“Vote for Toby! She loves puppies.”
Puppies? Again? I glance around the room, looking for Noah. Instead, I see a room full of puppies, all of whom are staring straight at me. Something about their beady little puppy eyes has me looking down at my body, but thankfully, I’m fully clothed.
Unfortunately, I’m wearing a puffy pink monstrosity. It’s so big and fluffy and pink that I can’t even move. I hate dresses, and this one is trying to kill me.
“Nice dress.” And then Jack’s there, only instead of wearing a tuxedo, he’s wearing boxer shorts. Well. This is certainly an interesting (and not entirely unwelcome) turn of events.
“Toby?” Jack says.
I look down at my dress, hating it, and then a moment later, it disappears, and I would give anything to have it back again. I cover myself with the poms I’m suddenly holding in each hand, but Jack doesn’t seem to notice at all.
“Toby?”
“Go away!”
“Toby?”
The puppies are closing in, and when they open their mouths, I see razor-sharp teeth. This is so not good. Rabid puppies, disappearing fluffy dresses, and Jack just keeps saying my name over and over again.
“Toby? Toby? Toby?”
And then we’re at the dance, and he’s holding my arm, escorting me up to the stage, and I’m wearing the pink dress again, but I know with every fiber of my being that the second I step onto that stage and accept that crown, it’s going to disappear.
“Clap your hands, everybody!”
Where is that cheering coming from?
“Toby?”
“Everybody, clap your hands!”
“Toby?”
I’m cheering along with them. I can’t help it. I’m walking toward the stage and cheering, and Jack is calling my name, and the puppies are gnashing their puppy teeth, and I know this just isn’t going to end well.
“Toby?”
“What?” I spit out.
Jack reaches out to touch my face. “Run.”
The second the word exits his mouth, there’s an explosion, and as I fly backward, the world around me engulfed in flames, my last conscious thought is that my fluffy pink dress has disappeared again.
For the second morning in a row, I woke up before my alarm. This was getting seriously ridiculous. A girl can only take so many naked dreams before she commits herself to a life of insomnia.
Looking at my watch, I ascertained that if I got dressed as quickly as I had yesterday, I’d have time for at least two cups of coffee. When I staggered into the kitchen wearing my standard cheer practice uniform—tiny cheer shorts and a sports bra—I wasn’t expecting to be greeted by a large percentage of the freshman class, but there were at least a dozen freshman boys in my kitchen, eating donuts and engaging in some kind of robust debate.
Given the fact that Noah was even less of a morning person than I was, I took this as a very bad sign of things to come.
“Toby!” Noah was either happy to see me, or very, very nervous. “Going to practice?”
I didn’t reply. Instead, I glowered at each and every person in the room, stole one of their donuts, and grabbed a thermos of coffee to go. This morning, dealing with my brother was going to have to wait. At some point, you have to prioritize, and right now, the morning’s debriefing won out. Maiming Noah was but a distant second.
Lucky for him.
As I walked out of the back door, the boys went back to their plotting, and I tried very hard not to wonder what the much-contested “phase three” entailed.
On the drive to the school, my mind checked out, and I went into the zone, completely absorbed in my own thoughts, but somehow able to navigate the early-morning traffic. There were so many questions swimming around in my head. The Big Guys owed us so many answers, and my gut instinct told me that we weren’t going to get all of them.
If I were the CIA, I probably wouldn’t tell my teenage operatives everything, either. That didn’t make this particular pill any easier to swallow, and I wondered what they would hold back. Not information about the bomb in Jacob Kann’s car—they owed me that much. Not information about the seller’s ID and the nature of the weapon for sale—without the information I’d torn from Kann’s laptop, they might never have made the connection. And they could hardly hold back on what had transpired between Amelia and the higher-ups at Peyton the day before. I’d been the one to plant the bug at Peyton in the first place.
On second thought, if I were the CIA, I’d tell us everything.
Someone tapped on my car window, and it took me a second to realize that I’d parked it. Grabbing my coffee and my bag, I turned the car off and slipped out.
“Good morning.” Tara’s voice was just slightly hoarse.
“Long night?” I asked her.
She inclined her head slightly. “I couldn’t sleep.”
I thought back on my naked dreams. “That makes two of us.”
“You didn’t lose a tail yesterday.” Tara’s words surprised me. She almost never talked about spy stuff so plainly, especially outside of the Quad.
“Yeah, well, I’ve been naked in every dream I’ve had for the past forty-eight hours.”
That got the slightest hint of a smile out of Tara. “You win.”
I waited until we reached the safety of the locker room before I voiced a more sensitive question. “What do you think they’ll tell us?”
“Whatever they want us to know.”
Those weren’t exactly the kind of words that inspired confidence.
It’s amazing how quickly even the most extraordinary things can become routine. I barely even registered our journey from the locker room to the conference table, but soon, I was drinking my coffee, and Brooke was giving us the rundown on Amelia Juarez in anticipation of the Big Guys’ call.
“She shouldn’t have been able to lose any of you.”
Brooke’s words didn’t have a visible effect on anyone in the room, but I somehow doubted that Zee had gotten any more sleep last night than Tara had. As for the twins, they weren’t polishing each other’s nails, which put them toward the more solemn end of the Britt-Tiff spectrum.
“But she did lose you, and that tells us something. It tells us that there’s a lot we don’t know about Amelia Juarez, because the four of you are good. And if she lost you, then she’s much, much better than we gave her credit for. Zee?”
Zee nibbled on her bottom lip, and for a split second, I could see the awkward little kid she must have been her first time through high school. “I did some more digging. The profiles the Big Guys gave us were explicit, but far from complete. We knew that Amelia had a need to prove herself to her family. She’s the youngest of five and the only girl. Her family is known for being brutal, merciless. They control everything from prostitution to the drug trade in at least three states. From what I’ve been able to tell, Amelia hasn’t been allowed to take much of a leadership role in the business.”