Free Fallout (Lois Lane) by Gwenda Bond

monitors as he talked. “But I figured it out by the questions they asked us, and how they made this big deal about destroying the code and all our work at the end of the semester. You want to see their schedules that bad?”
    I stood and walked over to Devin. Maddy got up and followed me over. “Of course I do,” I said. “Do it.”
    James was scowling again as he joined us. No surprise there. “You can’t do that,” he said. “I don’t think Perry would approve.”
    “Perry’s not here,” I said. “Maddy, did Anavi seem like she needed us to help her make this go away?”
    Maddy didn’t want to disagree with James. She fidgeted, her eyes fixed on the floor. “Yes,” she said. “She did.”
    James started to protest again, but then his face turned smug as Perry strolled through the door. He took us in, gathered around Devin’s desk.
    “I can already tell this is going better. I won’t stay and get in your way.” But he did come a little closer. “What are you working on?”
    James gave me a superior look, but before he could open his big mouth and spoil things, I spoke up. Trying to keep my voice light, as if playing around, I said, “Devin’s just hacking into the school’s mainframe so we can check out some schedules for a few students. They’re up to no good, and Principal Butler’s in on it.”
    Perry snorted. “Good one. Whatever you’re doing, carry on.” With a wave, he was gone, out the way he’d come.
    “He didn’t think you were serious,” James said, back to disbelieving.
    I would need to make a list of his expressions: disapproving, disbelieving, dis . . . something else. I shrugged. “I didn’t lie.”
    “Got it,” Devin said. He stopped typing for a second, raising his hand to direct us to the screens on his giant monitors.
    We watched as he opened several smaller windows on them, each one with a name and ID number at the top, followed by a class schedule and current grades for each class. The schedules shared something in common. There were no afternoon classes, nothing except the words:
    Independent Study — Project Hydra
    “That definitely looks like dirt to me,” I said. “The incriminating kind.”
    Devin grinned.
    He
was
cute, and he had hacking skills he wasn’t afraid to use. I grinned back.
    Then promptly thought of SmallvilleGuy and felt a twinge of guilt.
    And though this Hydra mention on the Warheads’ schedules was an undeniably positive development, evidence that there was
more
going on here, it bugged me. I wanted to know what it meant. What the more was.
    “This isn’t the first time I’ve heard the word Hydra today,” I said. “Our comp sci teacher said it to them in second period. I thought it might be something in the game. But when I asked Anavi, she said even though it’s in the game, it’s nothing much.”
    “Yeah,” Devin said. “Anavi’s right about that. Easy to slay. I beat it the first month I started. And it says it’s an independent study thing. They wouldn’t get credit just to play the game.”
    That reminded me I needed Devin to set me up for that night’s planned visit to
Worlds War Three
. But I wasn’t ready to broach that topic yet. I was hoping I could arrange for SmallvilleGuy to be my backup, though it was possible he’d have no way to get a holoset. He had to save for extras, and as far as I knew he wasn’t into gaming. But maybe he could borrow one, like I planned to. Lucy’s only had access to
Unicorn University
, and I didn’t have enough spending cash saved up to buy a
Worlds War Three
one.
    Maddy interrupted my train of thought. “What is a Hydra, anyway?” she asked.
    “Huh,” I said. “I don’t know.”
    James chimed in. “The Lernaean Hydra was a mythological monster, a sea serpent with many heads and poison breath and blood. If you cut one of the heads off, it grew two more. It wasn’t so easily defeated in the myths. In Greek mythology, Hera raised it to kill Hercules, and he had no luck