“And?” I prompted her for more information.

“And what?”

“That’s not all they told you.” Somehow, I was sure of this fact.

Brooke blew a wisp of hair out of her face and took the car around a corner a little faster than was strictly necessary. “Do the math, Toby. If Amelia doesn’t have the weapon, why would we stop her from meeting with Peyton? We still have an audio feed in one of their offices. The signal’s scrambled, but some intel is better than none.”

I felt every bit as stupid as Brooke’s tone said I was for not making the connection earlier. I was the one who’d planted the bug at Peyton. This was our chance to use it.

“What about the weapon?” I asked. This was about as far into “sharing” mode as Brooke got, and since the two of us were stuck in a car together anyway, I was going to press her for as much information as I could, even if her glare suggested that this course of action might not be in my best interest healthwise.

“After they ID’d the seller, the nature of the weapon became apparent.”

“And?”

Brooke slammed on the brakes as we came to a stoplight. “And apparently,” she said, her voice full of false cheer, “we’ll be debriefed in the morning.”

The Big Guys knew what the weapon was and who had it, and they expected us to wait until morning? No wonder Brooke was in such fine form.

“So what now?” I asked as Brooke pulled into her parking spot at the school.

“Now?” Brooke said. “Now I try to figure out how Amelia Juarez, whose only claim to fame is her family’s crime empire, managed to lose not one, but two of our tails, and dismantle our tracking chip, and you go home.”

“Go home?” I was getting the strangest sense of déjà vu.

“Be back for practice tomorrow morning.” Brooke eyeballed me. “And this time, don’t be late.”

And with that, she slid out of the car, shut the door without slamming it, and walked into the gym like she wasn’t a moving ball of stress and fury. I considered following her, but ultimately decided that I liked my head right where it was—on my shoulders, with my ponytail intact. So for the second night in a row, I followed Brooke’s orders and drove home.

I didn’t realize how tired I was until I walked through my front door, and then something in my mind clicked, and staying vertical suddenly became very difficult. Who would have thought sitting around all day, doing nothing, was so exhausting?

“How was your day?” My mom accosted me in the front hallway. If she noticed the zombielike glaze that had settled over my eyes, she said nothing.

How was my day? I considered my response. I’d spent the morning getting debriefed by our contact at the CIA, followed immediately by flaming the gossip fires by kissing Jack in the hallway, had watched my brother have a “moment” with a cheerleader, had discovered that Jack actually knew how to create a password I couldn’t crack, had girl-talked with Brooke while staking out Jack’s father’s law firm, had discovered that the Big Guys knew more than they were telling, and to top it all off, I’d nearly been hit by a car.

“Fine,” I grumbled.

“That’s nice, dear,” my mother said. “Now, you wouldn’t happen to know why your brother’s email stopped working, would you?”

Noah was such a tattletale.

“Not a clue,” I deadpanned, and then, before my mother could say another word, I climbed the steps and headed for my room, stopping only long enough to hear Noah on the phone.

“We’ve got to go bigger. We’ve got to be inventive. My friends, it’s time to think outside the box. It’s time for…” Noah pitched his voice lower, like a TV announcer.

“Homecoming: the next generation. This is an all-new frontier of advertising, gentlemen. So ask yourselves this question: are you ready?”

As soon as I developed the strength, I was going to short-circuit my brother’s telephone line. For now, however, all I wanted was to fall asleep, because the sooner I slept, the sooner morning would come.

CHAPTER 20

Code Word: Flat

“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.