“Yes, I’m okay, Brooke. Thank you for asking. Your concern is sweet, but really, you don’t need to worry about little old me.”

“If you weren’t okay,” Brooke said, “you wouldn’t be in the emergency room.”

Her logic seemed counterintuitive, but given the conversation I’d had earlier with Tara about how procedure was different for serious injuries, Brooke’s words made sense.

“So what’s up?” Tara asked, careful to keep our side of the conversation generic and innocuous enough that if the doctor walked in, he wouldn’t notice anything out of the norm.

“No word yet from the special unit the Big Guys sent in to check out the blast,” Brooke informed us.

“I can’t believe they wouldn’t even let me look at it!” That was Lucy, speaking from somewhere in the background. “Totally unfair.”

There were few things our weapons expert loved more than a good explosion.

“Sorry, Luce,” Brooke said. “I tried.”

I thought I heard a note of strain in Brooke’s voice and inferred that trying—and failing—wasn’t something Brooke was overly fond of. If she’d tried to get Lucy in on the explosion recon and hadn’t been able to, that meant that the Big Guys had forbidden it, which meant that maybe Brooke wasn’t exactly as in charge of this mission as she had been this morning.

Knowing her as I did, I could imagine just how well that was going over.

“So how did everyone else’s thing go?” Tara asked, still keeping with the quality vagueness.

“You know how when you called in Toby’s injury, you mentioned that you’d found a chip in Kann’s phone?” Brooke asked.

I just loved it when people talked about me like I wasn’t even on the secured, high-tech line.

“Were there more?” Tara asked, her voice even and measured.

I could practically hear Brooke nodding her ponytailed head. “Two of the other phones were also already bugged—Amelia Juarez’s and Anthony Connors-Wright’s.”

“And the third?” I asked, screening my words to make sure they would be opaque to potential eavesdroppers.

“Hector Hassan’s phone was not bugged,” Brooke said.

“We haven’t gotten anything significant from the audio yet, but if Amelia, Jacob, and Anthony were all bugged and Hector wasn’t—”

“Then chances are, he’s the one who…” I tried to censor myself. “Did the phone thing to the others.”

“That’s the current theory,” Brooke said. Then there was a long, significant pause, and I got the distinct feeling that I was missing something. It fell into place the second that the doctor stepped into the room.

If Hassan was the one who’d bugged Jacob Kann’s phone, then there was at least a chance that he was the one who’d planted the bomb. I was suddenly overcome with an urge to jump off the exam table and rush out to kick some TCI a-s-s. Because as it turned out, almost getting blown up? Not nearly as much of a deterrent as one might think.

“Toby Klein?” the doctor said.

I nodded, and Tara subtly hit the pause button, ending our communication with Brooke, before gently taking the earpiece from my ear.

“Sorry,” she said. “We were in the middle of a song.”

The doctor nodded and approached me. “What seems to be the problem?”

“I…uhhhh…got dropped.” I still couldn’t believe that anyone would buy that excuse.

“Prep or full extension?” the doctor asked.

I was somewhat disturbed by the fact that this doctor knew cheerleading terms that I didn’t.

Seeing my confusion, the doctor grinned. “You must be new,” he said. “Let me ask it this way—how high up were you?”

I tried to gauge the right way to answer that question. “Kinda high up?” I answered. “I think I hit pretty hard. I blacked out for a few minutes.”

The doctor shook his head and then took a closer look at the cut on the side of my head. “It’s not deep,” he said. His gentle tone lulled me into a false sense of security, and then his fingers prodded my bruise. “Does this hurt?”

I yelped and let loose an impressive string of expletives.

“Okay,” the doctor inferred, seemingly bemused, “that hurts.”

He pulled a light out from the front pocket of his lab coat and shined it in my eyes. He continued examining me as he ran through a list of questions, some of which Tara had asked me earlier, and some of which she hadn’t. In the end, he said that he didn’t think I had a concussion and that an MRI wouldn’t be necessary this time.

“You got off easy,” he told me. “If you’ll take my advice—and they never do—you’ll get out of this game while you still can.”

I had to remind myself that he was talking about the cheerleading aspect of it. He had no idea what we were really up to. Either way, there was exactly zero chance of me quitting. If anything, recent events had caused some perverse part of me to want to throw myself into this mission more.

Seeing the refusal to quit in my eyes, the doctor sighed. “I have three daughters,” he said. “The oldest one is five. If she wants to play football when she’s in high school, I’ll buy her the jersey, but the second the word cheer leaves her mouth, I’m locking her in her room until she’s thirty. It’s just too dangerous.”

And with that, he was gone.

I turned to Tara. “And you said I was a drama queen.”

Tara grinned. “Let’s go,” she said. “I think you have something Brooke will be very, very happy to see.”

Tara’s words registered, and after a few seconds, my hand flew to my throat. My necklace was still there, and the charm appeared to be in one piece. Until that moment, I’d completely forgotten that I was wearing the contents of the late Jacob Kann’s laptop around my neck.

I smiled, thinking how satisfying it would be to hand the data stick to Brooke all gloatylike, and echoed Tara’s words. “Let’s go.”

And then, because a full fourth of my brain had become dedicated to cheers, I rephrased my words with but a hint of irony in my voice. “L-e-t-s-g-o, let’s go, let’s go, l-e-t-s-g-o…”

Tara grinned. “Let’s go!”

CHAPTER 10

Code Word: Prezzies

By the time Tara and I got back to the Quad, my mood had improved significantly. You know your life is bordering on the absurd when a day you almost get blown up, but don’t have a concussion, is a good day. I think it’s safe to conclude that I was pretty much in happy denial land. All I could think about was that, despite our mission’s disastrous ending, I’d managed to do something that none of the other girls had.

I’d gotten computer intel. If any of Jacob Kann’s lovely, unencrypted files contained information about what he was doing in Bayport, that would be huge. Now more than ever, we needed to find out why the TCIs were here, because with Kann’s death, one thing had become crystal clear.

Whatever it was that had brought the TCIs to Bayport was worth killing for.

“Toby, OMG, are you okay?” Lucy greeted me with a huge hug and a mouthful of high-speed babble. “We were like so worried about you! I mean, I know you were standing far enough away from the blast that the resulting heat wave shouldn’t have affected you, but flying debris can be so totally deadly and stuff!”

“I’m fine,” I assured her. “Really, Luce.”

Tara rolled her eyes, probably at the fact that I’d gone from Drama Queen mode to downplaying the whole thing. All it took was a little sympathy.

“Do you think the cut will heal before homecoming?” Lucy was wide-eyed at the prospect. I brightened slightly at her question. Would this negatively affect my chances for homecoming princess?

Please, I thought, let this negatively affect my chances for homecoming princess!

“Don’t worry, Toby. We’ve got you covered.” Brittany handed me a small gift bag, and then Tiffany handed me a slightly larger one.

“Oooohhhhh,” Bubbles said appreciatively. “Prezzies!”