“Sometimes the satellite signal fails; sometimes if you end up underground, the signal doesn’t reach.”

“Okay,” I said. Tara stared down at her shoes, her face perfectly calm. It was that look that made me ask more. I was noticing more and more that when Tara was perfectly anything, it was a surefire sign that she was hiding something. Perfection was tricky that way.

“It wouldn’t be horrible,” I said, repeating her words.

“But?”

“It wouldn’t be horrible, but right before we lost the signal, April and Bubbles heard gunfire.”

“Gunfire?”

“Shots were exchanged.” Tara finished lacing up her shoes. “You’d better put yours on,” she said, handing me an identical pair.

“Shots were exchanged?” I asked. “SHOTS were EXCHANGED?”

Tara moved quickly, and before I could prepare myself, she had me pressed up against the locker banks, her face close to mine. “Keep your voice down,” she said.

I hadn’t realized that my posh partner could sound quite like that. I could have fought her, and I almost did, but after the past forty-eight hours, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Yet.

“Shots were exchanged?” I whispered.

She nodded, eased the pressure off my body, and gestured with her head to the shoes. “You’d better put your shoes on,” she said for a second time.

I looked down at the shoes, but didn’t move to put them on. “Brooke and Zee were shot at, and we haven’t heard from them since?”

Tara nodded.

“And you want me to put on my shoes so that we can go practice our halftime routine?”

Tara nodded again.

Around me, all of the others were suiting up, preparing themselves to Go, Fight, Win!

“We’re not going to send in backup?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

Tara shook her head. “Our original orders were really specific. This is a two-person mission. No backup under any circumstances.”

“And if the Guys Upstairs said it, it must be done,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Forget the fact that they might not actually know everything. Forget the fact that Brooke and Zee might be in danger.” I gave Tara a look that should have pinned her to the wall the way her arms had pinned me.

“You can’t just leave them there. We’re supposed to be a team.”

Tara didn’t respond, but I wouldn’t let it go.

“We can’t just do nothing. What if they’re injured? What if the operative they went to rescue is injured?”

“I alerted Central when I called in about the disk.” Chloe spoke softly, appearing next to me. “They haven’t heard from Brooke either, but they’ve got tracers on their agent, and he’s on the move. Their statisticians think that, based on movement patterns, it’s likely that Brooke and Zee are with him.”

“And ‘likely’ is good enough for you?”

Personally, I was ready to take a little visit to Libya myself. It was totally and completely bizarre, but the feeling bubbling up inside of me was eerily similar to the one that made me bail Noah out of trouble again and again. Ginormous football players, international terrorists…what was the difference? Somebody was messing with something that was mine. That “loyalty” thing Zee had made such a big deal of was forcing me into action. Zee and Brooke were on my Squad. They were my… okay, maybe we weren’t exactly friends, but maybe we could have been. Or maybe we would be, but right now, that didn’t matter. I was ready to kick some butt.

“If Central hasn’t heard from them by tonight, they’ll send in some agents from the surrounding areas.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but Tara lifted a hand to touch my arm.

“They’d be able to reach them before we could,” she said.

“And if something happened to Brooke and Zee, our cover’s pretty much blown there. If they’ve captured two teenage operatives, none of us are going to be any less suspicious than Average Joe Spy.”

“So we just stay here and do nothing?” I asked. I hated doing nothing.

“No,” Tara said. “We cheer.”

Whether or not cheering was preferable to doing nothing was a matter of some debate. On the one hand, practice would distract me from my insane urge to hijack a helicopter and fly it to Libya. On the other, I hated our halftime routine with the passion of a thousand fiery burning suns. It was a toss-up, really.

“B to the A to the Y to the Port, Bayport Lions take the court! L to the I to the O-N-S; when we leave you’ll be a mess!”

My voice was loud and clear—and distinctly pissed off, but at least this time, I was getting the words right.

“Bay-port Li-ons.” I clapped my hands five times like a good little cheerleading newbie. “Bay-port Li-ons.” Clap, clap, clap-clap-clap.

By the time we got to the end of the routine the first time, my hands had gone numb from all the clapping, and they were turning a nice shade of borderline purple.

“It’s called cheerleading,” Chloe told me, rolling her eyes. “Not ‘angry punks with self-mutilating tendencies.’”

“Don’t clap so hard,” Lucy translated. “Cup your hands like this.” Clap, clap, clap-clap-clap. She demonstrated.

“See?”

“And smile,” Bubbles said. “Then you won’t sound so angry.”

“But I am angry.”

“Doesn’t matter,” April said. She might have been as new to the secret agent game as I was, but she was a veteran cheerleader. “It doesn’t matter if you just broke up with your boyfriend or if you’re fighting with someone else on your squad or if you’re cheering on a sprained ankle. When you perform, you smile. You’re loud, you’re proud, you’re in charge, and you’re on top of the world. Your team is the best. You’re the best, and while you’re cheering, that’s all that matters.”

Apparently, cheerleaders were supposed to be able to turn on the happy at the sound of a single “Ready? Okay!” Before I’d become one, it had never actually occurred to me that their smiles might be fake. They were on the top of the social chain. They were pretty and popular, and they had nothing to worry about except what color bloomers to wear under their cheer-skirts, and so they smiled. For the first time, I understood what Lucy had meant when she’d told me that cheerleaders were predisposed to being good spies. I could even understand why the Squad program might have been initiated in the first place. If you were the government, and you were looking for a group of athletic, beautiful teenage girls who were generally thought to be morons, but who were actually masters at manipulating their own emotions and showing the world (or the crowd, as the case may be) what they wanted it to see, there was a certain kind of person who fit the bill.

The kind who cheered.

“Let’s try it again,” Chloe said. “Without the anger management issues.” She paused and then said the words that, as captain, Brooke would normally have yelled to start us off. “Ready? Okay!”

I forced myself to think of this as practicing in a different way. I wasn’t practicing a halftime routine. I was practicing the innocent, ditzy look I’d give to an enemy operative before I clocked him with a seventy-mile-an-hour roundhouse. I was practicing keeping my emotions off my face and out of my voice. I was perfecting my cover, so that someday, I could be the one rescuing Brooke and Zee. Or Lucy. Or Tara, or any of the others.

“B to the A to the Y to the Port…”

Scarily enough, when I thought about things that way, I was good. My smile was broad, my eyes were bright, and my voice was nothing short of peppy.

Wherever Brooke and Zee were, I was just going to have to trust that they were okay. After all, when it came to the art of deception, I only had to look at the beaming faces around the room to come to the conclusion that I was completely surrounded by masters.

CHAPTER 29

Code Word: Sexy

After practice, I miraculously convinced the twins that I could handle my own hair and makeup for the party. They made me swear to exfoliate, and I had to sit through a tutorial on foundation, but it was a small price to pay for a little space and some time with my own laptop. After booting it up, I updated a few of my programs with bits and pieces that I’d picked up from the sparkly Squad laptop. Then I thumbed through my decrypting programs and wondered if there was anything potentially useful that the Big Guys, whoever they were, might not have access to.