I had a whole new round of questions, in other words. Somewhere inside this building, the answers were waiting.
I watched as the Warheads stepped one by one from the van, migrating in creep formation toward the doors. This was the kind of building that would have tight security, the kind I couldn’t easily bluster my way through if I wanted them not to see me.
I needed more intel.
“You getting out?” the cabbie asked.
I also needed to get Anavi clear of them before I did anything else. “No,” I said. “I changed my mind about the extra credit. I’ll do it later.” He opened his mouth to protest, and I said, “That tip is getting bigger by the second. Take me to the Daily Planet Building and your day is made.”
He grumbled, but put the car in drive. Good thing I was frugal with my allowance for times like this.
I peered out the window as we passed the van. The driver was Ms. Johnson, the tightly-wound-and-coiffed comp sci teacher.
So the school really was in this up to its eyeballs. Given how little Ms. Johnson had seemed to care for her charges, I assumed Butler’s policy of “this is what I want, deal with it” was responsible for her presence.
I had more digging to do into the lab, but I had quotes enough to ensure that Butler and his fancypants suits were taken to the cleaners and hung out to dry on the front webpage of the Scoop. More than enough to make sure he’d have to order the Warheads to leave Anavi alone.
All I had to do now was write the story.
CHAPTER 12
I let the story unfurl from my fingertips, waiting for the others to arrive as I banged away at the keyboard of my laptop.
The red-headed guard at the front desk had given me a skeptical eyebrow raise when I claimed I was allowed to be here so early in the afternoon. Around me, the Morgue was quiet as a, well, morgue. The smell of old newspapers, with their musty dead print, was almost comforting as I wrote.
I included my trip into the game, and what I’d witnessed the Warheads doing there—it was a story of cyber-bullying bleeding back into the real world, of jerks targeting an excellent student, Anavi Singh, and making her unable to work or even focus when her whole future, in the form of her Galaxy spelling champ scholarship, was on the line. The story of a principal who claimed bullying was hardly ever a problem, was always overblown, and who refused to help his own stellar student, undeniably the target of harassment, at the end of fake automatic weapons and real-world insults and insinuations.
I left out any mention of possible mind control, of course. Or of SmallvilleGuy.
Tabbing over to the chat program, I checked to see if he was logged in. He hardly ever did during the day, but sometimes he would show if I pinged him.
As expected, he wasn’t there. And I was too afraid to send him a message to join.
But I left the window open, staying logged in.
Typing up the story had helped me calm down some. That was when I started to worry more about how the two of us had left things the night before. How I had left them, closing my laptop without even really saying goodbye. He must have assumed I was mad at him. When all he’d done was have my back.
He couldn’t be mad at me, could he? He had no reason to be. After all, he hadn’t been shot in the shoulder. And I wasn’t the one who kept so many secrets. He knew exactly who I was, and what I’d seen that night in Kansas. He’d never told me what happened to convince him the world was filled with impossible things, why he was so certain about it.
I tabbed back over to the chat screen.
Advanced Research Laboratories, I typed in. What do you know about them? and hit send. He should receive the message the next time he signed on.
I clicked over to the Strange Skies boards, where it had been a slow week. Not too many updates, and most of the stories I scanned through seemed like flights of freaky fancy:
Posted by Conspirator13, 3:30 a.m.: The visitors returned last night. In fact, they just brought me home a little while ago. There were three Greys, the usual alien scouting party, and they appeared at my bedside at exactly 1:02 a.m.—I looked at the clock when I woke. They took me outside and into their ship and that’s where the rest gets blurry . . . But they must be taking me for a reason. I am beginning to think I’m special.
Aliens would travel all the way to Planet Earth to take sleeping people onto their spaceships? Really? Next.
Oh, here was a better one.