by Gwenda Bond
It was because we had seen something real, something we weren’t supposed to.
And my dad—even with his top secret clearance—hadn’t known how to explain it either.
CHAPTER 4
I went to breakfast with a mission the next morning. After dinner the night before, Lucy had blown me off, so determined to spend the evening playing on her holoset that she’d already done her homework. That equaled no love for letting me see it.
But today, the curved shell was, as usual, sitting beside her plate of toast and turkey bacon. It was hot pink. When she’d unwrapped the present at Christmas last year, she’d seen the color and done her trademark nose wrinkle. She’d wanted Worlds War Three; my parents had been steered to Unicorn University as a more appropriate game for a young girl. After some justified ranting and raving, she calmed down enough to try it out. Based on how much she used it, the galaxy of unicorns was apparently more interesting than she’d thought.
I put toast on my plate with one hand, then reached out and snagged the holoset as I sat down across from her.
“Lois!” she protested.
“I just want to see it, Luce. Will you please tell me how to work it?”
“Fine,” Lucy huffed. But she didn’t snatch it out of my hands. Which made me remember that we needed to have a sister movie night sometime soon.
I hooked the holoset over my ear like I’d done with Devin’s, though the fit was a little snugger, and she nodded. “Then you push the button to turn it on.” When I lifted my hand, she jumped up.
“Wait!”
“Yes?” I said, my finger poised on top of the button.
Lucy came around the table to the chair beside mine. She whispered, “You won’t tell Mom and Dad, will you?”
Our parents weren’t around. Dad had already left for work, and Mom was upstairs changing so she could take Lucy to school.
“Tell them what?”
“On me, how I use it.”
“Now I can’t wait to see,” I said, and hit the button.
I blinked in confusion. I was inside the game world, but I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.
Just as the day before, a scene popped into being in front of me. The way holosets worked meant the details of the 3D holo projection were visible in detail only to the gamer, who felt like they were inside the game world, which felt so vivid it almost replaced the real one. But to someone looking on it was just a small blur of light and movement sprayed from the earpiece in front of the user’s face.
This was definitely different than the Worlds War Three landscape. It was all pastels and bright colors and nothing was on fire. The grass was princess pink.
“Trippy,” I said, attempting to get my bearings.
“Try not to talk. People in the game can hear you.” Lucy’s hand clutched my arm. “The holoset tracks your pupil movements and that’s how you’ll move.”
But I didn’t want to move, because I noticed the unicorns standing around me.
The biggest one neighed and trotted in front of me, batting enormous sea-green eyes. She was trailed by three others who each had dangerously sharp-looking horns.
“Hey, Deathmetal,” said the unicorn who stopped in front of me. A black ribbon was wound around the right foreleg it lifted to high-five me. Or high-foot me. Whatever you called it when a unicorn did that.
I glanced down. My own unicorn leg was wrapped in the same renegade style, as were the others’. One even had a black bandana knotted around its pearl gray horn. They might have once been delicate pristine versions of the imaginary creatures who represented the players doing word mini-games and running races and visiting castles as part of mastering Unicorn University. But these unicorns had gone bad.
“This feels so real, Luce,” I said. “You can customize it, I take it?”
But even getting the words out was hard. It felt like what was in the game was realer, almost more than reality, than Lucy’s hand on my arm. Or her voice near my ear.
“When you get enough points to graduate,” she said, low and worried.
“What did you do with Deathmetal?” the first unicorn said, taking a menacing step closer.
Lucy ripped the holoset off my ear and put it onto hers. “That was my sister. You see what I mean, right? She’s terrible. Gotta go.” She took off the holoset slowly, but I was having trouble watching her. The kitchen swam in and out, the odd sensation of coming out of the game worse than the day before. It must be because I’d spent a little longer inside.
I’d done some reading on the manufacturer’s website the night before. The more used to the real-sim tech your brain got, the easier it coped with entering the game—and the more careful you had to be when leaving. Some critics questioned whether it meant the technology might be dangerous, capable of making unintended changes in the brain’s neural pathways.
The kitchen stopped swimming after a few moments, and Lucy didn’t seem to be suffering any ill effects. Because she took her time removing it.
Lucy didn’t say a word, staring down at the holoset as she turned it over in her hands.
When she finally looked up, I’d recovered completely. I crunched a bite of toast and raised my eyebrows. “Lucy,” I said, “are you a killer unicorn?”
“You promised you wouldn’t tell.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” I set the toast back on my plate. “Who are those unicorns?”
“They’re from all over,” she said. “They didn’t want to play stupid unicorns either.”
“So you formed a gang.” I was glad she’d made friends in there. Our many moves hadn’t been easy for her either. “Why Deathmetal?”
She shrugged, sheepish. “It was the least unicorn-y name I could come up with.” She bit her lip, and then blurted, “You’re not really terrible, Lois.”
“Thanks for that, sis. Neither are you.”
*
Thirty-five minutes into first period, I breezed into the admin office. The blond assistant was behind her desk, wearing another flowered ensemble and appearing far less frazzled than she had been yesterday.
“Ronda, it’s so nice to see you,” I said. “Is the principal around?”
“In a meeting,” she said, and I breathed easier. Without batting a mascara-coated eyelash, she asked, “Shouldn’t you be in class?”
“On shore leave.” I waved the yellow hall pass my geometry teacher had given me after he finished lecturing and told us to do practice problems for the rest of the time. “I want to make a change in my schedule. I’d like to switch bio for computer science—I already checked and there’s a class that will fit second period.”
She waited—for what, I wasn’t sure. Then she said, “I guess it’s okay. Since you’re not asking to transfer to chemistry.” She paused. “Did you really create a noxious cloud that caused the evacuation of your school in Ohio?”
“Of course not.” I waved my hand dismissively.
“Good,” she said, typing something into her computer. I hoped that meant she was getting me where I needed to be next hour, if I was lucky. Which I wasn’t usually, but today might be the day.
“It was a few harmless chemicals mixed into an equally harmless cloud. Not noxious so much as big,” I said. “It was a distraction to help this girl, Sophie, who really needed an A. Her partner messed up their lab on purpose, because she broke up with him.”
“Huh,” she said, and gifted me a skeptical side-eye as she hit enter. She reached over and plucked a fresh document from the printer beside her desk. “Just don’t . . . hack the mainframe or whatever in your new class.”
“I solemnly swear,” I said. After all, there probably wasn’t even a mainframe to hack.
I crossed my fingers it would go just as easily when I came back and asked to transfer out of comp sci. I didn’t want to stay in the class any longer than I had to, not
if the Warheads were also in it. Computers were more SmallvilleGuy’s thing.
When I reached the classroom, Devin had saved me a seat next to him, along one of several rows of tables with tricked-out computer workstations that could have come straight from a Coast City high-tech start-up that also helped design futuristic movie sets. This school appeared to be way more flush with cash than most of my previous ones.
No doubt due to Principal Butler’s semi-convincing layer of charm.
“Morning,” I said, slipping into the seat beside Devin. I wasn’t used to having someone to sit next to. Not that I was convinced the other Scoop staffers wouldn’t go hungry zombie and turn on me yet, but maybe. Maybe the plan and the job would work out.
And it was impossible not to notice that Devin was cute.
“Do you even know anything about coding?” Devin asked.
“I know how to use computers,” I said, frowning down at a keyboard that included a few rows of symbols that might as well have been hieroglyphics.
“This is an advanced class,” he countered, “grasshopper.”
“So I gathered. I’m here to learn.”
I gave up on the keyboard and surveyed the classroom. A few other students were playing around on their computers, screens scrolling with lines of code. Anavi came in, slouching into a chair directly across from us, without even looking up. She must sit there all the time.
Well done, Devin.
Once at her workstation, Anavi glanced around, like she knew she was being hunted but couldn’t tell where the predators were hiding.
None of the Warheads were there, though. Not yet.
Before I could say anything to Anavi to lay the groundwork for interviewing her later, the teacher—Ms. Johnson, according to my revised schedule—showed up. She wore a boxy, skirted suit, and her black hair was swept back in a bun so tight that it must give her a headache by the end of the day. She primly carried a stack of papers.
As she went to shut the door, a hand pressed it back open. The Warheads had arrived—in pack formation.
“Pop quiz,” Ms. Johnson said to the owner of the hand, “and you almost missed it.” But her voice was timid, and she’d come close to dropping the papers.
Annoyance would have been the response I would have gone with, not being obviously unnerved. But, hey, I wasn’t the teacher.
The Warheads were dressed in black again. They also wore the same slightly mocking expressions. Half-smirks, like full ones required too much effort.
They glided in one after the other, moving like they were cogs in a well-oiled machine or individual bones in the skeleton of some large animal. Fanning out, they took seats down both sides of the table directly behind Anavi, who seemed already to be freaking out—even more—as a result.
And the choice to sit there had to be on purpose, because Anavi really did look like she might lose her breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the keyboard in front of her. They must have known that she wouldn’t be able to forget that they were behind her. But she also didn’t give them the satisfaction of looking.
Or, I thought, it might have been an attempt not to provoke them.
Anavi flinched and rolled her head from one side to the other with an odd jerk.
I leaned forward and spoke low. “Anavi, try to breathe. They can’t do anything to you here, not with all of us around.”
Anavi squinted at me through her glasses. “Who are you?” But she must have recognized me from the day before quickly enough. “You . . .” She spoke in little more than a whisper. “I entreat you not to talk to me. They might ascertain that I spoke to someone.”
Her eyes widened, like she’d realized they might hear as well as see her. She made that same weird flinching motion again, her head shaking from side to side—like she heard voices the rest of us couldn’t and wanted them out of her head.
“Um,” I said, “yes, because you’re speaking to me right now. They might ascertain that. But I’ve got your back.”
I looked over at Devin.
“I’ve never seen her act like this,” he said, quiet enough so only I would hear. “She’s usually low-key. Model student, smart game player . . . ”
“And them?” I asked. “Is this casual jerkery the norm?”
“Yeah, I have seen them be like that before. And worse in Worlds.”
The tightly wound Ms. Johnson cleared her throat from right behind us. Devin stopped talking and reached up to accept the papers she held out to pass along the row. She moved on to the next one.
I scanned the wording of the quiz questions and understood some of it, mostly from conversations with SmallvilleGuy about security and encryption protocols. He was into secrets. Protecting them, and obtaining them. But I wouldn’t be able to answer anything on this quiz with any confidence.
At least you don’t have to take a spelling test.
The teacher returned and stood over me. “Since you’re new, we’ll use your quiz to gauge what kind of catch-up you’ll need.”
Like that was a reassuring thought.
Finally, almost as if she’d been putting it off, the teacher took the remaining papers to the Warheads’ table. A boy took the sheets and then they all mechanically passed the sheets down the row in a way that was so synced, each person’s movement exactly the same, that it looked the opposite of natural.
“You’ll have five minutes for this,” Ms. Johnson announced, and if the Warheads’ arrival had rattled her prim groove she had it back now. She set an egg timer that tick-tick-ticked at the front of the room.
I pretended to fill out some answers, and then skipped ahead to circle a few random multiple-choice responses. I’d have tried to get some help from Devin, but becoming an expert in comp sci wasn’t why I was here. I wanted to see how the Warheads treated Anavi.
The overly-loud-for-stealth whispers came first. “What do you think?” said one, and another, “I think she should study harder.”
“Or try harder.”
“Now, now, it’s so hard when you just can’t remember.”
“What should she put for number two? A big word?”
Anavi shifted in her seat, uncomfortable. She twitched, moving her head like she heard voices again—but only after they’d stopped talking. Sweat ran down her cheek and, behind the lenses of her glasses, her eyes were squeezed nearly closed. She was gripping her pen so hard that I worried it might break.
Her head turned from side to side yet again, and she raised her free hand to brush by one of her ears.
I thought of how she’d described what they were doing to her to Butler the day before. She’d said it was like they were inside her head messing with her, on top of the whispers and harassment visible to everyone else in the class.
Including the teacher, who wasn’t doing anything.
Another round of whispers started up from the Warheads.
“It’s hard to concentrate with all the noise,” I said, loud enough that Ms. Johnson couldn’t pretend she didn’t catch it. “I didn’t realize we were allowed to talk during a test.”
The whispers ceased, but that didn’t mean silence won. The Warheads switched to low, offended laughter. Anavi shook her head and made her best attempt to return to the sheet in front of her. Her hand still clutched the pen.
“You’re not.” Ms. Johnson did step in, finally, focusing on the pack of offenders.
Took you long enough.
“You should stop disturbing the others,” she told them. She finally showed some irritation. “Hydra doesn’t mean you can act however you want. Not in my class.”
Now that was interesting. I made a mental note to find out what “Hydra” was, and why a teacher would bring it up to them. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
“I’m disturbed,” said one of the Warheads.
“Aren’t you?” another said.
“Anavi, Anavi, Anavi,” several of them chanted her name in a near sing-song, “are you disturbed?”
Anavi’s hand trembled around the pen, and I couldn’t imagine that what she was producing on the quiz was legible. But she was trying to take it, trying not to give in. That, I admired.
I scribbled down a few more answers, guessing the whole way and mostly paying attention to Anavi and the whispers. When the egg timer dinged, Anavi jolted in her seat in shock, triggering another round of sarcastic laughter. The girl had completely lost her cool.
While I clung to my spellcheck, I’d seen spelling competitions like the one Anavi had been in. The night before, after my game research, I’d looked up Anavi’s winning year and found a video of the last few rounds.
Some of the participants’ composure had melted away as they got closer to the finish line. But not Anavi’s. She stayed completely cool, calm, and alphabetically collected, right up to the end. Even when she won, the most extreme part of her reaction had been to crack a big smile and pump one fist in the air before walking over and hugging her proud parents.
But here she was, about to pass out over a pop quiz in a subject she usually made A’s in. I wanted to know how she’d done this time.
So I reached over to take her paper to pass it up front, then subtly leaned in when I handed it to Devin. “Give it a quick look,” I told him.
Even if I hadn’t witnessed how Anavi’s pen shook, the quality of the marks on the sheet made it plain. Devin skimmed the page and murmured, “This is weird.”
“What?”
But Ms. Johnson hovered over us, her hand outstretched. Devin accepted my quiz and added his own, handing them to her.
Once she walked away, he said, “They were wrong. All of them. Nothing even close to right. Like I said, Anavi was acing this class. She’s as good at this stuff as anyone in here.”
The Warheads stared over at us.
And there it was. I had earned the full smirk. From all of them.
That was better than them being focused on Anavi. So I accepted it and sent back a look of challenge of my own, proud.
