So, even though I’d never been a Campfire Scout, even though I’d never even been camping, period, I walked toward The League with total confidence. After all, I was a Campfire Scout—I had the sash and cookies to prove it. This was the EBP office building, nothing more. I was just there to hand out cookie samples. What did I have to worry about?
Step 3: Walk through the front door
I reached forward, pushing through the revolving glass door . . .
I froze. The lobby ceiling soared all the way to the top of the building, with plants hanging off the elevator landings on each floor. Everything was marble, but the building wasn’t quite as sleek as SRS’s—it smelled more like oranges and leather shoes than cleaner. Behind a broad wooden desk with a bowl of mints in the corner was a skinny man wearing a vest and a dotted tie; other than him, the lobby was totally empty. He gave me a confused look.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said, grinning like the cheerleading animals plastered around Kennedy’s bedroom—like this moment was the best moment, ever, ever, ever. I hustled over to him, dimming the smile when he seemed more concerned than charmed.
“I’m Walter Quaddlebaum from Campfire Scouts Troop three seventy-one, sir, and I’m here to offer samples of our new line of Campfire Scout cookies. Would you be interested in trying one?” I said all this exactly, like I was reciting it from a script a troop leader gave me.
“Oh!” The man’s eyes lit up. “Oh, I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t . . . Sugar and all . . .”
He looked from side to side, like someone might pounce on him if he said yes, then grinned at me and reached for a cookie.
“Thanks,” I said cheerily. “I’m supposed to give out the box to earn my Bakemaster Badge.”
“Of course! If you leave them here, I promise I’ll—”
“Oh, no—I have to give them out myself to get the badge.”
The receptionist looked at me and blinked. “But can’t you just tell your scout leader you gave them away yourself?”
I widened my eyes.
“You . . . you want me to lie?” I said this at nearly a whisper, like I’d never heard anything so horrific.
The receptionist hurriedly shook his head and held up his hands. “No, of course not, but I can’t let—”
“I don’t have any badges yet,” I said, lifting my pants-sash woefully. “And you want me to lie to get my first one?”
I sniffed and tensed my face until a few tears dropped from my eyes. My face always turned neon red when I cried, which usually was embarrassing—and part of the reason I never, ever let Walter and his minions make me cry—but right now that fearful color was coming in handy, along with the fact that I looked about as nonthreatening as a kitten. I mean, a crying kid bearing cookies? I let my lower lip quiver, just to complete the act.
“Don’t, don’t, don’t cry,” the receptionist begged. “I don’t want you to lie, of course not.”
He frowned and glanced down the hall directly behind him. “How about you go down that hall, then curve around and come back up here? It shouldn’t take long. Drop it in any of the open office doors.”
“What about the closed ones? Should I knock?”
“Oh, no one works in those—we’re pretty short staffed these days,” the receptionist said, looking back down the hall warily. “All right, go on.”
I grinned, wiped my tears away with the back of my hand, and scurried down the hall. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw him look down at his watch—I had ten minutes, probably, before he’d become suspicious and come after me.
I could work with ten minutes.
Step 4: Find Mom and Dad
Chapter Eight
Let me explain something about SRS.
We had offices. Plenty of them—halls of them, in fact. But agents were normally using them to practice kickboxing or hack into a computer’s mainframe or learn to speak Portuguese. Sure, there were the few odd people who sat quietly on computers all day gathering intel, but they were definitely in the minority, and they still looked impressive, typing away, then pausing to scribble down notes. I guess I expected to see something similar at The League.
Instead I saw . . . office people.
People lining up pencils on their desks. One guy playing golf, hitting a ball into a coffee cup. Another pretending to work busily, but actually looking at small, hairless dogs on a dodgy animal-rescue website. Everyone happily took cookies, and no one seemed terribly concerned about my presence. Was this a trap? It had to be a trap—this was The League, after all.
I came to the corner where I was supposed to take a right and emerge back in the lobby. I glanced in an office and looked at a clock—I’d been gone for four minutes.
That meant I had six more minutes to get as deep into The League as I could. Which meant it was time to go beyond the open doors. Time to go beyond this single floor. There was a heavy metal door to my left, totally unlike the wooden office doors. I pushed it open—a stairwell. I leaned my head over the stair rail and took stock. I was about only five levels from the very bottom, which seemed the most practical place to hold prisoners. I took note of an emergency exit door, just in case I needed one later, then hurried down the steps.
Five flights of stairs later, my shins were burning. I stopped at the basement level; ahead of me was a long, musty-smelling hallway. Every door was labeled: WATER, ELECTRICAL, CUSTODIAN. Maybe they were mislabeled to throw intruders off.
I opened the custodian’s closet. Brooms.
Electrical door. Fuse boxes.
Water. Water softeners.
At the end of the hall was a larger set of doors, not entirely different from the cafeteria doors back at SRS. It wasn’t until I got a little closer that I could read the label—TRAINING AND CONDITIONING. I supposed it was as good a door as any other I’d seen, so I pushed it open and walked into the room.
The gym back at SRS was full of sleek equipment. Chrome weight machines, black punching bags, treadmills, stationary bikes, and those weird stair-step machines that no one ever wanted to use. Otter always told us it was a room dedicated to our “personal best,” which maybe was true for some people. For me it was more of an ode to my misery. Everything there smelled like lemon cleaner, burning rubber, and sweat, though not always in that order.
The League gym was very, very different.
For starters, it smelled like old foam, spilled soda, and grease—in that order. The walls were painted a sort of creamy white, like the color of the good vanilla ice cream, and there were little bits of tape all over them from where posters or signs had been stuck up at some point. There were jump ropes hung haphazardly on hooks, some white and mauve weight machines in the far corner, and a rubber track that ran around the exterior of the whole thing.
There were also two people staring at me.
I remained calm.
That was what I’d been trained to do, after all, the thing that teacher after teacher had beat into my head as step one in any risky situation: remain calm.
Step two: assess the situation.
The people staring at me were kids—my age, probably, maybe a tiny bit younger. The boy was short with knobby joints and hair that stuck up like someone had just rubbed it with a balloon. He was arranging odds and ends from the gym—a three-pound weight here, an uninflated bike tube there, a few yoga balls at the end—into some sort of elaborate pattern, almost like a maze. The girl beside him had his black hair, but hers was neatly pulled into two short French braids. She also had glasses, the big kind that looked like they should belong to a history professor, and she was holding something that looked like several cell phones duct-taped together.
I dropped the box of cookies to the ground and braced myself. Hands to my face, fists ready—I could maybe take one of them out, but two? They had to be partners, if they were in here training together, which meant they knew exactly how to take out a target together. The girl looked particularly scrappy. I was never good with scrappy
.
“Five-second rule!”
I frowned. It was the boy who yelled it—no, screeched it, really. He dived forward. I hunched down, prepared to fling myself on top of him and hold him down—I mean, hey, I’ve got extra body weight, I might as well use it, right? I took a step forward, ready to land on his legs . . .
He grabbed a cookie and crammed it into his mouth, looking pleased with himself. The girl behind him crinkled her nose, making her big glasses rock on her face.
“You know that five-second rule thing isn’t true, don’t you?” I asked.
“Says the person who isn’t getting any cookies,” the boy answered, his words muffled as bits of sugar cookie fell from his mouth. I realized his shirt had a picture of a robot fighting a dinosaur on it.
I did not know how to assess this situation. The boy stooped for another cookie.
“Ben . . . ,” the girl said. “They’re his.”
“He dropped them!”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Who are you?” I asked. I meant for the words to be sharp, hard—more of a demand than a question, but I sounded more confused than anything.
The girl stepped forward. Her eyelashes were so long, they brushed against her glasses, and she had little heart-shaped stud earrings in. We weren’t allowed earrings at SRS—no tattoos, piercings, or anything that would make it easier for an enemy agent to identify us. The girl must have realized I was staring, because she reached up and touched one of the earrings absently, and then shrugged.
“I’m Beatrix,” she said. “He’s my brother, Ben. Our uncle’s an analyst. Do your parents work here?”
“My . . . uh . . . they . . .” Quick—think, Hale, think. These two weren’t agents—or if they were, they had incredibly good cover characters. I stood a better chance with the cover characters than in a fistfight, though, so I decided to play along. “They work in intake.”
“Intake?” Beatrix asked, squinting at me.
“Prisoner transport,” I clarified. “My dad. He just started the other day.”
“Huh,” Ben said. “Weird. Uncle Stan didn’t say anything about hiring new people. That’s sort of a big deal.” I waited, expecting him to press me further, ask questions I didn’t have the answers to. Instead he shrugged and said, “So why are you dressed like a Campfire Scout?”
“Because I am a Campfire Scout.”
“You don’t have any badges.”
“I just joined.” I cursed myself for not spending more time coming up with a cover character of my own. I aced the class in false identities earlier this year, and there I was, totally bombing at it in the field.
“Want to see my machine?” Ben asked brightly.
“What?”
“My machine. I call it the RiverBENd,” Ben said, motioning to the deliberately ordered collection of gym things. “It pours me a glass of water.”
I looked at the row of things—there was a broken trampoline and a janitor’s water bucket among the chaos—and frowned. With a grin, Ben dashed over to one end, where a yoga mat lay curled up atop a rolling cart. He slowly, carefully placed a finger on the mat, then nudged the mat forward.
The mat unfurled. When it flipped down, the edge caught the end of the bicycle tube. The tube snapped forward, sending three hand weights rolling down a ramp made of towels stretched tautly. The final weight flipped off the end, triggering a seesaw that bounced a yoga ball up into the air. The ball, in turn, slapped the end of a jump rope, which swung forward then back, spiraling itself around a mop. The mop tilted to the front of its cleaning bucket, upsetting a broom. To my amazement—shock, wonder, delight, even—the broom handle fell forward, striking the button on the water fountain.
The fountain turned on and an arc of water shot up into the sky, missing the drain by a mile. It cascaded beautifully down toward a plastic cup on the ground. I held my breath as . . .
It missed. By an inch, give or take. We all exhaled in disappointment.
“Oh, come on!” Ben yelled in frustration, turning around and kicking a basketball so hard, it bounced back off the wall and whizzed by my head.
“I told you,” Beatrix said. “I told you the pressure was wrong. You tested it when you were pushing down on the water fountain thing, but the broom doesn’t push as hard as you.”
To prove her point, she turned the cell phone contraption around so that we could see the screen. On it was a fancy drawing of the arc of the water fountain, an X where the cup should have been placed.
“Trust the Right Hand,” she finished sagely.
“The what?” I asked, worrying this was a code name for a weapon.
“The Right Hand. My phone? ’Cause it’s always in my hand? Get it? It’s a joke.”
I tried to laugh, but it came out as sort of a weird huckhuck noise.
“Okay, hang on. I can fix it,” Ben muttered, and walked to the water fountain. He repositioned the cup, and then began to meticulously backtrack through the machine, putting all the parts in their original positions. Beatrix helped him rebalance the weights.
“So . . . um . . . anyway,” I said. “So, my dad works in prisoner transport, and I was supposed to check in with him after I gave away the rest of those cookies . . .” I glanced at the floor. Lie, Hale, remember how to lie. “I can’t think of where it is, though.”
“We don’t have anything like that,” Ben said, shrugging. “I think we used to? Maybe? Maybe we could ask the receptionist?”
“Oh, I don’t want to bother him,” I said. “Maybe you call it something different, something I’m not used to. Holding?”
Beatrix shrugged, and Ben just returned to lining up the yoga balls.
They knew. They had to know, and the fact that they weren’t telling me made me more convinced than ever that they were agents undercover. It also convinced me more and more that they were stalling. We were in a race of wits, and I needed to stay ahead. The only way to do that would be by beating them to a confession.
I firmed my jaw, stood up straight, and tried to make my eyes all coal-like, same as on Dad’s “getting answers” face. I reached down and tugged at my shirt, stretching the neck down far enough that my uniform—and the SRS logo on it—was revealed. Telling the truth was definitely not something I learned in training, but desperate times called for desperate measures, right?
“Enough,” I said coolly. “No more charades. Where’s intake?”
Ben frowned, looking from the uniform and then back to me. “I really, really think we should ask the receptionist—”
“Intake,” I cut him off, waving a hand at him. “Don’t play dumb—I know exactly who you are and who you work for. I’m an agent with the Sub Rosa Society, and you have five seconds to tell me where intake is before I signal my support team!”
I yelled this. I didn’t mean to yell it, exactly, but as the words left my mouth, they climbed higher and higher until I was shouting and shaking and angry. I didn’t cut up a pair of pants and sneak a tray of cookies just to get stalled by two kids in an outdated training facility. My hands were clenched into fists, my eyebrows knitted together, and I glared at Beatrix, then Ben, then Beatrix again, until finally Ben spoke.
His voice was a little quieter now, more like his sister’s. “I think you should lie down for a little bit.”
“Show me where intake is!”
“Oh, we will!” Beatrix said earnestly. “In a second. Do you have blood-sugar problems? Lie down, and . . . Ben, how about you go get—Oh, good, he’s already gone—” I turned to see the door of the gym swinging, marking Ben’s exit.
This wasn’t working. Even if these two weren’t junior agents or agents in training, surely, whomever Ben went to get was—and I probably couldn’t handle myself against a fully trained League operative. I shook my head, turned, and ran. I shoved through the gym doors and took a hard right, away from the way I came. The hall was echoey and bare, and I could hear Beatrix padding along behind me.
“Where are you going? Wai
t, come on—maybe we can talk about this!” she shouted. Her voice was getting farther away.
I looked over my shoulder—I was faster than she was.
This was crazy; I was never fastest.
But Beatrix was panting like she rarely ran, and her glasses kept slipping down her nose as she gasped behind me. I sped up, even though my overworked shins were cramping. There was a door ahead—unlabeled—but I didn’t exactly have the time to worry. I smashed through it and into another hall similar to the one I just came through.
Beatrix was still behind me. I could feel the sweat slicking down my back. The stickers holding the sash together gave in. It fell to the floor.
Where are all the people? All the field agents? Their computer guys? Their analysts? A staircase ahead—I ran up it. When I looked back, Beatrix was still close behind, her hair fuzzy and cheeks blotchy red.
“Hey . . . look, he just went to get our uncle . . . You’re not in trouble . . . How many stairs . . . Oh . . .” She was fading fast as we moved up the staircase.
In all honesty I was fading too, but I was fueled by the fear of failure—I had to find my parents today, because The League would inevitably be on even heavier lockdown after a breach. I flung open another door, spun, and pushed my back against it. I looked around; I was back on the main floor, by the offices I’d snuck through earlier. This was not good—even office people would notice if a Campfire Scout went tearing down their hallway.
I reached over and grabbed the red fire alarm, yanking it down.
A shrill blare ripped through the building.
No one moved. I heard a few people sigh and then grumble about the alarm going off; one person rose and slammed her door.
Run, people! Why don’t you run? I heard Beatrix’s footsteps drawing closer and closer to the stairwell door.
I hadn’t come this far to get caught. I looked for ideas. Above me was a copper sprinkler head. It had a little bit of red glass in the center—when broken, it would signal the water to start flowing. I knew this because of an unfortunate incident involving me, Walter, and our clever idea to build a full-size catapult in the SRS sparring ring.