All right, I thought. One…two…three!

Pffft. Pffft.

I shot two darts in close succession, and both of them hit Merv in the side of the neck. He dropped to the floor. I winced at the sound and hoped that they hadn’t heard it in the other room.

“The lion sensation is taking the nation—blue and gold…let’s go!”

Brooke’s voice carried and I breathed a sigh of relief. Her cheerleading antics would hopefully keep Mopsy and Ross occupied long enough to let me disarm the security and swap in the decoy.

I pushed the vent aside and dropped down from the ceiling, landing in a crouch on the floor. First things first, I retrieved the darts from Merv’s neck and checked to make sure there was no visible sign that they’d ever been there.

Excellent.

I began sweeping the room. Of all of the aspects of the mission, this one—locating the security panel—was probably the one I was least qualified to do. My basic training had included several sessions on sweeping a room, but I hadn’t done it enough for it to be automatic, and right now, I didn’t have time to think.

I just had to act.

If I was a hidden security panel, where would I be? I walked along the length of the walls, looking for a loose panel, uneven paint, or anything that might give me the answer I desperately needed.

Think of it as a code, I told myself. A giant, living code. Where’s the aberration? Look for natural repetitions in the room and find something that breaks the pattern. Think of everything you know about Ross, about this room.

I continued searching the room manually and visually with no luck, until I opened the refrigerator. No way should a mad scientist’s fridge have been this neat and tidy. And what was with having multiple kinds of milk in one refrigerator? I reached up to examine the milk, and when I tried to pick one of the containers up, I encountered some resistance. I pulled harder, and with a pop, the back of the refrigerator opened to reveal a security panel.

In a twisted way, it made sense. If the guy had laser-sensors to protect a safe in his oven, of course the security system would be based in his refrigerator.

Now that I had access to the security panel, I concentrated on disarming the system. I pulled my black box out of the bag of tricks I’d brought with me. With a little technological ingenuity, I hooked it up to the hardware inside the panel and keyed in what I could ascertain about the make of the system.

Luckily, the black box came equipped with pictures, and once I narrowed the choices down, it quickly recognized what kind of system we were dealing with, which meant that it knew how many digits the password was. The box heated beneath my hand, and I waited as it accessed a satellite that would hopefully allow it to hack directly into the security provider’s system.

I looked down at my watch.

Hurry, I thought. Hurry, hurry, hurry. If Ross had actually invested in a system that was more secure than the black box could hack, I might have to get creative, and for once in my life, I really, really didn’t want to get creative.

Beep.

I took in a sharp breath at the sound, but the lights on the system went off, and I breathed out a sigh of relief.

Black box, I thought, how I love thee, let me count the ways.

As I moved toward the oven, I spent one second devoutly hoping that the box would pull its last trick—scrambling any remote signals that the system might be sending to the security provider.

I opened the oven door and stared at it for a second. To say that I’m not familiar with cooking or any of the tools used to do so would be an enormous understatement, so I wasn’t exactly sure if there was anything unusual about this oven, but time was running out, so I strong-armed it, and a back panel popped inward.

There, just within my grasp, was a small silver box. I grabbed the decoy, which was more of a gray, out of my bag of tricks and moved to swap the two. With any luck, I could make my way back to the bathroom, and Brooke and I could walk out of there with the weapon before anyone realized that Merv was in dreamland.

Unfortunately, the second before I made the swap, things began falling apart at warp speed.

I felt Merv behind me before I saw him, and I turned. He was easily three times my size, but he was groggy from the sedatives, and I was quick. I sank a punch to his stomach and kicked the gun out of his hand. He lunged at me, but I dodged and planted a hard kick to his groin, pushing him back. Once I had enough space to move, I steadied myself and then prepared my go-to move.

I was halfway through the roundhouse when I saw a flash of black and realized that Merv and I weren’t alone. But before I could figure out who our new black-clad friend was, we were interrupted by Flopsy realizing at high volume that I was no longer in the bathroom.

Seconds later, I registered a male scream, as Brooke attacked either Ross or Mopsy in the foyer.

Midturn, I appraised the situation without ever slowing down. I had to take Merv out quickly. Brooke was in the other room with Ross and two security goons. That meant at least three guns, and as good as she was, she couldn’t stop a bullet, even though Lucy’s bulletproof push-up bra had been known to stop one or two in the past.

Ignoring the sounds and sights assaulting my senses, I threw my momentum into finishing my roundhouse, and microseconds after my foot connected with his neck, Merv went down for the count.

My movement propelled by adrenaline, I zeroed in on the next threat and whipped out my pin/throwing stars, activated them, and starting launching them at the mysterious person in black, but even when I heard them hit, the person—whoever it was—didn’t stop.

And then the mystery intruder grabbed the silver container—the one I’d so kindly left sitting clearly visible on the stovetop—and it was up to me to get it back.

“You wanna dance?” I asked, advancing, ready for a fight. “Then let’s dance.”

Gunfire sounded from the direction of the reception area where I’d left Brooke. I wavered for a split second and then did the only thing I could do.

I ripped the bobby sock off my left foot and launched it toward the person in front of me, hoping that it would be enough to slow him or her down (but not enough to release the nanobots themselves) and then I ran toward the sound of the gunshots. Toward Brooke.

As I ran down the hallway and into the reception area, an explosion sounded behind me, but I barely heard it, because the situation in front of me demanded every ounce of attention I could muster. Brooke had managed to take Ross out, and he was lying in an unconscious heap on the floor, but the guards were a different story. One of them had a gun pressed to her temple. As my breath caught in my throat, the hired goons took their eyes off Brooke just long enough to look at me, and Brooke jabbed a spirit stick into Mopsy’s leg. She must have somehow triggered the release of the darts, because the oversized guard crumpled to the floor, and then it was just me, Brooke, and one guy with a gun.

I leapt toward him, not heeding the obvious danger, and as he swung his gun to aim it at me, Brooke went for his legs. The gun went off, but missed us both, and within seconds, Brooke had managed to grab his head between her feet, and with some pretty fancy footwork, she executed a perfectly flawless standing back tuck and came damn near close to breaking his neck.

As his eyes rolled back in his head, Brooke knelt down next to him to check for a pulse.

“Alive,” she said. “Did you acquire the target?”

And then I remembered the person in the kitchen and took off running without offering Brooke any kind of verbal answer to her question.

The kitchen was in shambles when I got there, scorched and burning as a result of my bobby sock grenade, but the black-clad figure, the silver box and the dangers contained within were nowhere to be found.

I swore. And swore. And swore.

“The hostiles are secured,” Brooke told me, coming into the room on my heels. “The backup team will have registered the gunfire and should be here any moment.” She broke off, processing for the first time the obscenities currently pouring from my mouth. Then she noticed the decoy, which had fallen to the floor.

“There was someone else,” the explanation flew from my mouth like projectile word-vomit. “They made it through a half dozen throwing stars and a grenade, and they moved…” I thought back over the other person’s motions. “They moved like one of us.”