Read Fallout (Lois Lane) for Free Online

and this wasn’t about him. It was about what we’d seen. What I now knew might exist out there in the world, not talked about in the open. I ended my post with: So, am I crazy or did this happen to me? Did I really see this?
    SmallvilleGuy had reached out to me right away via private message on the boards, almost as soon as I had posted, and said he went to high school in a small town in Kansas and that he knew I was telling the truth. Because he was confirming what I’d seen, he also said he couldn’t tell me exactly how he knew or who he was. There were others on the boards who made nonsense claims about aliens in the middle of the night and spaceship experiments. I didn’t buy into those. Of course. That was why I’d chosen the username I had.
    But SmallvilleGuy’s reassurance and other reports on the boards seemed legit. I was convinced: the reason Dad didn’t want me to talk about what we’d experienced to Mom or Lucy or
anyone
(even him) had nothing to do with keeping people from thinking we were crazy.
    It was because we had seen something real, something we weren’t supposed to.
    And my dad—even with his top secret clearance—hadn’t known how to explain it either.

CHAPTER 4
    I went to breakfast with a mission the next morning. After dinner the night before, Lucy had blown me off, so determined to spend the evening playing on her holoset that she’d already done her homework. That equaled no love for letting me see it.
    But today, the curved shell was, as usual, sitting beside her plate of toast and turkey bacon. It was hot pink. When she’d unwrapped the present at Christmas last year, she’d seen the color and done her trademark nose wrinkle. She’d wanted
Worlds War Three
; my parents had been steered to
Unicorn University
as a more appropriate game for a young girl. After some justified ranting and raving, she calmed down enough to try it out. Based on how much she used it, the galaxy of unicorns was apparently more interesting than she’d thought.
    I put toast on my plate with one hand, then reached out and snagged the holoset as I sat down across from her.
    “Lois!” she protested.
    “I just want to see it, Luce. Will you please tell me how to work it?”
    “Fine,” Lucy huffed. But she didn’t snatch it out of my hands. Which made me remember that we needed to have a sister movie night sometime soon.
    I hooked the holoset over my ear like I’d done with Devin’s, though the fit was a little snugger, and she nodded. “Then you push the button to turn it on.” When I lifted my hand, she jumped up.
    “Wait!”
    “Yes?” I said, my finger poised on top of the button.
    Lucy came around the table to the chair beside mine. She whispered, “You won’t tell Mom and Dad, will you?”
    Our parents weren’t around. Dad had already left for work, and Mom was upstairs changing so she could take Lucy to school.
    “Tell them what?”
    “On me, how I use it.”
    “Now I can’t wait to see,” I said, and hit the button.
    I blinked in confusion. I was inside the game world, but I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.
    Just as the day before, a scene popped into being in front of me. The way holosets worked meant the details of the 3D holo projection were visible in detail only to the gamer, who felt like they were inside the game world, which felt so vivid it almost replaced the real one. But to someone looking on it was just a small blur of light and movement sprayed from the earpiece in front of the user’s face.
    This was definitely different than the
Worlds War Three
landscape. It was all pastels and bright colors and nothing was on fire. The grass was princess pink.
    “Trippy,” I said, attempting to get my bearings.
    “Try not to talk. People in the game can hear you.” Lucy’s hand clutched my arm. “The holoset tracks your pupil movements and that’s how you’ll move.”
    But I didn’t want to move, because I noticed the unicorns standing around me.
    The biggest one neighed