Read Fallout (Lois Lane) for Free Online Page A

and trotted in front of me, batting enormous sea-green eyes. She was trailed by three others who each had dangerously sharp-looking horns.
    “Hey, Deathmetal,” said the unicorn who stopped in front of me. A black ribbon was wound around the right foreleg it lifted to high-five me. Or high-foot me. Whatever you called it when a unicorn did that.
    I glanced down. My own unicorn leg was wrapped in the same renegade style, as were the others’. One even had a black bandana knotted around its pearl gray horn. They might have once been delicate pristine versions of the imaginary creatures who represented the players doing word mini-games and running races and visiting castles as part of mastering
Unicorn University
. But these unicorns had gone bad.
    “This feels so real, Luce,” I said. “You can customize it, I take it?”
    But even getting the words out was hard. It felt like what was in the game was realer, almost more than reality, than Lucy’s hand on my arm. Or her voice near my ear.
    “When you get enough points to graduate,” she said, low and worried.
    “What did you do with Deathmetal?” the first unicorn said, taking a menacing step closer.
    Lucy ripped the holoset off my ear and put it onto hers. “That was my sister. You see what I mean, right? She’s terrible. Gotta go.” She took off the holoset slowly, but I was having trouble watching her. The kitchen swam in and out, the odd sensation of coming out of the game worse than the day before. It must be because I’d spent a little longer inside.
    I’d done some reading on the manufacturer’s website the night before. The more used to the real-sim tech your brain got, the easier it coped with entering the game—and the more careful you had to be when leaving. Some critics questioned whether it meant the technology might be dangerous, capable of making unintended changes in the brain’s neural pathways.
    The kitchen stopped swimming after a few moments, and Lucy didn’t seem to be suffering any ill effects.
Because she took her time removing it.
    Lucy didn’t say a word, staring down at the holoset as she turned it over in her hands.
    When she finally looked up, I’d recovered completely. I crunched a bite of toast and raised my eyebrows. “Lucy,” I said, “are you a killer unicorn?”
    “You promised you wouldn’t tell.”
    “I wouldn’t dream of it.” I set the toast back on my plate. “Who are those unicorns?”
    “They’re from all over,” she said. “They didn’t want to play stupid unicorns either.”
    “So you formed a gang.” I was glad she’d made friends in there. Our many moves hadn’t been easy for her either. “Why Deathmetal?”
    She shrugged, sheepish. “It was the least unicorn-y name I could come up with.” She bit her lip, and then blurted, “You’re not really terrible, Lois.”
    “Thanks for that, sis. Neither are you.”
    *
    Thirty-five minutes into first period, I breezed into the admin office. The blond assistant was behind her desk, wearing another flowered ensemble and appearing far less frazzled than she had been yesterday.
    “Ronda, it’s so nice to see you,” I said. “Is the principal around?”
    “In a meeting,” she said, and I breathed easier. Without batting a mascara-coated eyelash, she asked, “Shouldn’t you be in class?”
    “On shore leave.” I waved the yellow hall pass my geometry teacher had given me after he finished lecturing and told us to do practice problems for the rest of the time. “I want to make a change in my schedule. I’d like to switch bio for computer science—I already checked and there’s a class that will fit second period.”
    She waited—for what, I wasn’t sure. Then she said, “I guess it’s okay. Since you’re not asking to transfer to chemistry.” She paused. “Did you really create a noxious cloud that caused the evacuation of your school in Ohio?”
    “Of course not.” I waved my hand dismissively.
    “Good,” she said, typing