Killer Spirit

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  They weren’t the prettiest girls on the Squad. They didn’t have Lucy’s earnestness or Zee’s exotic look, or even Brooke’s flawlessly symmetrical face, but they knew how to work what they did have. They were blond, they were built, and they were (I had been told) five times hotter together than either of them was apart. There wasn’t a politician alive who could resist the Sheffield twins.

  “What about the rest of us?” Tara asked.

  “Chloe will keep you guys apprised of the situation,” Brooke said. “Unless you hear otherwise, plan to be at the park by no later than three. I’ll send you guys exact orders once we manage to do a little recon, but our priorities are getting the weapon and getting Amelia. After that, we’ll deal with finding out who planted the tracking chip in Toby’s shoulder—assuming it wasn’t Amelia herself.”

  How many times did I have to say “she didn’t touch me” before it sank in?

  “Lucy, we’re going to need every long-range paralyzing weapon you’ve got. I want Amelia unconscious the second we spot her. It’ll have to be something she’s not expecting, so get creative. Britt, Tiff, before you guys leave to find the senator, I need you to work your magic on Amelia’s picture and give us a rundown of the potential disguises you think would be most effective for her to use. We can’t underestimate her, and that means assuming she’s as good as you are. Chloe, anyone who comes with you after school needs to be in deep cover. I don’t care if you have to dress up like boys—don’t let Amelia recognize you.”

  A buzzer went off then, letting us know that first period was a mere ten minutes away from starting. Without a word, Chloe headed off to her lab, and the twins went to theirs. Zee hung back with Brooke, and the others slowly drifted off toward the locker room, to get changed and get ready for class.

  How did they get used to this? Knowing what I knew, how was I supposed to make it through a day at high school, watching three o’clock get closer and closer by the second?

  “Toby.” Brooke said my name, and I turned around to face her. Was this the part when I said thank you? Or maybe the part when she did?

  “You can’t go.” Apparently, this was the part when she issued more orders.

  “Can’t go where?” I asked, truly baffled.

  “This afternoon. Even if we need every man we’ve got, even if all the others go, you can’t.”

  I stared at her. I was the one who’d uncovered this whole thing, and now she was telling me I couldn’t be a part of it? What a suckfest.

  “You’ve been ID’d,” she said. “Whoever this agent is—assuming it’s not Amelia—he knows who you are. You’d lead him straight to the rest of us, and there’s no way for us to know for sure that you’re completely clean. You’ll have to go through a complete body scan later, to make sure there aren’t any more plants on you, but there’s no way I can pull that off without raising some major questions with our superiors. We can’t afford to have them questioning us right now.”

  Damn it. Since when had Brooke become so…so…reasonable?

  “So what am I supposed to do seventh period?” I asked. When I’d first joined the Squad, the biggest perk wasn’t the royal treatment I got from the whole school. It was the fact that I was henceforth excused from gym class for seventh-period practice.

  “Well,” Brooke said, smiling in a way that had me prepping myself for bad, bad news. “We still need to paint the banners for the game on Friday…”

  Double damn. Damn to the nth degree. Everyone but me was going to go out and save the day, and I was going to be stuck in the practice gym by myself painting banners for a football game.

  I forced myself to look at the bright side. If worse came to worse, I could always entertain myself by coming up with some creative banner sayings.

  Zee took one look at the expression on my face and shook her head. “Stick with Go Bayport,” she advised. “Or maybe Beat Hillside. No obscenities. No sarcasm. And nothing that even remotely suggests that the football team has the combined IQ of a spider monkey.”

  She knew me too, too well, but I have to confess—the spider monkey part had never even crossed my mind. Zee may have misjudged Amelia, but there are times when her genius really shines through.

  CHAPTER 31

  Code Word: Betrayal

  By the time I managed to wrangle my way back into the inarguably uncomfortable boots, I didn’t have much time to desweatify myself before heading to first period, and for once, the twins weren’t there to do it for me, and everyone else was so busy doing their own last-minute primping that no one seemed to notice that for the first time since I’d joined up, I looked somewhat less than Godlike.

  Knowing better than to press my luck, I snuck out of the locker room before anyone had a chance to do damage control on my barely made-up face, and for the first time in weeks, I felt like myself. I mean, yeah, I was wearing God Squad clothes, and yes, my hair was still God Squad hair, and practice had done nothing to dampen my Bounce Index, but I wasn’t perfect, and I didn’t look it.

  I didn’t look like the old me, either, but it was a start.

  Half of me expected to run into Jack on my way to first period, and I purposefully didn’t pay much attention to where I was walking, tempting fate to re-create the interaction we’d shared yesterday. And the day before. In just two days, things between us had gotten so much more physical, so much more intense.

  Then, just as I was reaching up to open the door to my geometry class, I came to the single most horrible realization of my life. Things had cooled down between Jack and me right after our first kiss. I’d been sending him back-off signals, and he’d respected that, even if he’d done it in a way that let me know that he wouldn’t stay away forever. And then, at the pep rally, he’d called off the truce and come up to me.

  He’d touched me.

  Had he touched my shoulder? Had he squeezed me while we were kissing? Had he planted something in my skin while my mind was too occupied with his lips to notice or care?

  I hadn’t spent much time thinking about how I’d gotten tagged, or who might have tagged me, but really, there weren’t that many options. I went to school, I went to practice, and I went home. Since I was pretty sure I could rule out Noah and my parents, and since the other girls had no reason to tag me, that left either school or some random interaction I’d had in transit.

  And if someone at school had tagged me…

  The thought ate at me, chewed at my skin and my stomach, and crawled up the back of my spine until I thought I was literally going to puke up all of the coffee I hadn’t drunk that morning. Except for the Squad, Bayport High wasn’t exactly a cesspool of secret identities. There was only one other person at this school who could have possibly had access to the kind of technology that Tara had cut from my skin that morning.

  Jack.

  I’d thought it myself. Of everyone at our school, he was the one person most likely to figure out our secret, and he was the one whose discovery would devastate our operation the most.

  I just hadn’t realized how much it would devastate me.

  “Thinking about me, Ev?”

  For a second, I thought I was imagining his voice, but then his hands were on my neck, and he was leaning in for the kiss.

  I don’t exactly remember what happened next. It’s all a little fuzzy, but the next thing I knew, Jack was on his back halfway down the hall, and my blood was pumping the way it only did after a fight. Most guys probably would have reacted poorly to that kind of violence, but Jack wasn’t most guys. He just climbed to his feet and held up his hands. “I come in peace,” he said, “and I swear to you, it wasn’t my idea.”

  That was less than comforting. He’d used me. He’d pretended…The things he’d said! The way he’d made me…And the whole time he was…

  I couldn’t seem to put a whole sentence together, even in the sanctity of my own mind. It didn’t occur to me—even for a second—that when we’d first met, our positions had been reversed. I’d been the one using him
. The first time we’d kissed had been in his father’s office, on the tail end of my part in our first mission of the season.

  “It wasn’t your idea,” I repeated dumbly. “So whose was it? Your father’s?”

  I was vaguely aware of the fact that we had an ever-growing audience. It’s funny how quickly you can get used to that given the right circumstances.

  “My father’s?” Jack repeated incredulously. “No offense, Ev, but I don’t think dear old dad really cares whether you win homecoming queen or not.”

  Homecoming queen?

  The incredible sense of betrayal in my gut faltered, but I had to remind myself that this guy was a player. He’d made a life out of being on top, and you didn’t get there—guy or girl—without knowing the rules of pretense as well as every girl on the Squad did. Jack had explained some of them to me himself.

  He was pretending. He had to be.

  “If you want to permanently injure someone,” Jack said, still keeping a safe distance, “I’d suggest venting your anger on Noah. This whole thing was his doing, not mine. He didn’t exactly ask for my permission first.”

  Noah? Homecoming and Noah? The wheels in my head were turning slowly.

  “What did Noah do?” I asked.

  “You’re going to make me actually say it?” Jack asked. “Come on, Toby. Have a heart. You already kicked my ass.”

  I had to admire the fact that he could admit it so freely.

  Wait, I thought. No. I did not have to admire that! I didn’t have to admire ANYTHING about Jack Peyton. Not now. Not when I wasn’t at all convinced that he hadn’t used me to get to the Squad.

  “If I come closer, are you going to go all kung fu on me again?” Jack asked slowly.

  My eyes narrowing into teeny-tiny slits, I shrugged. I wasn’t about to make any promises.

  “Guess I’ll have to take my chances then,” he said, and then he was by my side again, whispering into my ear. “Anyone ever tell you that you’re really cute when you’re proving yourself strangely deadly?”

  I bristled at the word cute and the way he said it. He was taunting me. I’d thrown him clear across the hallway, and now, he was taunting me. He was either very brave or very stupid.

  Or maybe, he was perfect.

  I tried to keep the sappy thoughts out of my head. I tried not to be affected by how close the two of us were standing. Batting 0-for-2, I tried to remember that nothing he’d said was a guarantee that my original assumption about his guilt was wrong.

  About that time, my brother came sauntering down the hall, his arms full of what appeared to be life-sized cutouts.

  I looked from Noah to Jack and then back again, just as Noah deposited one of the cutouts in front of the classroom across the hall. It was Jack, in all of his A-list glory, and Noah had pasted a sign into his cutout hand. JACK PEYTON IS HOT. TOBY KLEIN IS HOTTER. VOTE TOBY AND JACK FOR HOMECOMING COURT.

  Noah went merrily on his way down the hall, ignoring me, the look in my eyes, and the fact that Jack had started laughing. The bell rang then, and our audience groaned. Unlike the two of us, the others might actually get into trouble for being late for class. I turned to go to my geometry classroom, but Jack pulled me back toward him.

  “For the record,” he said, no hint of a smile on his otherwise perfect face, “I still think Mr. Corkin is the hottest.”

  “For the record,” I said, “if I find out you had anything to do with those cutouts, I’m going to kick your ass. Again.”

  “So noted.”

  And that was that.

  CHAPTER 32

  Code Word: Girl Talk

  By lunchtime, I had concluded that, contrary to my previous belief, that was not that. I felt like Jack was being real with me, but the logical part of my mind kept telling me that I was being an idiotic, emotional, pathetic girly-girl who wanted everything to be flowers and puppy dogs in Crushville. I couldn’t ignore the facts. Jack did have access to technology like the tracking chip, and there was no denying the fact that I’d had more physical interaction with him the past few days than I’d had with pretty much anyone my whole life. Amelia couldn’t have planted the chip on me. Besides Jack, I just couldn’t see who that left as far as suspects went.

  I couldn’t just waltz into the cafeteria and sit down at our table and play the popularity game with Jack, Chip and the Chiplings, Lucy, Tara, April, and Bubbles. I may have managed to increase my stealth factor significantly the past few weeks, but I still wasn’t that smooth, and more to the point, I just wasn’t sure I could take it.

  So instead, I opted out of lunch and headed for the gym. I doubled back twice to make sure no one was following me, and then I went into the girls’ locker room, and after jumping through eight million security hoops, I made my way down to the Quad.

  It was quiet, more so than I’d ever seen it. Our flat-screen was turned off, and I couldn’t even hear the ghosts of conversations we’d had about training, missions, or who liked who.

  “Please tell me you weren’t stupid enough to come down here during the day.”

  I turned and found Chloe giving me one of those patented Chloe Larson looks that made me feel so loved and so special and like everything was right with the world.

  I snorted. I couldn’t even think that last bit with a straight face.

  “Seriously,” Chloe said. “Do you have any idea how idiotic it is to just waltz into the Quad in the middle of the day when you know that your cover has been broken? I mean, are you trying to send out engraved invitations to our secret underground lair, or has your brain just stopped working altogether?”

  When she put it that way, she actually had a point.

  “I think I know who tagged me,” I said. “And he’s occupied.”

  Jack was eating lunch with the others, probably wondering where I was and why I’d abandoned him to suffer through the inanity of an A-list lunch on his own.

  “Shouldn’t you be worrying about Amelia?” I asked, trying to distract Chloe from her dogged criticism by mentioning the reason she was in the Quad during school hours—laying the groundwork for the massive mission she was coordinating that afternoon.

  “You know who tagged you, and he’s occupied,” Chloe said, repeating my earlier words and not allowing me to sidetrack her. “He as in who?”

  I chose not to answer. My suspicions about Jack were my own. I wasn’t about to let her know that maybe he didn’t like me as much as everyone had thought. I could do without seeing Chloe break into a cheer-dance of victory.

  “Because I know you’re not talking about him as in Jack,” Chloe continued.

  Was I really that obvious?

  “You really are special, aren’t you?” Chloe asked. Her tone left absolutely nothing unclear about her meaning. She shook her head, words flying out of her mouth as she did. “I can’t even believe I’m doing this,” she said. “I can’t even believe that I’m…never mind,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Just follow me,” she snapped.

  Completely bewildered, I actually followed her “suggestion.”

  Two minutes later, Chloe deactivated the security on her lab door and threw it open. “No actual penetration of our perimeter,” she said out loud. “Klein just wandered in unannounced.” It took me a moment to realize that she was talking to someone other than me. “Your position holding steady?”

  “Affirmative,” came the reply. I tried to identify where exactly the speakerphone, or communicator or whatever, was, but gave up. Chloe’s lab was a mess of accessories, wires, gadgets, gizmos, and clutter. I wouldn’t even know where to begin looking.

  Satisfied that Brooke and Zee were doing fine in the field, Chloe turned back to me. Rolling her eyes for no apparent reason whatsoever, she picked up a sheet of paper and handed it to me. “It’s an analysis of the chip,” she said. “It isn’t the kind that Peyton uses. Trust me—we’ve run into their tech before, and this isn’t it—it isn’t nearly state-of-the-art enough. The good folks at Peyt
on, Kaufman, and Gray would spit on this chip. It’s practically ancient.”

  I breathed in and out, in and out, letting this information sink in and trying not to let any of my myriad of emotions fly across my face. Chloe didn’t need to see how relieved I was that Jack wasn’t a part of this. Scratch that—nobody needed to know how relieved I was that Jack wasn’t a part of this.

  “Do you want to know the truth about Jack Peyton?” Chloe asked, her words coming out in a rush. “The truth is this. You’re using him, just like Brooke used him, just like I used him—and just like the two of us, you’re starting to fall for him. The difference is that Jack knew that we were using him—he just thought it was all about popularity for us, but in all of his teen boy wisdom, he’s decided that you’re different.” Chloe spat out the word.

  She was putting into words everything I’d been afraid of, and everything I’d tried not to hope for. Jack wasn’t using me. Jack liked me. I was using him.

  “Do you know why Brooke and Jack broke up?” Chloe asked suddenly.

  “Chlo,” Brooke’s voice came over the hidden speakers.

  “Back off.”

  “Because falling for your mark is the last thing you’re supposed to do,” Chloe said. “They started off using each other, and then…boom…there were real feelings involved, and Brooke’s mom pulled the plug.”

  “Chloe!”

  “And do you know why Jack and I broke up?” Chloe said softly.

  I took a wild guess. “Because you fell for him?”

  “No,” Chloe said. “Because he wasn’t over Brooke.”

  “Chloe, you need to shut up. Now.”

  “Don’t you have a hostile to be watching?” Chloe huffed. “Don’t make me mute you.”