“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?”