Still, as Brooke and I made our way out to her convertible, I had to wonder how exactly it had escaped her notice that this whole plan was insane. The Big Guys were insane. Our cover story was insane. And the fact that I was supposed to crawl through air ducts in a uniform this tight?

Stretchy fabric aside, still insane.

Fortunately, sanity has never exactly been my strong point, and even now, the adrenaline was pumping through my veins, telling me that we could do this, that I had to do this.

Besides, even if things got dicey, Ross wouldn’t murder two cheerleaders in broad daylight, and even if he tried, I was pretty sure I could take him. The nerds of the world don’t exactly strike fear into the hearts of black belts armed to the hilt.

Speaking of which…

I waited until Brooke started her car and raised the convertible’s top before I asked the question on the tip of my tongue. “What’s in Lucy’s goody bag?”

“Weapons are a last resort,” Brooke told me. “Ideally, we won’t have to use them at all. We get in, we get the bots, we get out. Remember, we were assigned this case because Peyton won’t suspect us of anything. If we break out the weapons, our superiors will have to send in backup.”

I was somewhat comforted to know that if things got truly dicey, the Big Guys would have our backs. Then again, these were the guys who’d kept us in the dark about the fact that the weapon we’d been instructed to retrieve could kill us, so it wasn’t like I had a great deal of trust that they had our best interests at heart.

“If they have to send in a cleanup team, we won’t worry about replacing the target with a decoy. Our main agenda then is to get the target, and preserve our covers. If the Big Guys send a team in, Peyton will know that something is up, and we’ll need to ensure that they don’t realize that that something involves us.”

She was throwing so much information in my direction that I almost forgot what I was waiting for. “Weapons.”

“Last resort,” Brooke said again.

“Gimme.”

With a roll of her eyes, Brooke handed me a small gift sack. Lucy considered “weapons” and “prezzies” to be synonymous.

I reached into the sack and withdrew a small baggie filled with pins that had words embossed across them. GO! one declared. FIGHT! WIN!

“The spirit buttons double as throwing stars,” Brooke said. “Twist the pin on the back, and they’ll morph.”

I did as she instructed and immediately decided that despite all evidence to the contrary, Lucy was a genius.

“What about this?” I asked, picking up a small, half baton.

“Spirit stick,” Brooke said. “It also shoots blow darts. One will stun, two will paralyze.” She paused slightly. “Don’t shoot the same person three times.”

I didn’t have to ask what a third dart would do. I looked at the potentially deadly spirit stick with new respect, but at the same time, my stomach flipped at the idea that with these weapons in my hands, I could be lethal.

Even as a last resort, I wasn’t ready for that. Putting the spirit stick gingerly aside, I took out two pairs of bobby socks.

“Grenades?” I guessed. Lucy had this thing for bobby-sock grenades.

“Yup. Put them on over your socks. If you need to launch them, they’ll tear off, but once you tear them, you only have ten seconds until detonation.”

The only thing left in the bag was a clipboard with a single piece of paper attached. Written on it were several names and addresses and what appeared to be orders for Cheer Scout cookies.

“What does this do?” I asked curiously.

“It makes us look legit,” Brooke said.

“Oh.” I was somewhat disappointed. I mean, after exploding bobby socks and throwing-star cheer pins, who wouldn’t be?

“We’ll hit up some of the other offices in Ross’s building before making our way to his. If he knows some of the other people who’ve ordered Cheer Scout cookies, any suspicions he might have about us should go way down.”

I couldn’t hear the term again without asking. “Cheer Scout cookies? Is there really such a thing as Cheer Scout cookies?”

Brooke executed an eloquent shrug and merged onto the highway. “There is now.”

As we drove closer and closer to Ross’s building and to our target, the deadly nanobots contained within, Brooke went through each step of our plan with me again and again, and I sorted through them on my own, forming a mental checklist.

Weapons? Check.

Memorized floor plan? Check.

Cover story? Check.

Plan for getting to the kitchen? Check.

Method for deactivating the security system? Hmmm.

“What kind of technology are we talking?” I was good enough to hack into almost any system on my own given enough time, but considering we’d only have a few minutes, a few technical boosters couldn’t hurt. Brooke nodded toward a central compartment and I opened it. My eyes fell on a small black box, and I smiled.

Eureka.

If I could find the security panel and it was computer-based, with any luck, I’d be able to rig the black box (also known as one of the seven wonders of the modern technological world) to scramble its signal.

“Where’s the decoy?” I asked. Brooke handed me a small, silver box. I frowned. “If we don’t know what the target looks like, how exactly were the Big Guys able to make a decoy?”

I mentally encouraged Brooke to come to the conclusion that our bosses were holding out on us more than she realized.

“We’ve got an approximation.” Brooke had an answer ready, and I wondered who had fed it to her and if she’d been in contact with our superiors since the phone call that morning. “Beyond that, it doesn’t matter. Ross may be able to tell the difference between the target and our decoy, but nobody else will, and if he’s willing to double-cross Peyton to sell his technology to the highest bidder, I seriously doubt he’ll balk at swapping a decoy in for the real thing.”

“Speaking of the evil nerdling, what’s his deal? Why aren’t we just knocking him out the second we get there and giving him something to alter his memory?”

Memory-altering drugs weren’t nearly as worthy of science fiction as nanobots that could rearrange DNA, so it seemed like a reasonable question.

“Funny you should ask,” Brooke hedged. “Phillip Ross may be a nerd, but he’s an extremely paranoid nerd with heavy security detail.”

And she was just telling me this now?

Keeping one hand on the wheel, Brooke tapped a command into the radio panel of her car, and a flat-screen popped out of the dashboard.

“Show bodyguards.”

The car responded to Brooke’s verbal order, and three pictures popped up on the screen, each depicting a man uglier and more massively enormous than the one before him.

“Larry, Moe, and Curly?” I guessed.

Brooke shrugged. “I was going to go with Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail, but whatever.”

Okay, I thought. Three gargantuan security guys, a paranoid (and perhaps rightly so) scientist, and in all likelihood, less than three or four minutes until they realized I was up to something.

“If you were eighteen, you would have two and a half years of training before you got a mission like this,” Brooke said, “but you’re not, so you haven’t. If you can’t cut it, tell me now, and I’ll put in a request for a non-Squad hacker with no breasts and an adrenaline addiction. Believe me when I say you’re replaceable.”

Believe me when I say that I didn’t believe her. She followed orders, and she’d been told to take me with her on this mission. If they’d given her a choice, Chloe would probably be sitting in this seat with some kind of breast-reduction bra on.

“I’ll be fine.” In that moment, I actually believed it. Insanity definitely has its perks.

CHAPTER 23

Code Word: Cookies

“Hi, I’m Misty,” Brooke said brightly.

“And I’m Fawn,” I added.

“And we’re selling Cheer Scout cookies,” we chorused together.

By the time we made our way into the foyer of Ross’s office, Brooke and I had the Cheer Scout routine down pat. The security guard who’d answered the door eyed us distrustfully.