by Stuart Gibbs
“Does Nefarious do anything besides play video games?” I asked.
“Not much. He’s pretty introverted. You got more words out of him just now than I have in the last month.”
“You’re joking, right?”
Ashley shook her head. “He’s an odd duck. Something seriously messed him up. I’m betting it was his parents.”
“Could be. What kind of people name their kid Nefarious?”
“Exactly. Although, believe it or not, Nefarious actually got off easy. According to his file, his folks named his little sister Placenta.”
“Ooh. That’s rough.” Given how Ashley had just gone on about how rigorous SPYDER’s selection process was, it surprised me that they’d chosen someone as socially awkward as Nefarious. But then it occurred to me that his awkwardness might actually be tied to his selection. After all, there was a flip side to the argument that SPYDER recruited only the elite: Most teenagers weren’t inherently evil. Sure, there were plenty of bullies, nimrods, pinheads, and other assorted jerks out there, but still, it’d probably be rather hard to find kids willing to commit large-scale assassination, chaos, and mayhem, no matter how much you were offering. That’d leave a pretty small pool of potential recruits—meaning SPYDER might have to settle for a kid like Nefarious, someone so socially maladapted that maybe he couldn’t quite tell what was evil and what wasn’t.
We passed between an archery range and a croquet lawn. On both, the grass was so perfectly maintained that it looked like green carpet.
“Do you actually ever go to classes here?” I asked.
“Oh, sure,” Ashley replied. “But they don’t start until noon. The mornings are for training on our own schedules.”
“Nefarious didn’t look like he was training at all.”
Ashley paused a moment before answering. “Nefarious has a very distinct skill set. He does what he needs to do.”
“And how does doing gymnastics count as training for you?”
Ashley grinned in response. “Boy, you’re just full of questions, aren’t you?”
“I’m new here,” I explained. “No one’s told me anything. Is there an introductory pamphlet or something I’m supposed to get?”
“No. SPYDER doesn’t print anything if they don’t have to. That stuff can fall into the wrong hands.”
We arrived at the rec center. It was a large building with huge glass windows through which I could see the rock-climbing wall, which had a three-story spire, and the indoor pool, which had several hot tubs. The Rec sat at the top of a small hill, so I could see the whole gated community from there.
According to the big sign at the entrance, the whole place was officially called Hidden Forest Estates. It wasn’t very large. There was only one street, a loop on which all of the houses were built. The rec center was in the very middle of it all. I counted twenty-four homes—although the community wasn’t finished yet. Halfway around, the asphalt road became dirt. A few houses were under construction, though many of the lots were still empty. The bang of hammers echoed from the building sites while bulldozers rumbled around them.
The wall was finished, though. It swept around the entire community, topped by barbed wire and security cameras, except for two imposing gates and a guardhouse at the front. Although the security was there to protect SPYDER, it didn’t look any different from what I’d seen at plenty of other gated communities.
“Are those houses all for our teachers?” I asked.
“Some of them,” Ashley replied. “Though our teachers aren’t just teachers, like at your old school. They all have real jobs for SPYDER, doing all sorts of important stuff for our projects, but they take a little time every week to teach us about their areas of expertise.”
“So . . . there’s more to this place than just the school?”
“Oh boy, yes. A lot more. This is SPYDER’s world headquarters.”
I looked around the property again, stunned by SPYDER’s brilliance. Unlike James Bond villains, they hadn’t built a giant secret lair on some remote island. Instead, the organization was hiding in plain sight. They’d built a gated community that looked like every other gated community in the country. There was nothing about it that seemed remotely unusual, or that would grab the attention of the USA’s spy satellites—although I suspected that, as with everything in the spy game, there was a lot more going on at Hidden Forest beneath the surface.
I asked, “Does everyone who works for SPYDER live here?”
Ashley giggled again. “Of course not, sillypants. SPYDER has operatives all over the world. But this is command central, the heart of the organization. All the important stuff happens right here.”
I looked at the land beyond the security wall. There was a farm on one side of the community, a bucolic place that looked straight out of a picture book, with a red barn and green fields. On the other side, there was only forest. Lots of deciduous trees, which meant we were probably somewhere in the eastern United States.
“Any idea where we are, exactly?” I asked.
“I’m not authorized to divulge that information to you at this time. Sorry.”
I nodded, having expected this. “I’m guessing that I can’t just walk out the front gate, either.”
“Now, why would you want to do that?” Ashley waved a hand toward all the great things around the rec center. “We’ve got everything you could possibly want right here.”
I glanced back at the security wall again. There was something unusual about it, something that made it different from the walls at other gated communities, although I hadn’t noticed it until now. The barbed wire at the top angled over both sides of the wall, meaning it wasn’t there just to keep people out. It was also there to keep people in.
I was trapped at evil spy school.
EDUCATION
SPYDER Agent Training Facility
September 5
1200 hours
My evil training began at noon.
The first class was advanced weaponry. This took place on the indoor shooting range, which was in the rec center, tucked between the squash courts and the sauna. Our instructor was Mr. Seabrook, who reminded me a great deal of my advanced weaponry instructor back at regular spy school; both men were tough, tightly wound, and constantly annoyed with how bad I was at advanced weaponry. Or even basic weaponry, for that matter. (While I was skilled at figuring out how to aim a weapon, firing one was a whole different ball game.)
“Ripley!” Mr. Seabrook yelled after watching me empty an entire clip of ammunition at a target silhouette and only graze its elbow. “My grandmother can shoot that gun better than you can—and she’s dead! How on earth did you ever manage to defeat our organization twice with skills like those?”
“I’ve always been more of a problem solver than a shooter,” I explained.
“Well, you’d better start practicing,” Mr. Seabrook grumped. “Right now, there’s no way in heck I’d trust you with a gun. In fact, with those hands, I’m surprised you can even use a fork.”
I did much better in my other subjects. Over the next few days, I was quickly immersed into the routine of evil spy school. Although we had our mornings free, instruction and training started immediately at noon and went straight until dinnertime. Even on weekends. Classes occurred in a variety of ways. For some, an instructor came to our house. For others, we went to the instructor’s house. And for yet others, we telecommuted, connecting with someone via the giant TV in our living room. (For most of these, our instructors’ identities were kept secret and we saw them only as silhouettes.) Plus, we spent a great deal of time doing physical training, either in our home gym or at the rec center.
For the most part, our instructors didn’t appear to be blatantly evil. Instead, they were disturbingly normal. In fact, they were considerably more normal than my teachers at spy school had been. Mrs. Henderson, who covered mathematics, science, and bomb construction, was a doting, motherly woman who often cooked dinner for us as well, while Mr. Garabindi
an, our coach (who insisted we just call him “Mr. G”) was supportive, cheerful, and friendly, even when showing us how to kill someone with his bare hands. The only instructors who were even a bit nasty were Mr. Seabrook and Joshua Hallal, who oversaw many of our lessons and still seemed bitter with me for making him lose a few parts of his body.
My classes, like my teachers, were bizarrely normal as well. There was surprisingly little that was evil about them. Many of the self-defense, explosives, and weaponry courses were eerily similar to those at spy school, while other subjects were tweaked only slightly. For example, while spy school taught counterespionage (activities designed to thwart spying by an enemy), evil spy school taught counter counterespionage (figuring out the methods the good guys were using to thwart you spying on them and then thwarting those so you could get back to spying on them in the first place).
Some classes weren’t much different from those I would have had in regular middle school. For example, advanced mathematics was just advanced mathematics—although Mrs. Henderson did try to spice up the word problems with the occasional evil scenario. (“If Ernst Blofeld has a thirty-ton surface-to-surface missile and he wants to destroy a government installation thirty-five miles to the north with a twenty-mile-per-hour wind coming from the east, how many pounds of thrust will he need to launch the missile and demolish his target?”) The only class that seemed remotely illicit was Lying Low 101, which taught us how to set up fake personas, forge government identification, and establish bank accounts in countries with loose financial regulations—and that wasn’t really evil so much as moderately sneaky.
It was all kind of disappointing. I hadn’t expected evil spy school to be crawling with jackbooted minions and run by a maniacal genius fiendishly plotting to overthrow the world—but I’d figured it would be at least a little less ordinary. I began to wonder if SPYDER was cooking up any sort of evil plot at all. Had they merely recruited me in the hopes that I’d be of some future service? And if they hadn’t, what was the point of Erica—and whoever she was in cahoots with—railroading me into going undercover right then?
Which led to another, even more unnerving question: What if Erica hadn’t been behind my ouster at all? What if I’d blown up the principal’s office on my own, truly been expelled from spy school, and misinterpreted Erica’s final words to me? If that was true, then I had enrolled in evil spy school by accident. Not only would this have been a terrible mistake on my part, but there was probably no way to undo it. I couldn’t just go to Joshua Hallal and say, “Here’s a funny story: I only agreed to come to this school because I thought the CIA wanted me to be an undercover agent here and find out what your evil plans were. But it turns out, they didn’t. So, do you think I could just drop out and go back to normal life? I promise I won’t tell the CIA anything about your secret hideout.”
It would never work. If I wasn’t really an undercover agent, there were only two ways to leave evil spy school: as a graduate or as a corpse.
This put me in the strange position of actually hoping SPYDER was plotting something. If the organization was truly hatching an evil scheme, then there was a reason for me to be undercover, which meant Erica might have really sent me there. Unfortunately, during my first few days, I hadn’t seen any evidence that SPYDER was plotting anything at all.
But maybe that was evidence in itself. Even though they’d recruited me to their school, SPYDER was taking great pains to keep secrets from me. True, SPYDER was an extremely secretive organization to begin with—and true, they might not fully trust me, seeing as I had been recruited from their rival school—but I got the distinct sense that they were hiding something.
For example, no one would even tell me where Hidden Forest was located—and I wasn’t allowed the chance to find out, either. My phone hadn’t been returned to me, and I was barred from using anything that would allow me access to a global positioning system. I was given a computer, but it was only for writing papers. I wasn’t even allowed to go online. If the compound had Wi-Fi, no one had given me the access code for it.
“This is ridiculous,” I groused at dinner on my third night. “Without the Internet, I can’t even do any research for school. There must be a wireless connection somewhere around here, right?”
“Maybe,” Ashley said, dumping Power Powder and almond milk into the blender. “But if there is, I can guarantee you, we’re not allowed to use it.”
“Why not? Doesn’t SPYDER trust us?”
“It’s nothing personal. It’s for our protection. They can’t just let us all surf the web. Because any line out is also a line in. The government could use it to access our computers.”
“That’s not true,” I argued.
“It is! That’s how SPYDER accesses the government’s computers.”
This bit of news was disturbing to me, but not exactly a surprise. SPYDER was a subversive and technologically advanced organization. Frankly, it would have been more startling to hear that they hadn’t accessed the government’s computers.
I pulled the pizza I was making out of the oven. It was the frozen, store-bought kind, although SPYDER’s purchasing department had at least sprung for an expensive brand. I would have preferred delivery pizza, but of course, no outside companies were allowed past the front gates for security reasons. “There’s no way they can give us any kind of secure access?” I asked. “Even for a few minutes a day? I’m not gonna watch YouTube or anything. I just want to send my folks an e-mail. Let them know I’m okay.”
“Oh, you’ve been doing that plenty,” Ashley said.
I looked up from slicing my pizza. “What are you talking about?”
“SPYDER handles all communication with your parents for you!” Ashley fired up the blender.
I had to shout to be heard over the appliance. “How?”
“They send a communications representative to a remote secure site to handle all personal correspondence!” Ashley shouted back. “You’re not the only one here with family, you know!”
“And it doesn’t bother you that they do this?”
“Are you kidding? I love that I don’t have to deal with my parents!” Ashley flipped the blender off and returned to her normal voice. “It’s one of the best perks at this school.”
“I’d be happy if I never had to talk to my folks again,” Nefarious said from the couch.
I’d forgotten he was there even though his standard air-strike video game was on the TV. This was because, with Nefarious around, a video game was always on the TV. After a while, it became background noise. I’d already begun tuning it out, the way that people who lived near airports tuned out the jet planes roaring overhead. Nefarious was such a fixture on the couch, I tended to not notice him—or to at least think he was in his own world and not paying any attention to Ashley and me. As it was, he hadn’t even taken a break from his gaming for dinner. He had a bag of Cheetos in his lap and a can of Pepsi wedged between his knees.
Nefarious didn’t even seem to be aware he had spoken. The words appeared to have slipped out of his subconscious. He was now entirely focused on the game, doing his standard mumbling commentary. “Adjustflapsincomingmissileevasiveaction.”
“What do they say in these e-mails?” I asked.
“Oh, the standard stuff, I guess.” Ashley poured her shake into a glass. “School’s great. You’re making friends. Learning a lot. Blah, blah, blah. If anything serious happens, like your grandma dies, they’ll let you know. Want some shake?” Ashley held the glass out to me.
I cringed reflexively. The shake didn’t merely look disgusting—a thick brown slurry—it also smelled bad enough to kill a canary. “Er . . . No thanks.”
“You sure?” Ashley pressed. “I made plenty. And it’s super healthy for you.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But it looks like stuff that ought to be coming out of you, rather than going in.”
Ashley stuck out her tongue in disgust. “Laugh now, but I’m gonna live to be one hundred and fifty, drinking
this stuff. The way you two eat, you’ll be lucky to make it past your thirties.”
If SPYDER finds out I’m a double agent, I won’t make it past thirteen, I thought. Then I said, “What about our friends? Does SPYDER handle all communication with them, too?”
Ashley hesitated a moment too long before answering. “Sure.”
“Do they really?” I asked, as pointedly as I could.
Ashley looked to Nefarious, who remained fixated on his game. Then she looked back to me and cracked. “They do, but . . . It’s pretty hard to have friends on the outside when you work for SPYDER. Too many secrets to keep and all. So after a while, SPYDER kind of weeds them all out of your life.”
“We have to give up all our friends?” I gasped.
“You gave up most of them when you ditched spy school, didn’t you?”
“I was thinking more about the friends I had from outside spy school,” I said, which was only half-true.
“Yeah, you kind of have to drop them.” Ashley seemed sad for a brief moment, then perked up again. “But on the other hand, we’re gonna get really rich at SPYDER. And we can be friends, right?”
“Right,” I agreed, though it took everything I had to paste a smile on my face. Down inside, I was overcome with anguish. If I really had mistakenly enrolled at SPYDER, there were a lot of bad things that would result, but losing my friends would be the worst. Having to cut ties with Zoe, Jawa, Chip, and Erica—who I still considered a friend even if she might not have thought of me that way—had been bad enough. The idea of losing Mike as well was soul-crushing. For all its faults, spy school had allowed me to have friends on the outside, provided that I followed strict secrecy protocols with them. Even though evil spy school had plenty of perks—free food and private bathrooms and water slides and the promise of riches ahead—there was no way those could ever compensate me for a life without friends.
Now I found myself desperately hoping I hadn’t made a mistake—and that I was on an actual undercover mission. I was determined to find out what SPYDER was up to, thwart them, and be reinstated in regular spy school, where I could resume my old life, surrounded by my old friends, as quickly as possible.
