Killer Spirit

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “I was trying to make things easy,” she replied. “At first, I thought I could scare you off, but the bomb didn’t seem to bother you much once you regained consciousness. I thought that when I crashed your retrieval mission, the other girls would realize they’d made a mistake and that you were never cut out for any of this.” She sighed. “And I thought for sure that when they discovered that you’d been tagged, they’d report it and you’d be gone, but no. They didn’t, did they? If they had, you wouldn’t be in school today.” She blew a wisp of hair out of her face. “It’s the darnedest thing.”

  Half of me thought I should just take her out then and there. She might have been trained as an operative back in the day, but she was old and I was young, and I was willing to bet a lot of money that she couldn’t move like I could. There weren’t very many people who could.

  “Nuh-uh-uh,” Joanne McCall said, making a tsking sound with her tongue. She pulled something out of her pocket, and I recognized the silver box in her hands. “You take so much as a single step toward me, and I’ll let these little darlings do their thing. I had a piece of your hair on file, you know. All that lovely DNA. So very convenient. I was so glad I’d gotten a hold of a sample that first day, when I saw you in the mall.”

  “How can you…I thought…Anthony…”

  “The TCI?” The fact that she used the acronym freaked me out. “I needed a diversion, and he was more than willing to buy a decoy. That boy is a bit slow. I knew he was bugged, and I figured you girls were listening, and that orders or no orders, you wouldn’t be able to resist saving the day.” She sighed nostalgically. “We never were.”

  This was just freaking unbelievable. The president of the PTA was a former agent who’d been stalking me for weeks. She’d duped Anthony into believing he had the actual weapon, assuming that we’d be listening, but instead, she’d tricked Amelia, who must have replaced our bug with one of her own. If Amelia hadn’t come to me, hadn’t issued her little challenge, Mrs. McCall’s decoy wouldn’t have worked, and I wouldn’t be here now, by myself, with a mad-woman.

  Her words echoed in my mind, and I wished I wasn’t processing them as fast as I was. She had my DNA, she had the nanobots, and she was saying that I wasn’t going to be around to enjoy the game on Friday.

  It didn’t take someone with my mathematical prowess to finish the equation.

  She was actually going to kill me. Psycho Mom was actually going to kill me. Again, I say: This was freaking unbelievable.

  I had to keep her talking long enough to come up with another plan. There had to be a way out. She couldn’t just use a prototype biotechnological weapon to kill me in Bayport High’s practice gym. Well, she could, but I certainly wasn’t going to let her.

  If I had a choice.

  So I did the only thing I could do to keep her talking. I asked a question I already knew the answer to, even though I really didn’t want to hear her talking about it.

  “Why?”

  She giggled then, a high-pitched sound that made me realize just how crazy she really was. “If you have to ask that, Toby, you really don’t belong on the Squad. I knew that, of course, but still, I thought you’d be brighter than this. I guess I give those other girls too much credit.”

  Just keep talking, I urged her silently, as I examined the exits in the room and the distance between us, trying to gauge whether or not I could make a run for it or knock the container from her hands before she could flip the lid.

  “And that’s why this has to get so ugly,” Mrs. McCall sighed. “Because those girls chose you, and the government signed off on it, even though they knew that I’d been prepping my Kiki for this her whole life. She didn’t know why, of course. She’s a sensitive girl, and she wasn’t ready to learn, but she would have been ready if they’d picked her. I worked too hard and too long to make her ready to just sit back and let them pick somebody like you.”

  My mom’s spiel about the mother who’d hired the assassin didn’t seem quite as outlandish anymore. In fact, compared to the situation at hand, it seemed almost reasonable. I mean, that mom hired an assassin. This mom was playing assassin herself—with stolen technology to boot.

  If I got out of this alive, I was never going to dismiss one of my mom’s random stories ever, ever again.

  “Once you’re gone, the others will see. They’ll have to give the tenth spot to Kiki. She’ll be wonderful, you know. She has to be.”

  I thought of poor, clumsy Kiki, whose only distinguishing characteristic was the fact that she was Hayley’s lapdog. She’d never make the Squad. I thought about telling Mrs. McCall that, but one look at her crazy eyes told me that such a comment might send her right off the deep end.

  Think, I told myself. There has to be a way out of this.

  “Enough talk,” Mrs. McCall said. “I know you’d love for me to carry on until someone comes to save the day, but I’m afraid that isn’t going to happen, Toby. It’s sad,” she said. “It really is, and I am sorry. These are supposed to be such precious years, but I’m afraid I have no choice—”

  “Freeze!”

  I’d never been so glad to hear a bossy, clear, more-popular-than-thou voice in my life. I looked past Mrs. McCall and saw Brooke standing in the doorway.

  She was holding a gun.

  CHAPTER 34

  Code Word: Teamwork

  I never thought I’d be so glad to see my school’s Queen Beeyotch holding a gun, but my joy was short-lived. Psycho Mom was way too psycho to go down without a fight.

  “Move at all, and I’ll shoot,” Brooke said, her voice pleasantly deadly.

  “You must be Karen’s girl,” Psycho Mom said, her voice equally pleasant and twice as unhinged. “You look just like her, you know.”

  “Thank you. Drop the box. Now.”

  “We weren’t in the same program,” Mrs. McCall continued. “But I heard about her. I went to Quantico when I graduated, you know, and all anybody could talk about was your mother. And then I met my Larry, and we got married, and well…sometimes, family just has to come first. I dropped off the radar, but when Kiki was born, I put in my notice, let them know that I’d be training her, and that if the program was still operational, she’d be ready.”

  Mrs. McCall frowned. “I never heard back, but I did some digging and when I realized your mother was living in Bayport, well, I knew this must be the place. I talked Larry into moving here. This school has one of the best cheerleading programs in the country, I told him. And it does. And Kiki’s done so well in it!”

  Brooke cocked the gun. “Box. Floor. Now.” Her voice was absolute steel. Gone was the teenager, gone was even the artifice of pleasantries. This was the warrior. I wondered how she was doing it—holding the gun, preparing to fire, doing it all without showing any external signs of weakness.

  Then again, this was Brooke Camden. Team Captain. Showing weakness wasn’t exactly part of her MO.

  Mrs. McCall held her hands out in front of her, like she was going to drop the box, but I knew beyond all knowing that she was going to open it instead. I flew toward her then, driven by the pull of survival.

  I should have known that Brooke had another trick up her sleeve, and I should have known that the trick in question had a PhD. Brooke never went anywhere without a partner. Girls traveled in flocks, and the Squad wasn’t an exception to this. There was safety in numbers.

  In the instant before Psycho Mom opened the box and I took her out (no idea which one of those possibilities was going to come first), I heard someone entering a number into a cell phone and turned to look at Zee. I didn’t have to glance down at the Bayport High emblem beneath my feet to know what Zee was doing, and I short-circuited my attack plan, putting every ounce of momentum I had into jumping straight up into the air.

  Mrs. McCall moved to open the box.

  And the floor beneath her feet gave way to nothing as Zee’s code activated the trapdoor mechanism on the emblem. Mrs. McCall disappeared, and then the emblem came back up into
place, just as I crashed to the ground.

  Remember when I said that some of the entrances to the Quad were less convenient than others?

  This was one of them.

  If you were standing within a six-foot radius of the center of the gym when the mechanism was engaged, you fell down and landed on the world’s largest trampoline in the middle of the Quad. Lucky for me, the floor mechanism was blindingly quick—otherwise, I would have fallen, too, and if I’d fallen with Psycho Mom and the bots, I’d be dead.

  “They can’t get through the floor, can they?” I asked.

  Brooke gave me a look. “Puh-lease,” she said. “You think we’re not equipped for nanoattacks? What do you think we are, amateurs?”

  Her hands shaking, Brooke lowered the gun to her side even as she smirked in my general direction.

  “Shouldn’t someone go after her?” I asked. “I would, but I’ve got this funny fondness of living.”

  “Yeah,” Zee said, managing to keep a straight face. “You have a real love of life. It’s a major contributing factor to that sunny disposition of yours.”

  Considering she’d just saved my life, I refrained from retorting.

  “And we don’t need to go down there,” Brooke said.

  “The others are already there. Chloe’s working on something to catch the bots, and the others are all ambush-ready.”

  “All of them?” I asked. Brooke nodded.

  “How?” I opted to stick with simple, one-syllable questions. As the reality of the situation sank in, I couldn’t handle much more.

  “Amelia took Connors-Wright down. We took her down. It was all very food chain–like.”

  Zee picked up where Brooke left off. “Then we confiscated the weapon.”

  “Did you realize it was a decoy?” I asked. After all, Brooke had never seen the real deal. Mrs. McCall had stolen it before she’d had the chance.

  “Not at first,” Brooke said, “but then Connors-Wright came to and started babbling about how much he’d paid for the right to kill his father, and we realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t nearly as much as a professional would have charged for the real deal.”

  “Of course, the fact that the payment was funneled through the Bayport PTA was a pretty big tip-off, too,” Zee added. “So we started thinking about what you said, about it being a rogue operative, and then it finally occurred to us to look at things from a different angle. Connors-Wright’s motivation for getting the nanobots was personal. What if the enemy operative’s was, too?”

  “What if,” Brooke said, “that person just really didn’t like you?”

  Oddly enough, this was apparently a really easy idea for Brooke to wrap her mind around.

  “What if Kann was never the target?” Brooke continued.

  “What if you were? What if the whole purpose of stealing the weapon from Ross’s office was to discredit you?” She paused. “And then there was that minivan that tried to run you off the road…”

  “If you were the target all along, and the enemy realized we’d left you alone…” She shrugged. “We hurried back.”

  “What about Amelia?” I asked.

  Brooke smiled. “Let’s just say that this time, my mom came through. Amelia won’t be playing any games any time soon.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder how long it would be before Amelia would find her way back out into the world. Somehow, I didn’t think she was the type to roll over and die, just because she’d been apprehended. In fact, she’d probably just see this as the next stage of the game.

  Beside me, Brooke looked down at the gun in her hand, as if realizing suddenly that it was there, and her skin went very pale. I tried to figure out a way to say thanks, but couldn’t quite form the words.

  “You okay?” Zee asked Brooke. Apparently, our profiler had already come to the conclusion that I was going to be just fine. Forget the fact that I’d almost died…

  “I’m not,” Brooke said, the gun still in her hand. “But I will be. My mom was right. I had to get over the gun thing eventually.”

  Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold up there, I thought. There were lots of take-home lessons from what had just happened—for instance, “Never underestimate the PTA” and “Don’t put Toby on banner duty”—but none of those lessons involved even the hint of the suggestion that Brooke’s mom had been right about anything.

  I opened my mouth to say this, but Zee shook her head. I bit back the words and almost choked on them, but figured that Zee had her reasons. She always did.

  “Look on the bright side,” Zee said, changing the subject.

  “What bright side?” Brooke asked.

  Hello! Saving me! Bright side! Our covers were safe! Bright side!

  “When the floor gave way, Toby’s banners bit the dust,” Zee said.

  That was supposed to be the bright side?

  “No offense,” Brooke said, and I prepared myself to be offended. “You’re a great hacker, but your bubble letters really suck.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Code Word: Catfight

  When I walked into the Quad the next morning, I wasn’t sure what I expected to find. I knew that the Big Guys had taken Mrs. McCall into custody, and that with their help, Chloe had been able to locate and deprogram the nanobots. Or so I’d been told. If I suddenly keeled over in the middle of the debriefing, I was going to know who to blame. I also knew that the Big Guys (and Brooke’s mom) had decided to forgive me my breach of protocol with Amelia, and Brooke her rogue operation. After all, in a roundabout way, we’d been right, and in a not-so-round-about way, we’d saved the day. Again.

  Besides, as far as the Big Guys were concerned, the threat was contained, and all was right with the world. And the fact that they were the ones who’d dropped the ball and actually left Joanne McCall off of their watch lists didn’t exactly give them much room to cast stones. I mean, come on—she was clearly unhinged, and they’d known she was in Bayport all along.

  Walking into the Quad, half of me expected some kind of celebration. Ribbons. Confetti. Ice cream would have been nice. Cookies would have been better.

  What I found was a half dozen girls gathered round a single screen.

  “New mission?” I asked. “Already?”

  “Homecoming vote projections,” Lucy answered. “Our old hacker wrote the program a couple of years ago, and we just entered in the last piece of data. It’s some algorithm thingy.”

  I winced at the phrase algorithm thingy, but figured that, depending on what the aforementioned thingy had to say about homecoming, I’d save any more dramatic reaction for later.

  “You’re in the lead,” Chloe told me, her voice tight. “By a lot.”

  Brooke flipped her hair over her shoulder. “I can’t believe we actually saved you,” she huffed. “This is our senior year.”

  I looked at the other nonsenior cheerleaders. Hadn’t any of them bothered to fill the seniors in on my little speech yesterday? “I practically begged the student body not to vote for me,” I said. “It’s not my fault my little brother is a spaz.”

  “The problem is that you did ask people not to vote for you,” Zee said. “Now half of them are supporting you because they think you’re nice, and the other half are voting for you because they honestly believe you don’t want to win, and they’re just being petty.”

  “Though, to be fair,” Tara added, “Noah’s pirate speech did have some effect as well. His Abraham Lincoln speech, not so much so.”

  I didn’t ask how this program somehow had the capability to analyze my brother’s wacky campaign ideas. I really didn’t want to know.

  “Just tell me what I can do to lose,” I said. “Please.”

  Brooke said something along the lines of, “I don’t think there’s a point,” but what I heard was, “I am going to make your life a living hell for this.”

  “Turn that thing off,” Chloe said darkly. “Let’s go upstairs and practice.”

  Brooke smiled then. It was a chilling sight. “Let’s,
” she said. “I was thinking we’d teach Toby how to fly.”

  Fly? As in give up my lovely, benign front spot position in order to let a bunch of girls with hardcore grudges against me throw me up into the air and hold me there? That so wasn’t going to happen.

  Except I looked at Brooke’s face again and knew that it would.

  The thing about being a flyer is this. If you think you’re going to fall, you will. If you think the bases are going to drop you, they do. And if you think this whole thing is some sort of twisted punishment for past sins, you’re absolutely one hundred percent correct.

  An hour later, I still hadn’t managed to stick a liberty, but I had managed to acquire several new bruises that would look just lovely with the homecoming dress the twins had picked out for me.

  “By the way,” Tiffany said, proving herself remarkably in tune with my thoughts. “We got you a new dress. It’s pink.”

  The torture, it appeared, was just beginning. The worst part of it was that as hellish as this was and as catty as they were all being, I knew that if things had gone differently and I’d woken up this morning as a noncheerleader, my life would have been a whole lot worse.

  “Let’s go again,” Brooke said. “One, two, down, up, down…up.” She counted off the movement, and this time, as they hoisted me none-too-gently into the air, I actually managed to stay there. My form wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t so much a liberty as a “get me the hell down from here,” but I stuck it.

  And from down below, Lucy took that exact moment to announce in her own perky, innocent, not-at-all-vindictive way that she’d asked my brother to homecoming.

  “Aggggggkkkkkkk!” The noise I made as I fell off the stunt was only vaguely identifiable. The others didn’t let me hit the ground, but they did catch me in a way specifically designed to give me a wedgie, and I was about ninety-nine percent sure that they were doing it on purpose.