Fallout (Lois Lane) (3 page)

Maddy truly
was
disappointed—that the boy would rather work side by side with her sister than her.

“Maddy has a twin sister,” the guy said to me. “You’d never know they were identical.”

There probably were things worse than the guy you had a crush on saying that kind of thing about your sister, but not many. Maddy could do way better than teeth-and-hair guy.

Teeth-and-Hair extended his hand, and I had no choice but to take it.

“James Worthington,” he said. “News writer.”

Over the years, my dad had dragged the family unit to tons of social functions, and I had met enough silver-spoon scions in tow of their politician parents that I could easily spot a seriously rich boy. And all of the seriously rich boys were dead ringers for James.

“Charmed, I’m sure,” I said. His name was familiar. “Your dad’s a . . . state senator?”

James released my hand and his frown returned. “No!” He sounded like I’d implied he worshipped Satan by the light of a full moon or, worse, was from new money. “He’s—he
was
the mayor. He’s . . . taking a break. To decide what his next move is.”

The remaining staffer, a cute boy with a short afro and an air of casual cool, failed to hide a low snort. His desk had two giant monitors and several other gadgets scattered on it.

James was scowling. Yet somehow he managed to throw off an “I’m superior” vibe while doing it.

“Remember, Lois is new to town,” Perry put in dryly.

“Your dad is
that
James Worthington?” I asked, before I could think better of it. I’d read about the charges against the ex-mayor of Metropolis. Multiple charges, including embezzlement. He’d gone to jail, but the family fortune supposedly remained. Why would his son work
here
, especially if he didn’t have to work, period? “Didn’t the
Planet
cover the scandal?”

The boy who’d snorted before spoke up. “Perry here was nominated for a Pulitzer for breaking the story.”

James gritted his teeth as he answered. “Dad was editor of the
Crimson
in college. Wants me to follow in his footsteps.”

“Probably not
exactly
. Not all of them,” I said. “He’s James Worthington Jr., right? So that makes you the Third?”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Yes.”

But he’d held on to his manners, more or less, which I couldn’t help but respect. Even if he was a “the Third.”

“I’m Devin, master of all things computronic,” the last staffer said. “Also on the news staff, and web designer. James will let us know when his dad’s back in office.” He added a word silently, mouthing to me: NEVER.

“People come back from worse all the time,” Maddy said.

“Thanks,” James the Third said to Maddy. Who soaked in the millisecond of attention he gave her like it was sunlight.

“So,” Perry said, “now that you’ve all met, you can stop bickering about disgraced politicians—sorry, James—and take a lesson from Lois. I asked her to join the staff because I could see right away that she has the instinct. The
killer
instinct. The nose for news. The thing that makes you ask questions and not stop until someone answers them. That makes you chase the great stories. Lois didn’t even know who I was, but she jumped right into a conversation, not afraid to challenge the principal with a tough question or two, even though it was her first day. If you watch Lois, you might learn how to do what you haven’t so far: report actual news that matters to your audience.” He looked at the staff and shook his head. “You were all the top of the applicant pool, but it’s time for this experiment to yield some results. Soon. I’ll leave you to it.”

I gaped at his back as he left. Did he not realize that he’d practically guaranteed they would hate me? Guess I had my answer about whether my plan for our new city was going to work.

I shifted my attention from the door back to the others.

Maddy narrowed her eyes. James lifted his brows, skeptical. Devin shook his head, like he was almost sorry for me. Almost.

“Are you going to let him talk to you like that?” I asked, unwilling to concede. I
would
make this work. “Are you going to let him be right?”

“He is right,” James said. “But he won’t help us.”

Devin sighed. “He keeps telling us that we should be able to find stories without being assigned them. That we’re, and I quote, destroying his faith in the next generation.”

“You agree with them that you guys suck?” I asked Maddy, hoping it wasn’t too blunt.

“Well . . . we haven’t been doing many stories,” she said. “No news noses or whatever.”

I went to the fourth giant hunk of desk and leaned against it. “Okay. I do think I might have a story for us.”

“Of course you do,” James said.

“Let’s hear her out,” Maddy said.

James’s mouth opened to say something else, but Devin said, “All right with me.”

Buoyed by the vote of semi-confidence, and not wanting James to have time to object, I pressed on. “We all go to East Metropolis?”

They nodded with varying degrees of reluctance.

“What do you know about the Warheads? I think they might play some kind of video game.”

“They’re those creeps, right? The black shirts?” Maddy asked.

Devin leaned forward and picked up one of the techy gadgets that littered his desk. It was a small black shell, curved to fit over an ear. Holosets were the biggest thing in gaming. They’d been rolled out two years ago, state-of-the-art reality-simulation tech and a handful of multi-player games to go along.

“They’re into
Worlds War Three
,” he said. That was the first game that had been released for holosets, and still the most popular. “I have second period comp sci with them, and I’ve seen them in there. The kind of players we call cannibals.”

“Cannibals?” I asked.

“They seem like they’d eat not only each other but their young. Tight unit lately, though. Racking up lots of kills.”

I reached out for the holoset, and Devin hesitated. “You want to try it?” he asked.

“You mind?”

After another moment, he stood and handed it to me. I slipped it over my ear. I understood how holosets worked in theory, but had never used one myself.

I asked, “Now what?”

He mimicked touching a spot at the top of the shell, and I pressed the button I found there. The office faded from view and a 3D holo-scape took its place, right in front of my face. It didn’t blot out the entire world around, not exactly, but it was impossible to look anywhere else. It felt like I was inside it.

I saw a landscape with a red sky and smoke and fire, human forms picking their way through it. Someone was riding a big scaly dragon, but there was a round metal spaceship cruising above too.

Devin was speaking, and it took effort to focus on his words instead of the ambient sounds from within the scene. “The worlds warring are ours, plus alien and fantasy ones. Elves and monsters. Rayguns and Martians. You can play solo or in teams like the Warheads. It’s multi-player, live action. Anyone you see is playing right now.”

A missile fired from beneath the dragon’s right wing, racing toward me. Coming straight at me, actually, a blazing streak—

I reached up and hit the off button, handed the holoset back to Devin. I shook my head to clear the scene from it. It took a few seconds.

“You called them creeps,” I said, turning to Maddy. “Have they done something creepy that you know about?”

“Not really,” Maddy said. “It’s just the way they are. Always in a pack together.”

“I ran into them at school,” I said, “and yeah, they’re creeps. And they’re bullying this girl named Anavi. I think in the game first, and it sounds like outside it now too. She must be in your class, Devin. Former spelling bee champion of the world or something?”

“I know her,” Devin said. “Solid player, and scary smart in class.”

“The thing is, Principal Butler didn’t do anything when she reported it to him. Except tell her to get over it. I don’t like it. Not with stories about bullying all over the place. No principal should be waving it off, not for some great student like Anavi. That’s our first story.”

If
the messing with the inside of her head part was true, then it might be an even bigger story. The whole thing might fall under the heading of Strange Phenomena. More and more things did these days, even if no one would admit it. The trick to seeing things other people missed was to look for them.

But the bullying angle was enough for now. No need to make these guys think of me as some nutty conspiracy theorist. I waited for the verdict.

James sniffed and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “You’re not the editor.”

“Neither are you,” Devin pointed out. “We’re just news staff. Same as Lois.”

“Technically, I’m the only person in this room who’s an editor,” Maddy said. She smiled. “Look, it’s a better idea than we’ve had yet. May as well try to get a story out of it and get Perry off our backs.”

“Which means you’re outvoted, the Third,” I said, and hopped off the desk. Time to get out while I was ahead. “I have to go home. See you in class tomorrow, Devin.”

“But you’re not in it,” he said.

I winked. “Maybe not,” I said, “but I will be by then.”

CHAPTER 3

When I breezed through the front door
of our new apartment, the whole place smelled like from-scratch tomato sauce. In other words: heaven. If heaven was full of unpacked boxes, anyway. We’d arrived ahead of the Army-hired movers the Friday before and had only unpacked stuff we needed immediately over the weekend.

The new place was nice if still a work-in-unpacking-progress, a two-story brownstone in a good neighborhood, a couple of blocks from a subway station. We might not have James the Third money, but generals got paid well enough.

Especially when they were as beloved as my dad.

Speaking of, he poked his prematurely gray head around the kitchen doorframe and waved me over. “Come tell me about this gainful employment you’ve supposedly found.”

He sounded like he approved of the idea. I wasn’t so sure he’d be happy when he heard
where
I was working. The military liked its secrets, and part of my dad’s job was keeping them. He definitely seemed to be doing more and more of it since two years ago and that night in Kansas when the two of us had seen . . . whatever it was we’d seen.

I walked to the kitchen, choosing the right words as I went. But when I reached the doorframe I realized too late that Dad had summoned me into a trap. A second later, a small knee swooped in behind mine, dropping me half to the ground. My little sister, Lucy, erupted into giggles, and then let me up.

“No fair.” I cuffed the pink-cheeked, blond-ponytailed brat on the shoulder. Everyone always said Lucy and Mom looked just alike, blond and fine-featured, while I took after Dad with my dark hair and sharper angles. “I was distracted.”

Lucy crinkled her nose up, her hair swinging back and forth as she shook her head. “I don’t think you’re supposed to admit that. Not in front of Dad.”

“She might be taking the self-defense lessons a little too seriously, Sam,” Mom said from the stove. But she couldn’t have been that concerned, because without even looking over to check out the scuffle, she kept stirring.

I knew Dad had gone to the office today, but he’d been home long enough to change out of his dress uniform with its medals and ribbons. In a crisp polo, the lack of heroic bling left him only a shade less intimidating.

“So, what’s this job you texted about? Do you know if you got it?” he asked.

General Sam Lane cowed lesser mortals—at least those who weren’t his daughters. But the first lesson I ever learned?
Never show fear.

I steeled myself in case he fought me on this. He was not a fan of the media, and regularly spent breakfast grumbling over the “slant” of stories in the morning paper.

“It was the luckiest thing,” I said, going over to pick up a wooden spoon and steal a taste of the tomato sauce. “There was a guest speaker at school recruiting people for a new, um, online magazine that the
Daily Planet
’s doing. For teenagers. I figured, since we’ll be here a while, it’d be a good way to meet new people. Put down roots.” The things he’d said he wanted me to do.

I stole another spoonful of sauce to hide my nervousness.

“The
Daily Planet
, hmm?” he said.

“It’s called the
Daily Scoop
,” I said.

He and Mom exchanged a look. A long one.

“All right, I guess,” he said, finally. “Sounds like it might keep you out of trouble.”

“That’s what I thought too.” I put down the spoon and started backing out of the room. “Me and trouble are no longer on speaking terms.”

Lucy whined, “Lois gets to do everything fun.”

I stuck my tongue out at her. “Your turn will come.”

I’d spend some quality time with Lucy later.

She had a holoset—it hadn’t come with the game she’d asked for, but she played it enough despite that. I wanted to try it out, learn more about how the tech worked in prep for taking on the Warheads. But first, I had a more pressing engagement.

“Dinner’s in twenty minutes,” Mom said as I turned and bounded up the stairs to my room. I closed the door and waited a second with my ear to it to make sure no one was following, including Lucy practicing her stealth skills. Then I turned the lock.

Sure, it was probably overkill. But my friend claimed it was too dangerous for us to talk on the phone, let alone use Skype. He wouldn’t tell me his real name, or let me see his face or hear his voice. He said it was too much of a risk for him—and for me, too, by extension. He wasn’t willing to chance it. He wouldn’t say more about why. I suspected it had something to do with his parents, though he claimed they were just farmers.

But I always locked my door to prevent having to explain to
my
parents or kid sister what I was doing, since any of them were capable of barging in without warning. My friend and I were also careful about passwords. We only communicated using a hyper-secure chat service. He had an online techie developer friend who was paranoid about spyware and had created the app we used on our phones and the more elaborate software installed on my laptop. Secrecy when we met up was a ritual now too, like locking the door. Habit.

He
was my secret and I would keep it faithfully. Yes, it was irritating that he wouldn’t trust my word and refused to tell me who he was. But, well, it wasn’t irritating enough for me to give up on our . . . friendship. He had his reasons and I had to believe that they were good ones.

Someday maybe he’d tell me what they were. Or I’d figure them out on my own.

For tonight, I hoped he was there.

I opened the silver lid of my laptop and typed in my secret fourteen-character alphanumeric password. After it was accepted, I opened the chat window and put in the next code.

He
was
there waiting, or at least it looked like he was. The second I logged on to my chat account, invisible to anyone else, I saw his handle. Before I could type a greeting, he did.

SmallvilleGuy:
I expected to see you on the news, the first girl ever kicked out of a Metropolis high school on her first day. I was going to tell you I was impressed. But a job?

I grinned. Rolled my eyes a little, and laughed. I typed out several messages in a row, not letting him get a word in edgewise—he was used to that from me, he always teased—about school, my new job, and the fact that even my dad had seemed to approve.

S
orry to disappoint you,
I typed last,
but I told you it’s going to be different here. I’m making a change, onto the straight and narrow.

I waited, the cursor blinking, until a line of text popped up that told me he was typing a response.

Those seconds when I was waiting to see what he’d say next, sometimes they were the longest moments of my life. The pure anticipation made my heart race.

I could admit it to myself, because no one else would ever see it. Even he would never know how silly and vulnerable I was while I waited.

I—also known as SkepticGirl1—had first met SmallvilleGuy two years earlier on Strange Skies, a message board where the slightly-less-lunatic fringe tracked reports of phenomena or sightings or events that couldn’t be easily explained away, no matter how dedicated the local cops and the military and anyone else who got asked about them were to downplaying and denying.

I wasn’t dumb—especially when he said he couldn’t tell me his name, I was aware he might be some middle-aged creep pretending to be my age, and so I demanded proof that he wasn’t.

After a few minutes, he’d sent me a message with an image attached. It was a photo he’d taken with his phone of his learner’s permit, his thumbs covering up his name and his face. The age and locations were right, though, and it had only been issued a few days before.

Then fourteen, he was too young for a regular driver’s license, but had been able to get a permit early because of his parents’ farm. His willingness to provide proof (and his personality and my gut feeling) had convinced me.

Before, I never really had anyone I could talk to. No one who was interested in things the way I was.

Before, there was no one I could count on talking to about my day at the end of it.

He was
still
typing. But when he finally stopped and the words appeared, I suspected he’d typed something else first and deleted it. The message was way too short for the time it had taken.

I knew it wasn’t fair, because I liked that he wasn’t able to see me blush or snort laugh or scoot up to the edge of my chair during our chats. But I did consider it a downside that
I
couldn’t see
him
.

SmallvilleGuy:
I hope you love it there, but you don’t need to change. You said Perry saw you arguing with someone. Who was the someone?

SkepticGirl1:
Um . . . it might have been the principal?

SkepticGirl1:
Shut up.

SmallvilleGuy:
Yes, clearly the straight and narrow.

SmallvilleGuy:
(But I mean it. Don’t change.)

SkepticGirl1:
Anyway, sap, I did want to tell you about that part. I think it might be like something off the boards. Maybe. This girl’s claiming a group of gamers have been messing with her head. Literally. At least according to her.

I called him sap, pretending it was a joke. But it wasn’t. He was never afraid to be openly sincere, something I had a tougher time with. “Don’t change”—who besides a counselor would be brave enough to say that to someone and emphasize that they meant it? Not me.

I told him the rest of the story about Anavi and her pleas to the principal.

SmallvilleGuy:
Definitely weird. I’ll see what I can dig up. It could just be stress from them targeting her. I have a feeling they’ll regret it, now that you’re on the case. Promise me you’ll do something, though?

SkepticGirl1:
Kick them in the face?

SmallvilleGuy:
Be careful, at least until you know what the deal is.

SkepticGirl1:
Sounds boring.

SmallvilleGuy:
Ha. You know, I wasn’t that far off. So what if you’re not on the news . . . you’re going to be writing it. And you’ll be great.

I grinned. Then typed:
So, how was your day?

He might not be willing to tell me his real identity, but we told each other just about everything else.

SmallvilleGuy:
Same old mostly. Got a B on my
Macbeth
paper, even though the teacher hated it. All her comments were about how I was focusing too much on my own reactions.

SkepticGirl1:
Or maybe she just likes the play. Didn’t you make it a big discussion of how terrible all the people in it are?

SmallvilleGuy:
It’s not a good sign when the witches are the most sympathetic characters, that’s all I’m saying. And maybe she has a crush on the Thane of Cawdor.

SkepticGirl1:
A B’s not so bad. Don’t complain too much. Anything else?

SmallvilleGuy:
Bess the Cow (your favorite) finally gave birth.

SkepticGirl1:
And you didn’t lead with that?!

Bess was the subject of many hilarious farm boy anecdotes.

SmallvilleGuy:
Sorry. I’ll take a cute calf picture for tomorrow.

SkepticGirl1:
Then I’ll forgive you. Did you name it yet? Boy or girl?

SmallvilleGuy:
Girl. Why?

Because I had a crazy thought about what he should name it, thanks to Maddy.

SkepticGirl1:
I did some research at the library during English, on famous women journalists.

SmallvilleGuy:
Of course you did.

I smiled and stuck my tongue out at the screen.

SkepticGirl1:
Anyway, I think you should name her Nellie Bly—she was one of the first investigative reporters. She did all kinds of amazing things like infiltrating an asylum to expose what was going on there and setting a world record by circumnavigating the globe in 72 days.

SkepticGirl1:
What do you think?

SmallvilleGuy:
That my dad will think I’m crazy. But okay. Nellie Bly it is. Speaking of, I have to go check on Nellie now. Make sure she’s doing okay.

SkepticGirl1:
Okay, sap, because I have to go eat dinner. Spaghetti. You ready to tell me who you are IRL yet?

I always asked, though I didn’t expect an answer anymore.

“Lois!” Dad called out for me, but I waited.

SmallvilleGuy:
I wish I could. You know I do.

SkepticGirl1:
But you can’t. Even though . . .

Today had been a good day and there was going to be a baby cow named Nellie Bly in the world, a tribute to my new hero. Maybe I could risk being brave with SmallvilleGuy too.

SkepticGirl1:
Even though if you did, then we could see each other. For real.

I closed my eyes, only opening one to see his response. It wasn’t there yet, but then the words popped up.

SmallvilleGuy:
Now I really wish I could. More than you know.

I sighed, and if my fingertips touched the screen and those words for a second before I typed my response, it didn’t matter to anyone but me. No one else would ever know that I could also be a sap.

SkepticGirl1:
I’ll keep it in mind. Later, mystery boy.

“Lo, dinnertime!” Lucy shouted from right outside the bedroom door, trying the knob.

I clicked to sign off. But not before I saw one last message from him.

SmallvilleGuy:
The Warheads really do sound like they could be bad news. Be safe.

I closed the laptop.

The night I “met” SmallvilleGuy online, two years ago, I had gone to the Strange Skies site for a reason. I’d seen something a week earlier that I didn’t understand and couldn’t let go.