by Gwenda Bond
The post SmallvilleGuy had been talking about wasn’t hard to find. It was in priority placement, the most popular new thread, nestled right below all the sticky “Introduce Yourself” and “Ground Rules” posts. There was a flaming fireball next to it that indicated a lot of activity. Even though the timestamp was only a few hours old, it had six hundred views and seventy comments. For Strange Skies, that was a ton of action.
I clicked to open it, feeling a resurgence of SmallvilleGuy’s contagious worry.
Posted by Insider01 at 3:30 p.m.: I know many of you have witnessed a flying man and posted accounts here. I am pleased to tell you that I have many important details to share about a flying man. And I will be sharing those with you here in the coming days. Keep one eye on the skies and another eye here. You won’t want to miss this.
CHAPTER 4
I wasn’t typically an early riser on Saturdays, but dreams like I’d had all night would roust anyone out of bed. About flying men toppling from the sky while I watched, helpless, and bats with lasers coming straight at me, and weird labs filled with paper files whose pages went blank as soon as I opened them. I didn’t need to consult an oracle to know I was feeling stressed about everything that had happened the day before.
My laptop hummed to life with a press of the spacebar. I swung by Strange Skies first, where the Insider01 post had garnered another four hundred views, bringing it over one thousand, and had a slew of more comments. None of them were from SmallvilleGuy. He wasn’t in our chat app when I signed in either, but I left the window open as I navigated to my browser and did a basic search on “Ismenios laboratory, labs, company.”
I clicked through a page of unpromising matches. The only mentions of the word Ismenios were mythology-related, not a lab among them. The dragon Ismenios, named for where it lived, had fought and lost to a guy named Cadmus in Greek myth. He planted its teeth in the ground, because… myth reasons, I guess, and they became warriors who helped him found some ancient city. Melody had said a guy fighting a monster was the logo for her company, so it was probably the inspiration for the name. But not what I was after.
I added “Metropolis” to the search and retried it.
Still nada.
I located my phone and selected Maddy’s name from my contacts list. I could have texted, but if she wasn’t up yet, the blaring punk that was her ringtone would serve the function of an alarm.
“Lois?” she growled.
Not up, then.
“Um, hi, is Melody handy? I have a question for her.”
The phone landed on a surface with a kerplunk and Maddy called, “Melody! Come here, please. It’s Lois.”
A few quiet moments and then, “Could you keep it down, please? Do you want Mom and Dad to find out about this?”
These two were masters of swapping the sarcastic “please.” I wondered if they’d ever gotten along. Twins were supposed to have a special connection, weren’t they?
I heard a noncommittal grunt that must have been Maddy’s response to her sister. A second later, Melody’s voice sounded in my ear. “Yes? Did you find something?”
“Good morning to you too,” I said. “Not yet. How did you hear about the offer? An online ad, or something in a magazine or the newspaper? Craigslist?”
“Oh,” she said, “no. There was a flyer on the announcements board at school. It had those little squares you tear off with the phone number.”
An honest-to-goodness lead. “Do you still have the number?”
“No, I didn’t save it in my phone. And I tossed the paper ages ago. That’s why I took the taxi out there yesterday, obviously. Why?” Her voice got strained then. “Are you running into trouble?”
“Nothing major,” I said. “It would have made things easier, but hard is fine too. The hard way and me go way back. How are you feeling?”
“Perfect as usual. Maddy—stop it, I’m still talking—”
“That all you needed?” Maddy asked.
“Yep.” I didn’t think it was a lie. I drummed my fingers on my desk.
She lowered her voice. “You are going to be able to help her, right?”
I hope so.
“Maddy, you can trust me.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ll talk to you again at a decent hour when normal human beings have conversations.”
“Hilarious.”
She hung up. I crossed my fingers that she wasn’t actually mad. I had no idea if I was doing the friend thing right or utterly screwing it up.
So. Perfect-as-usual Melody had found out from a flyer posted in the school, which meant zero potential to track down an online ad. The weird science guy might not even have hung it up himself. He could have paid a student to do it, if he was doling out $500 left and right and maintaining a top-secret lab far under the radar.
One detail drifted back to me: that he had avoided anything but paper for recordkeeping.
Besides the name Ismenios, I had the address. Pulling up a map site, I plugged in info for the mural’s location, then dragged the cursor across the street and jotted down the address for the building directly opposite.
If science guy didn’t leave a paper trail, the property owner could be a place to start. I pulled up Metropolis’s property information search and plugged in the address… and came up with nothing.
Now, that was weird. Weirder than Ismenios Labs not having a website. A big fat zero results for any existing properties on that block. Nobody owned it?
My news nose was tingling again. I’d been to the address, and it showed on the map, therefore it existed. Just not in this online database. There had to be a paper trail somewhere, but it would take a visit to City Hall to rifle through records and locate it. And the property and business registration offices’ page informed me there were no Saturday hours due to budget- saving measures.
I’d have to take a field trip there after school on Monday.
I clicked over to our chat app. SmallvilleGuy remained MIA. But when I went back to the Strange Skies tab on my browser, there was a new post on the Insider01 thread.
Posted by Insider01 at 8:20 a.m.: I’m pleased, if not surprised, by your clear interest in what I have to share. I’ll post the first exclusive details about the flying man at precisely 8:05 p.m. UTC. Stay tuned.
What in the world was UTC? I looked it up. It stood for Coordinated Universal Time, which had more or less replaced Greenwich Mean Time decades earlier, aka the international standard everyone else set their time zones by. The acronym didn’t match the term exactly because the French and the English had some sparring match over it and had to compromise. It was five hours ahead of us, which meant the post would be up this afternoon at 3:05 p.m. my time. It also meant the poster had left no clue about where he or she might be located. I closed my browser and keyed in the uber-long password for our secure chat program. SmallvilleGuy still wasn’t online, but I typed out a message he’d see when he logged in.
SkepticGirl1: Talk to you at 3:06 p.m. Eastern, I guess?
I waited a couple of minutes, but he didn’t show. And I couldn’t just sit around here all day doing nothing, waiting and making no progress on my story and Melody’s problem.
I couldn’t let Maddy down. Finally, I had friends, and I was determined to be the best friend anyone ever had. That this resolution was perhaps a little pathetic wasn’t lost on me.
It didn’t matter. My friendship with Maddy was worth more than my pride.
I closed my laptop, picked up my phone, and texted her: I’m coming over later.
First, I needed to borrow an item from my dad.
*
I wanted to pay a visit to the scene of the crime, as it were, and to do that, I needed to raid the stash in Dad’s locked cabinet. Alas, I wasn’t the only early riser. Dad was in his study, a major complication to my day’s developing itinerary.
; As a foil, I lugged the homework I had to do at some point this weekend (better now than never) down to the living room. I’d wait for him to do something—anything—else, and leave me free to access the cabinet.
An entire hour after I set up camp, he emerged. He was in his day-off casual clothes, no uniform in sight, and yet he exuded a sense of unquestionable authority. A general was always a general was always a general.
“Homework this early on a Saturday?” he asked. “Wait. Is it the apocalypse? Did someone forget to tell me?”
“Haha, Dad. Very funny,” I said. “I guess if you don’t want me to care about school…”
I flipped my notebook shut on a series of short answer responses for English. The sexists of Hawthorne’s New England and their dark red letters could wait.
“Lois,” he said, with a long-suffering sigh, “I was kidding. It’s good to see you working so hard. At school and even your job.”
“Even my job,” I deadpanned back. “That awful thing.”
“I mean it,” Dad said.
I gave him a salute. “I’m sure.”
“Lois, I really do. I’m glad you’re settling in here. Principal Butler says you’re behaving better at school.”
I hadn’t realized the two of them had become so chatty. Figured.
He stood there, looking at me and waiting for some kind of response.
I rolled my eyes. “Right. Butler is a reliable source. He’s a man who deeply cares about the students of the school. Especially the one who publicly embarrassed him.”
Butler had taken some heat over his non-response to the bullying of Anavi, which had been the subject of my very first story for the Scoop. That he’d been seemingly unaware of the extent of the illegal experiment his students turned out to be subjects for didn’t help him out any either.
“I’m aware of your thoughts on the man, but he’s been perfectly nice to me, and if you didn’t notice, that was favorable feedback about you.”
He was right. I should be glad the loathsome Principal Butler had given me a good report. But I wasn’t going to admit it out loud.
“At any rate,” Dad said, and sighed, “I came out here to tell you I’m going for a run.”
He headed upstairs, presumably to change. As soon as he was out of sight, I scurried into the study.
Waiting until he was officially out of the house would be better. But the “even your job” comment rankled. The Scoop was important to me and he knew it, and he also knew that I’d knocked it over the wall for a home run—was that how that worked? I’d ask my favorite sports fan later—with my first stories.
“The Scoop is the most important thing I’m doing.” Muttering under my breath, I hurried through his study, with its thick books about wars and big desk with rarely used computer and comfy leather chair, making my way to the framed family photograph on the top of the bookshelf. My face scowled out at me from amid my parents’ and Lucy’s smiling ones.
Dad’s job for the military involved a lot of heavily classified activities. I wasn’t exactly sure what they entailed, but it meant he kept a veritable treasure trove of handy items under lock and key here at home.
I plucked the key from where it was stuck behind the frame of the family photo and moseyed over to the tall wood cabinet. I’d made a thorough inventory of everything in it, so I didn’t hesitate, just bent to retrieve the lock pick tools I needed. Door closed, lock re-locked, key re-stowed.
Dad came down in his running clothes and sneakers just as I hit the hallway, pocketing the tools.
He stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “Sorry about before. I just wanted to let you know that I’m proud of you. You’ve been trying hard since we got here, and I’ve noticed.”
This was why Dad inspired such loyalty among the soldiers he’d commanded and the people he worked with. Winning his approval wasn’t easy, and he parceled it out scarcely, which made it all the more gratifying. My palm itched around the tools I’d borrowed from his office.
My guilty conscience itched too.
“I maybe overreacted before. Sorry,” I said. “Homework and I never did get along this early in the morning, so I’m going out to have lunch with Maddy and her sister. I’ll be back before dinner.”
Before 3:05, in fact.
Upstairs, I gathered my phone and bag, and checked chat one last time. SmallvilleGuy wasn’t currently logged in, but he had responded to my message.
SmallvilleGuy: 3:06.
SmallvilleGuy: I’m afraid you’re going to win our bet.
His terseness was worrisome, particularly after his reaction last night.
But there was no way to fast-forward to later this afternoon for a sneak preview of what Insider01 had in store for us all. So I might as well try to get a lead on the missing lab in the meantime.
Given how much what was happening on the boards upset SmallvilleGuy, even if this person did have information about the flying man, I didn’t want to win.
CHAPTER 5
I had no idea what Maddy and Melody’s parents did for a living, but it was clearly lucrative. They didn’t have the kind of money James Worthington the Third’s family had (before his dad went to jail anyway), but they lived in a modestly ritzy apartment building in a modestly ritzy section of the island of New Troy. It wasn’t that far from our nice (if actually modest) brownstone, but it was a world apart. A world with cheerful uniformed doormen. Theirs had already been given my name, and he admitted me with a smiling flourish toward the first door to the left of the marble lobby.
My welcome would probably have been less effusive if the doorman had known I was here to invite the Simpson twins on a field trip to Suicide Slum. I’d dressed down again, wearing jeans, my trusty boots, and a slightly faded houndstooth-patterned button-down from a vintage shop Maddy had dragged me to the week before.
I rang the bell, and the door immediately opened to reveal Maddy. She must have been waiting there. Her T-shirt today was for a band called Snoozer Loser.
“Did you invite James?” she asked, raising her voice enough to be heard over the dulcet tones of classical piano music emanating from inside the apartment. None of this was expected—not the question or the sonic environment.
“Uh, no,” I said. “Why?”
“Because—” she motioned for me to follow her up the hall. The music got louder with each step we took, and we entered an elegant living room with tall ceilings and a grand piano. “—this,” she finished.
James and Melody were in the room, she at the baby grand and he watching in rapt attention from a dainty brocade settee as she played a piece. She finished with a polished, clearly practiced stroke of the keys, and James burst into applause.
Then she saw us. I expected an imperious command of some kind for us to applaud too, but instead she blushed.
“So, you guys have music in common,” I said to Maddy.
“Not really,” Maddy said.
“Maddy’s taste is too cool for me,” Melody said, making it sound like an insult. “She stopped taking lessons when we were twelve.”
Maddy didn’t counter, so I assumed it was true. Interesting.
“What are you doing here?” James asked me, and got up from the dainty sofa.
“I could ask you the same question,” I said. “But I’m going to caper out on a limb and go with… avoiding your father.”
“Got it in one.” He ducked his head and considered his shoes with a thoughtfulness that obviously wasn’t about his footwear.
I probably shouldn’t have brought up his dad.
Great job, Lane, proving you really get this whole friendship thing.
I resolved to do my best to be nice to him. Mostly. Even if he was inadvertently distressing Maddy with his clueless fixation on her sister, he was my friend too.
“You guys game for a little espionage?” I asked.
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“Yes,” Maddy said, clasping her hands together under her chin in eagerness.
“What sort of espionage?” Melody asked.
James frowned, the expression he almost always deployed in response to my plans.
“I thought we’d take a field trip to get a closer look at the building with your phantom lab. See if we find anything there to point the way. It might refresh your memory. You up for it?”
Melody hesitated, doubtless worrying about us all being seen together. I was prepared to argue her into it, but she nodded. “Anything that will make this nightmare end.”
Of course, that was officially too nice, so she had to add something. “Besides, James will be there. Being seen with James is fine.”
“Yuck,” I said. Then, to James, “Sorry. You know what I mean.”
“Don’t mind me,” he said.
He was officially acting weird too. There was none of the usual peeved tone he responded with whenever I inadvertently—or advertently—insulted him. Boys. Who could understand the mysterious workings of their minds?
“I’ll arrange a ride.” I whipped out my phone and sent a text to my favorite trusted cab driver: Available to pick up four of us? I added the address.
Be right there, came the response.
Melody left the room, presumably going to get her stuff, and Maddy came closer. James did too. “She had another episode,” Maddy said. “After you called this morning. It didn’t last long but… She looked so weak afterward. She didn’t even yell at me to get out of her room.”
“This whole situation is bizarre,” James said. “Why did she need the money?”
Maddy said, “She didn’t. My parents would give her the moon if she asked for it. Maybe literally.”
Unfortunately, Melody returned in time to hear this. “No, they wouldn’t,” she said, her cheeks still pink. Being embarrassed about playing the piano made about as much sense to me as having to obsess over what people thought of everything you did because you were popular.
It was pretty clear that Melody and I didn’t have a lot in common.