Perfect Cover (The Squad 1)

Finally, Brooke turned to address a comment (or, as I could already wager was more likely, an order) to me. “Come back to the gym after sixth period. Starting today, you’ll be excused from seventh for practice.”

No more gym class with a neofascist softball coach yelling in my face? I could learn to live with that.

“Britt, Tiff, you guys can Stage Five her while the rest of us debrief April this afternoon.”

“Stage Five?” This time, I couldn’t keep the question in. If anyone was going to Stage Five me, someone sure as hell was going to tell me what a Stage Five was first.

“A Stage Five makeover,” Brittany said, tossing her too shiny, too long, too gorgeous blond hair over her shoulder.

Tiffany leaned forward to examine my eyebrows. “Better make that a Stage Six.”

Tara reached out and lightly touched my shoulder just in time to keep me from leaping at Tiff. I’d had just about enough of the criticism twins. “Fourteen minutes,” Tara said. “We’d better get going.” With the ease of a skilled diplomat, she steered me away from the table, the twins, and Brooke’s mouth, which was already issuing new orders at top speed and high volume.

“You’ll get used to it,” Tara promised.

“The twins or Mein Kampf Barbie?” I nodded toward Brooke.

“Both.”

I followed her lead and we approached one of the far walls.

Tara gestured to a small, squarish panel. “This is a touch pad,” she said. “You place your hand on it, like this.” She pressed her palm firmly against the square. A small flash of light rose from the bottom of the panel to the top, like a wave of concentrated laser beams.

“Let me guess,” I said. “It scans your fingerprints?”

Tara nodded. “Among other things.”

“What other things?”

The door slid itself open, and Tara stepped through it. “You’ll see,” she told me. Tentatively, I followed her through to another large room, trying to prepare myself for everything from nuclear warheads to spirit sticks.

Instead, all I saw was another large, mostly bare white room.

“This is the guidepost,” Tara said, walking to stand in the center of the room. “From here, you can go any direction. The girls’ locker room is directly above us. Cars and bikes are downstairs. Tunnel on the left leads to the helipad. Tunnel on the right will take you out to the woods.”

“Bayport High has a helipad?”

Tara smiled a real smile for the first time since I’d met her. “There isn’t much that Bayport High doesn’t have,” she said. “Most people think we have ridiculously wonderful facilities because we’re such a wealthy school district, but really, you’d be surprised what having a secret government project housed beneath your school does for funding.”

“And no one thinks it’s strange that we have a helipad?” I asked.

Tara answered my question with a question. “Does anyone think it’s strange that we have four gyms, an Olympicsized training pool, a near-gourmet cafeteria, the biggest theater in a hundred-mile radius, and one of the most comprehensive library collections in the state?”

“Point taken.” Because now that she mentioned it, Bayport’s facilities were pretty extreme, even for a school district as wealthy as this one. If I hadn’t ever questioned that, there was a decent chance that no one did.

“The guidepost also serves as a loading center,” Tara said, smoothly moving on.

I looked around and didn’t see anything to load. Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.

“WEAPONS, OKAY!” Tara switched into cheerleader drive so fast I almost choked on my own spit. Her yell was loud and singsongy, and there was no mistaking the cheesy grin plastered to her face: she was one “Go Lions” away from a halftime show.

“What was that?” I asked, but the sound of my words was completely drowned out by the whirring of the shifting walls. Panels flipped, walls moved, and an instant after Tara had spoken (or rather, cheered), the entire left side of the room was filled with rows and rows of guns, knives, and…

“Bobby socks?”

“We rarely carry traditional weapons,” Tara said. “You’d be surprised how many ways you can incapacitate a grown man using a pair of bobby socks.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Bobby sock grenades, bobby sock handcuffs, chloroform bobby socks…”

“You know that you people are seriously sick, right?”

Tara shrugged. “You know that you’re one of us now, right?” she countered.

“Is this it?” I asked, scanning the weapons on the wall and avoiding her question. “Guns, knives, bobby socks, ribbons, lip gloss…I don’t even want to know what that thong is for.”

“Don’t worry,” Tara retorted lightly. “That information is classified.”

The sad thing was, I couldn’t tell whether she was joking or not.

“As for the other part of your question,” she continued, “we have entire storerooms and laboratories dedicated to equipment and weaponry, but if you need it for a mission, you’ll find it here before you leave.” She paused, and her eyes held mine. “Lucy and Chloe are better at their jobs than you probably think.”

“It wouldn’t be hard.” The words left my mouth, and though she didn’t glare at my cheerleader-directed animosity the way any of the others would have, I was briefly overcome by the realization that she probably knew eighteen ways to kill a person involving a bright orange thong. Showing more discretion than usual, I changed the subject. “How’d you get the weapons to appear?”

“Simple,” Tara answered evenly, and then without warning, she let out another cheer-yell. “WEAPONS, LAST TIME!”

More whirring, and the panels rotated and moved until the room settled back into its normal configuration.

“So ‘weapons, okay’ brings them out, and ‘weapons, last time’ puts them away?” It was meant as a rhetorical question, but Tara answered it anyway.

“No,” she said patiently. “‘WEAPONS, OKAY!’ takes them out.” Sure enough, at her call, the whirring began again. “‘Weapons, okay’ won’t do anything.”

“You have to yell it?” I asked.

Tara shook her head. “You have to cheer it. The voice recognition software is programmed to read both your voice identification and a combination of your tone, volume, and cadence. It’s an added security measure. It’s hard to cheer under duress. This way, if someone’s trying to force you to reveal our weapons supply, you probably couldn’t do it even if you tried.” She tucked a strand of stray hair behind her ear. “Your turn. And remember, don’t just say the words. Cheer them.”