by Gwenda Bond
The resemblance between James and his dad was even stronger when they were both frowning. “Sure,” James said, and he and his dad led Devin and me from the room.
We traveled down a long hallway lined with a thick rug, and into a salon-type room edged with a variety of potted green plants. A deluxe stereo system waited in front of a sitting area and a table.
None of us said a word as James turned on some music—overblown mellow eighties stuff, like my own mom and dad occasionally pulled out—and cranked the volume to a moderate level. This must be the room where his dad had made his confession to James and his mom.
“So, Dev, what story did you say you were working on this week?” I prodded Devin.
“Oh, not so much a story as some new design features,” he said.
James said, “What kind of features are you thinking?”
“I’m going to use the bathroom,” I said, but I didn’t get up. I winked at them instead.
Devin and James nodded and continued to talk, while I motioned for James’s dad to take a seat on the couch. I did the same, a couple of feet away. I pulled out my notepad and wrote my first question down on a fresh sheet of paper.
He watched me, still frowning.
You think the house is bugged? I held up the pad to show him what I’d written.
He nodded.
James and Devin’s conversation faltered for a moment, but then they continued smoothly. “If we didn’t have to moderate all the comments,” Devin was saying, and James agreed, “Yes, it’s so very time consuming. But you know what they say about the comments.”
I wrote another question, and held it up for James’s dad to see.
Were you innocent?
His nod was measured, and convincing.
Okay, next question. Have you ever seen the man in the photo before?
He shook his head.
Do you have a brother, a twin? Any idea who the guy is?
He expelled a sigh. None, he mouthed, shaking his head.
James and Devin were managing to keep up their fake conversation, but barely. If this place was bugged, the listeners would start to question why my voice or James’s dad’s were never heard, so I needed to finish up here. But I was certain of one thing: the man at City Hall, James’s dad, and Melody’s weird side effects were somehow connected to each other.
But what could I ask him to prove it?
Oh, wait. I added a new question, based on the property revelation Devin and I had turned up:
Do you think Boss Moxie framed you?
His frown lines deepened around his mouth and eyes, but he didn’t move to respond otherwise. I’d take that as a yes.
That was fine. I had another question anyway. Two, to be precise.
Did Boss Moxie associate with any scientists?
Does the name Ismenios mean anything to you?
James was peering down to see what I was writing, and he and Devin were silent for a moment as I held up the notepad.
The ex-mayor’s head tilted again, curious. He held out his hand.
I forked over my notepad and pen and he accepted them. He hesitated, but then wrote something and handed it back.
Yes, actually. Dabney Donovan. Scientist at Ismenios.
The ghost of the double D signature on the bottom of the paper I’d found at the original lab location came back to my mind. I wrote another question:
Do you know where this person is now?
He shook his head. A short, sharp no.
I held up one finger to indicate one more question. For now.
Do you have any way we can prove your innocence?
He stared at me, then his gaze flicked to the pad in my hands. There was such a longing reflected in his face. He reached out his hands, and I placed the notepad and pen into his again.
He flipped the page over and began to add something.
The ex-Mayor Worthington passed the notepad back to me. He’d written:
Too dangerous.
There was only a single logical rationale for the events of this afternoon: They were a message that he wasn’t really “home free,” and that there were people paying attention to him who could and would set him up again if they so wished.
Say, if he tried to clear his name, now that he was outside.
And the warning had worked. He was scared.
“I think we’re just about finished with this, Lois,” Devin said.
James agreed, “Looks like it.”
My mouth opened and I barely kept an argument from spilling out. He didn’t get to decide what was too dangerous.
But this would do for the time being. I’d convince him when I had to. Someone else deciding what was too dangerous for me to be involved in or pursue had never stopped me yet. This would be no different, especially since Melody needed help too.
I jolted in shock at the completely normal sound of my phone ringing.
I knew that ringtone. Yep, the word HOME flashed on the screen.
I was done with investigative work for the night. My parents would be wondering where I was, and SmallvilleGuy still owed me a full report on his whereabouts.
“Hi, Mom,” I answered. “Oh, no, Devin and I were working at James’s and I lost track of time. I’m headed home right now. You guys go ahead and eat.”
I hung up and faced the others. “I really do have to go. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I stashed my notebook and tapped out a message on my phone. It was to data-master Devin. James’s dad confirming the association between Moxie and Ismenios Labs might prove extremely helpful: Do some thinking about how we might be able to make a list of Moxie’s properties? Esp in Suicide. Ismenios could still be hiding in one.
He took it in and began tapping a response as we started up the hall to the door. My phone buzzed: Won’t be easy.
I returned: Easier than going through each one of those binders by hand.
He nodded to me and mouthed: I’ll try.
I turned when we reached the front door and tapped out a group message, watching Devin and James’s phones light up with it. Maddy would be getting it too.
It was simple, and Devin and James probably could have figured it out on their own: Let’s meet first thing in the a.m. Melody’s problem and what happened today are connected. Not sure how yet.
But I vowed that I would know before long.
CHAPTER 10
“Lois, is that you?” my mom called from my parents’ room when I hit the upstairs landing at home.
There was nothing for it but to go see them. And seeing your parents lounging in bed would never not be weird. But there they were, tucked in under a turquoise-and-black plaid blanket in their room at the end of the hall, doing their usual winding-down-before-an-early-bedtime things. Dad was reading a thick biography of the military variety, and Mom was watching TV and playing a game of solitaire on her tablet at the same time.
“Sorry I’m so late,” I said, leaning against the doorway. “I grabbed a slice on the way home.”
“Woman cannot live on pizza alone,” Mom said.
“Girl can try,” I countered.
“Touché,” she said. “But tomorrow go nuts and add a vegetable of some kind?”
“Deal.” I swung away from the door, preparing to head to my own room and a waiting SmallvilleGuy.
“Did we see you on TV earlier?” Dad asked, stopping me in my tracks.
This had taken a turn I had no idea how to map in advance. “Um, I doubt it…”
Dad didn’t let the matter drop. “I thought I saw you in the background during a story about some disturbance at City Hall. Something to do with the mayor’s office?”
“Oh, yeah, probably,” I said. “Sounds like it was just a false alarm, rumor mill working overtime because the old mayor’s out on good behavior now
. Devin and I went there to do some shoe leather reporting, looking up some documents. The building got evacuated just as we were finishing up.”
“You should be careful,” Dad said.
As if I’d known the building would be evacuated.
“Always,” I said, and they both rolled their eyes in tandem. Thanks for the vote of confidence, parental units. I made my escape, saying, “Good night.”
In my room, I logged in to chat while changing into my pajamas. A message awaited me there.
SmallvilleGuy: I’m in Worlds. I think it’ll be easier to talk than type, if you don’t mind?
It was from fifteen minutes earlier.
The entire day had been one loopy event after another. I didn’t know what to make of the appearance of the double of James’s dad, or the connection I thought he had to Melody, and what role the timing of all this played. I didn’t understand what could possibly link a random student at East Metropolis with the ex-mayor. Or why Mr. Worthington hadn’t fought the charges if they were false. Not to mention why he’d been framed to begin with.
I didn’t know what to make of any of it.
But I’d puzzle all those things out eventually.
And I knew one thing. Talking to SmallvilleGuy would make me feel better.
I locked my door and slipped my holoset over my ear, easing down onto the bed. I pressed the power on and blinked to find my room replaced by the holoscape as it rose up in front of me.
Nighttime had come again in the game, with the sounds of distant gunfire and the eerie repetitive melody that sometimes accompanied spaceships with their sequences of glimmering lights. The red sky also contained a purplish hue this evening, and a million pinprick stars shone down in various colors: red, white, blue, green.
Night was never exactly the same twice in the game. But it was always lovely.
“There you are.” His familiar voice greeted me. “I am so sorry about yesterday. Were you really freaking out?”
He left the shadow of the turret. Guilt tinged his question, and it was so sweet, if I hadn’t forgiven him already I would have in that moment. I never could hold a grudge against him, it seemed. Which was inconvenient, but in a nice way.
“I was,” I answered truthfully. “I’m not used to not being able to get in touch with you. I mean, not during times when I expect to be able to. We’ve always known each other’s schedules. And then there was all the weirdness with the boards and our new Insider.”
I couldn’t quite bring myself to say it was because it felt like I should know. And yesterday, I hadn’t.
“I was trying to get to the bottom of that,” he said.
I frowned. “No farm emergency?”
“There’s that too. Bess… she was sick. Still is.”
“Oh no!” I laid my hand on his arm before I realized I was doing it. Bess the cow was Nellie Bly the baby cow’s mother, and a fixture at the farm. I was pretty sure he thought of her as a giant pet.
“My thoughts exactly,” he said, putting his hand on top of mine. “Shelby was beside himself.”
The dog worshipped the cow as his giant idol, from all reports and photographic evidence.
“And how’s she doing now?” I asked, afraid of the answer. I imagined farms could be as life-and-death as a battlefield.
“Much better, but it was hard to see her so sick. To not be able to do anything to make her feel better.”
“I can only imagine.” Poor Bess.
“The good news is Dad was able to get the vet out and now she’s on antibiotics and responding well. Just an infection.” He steered us inside the tower, where we were heading by habit and silent agreement. “But we’re having to bottle-feed Nellie, and she is a hungry baby. Dad needs sleep more than I do. So when I wasn’t checking into the Insider thing, I was out in the barn playing fake mama.”
I didn’t have any idea what he looked like outside the game. So my mind conjured an image not that far off the form in front of me, sans the green skin; a boy with black hair and blue eyes behind glasses, cradling the small, adorable Nellie as she gulped down sustenance.
It was a nice image. I was diverted from it by a glimpse of what I thought was a pair of red-lined wings drifting through the sky nearby. But I wasn’t positive it was the bat, and then whatever I’d spotted was gone. If the possible spy showed up again, though, I would officially have to start to worry about that too.
“I have a lot to tell you,” I said. “After your news.”
His hand slid down my arm, and I felt the touch in every cell and molecule along the way. He took my hands in his, and mine warmed instantly. I hadn’t noticed the chill before. We floated up in flight through the hollow tower, parallel with each other, hands clasped tight. He guided us to the bench by the window, more smoothly than the other day—as if his flight skills were improving—and we sat down beside each other. Was it my imagination or were we sitting closer than we had the first time?
I missed you, I wanted to say, about the day before. But I didn’t.
He said, “You first.”
“Well, I do have a favor to ask. It’s a long story, but that alert at City Hall gave us a lead on Melody…” I related the main events of the afternoon, gratified by his surprised reactions. “What happened to her is mixed up with James’s dad the ex-mayor, who I now believe might be innocent after all.”
He blinked. “Busy day. Okay. What can I do?”
“Nothing for now. I have Devin figuring out if we can make a list of places owned by Moxie where Ismenios and this Dabney Donovan guy might be holed up, assuming he’s Melody’s guy.” My gut sensed that he was—and I was curious about how and why James’s dad had met him, and known he was a scientist at Ismenios. But that could wait. James’s dad seemed too spookable to push before I had to. “You just take good care of Nellie Bly.”
“I’d never let anything happen to our Nellie on my watch.”
I brushed my hair back over my bare elf shoulder. The words “our Nellie” made me want to grin like crazy, but I forced myself to focus. He still had news to tell me, from consulting his genius friend.
“Did TheInventor have much to tell you about our mysterious Strange Skies poster?” I asked.
He turned to face me, his knee touching mine. I tried not to be distracted by the light contact.
“So, I don’t know if I ever told you this, and I wasn’t sure until now, but TheInventor didn’t just build our chat software. He built Strange Skies too.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Not shocking, but interesting.”
“He’s paranoid about protecting user identities, apparently for a reason, and flushes IP addresses automatically. Which unfortunately means he doesn’t have any way of finding out who the new person is. They didn’t respond to a DM from him.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t give up hope yet.” But his expression had gone grim. “He reached out to QueenofStrange. She did go to the ‘sighting’ and says in reality there wasn’t one. She agreed to post that there was.”
I had never even considered that her terse message might have been a lie. I sat straighter, knee pressing more firmly against his. “Agreed why? With who?”
His grim expression got grimmer. “With the federal agents who were waiting there to interview her when she showed up. They asked her all about the flying person, what she knew about him, when she’d seen him. She told TheInventor the whole thing rattled her so much she won’t be back on the boards anytime soon.”
“What kind of federal agents?”
“You and I are great minds. You’re asking all the same questions I did. They showed zero ID and she didn’t press for it, but they convinced her they were definitely some kind of investigators. FBI maybe?”
“FAA concerned about the airspace issue?” I offered. “NSA? CIA?”
“Right,” he sai
d, serious as I’d ever seen him. “Who knows? It could be anyone.”
“You think Insider01 will be back to post again? Queen can’t have had much to tell, not beyond what she’s put on the boards.”
“I do,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s another post when we leave here.”
SmallvilleGuy’s instincts had trumped mine on the new poster being something to worry about. I was going to lose the bet we’d made, and I didn’t care anymore.
This was bad news.
“Any theory what they want?”
“I think they’re hunting the flying man.”
The words sent a shiver through me. He said nothing more.
Here was something else to stay worried about. So, the list now included: the scope of my story and whether it was too dangerous like James’s dad had said; how to track down Melody’s lab and this scientist, the elusive Dabney Donovan; and an unnamed official threat to the boards and the flying man, from some nebulous federal agents.
“I should probably get going in a couple,” I said. “I have to meet with everybody else in the morning. I need to think about Melody and Worthington and this Ismenios guy, come up with a theory.”
“I know you do. You’re always thinking, Lois Lane.”
I gave him a small smile. “It’s the only way things get figured out.”
“I should go too,” he said.
But neither of us moved. The torchlight flickered over our faces as our eyes met.
The thing I hadn’t listed that I was worried about, of course, was whether we were becoming more than friends. Or whether the gulf of secrets was too wide for us to cross.
When he spoke, I understood we hadn’t left because we were both aware there was more left to say.
“There was another reason I didn’t answer yesterday.”
I was on a date, my traitor brain imagined him saying. I was making out with my new girlfriend. Not that I could fault him. We had no agreement otherwise, and we weren’t in each other’s lives, not in a daily, real-world way.
But it felt like we were. Like we were as important to each other as anyone else, as the people who we did see every day, right in front of us.
