Book One

by K. C. Archer

  Teddy laughed. And her laughter drew Boyd’s attention back to them.

  “Unless I ask for specific information, Costa, you may reply to me in one of three ways: ‘Yes, ma’am,’ ‘No, ma’am,’ or ‘No excuse, ma’am.’ Anything else will get you on that ferry back to San Francisco. Now let’s try again. Why aren’t you in uniform?”

  Pyro fixed his gaze on a point over Boyd’s head. Seconds ticked past. Boyd shook her head and lifted her clipboard.

  “No excuse, ma’am,” Pyro said.

  Teddy let out a breath as Boyd lowered her clipboard again. “Give me fifty.” Pyro dropped as Boyd continued her speech. “I love comedy, I really do. In fact, nothing’s funnier to me than watching a smart-ass blow his last chance. Tell me, were you kicked off the force because you were funny, Costa?”

  So that’s why he’s here.

  Boyd stepped away as Pyro finished his push-ups. “There are twelve of you left,” she said. “Divide yourselves into two squads.”

  They split naturally into the groups they’d already favored: Misfits and Alphas. Before Pyro’s clash with Boyd, Teddy had wondered what side he would pick. Sure, he acted like one of them, but he also used to be a cop. Now she knew where he stood: the Misfits included Teddy, Jillian, Dara, Pyro, Jeremy, and Molly. Teddy hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting any of the Alphas yet, but three men and three women stood across from her—all of them annoyingly fit.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, there is good in this world, and there is evil. Out there, you will be facing drug dealers, traffickers, rapists, murderers, and terrorists. There is one word, and only one word, for those people. Enemy. In here, the opposing squad is your enemy. If you fail, the enemy wins. I don’t care about trying. I care about winning. Got that?”

  The idea of stopping a violent criminal made Teddy’s heart pound. She’d always been on the other side of the law. Now things were about to change. She was going to change.

  “This course is designed to replicate everyday obstacles,” Boyd said, directing their attention to the structures in the center of the room. “The sort of obstacles that law enforcement and military personnel might face. You’ll move through the course as a unit. Clear?”

  Boyd explained the mechanics: belly-crawl under thirty feet of wire, rope-swing across a pit, walk an elevated balance beam, traverse a set of monkey bars, drag a two-hundred-pound dummy to a point of safety, climb up a wall, and rappel down the back in less than twenty minutes. Teddy cast a look at the rest of her squad. With the exception of Pyro, they all looked worried. Especially Molly, who surveyed the wall with wide-eyed, panicked horror.

  Boyd lifted her stopwatch and pointed to the Alphas. “You first.”

  The Alphas flew through the course with a grace that was beautiful to watch. The only glitch occurred at the rope swing when Ben Tucker, an Alpha who looked like a rich kid from a John Hughes movie, shot forward without sending the rope back to the next member of his team.

  When they finished, the Misfits lined up at the starting point. Teddy wiped her palms on her gym shorts. She could only hope her teammates had been studying the Alphas’ run as carefully as she had. Boyd blew her whistle and they took off.

  They made it through the belly crawl and across the rope swing, each Misfit deliberately hurling the rope back to the next squad member. So they had been paying attention. Jeremy wavered on the elevated balance beam, but Molly grabbed his hand to help him. Teddy made it across the monkey bars before her arms gave out. Pyro, Dara, and Teddy caught the two-hundred-pound dummy and dragged it to the point of safety.

  Teddy joined her group as they raced toward the massive wall, the final obstacle. Pyro bent down to give the other recruits a knee up. Dara caught the top of the wall, hurled herself over, and raced to the finish line. Jillian followed. Then Jeremy. When Teddy placed her foot on Pyro’s thigh, it slipped, nailing Pyro in the groin. He crumpled. “I’m so sorry,” Teddy said.

  “You owe me one,” he said, and then pushed her up toward the wall with his hand on her ass.

  “This makes us even.”

  “Not even close,” he said.

  Teddy made it to the top of the wall, swinging her legs over to rappel down the other side. Only Molly and Pyro were left. They were going to make it.

  Then Teddy looked up to see Molly frozen at the top of the wall, her limbs rigid, her delicate features frozen in fear.

  “Thirty seconds!” Boyd bellowed.

  Pyro was already halfway down the wall before he saw Molly stuck at the top. He yelled to Teddy, “I need you to hold her rope while I carry her down. I won’t leave a teammate behind.” Teddy hesitated. Her instinct was to drive forward, to take care of herself first. She stood for a moment, trying to decide which way to move. By the time she glanced back, it was too late. With Pyro’s help, Molly was halfway down the wall. With nothing else to do, Teddy ran across the finish line.

  “What happened back there?” Jillian asked.

  “Molly froze.” Teddy heard footsteps pounding behind her and turned to see Pyro crossing the line, carrying Molly in his arms, just as Boyd blew her whistle.

  Teddy looked around, hoping to see happy faces. “You might have passed the test,” Boyd said. “But you lost to the other squad by a full two minutes. That means your enemy won.”

  Teddy’s gaze shot to the Alphas, who stood grouped together on the sidelines. A tall girl, her shoulder-length brown hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, laughed.

  Boyd continued, “In the real world, there are consequences when you fail. You die. Your partner dies. An innocent victim dies. Nobody will die in my classroom when you fail, but there will be consequences.

  “The winning squad goes back to the dorms to shower and relax. Losing squad reports to Harris Hall for kitchen patrol after dinner. That means mopping floors, scrubbing appliances, cleaning toilets, washing plates and silverware, peeling potatoes, and whatever else the dining staff tells you to do.”

  The Misfits walked off the track in silence, heads low.

  “It could be worse,” Dara said.

  “How so?” Jillian asked.

  Dara gestured to the window, where the gates to Whitfield loomed. “We could be going home.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  TEDDY AND JILLIAN RETURNED TO their room, exhausted after cleaning every single one of the dining hall’s long tables. Teddy threw herself down onto her cot with a sigh.

  “Aren’t you going to the party?” Jillian asked, spraying a cloud of patchouli.

  “I’m wiped.” Teddy couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone to sleep this early. Probably the same time she’d last been forced to do chores. “Also, FYI, you smell like my grandmother’s attic. Actually, no, you smell like the chest in my grandmother’s attic that belonged to her grandmother.”

  “The third-years are hosting,” Jillian said. Her bracelets jingled as she turned to face Teddy. “And patchouli’s an aphrodisiac.”

  Teddy groaned. “I don’t want to know that.”

  “I bet I can convince you to come with me,” Jillian said.

  “I bet you can’t.”

  “There’s a rumor that there’s going to be contraband at this party.”

  Teddy made a face. “You think you can tempt me with drugs?”

  “Not drugs,” Jillian said. She picked up Teddy’s leather jacket and threw it at her. “Cheeseburgers.”

  *  *  *

  Twenty minutes later, dressed in a black V-neck, her favorite pair of jeans, her leather jacket, and her best (and only) combat boots, Teddy followed Jillian to the southwest corner of campus and over the serpentine brick wall that encircled Whitfield’s perimeter.

  The rest of the Misfits had arrived already. The Alphas were there, too. Teddy deduced that the others must be upperclassmen. After two days at Whitfield, Teddy still expected to encounter weird psychic behavior among the otherwise normal twentysomething students. Maybe levitating a keg. But all she saw was a makeshift bar set up in one corner o
f the clearing and a lanky guy pouring drinks into red plastic cups.

  Jillian mumbled something about an aura calling to her and walked toward the campfire. Teddy scanned the crowd for Pyro. There he was, leaning against a tree. And could that boy lean. He was talking to Liz, a petite blond Alpha from their year. Jillian had told Teddy that Liz was a clairvoyant gymnast from Kentucky. If she’d been as good at seeing the past as she was at seeing the future, Liz would have known that Teddy had seen Pyro first.

  Liz flicked her blond hair over her shoulder. Teddy wasn’t going to pretend to be some team-spirit type just to impress a guy. If Pyro lost interest in her because of what had happened in Boyd’s class, that was his problem. She wasn’t going to waste another second thinking about him. So she did what she always did at parties: made her way to the bar.

  “Welcome to our top-secret institution’s top-secret hootenanny,” the bartender said in a Texan drawl. He introduced himself as Brett Evans, a third-year.

  “Teddy, first year. Or possibly no year by this time tomorrow.”

  “Then you have no excuse not to celebrate tonight.” He winked, handing her a drink.

  “Who said I was looking for an excuse?” She cast one more look at Pyro and Liz and downed the drink. Vodka and something sweet. She handed the cup back for a refill. “Doesn’t this party kind of violate every one of Whitfield’s Code of Ethics?”

  Brett laughed. “We haven’t been shut down since I’ve been here. And the tradition was already in full swing when I arrived, so . . .”

  “But the staff is full of military personnel and psychics; they must know what you’re up to.”

  Brett considered her for a moment. “This place has more twists than a pretzel factory. But I don’t poke a possum, even if I’m pretty sure it’s dead.”

  “In English, please?”

  Brett refilled her cup. “That’s Texan for drink now and ask questions later.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Teddy saw Pyro making his way toward the bar. So she grabbed Brett and dragged him to the makeshift dance floor.

  There were bursts of drunken laughter from a group of the first-year Alpha guys. Teddy had learned their names at dinner. The all-American eighties teen dream was Ben Tucker, the de facto leader of the group. Supposedly, he was telepathic. His chief suck-up was Zac Rogers, a college soccer player who received psychic messages through dreams and planned to fast-track to a position with Homeland Security after Whitfield. The third was Henry Cummings, another clairvoyant.

  Kate Atkins, the tall brunette, stood off to one side of the dance floor. She was an icy midwesterner from a military family who didn’t seem to have an at-ease switch. A claircognizant, Kate had flashes of insight that allowed her to know things without regard to source, logic, or facts. Ava Lareau swayed in the middle of the crowd. She was a medium from Mississippi, and Dara swore she dabbled in voodoo, which was strictly forbidden at the school.

  Teddy looked up at Brett as they danced, wanting to ask him more about Whitfield’s traditions, but his eyes were elsewhere. Teddy realized that he was staring at Jillian, who was dancing to the beat of her own drum. “Ask her to dance,” Teddy said, nodding toward her friend. “She doesn’t always smell like mothballs.”

  Brett smiled. “All right.”

  Teddy returned to the bar, where she bumped into Molly, the one person she didn’t want to see: she still felt terrible about what had happened on the track.

  “Shot?” Teddy asked, lifting the vodka bottle.

  “I’d rather not compromise my position,” Molly said. She took a swig from a water bottle.

  Teddy rubbed the back of her neck. “I guess it’s obvious I’ve never been good at team sports.”

  “Well, I have this thing with heights,” Molly said. “I’ve been working on it.”

  The two shared an awkward silence. Teddy wished she were the kind of person who would not have hesitated on the course. Like Pyro. Teddy hoped Molly could feel what she was feeling right then, because she wasn’t capable of saying it out loud. “Anyway,” Teddy said, “I was dragged here under the promise of burgers, and I have yet to find one.”

  Molly nodded toward a figure emerging from the woods: Jeremy, carrying a box from In-N-Out.

  “My hero,” Teddy said as she accepted a wrapped burger. She held it to her nose and inhaled. “Have I told you lately that I love you?” she said to Jeremy.

  “Me or the burger?” Jeremy asked.

  “I love you each in your own special way.”

  Jeremy blushed.

  Dara walked up behind Teddy, grabbing a burger. “All right, leave some for the rest of us, Cannon.”

  Teddy took two more burgers and followed Dara to the campfire, where they sat down on a log to eat.

  “You never mentioned how your test went,” Teddy said to Dara. She wanted all the intel on the psychic-ability exam; she needed any help she could get.

  Dara chewed her bite of burger longer than necessary. “I come from a long line of psychics,” she said. “Like great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother long. My family expected me to go into the ‘business,’ but I didn’t show any aptitude until a year ago, when I saw my grandmother’s death. That was really messed up. My mom was relieved, though. That was doubly messed up. So I’ve gotten only one real death warning, and now I’m here.”

  So Dara was still figuring out her psychic abilities, too. “They must think you have potential, otherwise you wouldn’t be here,” Teddy said.

  Dara shrugged. “I guess. Hand me another burger, would you?”

  Teddy passed another from her stash.

  “So, speaking of contraband,” Dara said, “there’s a rumor that Brett has keys to the reception of the lab. He’s running some sort of black-market setup where you can trade crap for Internet access. I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t go a whole year without checking Facebook.”

  Teddy had little interest in status updates, but that didn’t mean she didn’t miss being plugged in. “I thought there were computers we could use on campus.”

  “Have you seen those computers? They’re PCs from the nineties. I’m talking dial-up action. And first-years can’t even use them until second semester, when we have case assignments.” Dara took another bite of her burger. “Also, I suggest becoming Jeremy’s best friend ASAP, because he’s the only one we know who’s got a way off-island.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He’s got a boat stashed somewhere. His family is from San Francisco, and apparently, they’re loaded. Not quite Whitfield rich, but almost.”

  Teddy watched as Jeremy whispered into Molly’s ear and Molly smiled. Jeremy didn’t seem like the kind of guy to have a ton of moves, but he must have found one that worked on Molly. Teddy hoped she wasn’t just in it for the boat.

  Teddy put down her burger. “I’m going to get another drink. Want anything?”

  Dara shook her head.

  As Teddy made her way back to the bar, she cast glances for Pyro and Liz, but they were nowhere to be found.

  “Looking for someone?” a voice behind her said.

  “Not someone,” Teddy said, turning to face Pyro. “Something.” She held up her red plastic cup as evidence.

  He leaned against a nearby tree. God, the leaning. “Come on,” he said. “You’ve been watching me all night.”

  “You know, I had assumed you moved on,” she said. Teddy thought back to Boyd’s class. Talking about her feelings was harder than Boyd’s obstacle course. She didn’t want to make excuses, but she couldn’t let him think she was the kind of person who would leave a teammate behind.

  “And why would I do that?”

  She shrugged. “Because I was ready to abandon my teammate to cross the finish line.”

  “I saw you tonight.” His gaze flicked down her body. “And I reconsidered.”

  “Seriously, Pyro.”

  “I’m being serious,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “It happens. People choke.”
>
  “Not you.”

  “Yes. Me. I left someone behind once.” He shifted on his feet, visibly uncomfortable. “My first week.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  He looked up at the stars as if searching for a sign, a reason to continue. “My partner, Anthony Mandarano,” he said, looking back at her. “Just had his second kid—baby girl. It was just supposed to be a normal, regular 415.” He turned away from Teddy. “When we arrived at the scene, we heard shots. Anthony told me to call for backup while he went through the back entrance. He—” Pyro turned back to face Teddy. His eyes were blazing. “He was shot while I was radioing for help. If I had gone with him, or if I had been the one who had gone . . .”

  Teddy wanted to brush his hair from his forehead, touch his cheek. Instead, she said: “You were following protocol.”

  “Yeah, tell that to his kids.”

  “So that’s why you’re here?”

  “I set the whole place on fire. The whole goddamn house. I didn’t even mean to do it.” He paused. “I was recruited after that.” He shot her a sideways glance. “Like you, I’m guessing.”

  Teddy ignored the question, focusing her attention instead on the flames tattooed at the base of his neck and on his collarbone, and the long, lean cords of muscle visible through the thin white cotton of his T-shirt.

  When she looked back at the campfire, she saw that the party was winding down. The music was playing low and slow; the dance floor had cleared out. The breeze coming off the bay had turned cool. She rubbed the goose bumps that sprang up on her arms. “We should go.”

  “Why? You drunk?”

  “Nope. I just feel . . . good.” That was true. The vodka had taken the edge off her headache.

  “I wouldn’t want to make a move on you if you were drunk.”

  “Oh?” She arched a brow. “You’re going to make a move on me?”

  “Definitely.”

  “What about Liz?” She hated trying to read guys. In that respect, this ignorance was bliss.

  “I was just trying to make you jealous.”