by Gwenda Bond
TheInventor could be watching. I couldn’t afford to fill Clark in on everything that had occurred on the way home. That could wait until tomorrow.
SkepticGirl1: I’d already forgotten all about it. Baseball, wha?
SkepticGirl1: I kid, sap. Me too.
SmallvilleGuy: I just wanted to make sure you got home okay. I tried the phone app, but you weren’t on.
SkepticGirl1: Yeah, well, I had to warn my mom about a certain phone call she’ll be getting tomorrow.
There was no response for a moment, and I worried I’d offended him.
SmallvilleGuy: Was she surprised about me?
Argh, this was delicate. He’d told his parents about me. I’d told mine a cover story about him, at best. He wasn’t the only one with secrecy issues.
SkepticGirl1: Sort of. With Dad leaving, it was better not to tell her you were coming until today.
SmallvilleGuy: Right, well. I hope they like me.
SkepticGirl1: Lucy is probably going to embarrass me so much I have to put her out of her misery, so don’t get attached.
SmallvilleGuy: I should probably let you go, rest up for tomorrow.
SkepticGirl1: I can’t wait to hear about your big day in Metropolis. I’ll text you at lunch so we can make a plan for after school.
SmallvilleGuy: My day will be boring until then. ;)
I resisted the urge to squeal and typed a response.
SkepticGirl1: Mine too. <3
SmallvilleGuy: Good night, sap.
SkepticGirl1: Guilty as charged. Night.
I wanted to have sweet dreams of baseball and non-awkward kisses. Instead I dreamed of being pursued around Metropolis. The streets were dark, and shadows stretched around me. I heard Dabney Donovan’s footfalls behind me. I saw a flying boy silhouetted by a moon. The dreams chased me through the night, until I woke up, hoping they wouldn’t be doing the same thing during the day.
CHAPTER 17
I knocked at the study room door, and Maddy pressed it open.
“Password?” she asked.
“Josephine Baker,” I responded. I was learning not to be surprised at who turned out to have secretly been a spy; I’d thought Baker was just a singer. But Maddy had informed me she was a highly effective informant for the Allies during World War II, hiding messages in her sheet music. Who knew?
“Your memory is getting better,” Maddy said, and she swung the door open. James and Devin were already at the table, naturally having arrived before me. Maddy took her usual seat on top of the table. Her T-shirt read The Newsgirls, which gave me a sense of her priorities but not her emotional or relationship status.
“I have the memory of an elephant,” I said.
“For passwords, I meant,” Maddy said dryly.
“I don’t actually know whether elephants have good memories or that’s a myth,” I admitted.
“They do,” James said. “At least for some things—faces of other elephants, in particular. There’s a whole theory that they remember all sorts of knowledge their family needs. They’re matriarchal.”
“How do you know so much about elephants?” I asked James, unable to resist.
“We took a family safari when I was twelve.” James shrugged, almost as if he was embarrassed by it.
“You did?” Maddy asked, eyes big. “What animals did you see?”
“All of them,” he said. “It was kind of nuts seeing a lion just a little way in front of us… I don’t understand why people would want to go there to shoot them. Or shoot them, period.”
“It does make you wonder why humans get to be at the top of the food chain.” I pulled out a chair and dumped my bag on the table. I sometimes forgot what kind of wealth James had grown up surrounded by.
James put his elbows on the table. “I’ll show you guys pictures sometime if you want.”
“I want,” Maddy said.
Devin hadn’t said a word yet, but now he spoke up. “Fascinating as the animal kingdom is, do we want to get down to work?”
He had a troubled expression, and that made me instantly ready to focus. “Yes, please,” I said. I explained to James and Maddy, “We went to the library together yesterday to try to find info on the Contessa, since there’s nothing online. A librarian friend of Devin’s found us the title, but way back in the 1600s. We figured it must be fake.” I turned to Devin. “What’d you find after I left? Is she real? Or was Boss Moxie just messing with me?”
“For the first three hours of going through those old business journals, I thought that’s what was up too,” Devin said.
“First three hours?” I asked guiltily, thinking of how I’d been living it up at the ballgame.
“Of five total,” he said.
“Whoa,” Maddy said, impressed.
“What’d you turn up?” James asked.
Devin shook his head. “This is where it gets weirder. I eventually found a reference to her in a business journal that isn’t indexed online. It was from the late 1980s, and it mentioned the name of her company. Arcana Imperii. In Latin, it means—”
“I know this one.” James held up a hand. “The secrets of power? A charge against Roman governments, right?”
“And I thought your dad wanted you to be a journalist, not a lawyer. Nice Latin,” I said.
“Once I linked her to that,” Devin said, “I found it mentioned way more often. The company has funded all sorts of weird, interesting, lucrative research over the years.”
“You put together the info anywhere, Devin?” I asked, hoping.
He fished in his backpack and handed me a few printed-out pages. “I figured you’d ask.”
“I’ll pass these around to the rest of you today once I’m done,” I said, taking them. “We all need to know what we’re dealing with. Why and how has some countess who covers her tracks ended up with Donovan, who also covers his? She didn’t look that old, either. Not old enough to have been running a company in the 1980s, much less the 1600s. We’re missing something here.”
“A lot of somethings, probably,” James said. “I don’t feel like anything we’ve found out makes sense. Did Reya say anything else helpful to you last night?”
“Just that they weren’t going anywhere, and that they’re going to do something soon,” I said.
James sighed. “Vaguely ominous is the opposite of helpful.”
“Right?” I studied the papers Devin had handed me. The Contessa seemed really interested in technology for someone who had such old money. Then again, I didn’t understand the rich all that well. James had taught me they weren’t all the same.
“As you probably guessed, the new name didn’t turn up anything in the missing kids database,” Devin said.
“We still have no idea what they want with all this,” Maddy said. “I guess we’re hitting the Scoop after school?”
The first bell sounded. I felt guilty for not telling them that I had a pretty good idea what they wanted.
Me.
Though I didn’t know why.
I’d also meant to prepare them for bringing Clark along, but it could wait.
“Yep,” I said.
Devin got up from the table and lingered so the two of us could walk out together.
“What’s up?” I asked once Maddy and James were out in the library proper. He was obviously after a private word, but I wasn’t sure I could handle it. I didn’t want any more of a shadow over the awesomeness of having Clark in town. Of knowing dreamy SmallvilleGuy was even dreamier Clark.
“Maybe nothing,” Devin said. “Probably something. I haven’t had a chance to decrypt the message yet, but your guy made another contact with the government.”
“I thought you said he deleted the bug. How’d you find out?”
“He enabled it again. I can only guess so we’d see this. But he encrypted it, to make m
e work for it.”
“So whatever the message is, it won’t be good.”
Devin nodded, sympathetic. “That’s my guess. I just wanted to give you a heads-up. I’ll crack it after school while we’re at the Scoop. Shouldn’t take long once we get there.”
“Great,” I said, meaning the exact opposite.
*
Lucky for me, we had a reading assignment in second period. Which meant I could do my extracurricular homework instead.
The dossier Devin had compiled on the mysterious Contessa del Portenza’s business concerns made for interesting reading. She’d been an early funder of all sorts of visionary technology, from undetectable shadow weapons to a company that developed some of the components that Advanced Research Labs had later absorbed and turned into real-sim holotech.
Hmmmm. Maybe the presence of my first article—all about Advanced Research Labs experimenting on teen gamers with shady VR tech—wasn’t a coincidence. The CEO of ARLabs had gone down once the revelations went public, losing control of his company.
Flipping through the rest of the papers, I saw no evidence she’d ever had any ties with ARLabs directly. None with Cadmus either, so she couldn’t have met Donovan there. In fact, she did fit Boss Moxie’s description of having pet enthusiasms. Her company dropped ten mil here, another hundred mil there, pocketed any earnings and moved on to the next whim.
That was how it looked from where I was sitting, anyway.
None of it explained why someone who’d taken such pains to keep a low profile would be involved in a project that was destined to be discovered—that, in fact, was baiting a journalist.
More hmmm.
My phone buzzed in the pocket of my messenger bag. The teacher was grading, or pretending to, so I chanced slipping it out. I’d stayed logged into the chat app today in case Clark wanted to send me any adorable photos from the Kents’ planned day of museums and touristy stuff.
I did have a message from him.
SmallvilleGuy: Your crew are popping up around town again.
This was bad news.
SkepticGirl1: Thanks.
I swiped over to the browser, where I had the Daily Planet homepage bookmarked. Of course there was nothing there. Perry wasn’t going to run an unverified report.
Oh no. Perry. He wouldn’t be happy if what SmallvilleGuy said was true.
I went to my next bookmarked page: Loose Lips. The goods were there, ready and waiting. A half a dozen threads, all timed within the last hour or so. I clicked the top one, with the headline: “OMG I saw a dude running crazy fast.” The post was short and sweet and essentially echoed the subject line.
I had no doubt the poster was telling the truth.
The next one I clicked had blurry phone-cam video of speedy Todd.
“Ms. Lane, phones aren’t allowed in class.”
“Uh, sorry,” I said with an internal groan.
Waiting till lunch to find out more of what was on Loose Lips wouldn’t be easy. Neither would facing Perry and telling him we weren’t much closer to a story after he’d told me to get cracking.
Maybe I should just march back to the building I suspected was connected to them and demand some answers…
Except there’d never been any sign anyone was there.
They wanted me to come to them.
We couldn’t let these guys keep showing up around the city much longer, even if they were just making noise and not hurting anyone.
Paying attention in my classes proved impossible. James flagged me down in the hallway right after lunch, and I handed over the dirt—such as it was—we had on the Contessa.
He started to say something, but I cut him off. “More appearances are happening. Right now, today, all over.”
He gave me a grim nod. “I know all about it. Have you checked your Scoop email lately?”
I shook my head.
He took his phone out of his pocket, tapped the screen, and spun it so I could read the message.
From: White, Perry [Daily Planet]
To: Scoop Staff [The Daily Scoop]
Subject: Status update, 3:45p
More wacko reports pouring in. Have a story update for me. See you then.
Perry White
Managing Editor, Daily Planet
That was short for a Perry email and remarkably bullet-point free. I wondered if I needed to add this to the Perry Mood Scale, along with loose neckties. First, I’d have to figure out what level of panic it should leave us in.
“Brevity is the soul of wit?” I said.
“Or the soul of an editor who is losing patience,” James said. He put his phone back in this pocket and held up the papers. “Thanks for these. I’ll hand them off to Maddy before last period.”
I’d been meaning to talk to him. Now was as good a time as any. “Uh, James, about Maddy… you know she’s been having, um, issues with Dante? I just wondered… do you still like her?”
James stared at me for a long moment. Then he said, “I know you think you’re not just being nosy. But… it’s really none of your business.”
My mouth gaped. I was too shocked to formulate a response.
“See you later,” James said, easily, like there were no hard feelings.
Watching him disappear up the red and blue hallway, I couldn’t even be mad. He was right.
But I was still new at this, at navigating friendships. So I’d apparently offended one of my few others, James. The fact he’d seemed so unsurprised by it didn’t make me feel better either. Today was turning up nothing but bad and confusing news so far.
Meanwhile, I sent SmallvilleGuy a message: Not safe for you at the Scoop; Perry’s called a staff meeting. I’ll text you when it’s over.
SmallvilleGuy: Boo. Can’t wait to see you.
Neither could I, but we’d have to.
*
Taxi Jack pulled up at the curb to let us out at the Daily Planet Building after school. “You guys would tell me if there were really flying people around, wouldn’t you?” he asked. “I’d like to see that.”
“Sure thing,” I said, surprised he hadn’t already spotted one of our silvery tormentors in his travels around the city. We’d all been watching out the windows on the drive from school, and—if the others were like me—half-expecting the entire armor squad to show up whenever we hit a red light.
James and I split the fare, and then the four of us stayed quiet as we grimly marched across the plaza and inside. Then it was through the lobby and onto the elevator. We had no way to delay meeting our Perry fate.
At least we were a few minutes early. It would give us a little time to regroup and prepare for whatever he had planned. But as we exited onto the basement level, we could hear the chorus of phones ringing from our office. And as we approached the door, it was already open…
“The lights are on,” Devin said.
“Perry,” Maddy and I said at the same time.
Apparently hearing his name, our boss popped his head out of the door and waved at us. “Come on, everybody in,” he said.
We obeyed him to the soundtrack of screaming phones.
He stopped in the middle of the floor, in the open area between our desks. “I can’t hear myself think with all these blasted phones ringing. You can start taking calls again as soon as I leave, but let’s take them off the hook for now. Just apologize nicely afterward.” His tie was snugly at the neck of his shirt. We glanced warily at each other while we did as he ordered. He waited, seemingly calm. Was this a trick?
“So,” he said, when the phone receivers were all laid on our desks. “As you know, Lois and I spent Saturday out at Stryker’s Island looking for leads from Boss Moxie. We got a little information, but not a lot.”
The others’ eyes slid to me, and I spoke up. “We found some information about the Cont
essa this weekend. She’s got a track record as a business investor.”
Perry squelched me with a look. “I told Lane I wasn’t sure this was still a story, but she assured me she thought it was. She insisted there’d be more crackpot reports of people doing impossible things. She was right.”
That was awfully neutral, almost positive. I couldn’t tell where he was steering our ship. We’d expected to be in the center of a big storm. I didn’t think we were wrong. This had to be the eye of the hurricane.
“The main page of Loose Lips is filled with posts from people like the ones calling these offices. They’re claiming to have videos of people running faster than cheetahs and flying like birds.” Perry flapped his hands.
There was a real wildlife theme developing today. Maybe James could show Perry his safari photos too.
Devin and I exchanged raised eyebrow looks and I could guess he was thinking the same thing.
Perry continued. “I also told Lane over the weekend that if she was right, then you guys had better have a story ready to go. Do you?”
We were quiet. He knew the answer, so why was he asking? But I was hardly going to speak up and say that.
“No,” James said, at last, when it became clear Perry expected a response from someone. “Not yet.”
“But we’re working on it,” I said. “And we won’t stop until we run it down.”
“Good,” he said. “Some of you can stay here and take phone calls. At least one of you should be out gathering some news. You should’ve done that instead of all coming here, despite my message.”
As if he wouldn’t have yelled at whoever hadn’t come. Tricky. I bit my lip to keep quiet.
“I want this story,” Perry said, starting to walk out. “The real story. So people know we’re the ones they can trust to level with them. I’ve got a staff report running in the meantime. The police are still just considering this a public nuisance. But that could change. So. Go. Get. Me. The. Story. Understand?”
We nodded as if we were one organism. “Yes, sir,” I said.
He didn’t correct me and tell me to call him Perry. He just stormed out. So he was mad.
“How are we going to do this?” James asked as soon as Perry was gone.
