn’t think Anavi needed much help in here.