Killer Spirit (The Squad 2)

I turned the bottle over in my hands, hoping for instructions. No such luck. The fact that the superconditioner was in an unmarked container didn’t surprise me. Half of the twins’ hair products were acquired on some kind of beauty black market that I tried not to ask too many questions about. Really, it was better that I didn’t know.

“Okay,” I told myself by way of a pep talk. “You can do this.” I’d been drafted for the Squad because of my ability to deal with codes of both the electronic and written variety. Pseudo-incomprehensible conditioning instructions should have been a piece of cake.

After about five more minutes, I gave up hope of deciphering the third line of the instructions and decided that my best bet was to wet my hair, slap the goop on it, leave it there for “three episodes of Laguna Beach on DVD,” and then rinse it out.

I stood up, stuck my head in the sink and turned on the faucet. The water was warm on my head, and as I soaked my hair, I couldn’t help but think that it didn’t feel like my hair. It was soft and smelled like flowers instead of generic all-in-one shampoo/conditioner. In short, this really wasn’t my hair, despite the seemingly contradictory fact that it happened to be growing out of my head.

Once my hair was soaked, I turned off the faucet, sat back down, and counted backward from three as I unscrewed the top to the bottle.

“Three, two, one…here goes nothing.”

The conditioner smelled strongly of mint, and just breathing it in had me blinking back tears. That was some potent stuff. I briefly considered the possibility that the twins were experimenting on me, and then decided against it. Of all of the cheerleaders, I was the one most likely to voluntarily shave my head, and the twins were responsible for making sure that I didn’t commit hair felonies. Anything they gave me was guaranteed to make me girlier and more starletesque, so the chances of the two of them experimenting on me were really slim to none.

Desperate to protect myself from the scent of the treatment, I wrapped a towel around my head and went back into my room in search of a distraction. Out of habit, I ended up at my computer, but instead of launching an internet browser, I pulled up a Word document I’d been working on for the last few weeks and added a new line of text.

The twins don’t know anything.

“And,” I said under my breath, unable to ignore the tingling in my nostrils, “they might be trying to kill me.”

As I skimmed the rest of the file, I wondered why I was even reading it again. I knew what it said. I’d written every word myself, and I thought about it almost every day. This document—not even a half-page long—contained everything I’d managed to find out about Jack’s uncle. His name was Alan Peyton. He’d grown up in Bayport and was a year older than Jack’s dad. He wasn’t listed in any of the Peyton firm’s official annual reports. Chloe acted sketchy when I hinted that I’d figured something out. None of the other girls had reacted at all.

And that was it. Given that I was part of an elite operative team, I probably should have been able to find out more, but short of hacking into the Big Guys’ mainframe (which I was pretty sure would be frowned upon), there wasn’t much I could do besides talk to the others and run a Google search on the name. It wasn’t like I needed to know; I just wanted to. I wasn’t concerned about the connection. If I’d figured it out, there was pretty much zero chance that it had somehow evaded the CIA’s notice. I mean, good old Uncle Alan left messages on the firm’s answering machines. That wasn’t exactly lying low.

Since I wasn’t worried about the connection, I could only conclude that my fascination with it was based on two things. The first was the fact that I viewed the world in terms of patterns, and the inner workings of this particular family tree didn’t fit any I’d ever seen. This whole situation just did not compute. If Jack’s dad had been older, and the uncle had been younger, then maybe I could have made sense of it, but I just couldn’t figure out why the heir to the family business would dedicate his life to tearing it down. The second factor in my fascination, as much as I hated to admit it, had to do with Jack, and the way that on some level, I couldn’t help but wonder where he would fall on the family tree. Figure out the pattern, figure out Jack.

I’d officially spent way too much time around Zee, because before I’d joined the Squad, I hadn’t analyzed my own motives nearly this much. I shut the Word document and pushed all thoughts of Jack out of my mind.

Great, I thought, now I need a distraction from my distraction. I got up from my desk and started looking for something that wouldn’t have me analyzing my subconscious desires, and I found it under my bed.

It was a plain, vanilla-colored notebook, with no title and no decoration on the cover. Of everything that the Squad had given me, this book was the lone item that wasn’t sparkly, lacy, or ridiculously brightly colored. For the first time since Lucy had handed it to me, I opened the book.

It was supposed to be some kind of history of the Squad program, but since Lucy had provided me with the Cliffs-Notes version, I’d never read it for myself. As I flipped through the pages, I smiled. If I’d realized the book was written in code, I probably would have paid a lot more attention to it a lot earlier.

On the surface, the scrapbook seemed straightforward enough: pictures and pieces of fabric and neatly written paragraphs about games, halftime routines, and private jokes. It was at least twenty-five or thirty years old, and as I flipped the pages, I couldn’t help but notice how cheer fashions had changed over the years. The skirts were significantly shorter now, and half of our tops revealed midriff. Our plethora of cheer uniforms (because we wore our uniforms every game day and couldn’t repeat outfits in a given week) boasted more eclectic styles, too.

I paused, wondering if Zee could somehow reverse the fashion programming the twins had obviously crammed into my head somewhere along the way.

“Look at the code,” I told myself sternly. “Not the clothes.”

I scanned through all of the written material, looking for letters that were bolded or tilted or written in a slightly different script than the others. That was the Squad low-maintenance encoding technique of choice.

I found nothing.

Okay, I thought. This could get interesting.

I tried looking for words that felt out of place in context with the others on the page. If I could identify at least one word that had been chosen for a property other than its meaning, I might be able to pick up on some pattern or trick to it. The third letter of the third word on the third page, combined with the fourth letter on the fourth page, or something like that.