“And let’s give beautiful Bill and plain old Hillary their dinner… and—” A gurgling, insistent series of snorts from Althea, a Vietnamese potbellied pig, interrupted Shira’s baby-talk monologue as she fed her prized peacocks.
Fiona cleared her throat and stepped out of the shadows of the barn toward Shira, Charlie in tow.
“Hi,” Charlie said, noting the mud-smeared rubber boots adorning the feet of one of the richest, most powerful women in the world. Shira had tucked her auburn curls into an Alpha Academy promotional cap, but even in the musty barn she still wore her trademark dark glasses. She pressed her lips together in a thin, tight smile.
“G’day, Charlie.”
T-Minus 11:00
Charlie looked up after a quick glance at her aPod timer. Now was when her performance had to be perfect, or she would run out of time and be ushered off the premises before completing the mission.
“I always thought you had someone to do this”—Charlie waved her hand around the whole animal menagerie—“for you.”
“Oh, this?” Shira unlatched a pen that housed two lambs covered in sky blue wool. “This, m’dear, is what keeps me sane. Reminds me of the emu farm I was raised on. These little blue lambs were given to me by Ashton and Demi last month—some cloning project they’re financing, God knows why.”
Stick to your plan, Charlie reminded herself, swallow-nodding. Charlie needed to keep Shira busy with small talk until her 5:58 phone call.
“So, um, my mom sends her regards. She’s in school, you know. In England. New South Wales. She’s studying art history. She’s considering getting her PhD—”
“Is that right?” Shira said absently. She bent down to scoop up a baby quail that had become separated from its brothers and sisters. “And you, Charlie, are you learning anything at this fabulous incubator for talent?”
“I’m learning so much, I can hardly believe it. The teachers here are amazing. This week I’m creating a new circuit system for a teleportation device I’m working on, and you already know about the nail polish—”
“Mmmm.” Shira barely responded, focused only on the zebra in the corner stall. “Fiona, make a note to call the vet in the morning. Zorro hasn’t touched her food.”
“Done.” Fiona entered the new task into the clipboard.
“You were saying, Lolly? Full speed ahead, yes? Keeping up with all the gifted girls at the Academy not proving to be too much for you yet, I suppose.”
“Actually, no…” Charlie trailed off. This was the Shira she knew and loathed! When would the woman realize that Charlie had a brain in her head? That she had done more to create the technology on Alpha Island than almost anyone? “I’m managing to hold my own here so far,” she said tightly, checking her aPod clock yet again.
T-Minus 5:00 (Phew!)
“So, like I was saying, I’m working on this new circuit—the configuration has never been tried successfully before. It requires a crazy amount of CAD coding, so I’m brushing up on that in my spare time….”
Charlie smiled to herself as Shira’s face went slack from boredom. Technology was never Shira’s strong suit. She paid the bills to create and maintain Alpha Academy’s technology wonderland, but that was about it.
“And my bunk-mates are great. You know we lost Renee of course. The actress? We’ve been wondering, is someone coming to take her bed?” Charlie glanced at her aPod.
T-Minus 4:00 (yes!)
Fiona, who’d slipped out earlier without a sound, returned to the barn. “I’ve got Greenspan on hold,” she said lightly, crossing something off on her touch-screen clipboard. Charlie remembered when that clipboard belonged to her mother. Next to Charlie, it had been Bee’s most valued possession.
“Oh, enough stalling, Charlie. I can’t be expected to know every little thing. Now you said you had a name for me. Spit it out!”
Tick tick tick! Charlie stepped closer to Cookie and stroked the yellow fur on her neck, imploring the alpaca to help her waste a bit more of Shira’s time.
“Right… by the way, we were wondering if you’d given any thought to holding a competition of some sort for the more musical Alphas, because a lot of the girls are kind of over the inspirational music relaxation component of lights-out. Some of these girls are so fickle. I mean, I personally like it just the way it is….”
“Charlie! A name!” Shira was standing in front of her now, hands on her slender hips. Her Vietnamese potbellied pig squealed impatiently.
“Um, yeah. I was just getting to that.”
Charlie looked down at the little blue clones, bleating away in their pen. Out of nowhere, a line of an old song her mother used to sing to her popped into her head: Mares eat oats and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy. A kid will eat ivy, too, wouldn’t you? “The girl is named Lambert. Ivy Lambert. She’s been spreading rumors about you, saying that the reason you wear sunglasses all the time is that your eyes are bloodshot.”
“Bloodshot!” Shira unconsciously pushed her glasses up her nose. “Explain.”
“She says they’re bloodshot…” Here Charlie leaned in dramatically, lowering her voice to a whisper. “From drinking!”
Shira gasped.
“Ivy Lambert,” Charlie repeated for dramatic effect. “She’s got to go.”
“Shira!” Fiona called. “It’s time.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Shira muttered. Charlie the Spy had done her job, and now Shira was on to her next piece of business. “See yourself out. You don’t want to be late for dinner.”
“No problem.” Charlie smiled. It was almost too easy.
0:00 (Step two, complete.)
As Fiona and Shira hurried away, already discussing that day’s performance of Shira’s portfolio on the world markets, Charlie crept around the stables until she got to the side of the house where the recycling was kept.
Her hands trembling like the feathers on Shira’s baby quail, she flipped open a fuse box on the wall to reveal a keypad, praying the entry code hadn’t been reset. Charlie typed in the age of each Brazille Boy—16 (Melbourne), 15 (Sydney), 14 (Darwin), 13, 13 (the twins, Taz and Dingo)—and held her breath.
“Come on, come on,” she whispered, staring at the wall where she knew the panel was hidden. Besides hanging around with Darwin, she’d practically watched the place being built, and she knew it better than anyone. Hopefully, even better than Shira.
Finally! Three green LED lights flashed and a thin panel in the wall slid open to reveal a staircase to the lower level of the house, where the control room was.
She darted in, holding her breath until the door clicked shut. Charlie reasoned that she had at least three minutes until Shira ended her call, and she quickly reset her aPod’s timer.
T-Minus 3:00
Pulling a pair of silver work gloves out of her skirt pocket, Charlie raced down the stairs, heart in her throat. Not daring to turn on a light, she groped in the near-blackness toward the closet where the mainframe was kept. Inside, hundreds of tiny red, blue, and green lights blinked along the tops of dozens of connecting ports. The room was like a giant bowl of Skittles-fettuccine, crammed with thousands of wires in every color of the rainbow, draped over every nook and cranny of the closet. So much electricity happening in one place would normally look beautiful to Charlie, but now instead of seeing the wonder of technology in action, her heart sank. How on earth would she find it? She stood frozen in place, not knowing which way to turn. Her phone vibrated in her pocket, indicating two minutes had already passed.
Don’t wimp out now, she told herself sternly, praying Shira’s call would run long. Treating the room like a geometry problem, she reasoned the wires connected to the cameras would be closest to the bank of computers in the basement.
Gently parting a curtain of wires marked RESIDENCE, she crept toward the right-hand wall of the closet. Standing on her tiptoes, she found it: a vertical box with a neatly typed label on it marked SECURITY.
&nbs
p; Clapping her gloved hands together, Charlie went to work. She disconnected the output wire, switching places with the input. For good measure, she typed a few system-scrambling commands into the keyboard attached to the mainframe.
Mission accomplished!
Taking the stairs two at a time, Charlie darted out of the closet, then bounded up the basement stairs as fast as her feet would take her. Sliding the panel closed again, she dashed for the side gate, thankful that the sun had dropped low in the sky. Channeling her inner Catwoman, she ran silently away from the house and hurried toward the Pavilion.
As she dashed down the walkway toward safety, the soft pink tropical twilight was suddenly drained of all its candy-colored streaks. A dreary front of gloomy slate gray quickly covered the whole island. Charlie shivered, looking up for a second before running even faster, her heart pounding in her ears.
Either Shira had just discovered that her precious cameras no longer worked, or she’d just realized that Ivy Lambert didn’t exist.
5
JOAN OF ARK
MAIN DECK
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21ST
7:09 P.M.
The wind whipped through Skye’s white-blond waves as Taz took on more speed, throwing the boat’s steering wheel to the right in a series of twists that showed off his broad shoulders and golden tan.
“I can do the circumference of the whole lake in seventeen minutes!” he yelled into the rushing wind.
“Go for it!” shouted Skye, leaning back against some rigging and feeling her hair whip around her while she squinted at the mountains surrounding the lake for signs of life. So far, so good: The only audience they had wore pine needles, not binoculars. It was a relief to be doing what she did best—basking in the attention of a cute boy. A founding member of the DSL Daters back in Westchester (they prided themselves on making super-fast connections with boys), Skye knew that hanging with a hottie on a boat was smack in the middle of her comfort zone. And now that the cameras were down, Skye was free to enjoy her relapse with a serious case of Taz-Mania. When he suggested she join him for an after-dinner joyride on Shira’s yacht, the Joan of Ark, she had jumped at the chance.
Thanks to Charlie, it was Alphas Gone Wild—just the way Skye liked it. On her way to meet Taz, Skye had passed a cluster of girls planning a midnight trip with Melbourne to hike up the mountain just past the arts building and soak in the natural hot springs. Another group was going on a late-night swim on the beach with Dingo, and the Beyoncés had teamed up with the J. K. Rowlings to create an island-wide version of capture the flag. Everyone seemed to be having fun again, but she was pretty sure she would be the talk of breakfast tomorrow if she decided to blab details of her night. After all, none of the other Alphas got a private tour around the lake—or a Brazille boy all to herself.
Taz took the boat expertly through the teal water in the center of the @-shaped island and Skye shivered, feeling the wind whip through her teeth and through the thin cotton fabric of her pearlescent white minidress, which she’d worn because it seemed nautical enough and because it made her legs look ten miles long accentuating her Clarins-assisted tan. She yanked down a pair of pale pink dance sleeves. (Thankfully, she hadn’t set fire to all her trademark accessories—just the one pair, for symbolism’s sake.) We are so Kate and Leo right now!
Back in Westchester, the night before Skye boarded her personal Alpha plane to Alpha Island, where magazines and TV were off-limits, she had paged through an Us Weekly and spotted a headline that read, “Beefcake Brazille Boy’s Swift Split!” She had no idea if Taz had ever actually dated Taylor Swift, but she knew it couldn’t hurt her chances that she shared the singer’s long platinum wavelets, slender waist, and B-cups.
Skye pulled her Isadora Duncan long white scarf up around her blond curls and held on to the boat’s railing. She had never been more sure of her decision to ditch her dance obsession and turn her attention back to what really mattered. Taz was a male version of herself, only with thick eyebrows and luscious brown-black hair—and Skye wasn’t afraid to admit she loved herself.
“Look.” Taz pointed to the Theater of Dionysus glinting in the sunset, suspended above the forest on the south side of the lake. “It’s the dance cube!”
Skye grimaced. “I’m so over that place. Mimi hates me. No matter how hard I work, my moves are never good enough.” Skye felt the familiar lump in her throat begin to form and swallowed hard, gritting her teeth through her still-raw emotions, hoping the wind in her face would dry the tears that persisted in welling up annoyingly in her eyes every time she thought about her disastrous comeback-turned-takedown.
“Forget Mimi!” Taz yelled over his shoulder. “Life’s too short to do anything that isn’t fun! This’ll take your mind off things.” His ice blue eyes twinkling mischievously, he flipped a lever that sent the Ark careening even faster through the water. “Wooo! Now we’re rolling!”
“Mimi who?” Skye joked, but the question was sucked away by the gale-force wind, and she wasn’t sure Taz heard her. Not that it mattered—she didn’t want to talk about Mimi anymore. They were on a joyride, not an oy-ride.
As the boat swerved violently to the right, she was relieved to see that there were life preservers neatly tied to every few feet of the yacht’s railing, just in case there was a disaster of Titanic proportions.
“I’ll be right back!” she called out to him. Despite how much fun she was having and how good Taz was at taking her mind off things, she needed to go below for a bit or he would know exactly what she’d had for breakfast.
“Can you get me a Coke from the fridge downstairs?”
“One Coke coming up!” Skye salivated at the thought of high-fructose corn syrup, which was banned from the Academy cafeteria. A few slugs of liquid poison (her mother’s term—Coke was also banned for all dancers at Body Alive) might make her forget all about Mimi.
She headed down a narrow stairway to the berth of the yacht and stepped into a hexagonal room decorated in a neo-nautical style. There was a kitchen off to one side, a sleeping area with three ovular bunk beds, and a large sitting area with two white leather couches flanking an anchor-shaped chrome coffee table.
“Must be nice,” Skye said to herself, gawking at the gold wall sconces shaped like pieces of coral. She walked toward the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the other side of the room to check out the waves they were leaving in their wake. Westchester was plenty posh, but nobody she knew back home owned a yacht like this.
“Not always,” someone said.
Skye jumped, nearly toppling a futuristic pelican-shaped vase off a side table. “Who’s there?” she asked the dim room.
She watched as a slender, sinewy arm reached up from one of the couches and flipped on a lamp. A second later, the head and shoulders of Sydney Brazille popped up. He’d been laying on the couch in the dark. Alone.
Weird.
“What are you doing here?” Skye hid her gritted teeth with a smile, already annoyed at the castaway for tagging along on her private date. She didn’t have any classes with Sydney and he wasn’t in the tabloids as much as his brothers, so she’d barely laid eyes on him before now. As she walked toward him, she was surprised by how cute he was. He wore his hair longer and tousled, and his dishwater-gray Modest Mouse T-shirt was rumpled and ripped a little at the collar, but his angular bone structure, windblown lips, and deep-set eyes that turned down at the corners made him look brooding and tragic.
“Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?” He ran his hand awkwardly through his hair and raised his eyebrows at Skye.
“Taz invited me. He’s upstairs, driving the boat.” As if on cue, the yacht lurched to the left. Skye decided she’d better sit on the couch rather than risk breaking a lamp.
“This is where I come to write sometimes, when I need to be alone,” Syd said, shutting a leather-bound notebook he’d been holding. “I thought I could get through Taz’s joyride without him noticing I was
down here. I’ve done it before.” He smiled slyly, revealing a slight gap between his two front teeth.
Undeniably hawt! Skye made a mental note to tell the Jackie O’s about the underappreciated charms of the most brooding of all the Brazille Boys later that night. She would never have guessed that his reputation as the shy, sensitive, soulful one wasn’t pure PR hype.
“Sorry I interrupted you,” said Skye. “I know how it feels to need to write stuff down. Sometimes it makes it feel more . . . real.” She thought of her HAD slipper—a lot of good it had done her lately.
“You’re really talented, you know,” Syd said, leveling his eyes on her. It felt like he was peering into her soul.
Skye blushed as a nervous giggle escaped her lips. How would he know?
“I’ve seen you practicing in the dance cube,” he went on. “After you hurt your ankle, when you had to catch up with the other dancers, I watched you practicing alone before dinner. You’re awesome. You have so much soul. And heart, too.” He smiled again, and Skye got another peek at the gap. “When I saw you dancing, it was like I could hear how the music sounded just from watching you.”
Now she was the one who ran an awkward hand through her blond wavelets, in an attempt to cover up her bright red ears. What was she doing here? Who was this boy who watched her practice? How had she not noticed him before now?
“That’s, like, the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me… since I got here, at least.” She paused, her voice wavering slightly. “Too bad Mimi doesn’t agree with you.”
“She will,” Syd said, locking his moss-green eyes with her turquoise blue ones. “You’re too talented for her not to catch on soon.”
Skye sat back and blinked at him, startled by how certain he sounded. “I thought so once, but I’m not sure now.” Skye wasn’t used to being so honest with someone she’d just met, but it felt good to drop her guard and let herself be vulnerable for a change. “I’m thinking of taking it down a notch. Maybe life’s too short and I should just concentrate on having fun.” Like your brother says.
Movers and Fakers Page 4
