I swung into the nearest office—where the guy was playing golf with a putter and a coffee cup. He stared at the fire alarm, frowning, like it was a radio turned up too loud. I shook my head at him, grabbed the putter from his hands, and ducked back out before he had a chance to react.
Beatrix pushed the stairwell door open just in time to see me swing the putter hard at the sprinkler head.
The sprinkler head cracked off the ceiling, breaking the red glass. Beatrix and I stared in unison for a brief second and then, just as the golf club owner whirled around his door, water began to gush down. The other sprinklers obediently kicked in.
Now, finally, there was action. Screaming, shouting, and squealing rang out. People dashed from their offices, papers or purses above their heads. From the end of the hall I could hear the receptionist shouting for people to “run for their lives!”
I questioned this receptionist’s threat-response training.
I dropped the golf club and sprinted back toward the stairwell, brushing past Beatrix, who looked dumbfounded and maybe a little impressed. The door slammed behind me as I slogged upstairs, leaving a trail of puddle-footsteps. My street clothes were slowing me down; I shimmied out of them as I ran, darkly grateful for the waterproof SRS uniform underneath.
Now I needed a hiding spot—any hiding spot—where I could wait until I figured out where intake was. I reached the next floor and grabbed the door handle.
Locked.
I tried the next floor.
Also locked. Wheezing, I leaned back against the railing and looked straight up. The stairwell wound up and up and up above me so high, it made me dizzy.
The bottom door flung open and staring up at me were Ben, Beatrix, and two adults. One was tall and skinny and looked like a stretched-out version of Ben. The other was a tall blond woman wearing a pantsuit that was dripping water. She pointed to me.
“An SRS uniform, I see. Grab him, Clatterbuck,” she said.
“Uh . . . okay,” said the tall man—Clatterbuck, I guessed—sounding like he’d been woken from a nap and thought he might still be dreaming. He blinked back the water from his eyes and started toward me.
I swallowed. I couldn’t even beat my own classmates in a fistfight. I didn’t stand a chance against a real agent—much less a League agent. I tried not to look terrified as Clatterbuck approached. I had to say something, anything to stall them, to confuse them.
“Groundcover! I’m working on Project Groundcover!” I shouted, saying the first mission name that came to mind—the only mission name on my mind lately.
Behind Clatterbuck, the suit lady froze.
“What did you say?” she whispered. Clatterbuck stopped. He tried to look back at his boss without taking his eyes off me, which only caused his eyes to cross.
“Groundcover,” I repeated, trying to puff my chest up. I deflated when the seams of my uniform sounded seconds from popping.
The suit lady smiled, the kind where it was all glossy lipstick lips and no teeth. She folded her hands at her waist.
“Relax, Clatterbuck,” she said. Then to me: “Do you like pepperoni pizza?”
“I . . . what?”
“Pepperoni,” the suit lady repeated. “We can order whatever you like. Just so long as you’re telling us everything we want to know about Project Groundcover.”
Chapter Nine
Clatterbuck was Beatrix and Ben’s uncle. He didn’t look impressive, but I opted to believe that he was—for all I knew, he was one of those assassin-type guys who could kill me with his pinkie or something. Those guys always looked weird. The suit lady didn’t introduce herself, so it wasn’t until they’d escorted me through the waterlogged hallway and back to her office that I read her name off the door: PAMELA OLEANDER: DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS.
The League’s director—its version of SRS’s Dr. Fishburn.
So, double terrifying.
Oleander sat behind her desk, where Clatterbuck had just set three boxes of pizza. Oleander opened up the nearest box, and steam rose from it. She lifted a slice and took a bite, dodging a few drops of grease just before they hit her pantsuit. Clatterbuck took the seat beside me and reached forward to steal a slice for himself. He mangled it into a lump of cheese and dough as he tried to open a can of soda without putting the pizza down.
Oleander chewed for a few moments before speaking. “Have a slice, Mr. . . .” She waited for me to fill in my name.
“Jordan. Hale Jordan,” I said. The League had to know about my parents—I mean, everyone in the spy game had heard of Katie and Joseph Jordan. Maybe learning that I was a Jordan too would strike a little fear into their hearts.
Unfortunately, Oleander didn’t react to the name. She just nodded and pushed the pizza box closer to me. I tensed the muscles in my stomach to keep it from growling. My vending machine breakfast had been ages ago, but no way was I taking any food The League offered me—it almost definitely had a sleeper drug in it.
Oleander shrugged when it became clear I wasn’t taking a slice. “Mr. Jordan—let’s be clear. I’m not offering you pizza after you flooded my building just to be nice. I’m doing it because I want your help.”
I scoffed, but Oleander ignored it. She put her pizza down and leaned over the desk a little, keeping her eyes hard on mine. “I’ve heard of Project Groundcover. But I don’t know what it entails. I want you to tell me.”
I worked hard to look blank—I’d done well in Advanced Interrogation techniques and Body Language Analysis, so I knew Oleander was already making mental notes, working out what would make me crack. Best to give her as little information as possible. “You think I’ll trade you information for some pizza? Not a chance. You have two of our agents,” I said coolly. “Give them back, and we’ll discuss Groundcover.”
“I don’t have them,” Oleander said.
“I don’t believe you,” I answered.
Oleander sighed and put her piece of pizza down. “Mr. Jordan, even if I wanted to kidnap SRS agents, how would I go about it? Look around. Does this look like an elite spy agency to you? There’s not a single field agent in this place, much less someone with the skill to take out two SRS agents. The government cut back our funding ages ago when we couldn’t stop SRS.”
I frowned. The League had government funding? That didn’t make sense—SRS was the government organization. The League was the criminal agency. Why would criminals have government funding?
Oleander saw my hesitation and stopped on her way to grabbing another slice of pizza. She gave me a sort of pitying look. “Wait—that surprises you, doesn’t it? I bet everything I’m saying surprises you. You’ve always been told that SRS are the good guys. That The League are the bad guys. Right? Of course you have.”
I didn’t answer.
“And you’ve probably been told we’re huge and powerful and out to get you.”
I still didn’t answer, but I guess I didn’t need to. Oleander rose. “Come with me,” she said.
With Clatterbuck on my heels, Oleander walked me down the hall, past people mopping out their offices, and to the stairwell. She fumbled with a massive ring of keys that clinked together like an instrument as we walked up a flight of stairs to the very door I’d tried to open earlier. Oleander gave me a quick look and inserted a thick brass key into the lock, turning it.
The smell of age swept over me, old paper and blankets and stale bread. The floor was completely dark. Oleander stepped in first, the clack of her heels echoing across the room. She reached toward the wall and flicked the lights on. They protested, flickering and snapping as one by one they slowly lit.
“This was the tech floor, I think,” Oleander said.
“No, this was the control deck,” Clatterbuck said rather somberly, running a finger across a dust-caked desk.
“Sorry,” Oleander answered. Then to me she said, “It was before my time. I didn’t take over till after they’d pretty much shut everything down.”
I barely heard this, too shocked by
what I saw.
A control deck, similar to the one we had in SRS—dozens of desks, a gigantic screen, maps on the walls, speakers, a bridge lifted slightly above the rest of the room, like a stage, for the mission commander to pace on. Except everything in the room was wrong. It was old—the desks were empty, stripped of computers save a few yellowy-gray monitors. The speakers on the walls were massive and square. Even the maps were wrong—countries and territories I’d memorized when I was nine were drawn in spots they no longer existed. It looked haunted, like a corpse of a room instead of a place where real people worked.
Don’t fall for it. They made it look old. Nothing an effects team couldn’t pull off while you were in Oleander’s office.
“We’re broken, Mr. Jordan. We’re not powerful, we haven’t kidnapped your agents, and moreover, we’re not the bad guys. SRS is the place with high-end technology, with agents all over the world. I know they’ve convinced you that they’re the secret government agency, but, well . . . it’s not true. They lied.”
“You’re saying that SRS has managed to trick hundreds of agents, support staff, and their families into working for the wrong team? That’s stupid,” I snapped.
“That’s genius,” Oleander said steadily. “And furthermore, these agents who are missing? Look at The League. And then look at SRS. Which organization do you think has the resources to make two people vanish?”
“Are you saying SRS kidnapped their own agents?”
“I’m saying that’s a lot more likely than us being behind it,” Oleander said coolly. She retreated from the room, flicking the lights off as she went; one sparked as the fluorescent bulb blew. “We can continue the tour, if you want. Seventy-nine floors total. I’ll show you every one, if that’ll make you believe me.”
“It won’t,” I scoffed.
Oleander frowned at me; Clatterbuck looked back and forth between us like he was watching a tennis match. “Well then, Mr. Jordan,” Oleander finally said. “Whatever will we do with you?”
I didn’t realize it at the time, but Oleander was asking a real question—whatever would they do with me? Clatterbuck reported that the intake cells—they did have them, after all, which made me feel pretty smug—were full of storage boxes. Finally Oleander frowned and rapped a pen against her lips. “What’s in your office, Clatterbuck?”
“Um . . . a chair, a desk, a bobblehead dog, a dead house plant—”
“I mean, that he can steal or read or report back to SRS,” Oleander said testily.
“Oh! Nothing. Everything on Creevy’s been locked up,” Clatterbuck answered. I didn’t know who Creevy was, but I didn’t want to let them in on that fact, so I stared at the wet floor like it was particularly interesting.
“All right.” Oleander nodded. “We’ll lock him in your office until he tells us about Groundcover.”
“And if I never do?” I asked, folding my arms. I was trying to look menacing, but given the soaked SRS uniform, I suspected I looked more like a giant wet raisin.
Oleander gave me a pitying look. “You’ll talk, eventually.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because,” Oleander answered as she walked away, “you’ll realize I’m telling the truth.”
Truth.
She couldn’t be—there was no way. And yet, that word shone like a beacon in my head, guiding me toward the last time I’d heard it. My parents, talking in the kitchen, my mom’s voice on the edge of tears. We pretend like we don’t know the truth.
Could this be the truth my parents were talking about?
Clatterbuck warily escorted me to his office, which was on the same floor as the gym and tucked away in a corner—as such it had been spared the sprinklers on the floor above. Being basement level, it didn’t have a window, but he’d tacked a few dozen tropical calendar pictures to the back wall, which worked as a surprisingly decent substitute. Tropical pictures aside, the room looked like it belonged to a comic book illustrator, or maybe a zombie movie aficionado. There were vintage movie posters on the wall by the door and little figurines on every flat surface. Toy cars still in boxes and pictures of him with everyone from the Queen of England to that guy from the action movies. I couldn’t help but think this office rivaled Kennedy’s bedroom in terms of colors per square foot.
And it didn’t look as evil as I’d expected for The League.
Clatterbuck gave me a sort of smile and turned to go, yanking a baseball player bobblehead off a shelf and tucking it safely into his pocket as he went. As soon as the door clicked, I sighed and collapsed into his desk chair, wiggling around as the edges of the duct tape covering the cushion poked me. My mind felt crowded, too many thoughts bumping into one another.
SRS agents were taught to trust our guts—it was the very first thing we learned when we started training at seven years old. Go with your first instinct and never look back. I’d always liked that—the idea that the right thing, the ground truth, was already deep inside us, and we just needed to listen to it. It was the lesson that convinced me not to give up when training got terrible, when Walter got muscles, when Kennedy became the best gymnast at SRS—because I always knew that deep down, the true thing in me was a spy, through and through, no matter how slowly I ran a mile.
But now, even while my head was shouting that Oleander must be lying, that The League was tricking me, the deep true thing was whispering, chanting over and over: Truth. Truth. Truth.
Find the truth.
Chapter Ten
I thought I was losing my mind—time seemed to be going in reverse. Then I realized time actually was going in reverse—that Clatterbuck had some sort of goofy backward clock. I shook my head at it, then continued to comb through his desk drawers. Most were full of Chinese menus and paper clips.
Someone rapped on the door. I eased the desk drawer shut and stood up gingerly.
“Hale?” a tiny female voice called out. “It’s Beatrix. Beatrix Clatterbuck? From the gym?”
“I remember,” I answered through the door.
“I brought you some pizza. My uncle said you didn’t eat earlier.”
“I don’t want it,” I answered, though again my stomach growled at that exact moment just to mock me.
“Okay,” Beatrix said, sounding doubtful. “I didn’t lick it. Seriously. Open the door.”
“It’s locked—”
“No, it isn’t,” Beatrix said. “I mean, it is, but it’s locked from your side. They couldn’t just lock you in forever; there’s no bathroom.”
She was right about there not being a bathroom, though it hadn’t occurred to me till she’d said it. I strode to the door and pulled down on the handle; it clicked and the lock popped out obediently. I exhaled in disbelief—they really had left me in an unlocked room?—and pulled the door open. Beatrix grinned at me, and it was hard not to notice her overcrowded teeth. At SRS, she’d already be in braces. Probably wearing contacts too, I thought, looking at her pink-rimmed glasses. Agents couldn’t risk losing their glasses in the middle of a mission.
A thin black net dropped from the ceiling over Beatrix’s head.
Beatrix’s eyes widened. She dropped the plate of pizza as the net whisked her off her feet. Limbs went everywhere as she was pulled up to the ceiling in a ball. The net’s counterweight—another person—sank down, landing expertly in black SRS-issued boots.
With pink owl stickers on them.
“Kennedy?” I asked, wondering if perhaps I was hungrier than I’d thought. Was I hallucinating?
“Hale!” Kennedy squealed, bounding forward to give me a hug, a flame of red hair bouncing around behind her. “I did it! The net trick! I wish I could tell Agent Hartman. She said I’d never get it before Darcy Bellows, but look!” My sister appeared to be either on the verge of tears or laughter, but it was impossible to tell which.
“Why am I in a net?” Beatrix asked from above. I looked up and saw that the net was slowly spinning side to side. Beatrix looked mildly inconvenienced, if anything. ??
?That was the last of the pizza,” she added, pointing to the plate that was now overturned on the floor.
“Are you all right?” Kennedy asked her, putting her hands on her hips. “It’s my first net trap.”
“I’m okay. Ben is going to be so mad I got caught in this instead of him—what sort of knot is at the top? I have to tell him. Did you use a pulley?” Beatrix asked.
“How did you get in here?” I asked.
“I shimmied through some windows downstairs. It was easier than I thought—apparently the building just flooded? Or caught fire? Everyone was too busy with that to notice me, I guess.”
“Okay, okay, let’s just get out of here,” I said. I didn’t want her to know, but I was pretty mad at her for following me—now I had to leave without answers about Mom and Dad, since there was no way I would let Kennedy stay here longer than necessary. “There are guards,” I said swiftly as I stepped out into the hall beside her.
“League elites or just regular agents?” Kennedy asked.
“I . . . I don’t think either,” I said.
Kennedy didn’t understand, but there was no time to explain. “You won’t fit through the window I shimmied through to get in—”
“Emergency door,” I interrupted. “First-level stairwell. I saw it earlier. It’ll set off the fire alarm, but it’s that or the front door. We’ll have to run for it.”
We froze in unison—footsteps, coming toward us from where the hall crossed up ahead, just in front of the 493 DAYS WITHOUT AN ACCIDENT! banner. Kennedy faltered. Sneaking into a building was one thing, but facing off with a League agent was another. She gave me a worried look—I had to move first. I was her big brother, after all. I rushed out into the hallway, shoes squealing on the floor. The footsteps belonged to three men who were running straight at us. I braced myself.