“Sorry.” This time, I actually offered up a response, but Brooke seemed to sense the fact that I wasn’t apologizing for being late so much as I was for the fact that I’d been part of that awful exchange with her mother the day before. Being Brooke, she didn’t exactly welcome my sympathy.

“And what are you wearing?” She sounded so aghast that I glanced down, terrified for a split second that somehow, I’d forgotten to get dressed that morning and was not, in fact, wearing anything at all.

I breathed a literal sigh of relief when I saw the top of the camisole. “What’s wrong with my clothes?” I asked. The one time I’d actually tried to be relatively fashionable and make a good cheer impression, I’d somehow violated an unwritten mandate of matching?

I really needed my coffee.

“You’re not dressed,” Brooke informed me, her lips pursed. “For practice.”

She said the words like they were two separate sentences, and it took me a while to realize that they weren’t, and another second or two after that to process what she was saying.

Everyone else in the gym was dressed in their regular practice clothes—cheer shorts and sports bras and the occasional tank top. How was it that I’d worn cheer clothes the past two days, and we hadn’t said so much as a Go Lions, but today, I got dressed for school, and all of a sudden it was bona fide practice time?

“Go change,” Brooke ordered.

I had to remind myself that she didn’t know what I knew, and that there were so many issues behind her captain complex that I couldn’t really hold it against her, but her tone still rubbed me the wrong way.

“Listen,” I started to say, and then I cut myself off and decided to opt for gestures instead. I tossed my hair over each shoulder and then tucked it behind my ears.

We need to go down to the Quad, I thought. I willed her to understand.

“No.” She understood, and she wasn’t buying.

“I like found some stuff out last night,” I said, pitching my voice into a slight lilt and doing my best to speak in a ditz code she’d understand.

“Practice first,” Brooke said. “Stuff later.”

And right then, I almost had a meltdown, full-on Toby temper tantrum. I’d spent hours hacking and going through files, trying to come up with a way for her to save face, a way for us, as a Squad, to get the job done and do something right, and then I’d spent a good fifteen minutes with a gun in my face, and she wasn’t even going to let me explain.

I felt a hand squeeze my shoulder gently, and I noticed Tara standing next to me. “Practice first,” she said softly. “Unless it absolutely can’t wait.”

I thought about the fact that Amelia had made it quite clear that we weren’t allowed to move in until this afternoon, and the fact that taking orders from a known hostile was just crazy enough that Brooke wouldn’t need much of an excuse to dismiss it out of hand.

“Fine,” I said evenly. “Practice first.”

Brooke stalked over to her bag and tossed me a pair of blue shorts and a navy sports bra. “Go change.”

I did as I was told. My shoes and socks were still in my locker, and I managed to pull off a pretty quick change, especially considering the fact that the atrocious boots on my feet weren’t exactly easy to take off.

When I got back into the gym, the others were in formation for our newest cheer—the one we’d be debuting at the homecoming game on Friday. It was a simple triangle shape, with Brooke on point, the twins behind her, Chloe, Lucy, and Bubbles in the row behind them, and the rest of us in the back row. I was conveniently tucked away in the back row middle, where any mistakes I made would likely go unnoticed.

Under Brooke’s sharp commands, we practiced our formation changes, going from our opening formation to spreading out in two lines of five, and finally, to our ending formation. This cheer was the first one they’d ever taught me that included stunting. I was just happy that I’d been relegated to the relatively benign position of “front spot,” which basically meant that while the “bases” lifted the “flyer” up into the air, and the “back spot” held everything together and watched out for the flyer’s safety—I just kind of stood there and looked pretty, adding in whatever extra balance I could.

The stunt itself was called a liberty. Originally, the plan had been to go for a “scorpion-liberty-heel-stretch, double full down,” but ultimately, they’d scaled it back for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that even as a front spot, I could still send the whole thing crashing down. As much as my cheer skills had improved the past couple of weeks, when it came to life or death maneuvers on the field, no one trusted me farther than they could throw me, which, coincidentally, I’d found out the week before was surprisingly far. Don’t ask.

We ran through the cheer again and again and again, sticking the stunts at the end each time, but there was always something about our performance that wasn’t quite good enough for Brooke. There was nothing uglier than a cheerleader on the warpath.

An hour later, I was drenched in sweat, my voice was hoarse, and my armpits were killing me. At the end of my rope, I stepped forward, just as Brooke yelled, “Again!”

I met her gaze. I flipped my hair over each shoulder and then tucked it behind my ears, and I stared. This time, there wasn’t any pity in my eyes. It was all determination. Our routine was flawless. We’d been working on it for weeks, and until the past couple of days, the spy end of our operation had been limited to training, which we did primarily in the afternoons. We’d practiced enough.

It was time to get down to business.

Brooke narrowed her eyes, and I could practically feel her need to impress her authority upon me, but a second later, Chloe, of all people, came to stand beside me. I could see the question in her eye.

You found something, didn’t you? She asked silently.

I nodded, and then Chloe did something that surprised me. She took her hair out of its ponytail, and then flipped it—first over her right shoulder and then over her left, before nodding at Brooke and tucking her hair behind her ears. As a general rule, it was code for using the back stairs to get down to the Quad.

In this case, it was Chloe telling Brooke that she thought we should go.

I expected the gesture to cause a major catfight. Brooke and Chloe were both really territorial, but whatever they’d talked about on the phone the night before must have temporarily softened the competition between them, because Brooke just sighed and inclined her head slightly.

“Water break,” she said. “Back in ten minutes.”

I read between the lines. We were going to the Quad, and I had exactly ten minutes to make my case.

CHAPTER 29

Code Word: Itchy

“So you think that based on the recommendation of a hostile TCI, who is, by the way, the lead suspect in yesterday’s theft, that we should…what?” Brooke just stared at me. “Go to the park? Take down Connors-Wright? It’s not like we have jurisdiction here. Not anymore.”

“And besides,” Tara said beside me, ever the voice of reason, “I’m sure our superiors are still keeping track of the remaining TCIs.”

“Like they kept track of Amelia so well that she ended up in my bedroom?”

“You should have incapacitated her.” Brooke’s tone was stony.

I gave her my best innocent look. “This operation was a Do Not Engage.”

“There is no operation!” Brooke was coming close to yelling, and even though the cheer-tone was still present in her voice, the veins in her forehead were starting to pop out, just a little.

“There should be an operation.” I was implacable, or at least as implacable as I could be after the stunting torture I’d just been through. “There has to be one. You’re acting like Amelia just passed me this information, no strings attached. That’s not what happened. You keep talking about her ‘recommendation,’ but that’s not what we’re dealing with here. This is blackmail.”

“We have no way of knowing if this is a trap.” Chloe kept her voice calm, but I could sense the antagonism coming off of her in waves. “For all we know, Peyton put her up to this to confirm some suspicion they had about you.”