YOU LOWER THE IQ OF THE WHOLE STREET.”(SHERLOCK)Every muscle in Liv’s body tensed to run.“Mom, I can expl—”“No,” her mother said in a hollow voice, “I don’t want to hear it.”“But—”“I went online after I found your exam. I looked up your @LivOutLoud account and started searching.”Liv blinked. “You did what?”“I googled all of it. You’re back at it again, Liv. You and Xander haven’t been working on school projects at all.” She opened the laptop back up, the screen blinding in the dim room. “Watch,” her mother commanded.Xander, as Major Malloy, stood in front of the burning remains of the colony on Io (which Liv had carefully lifted from the last Starveil trailer). The text “Spartan Survived!” rippled across the screen, disintegrating into a shower of sparks that rained down onto the colony’s pockmarked surface. As fire spread from building to building, the screen cut to a series of fan-generated images and video. These played in snippets on a holoscreen, while Xander begged the resistance to send more evidence of Spartan’s survival.
