Spy Ski School (4 page)

“At least Elizabeth will still be around,” I suggested, meaning Elizabeth Pasternak, Mike's girlfriend and the hottest girl at my old school.

“I broke up with her,” Mike said.

“What? Why?”

Mike shrugged. “I just wasn't that into her.”

That's how cool Mike was.
He
broke up with the most popular girl at school, not the other way around.

Or, at least, he was
claiming
he'd broken up with her. I wondered if Elizabeth had really ended it—and if Mike was actually angry about
that
, rather than me.

But then, there was a good chance he was truly angry at me. After all, if Mike had treated me the way I'd been treating him—even though I wasn't doing it on purpose—I would have been upset too.

We passed some of the only other people dumb enough to be outside on a freezing day: a young couple, probably in their twenties. The girl had green eyes and short dark brown hair, while the guy had brown eyes, blond hair, and a knit ski cap. Both were wearing blue jeans and snow boots. The girl's hands were tucked deep into the pockets of a pink winter jacket, while the guy had leather gloves with a white paint stain on the thumb.

Normally, I wouldn't have noticed any of this, but I was working hard to improve my memory skills. It had been three days since I'd been assigned my mission, and to my surprise, most of my prep work had been memory exercises. It wasn't nearly as glamorous as learning martial arts or bomb
defusion, but the Hales claimed it was even more important. “A keen memory is the best weapon an agent can have,” Alexander had explained. “Well, besides a gun. Or a knife. And maybe a hand grenade. Okay, technically, there's a
lot
of weapons that are better than your memory, but memory's still awfully important. Because . . . Oh, nuts. I forgot what I was going to say.”

At this point, Cyrus had groaned and told me, “If you actually succeed in getting close to Leo Shang, you'll have to remember
everything
you see and hear.”

“You can't just give me a little spy camera and some sort of recording device?” I'd asked.

“If Leo Shang catches you with either of those things, he'll kill you,” Cyrus had told me.

This was a very convincing argument. I didn't want to be dead, so I was beefing up my memory. It had turned out to be far more work than I'd expected. I had been pulled out of my regular classes and placed in an intensive memory immersion course. For hours each day, I'd memorized random strings of numbers and decks of cards. My instructor, Professor Richmond, had walked me down the city streets and then peppered me with questions about everything I'd seen: What model car was parked closest to the corner? What type of earrings had a mail carrier been wearing? How many people had failed to clean up after their dogs? It had seemed
almost impossible at first, but I was already getting better at it, picking up things I never would have noticed about my surroundings before. Like how everyone else at the zoo was dressed.

“Why are you staring at those people?” Mike asked me.

I still needed a bit of work on not being so obvious, however.

“I thought I recognized them,” I said quickly.

Mike stopped walking near a park bench where an old woman sat (black overcoat, red earmuffs, big hairy mole on her chin) and fixed me with a hard stare. “Have you recognized a lot of people at the zoo today? Because you've been staring at everyone we've passed.”

“No, I haven't,” I said, even though I had. It occurred to me that Mike had quite strong powers of observation himself.

“You have so. You've been acting weird all day. Even weirder than usual.”

“What do you mean, ‘weirder than usual'?”

Mike began ticking things off on his fingers. “The last time you went to Adventureland Mini Golf, you took after some suspicious guy and ended up burning the whole place down. On the one day you were back at school with me, you beat up Trey Patterson and three of his buddies and then vanished. And the one time you told me to sneak onto St. Smithen's to spring you for a party, I got tackled by a
commando squad. They claimed it was only a training exercise, but I
know
that was a bunch of bull.”

“I realize that all
seems
kind of weird,” I replied. “But there's a good explanation for everything.”

“Yeah. Something strange is going on at that science school. And you're wrapped up in it.”

“Er . . . ,” I said, and then had no idea what to add. Mike had caught me completely off guard by nailing the answer.

Mike waited for two other zoo visitors to pass us—a mother (heavy tan parka, hiking boots, librarian glasses) and son (blue Batman jacket, snow boots, a river of snot running from his nose)—and then whispered, “They're experimenting on you, aren't they?”

I'd been preparing myself to be accused of being a spy, so now I was caught off guard again. “What?”

“I mean, it's a science school, but there's all this secrecy around it,” Mike explained. “So whatever they're up to . . . it's not kosher, right?”

“Um,” I said, not quite sure where this was going. “Maybe.”

“So what do they do to you?” Mike asked, growing intrigued. “Inject you with all sorts of weird chemicals to give you incredible martial arts skills one day and hyper-attentiveness the next?”

I was annoyed that Mike thought I was a human guinea
pig, but then I remembered what was known as “Delman's Law of Opportune Aliases”: If someone mistakenly assumes something about you, it's much easier to simply let them believe it than to make up something else entirely.

So I said, “Yes. I'm a human guinea pig.”

“I knew it!” Mike crowed, so loudly he startled a passing zookeeper (gray hair, bushy mustache, coveralls smeared with what looked disturbingly like animal poop). Then he lowered his voice again and said, “This explains everything. All your screwball behavior.”

“I guess,” I said.

“Even the commando squad,” Mike pointed out. “Because all these experiments must be super top secret, right? I'll bet the Pentagon's involved, cooking up stuff that'll turn even guys like you into mega-warriors.”

I should have just said yes. But I didn't. I was growing too upset with the direction this conversation had taken. Although I was under orders to protect the secrecy of spy school, I hated that Mike thought I needed a secret formula to turn me into a warrior. When I'd defeated Trey Patterson—and SPYDER—I'd done it all by myself.

So I asked, “You've suspected this the whole time I was at St. Smithen's?”

“Well, not the whole time. I thought it was just your standard dorky science school for a while. But after the
commando attack, I got a little suspicious. Why do you ask?”

“Because when I came back to our old school a few months ago, you told all those girls I was training to be a spy.”

“I did?” Mike asked blankly.

“Yes. You told Elizabeth and Kate Grant and Chloe Appel . . .”

“Oh, right! I did! To impress them. I mean, I couldn't tell them you were a human science experiment. That would have weirded them out. To be honest,
I'm
a little weirded out by it. You're not radioactive or anything, are you?”

“No,” I said curtly. “So you
never
thought I was training to be a spy?”

Mike burst into laughter. “You? A spy? That's ridiculous!”

I decided not to push the issue any further. I'd already violated a dozen secrecy protocols. And frankly, the direction of the conversation had grown even more embarrassing. “Yeah,” I said, faking some weak laughter myself. “Imagine
me
being a spy.”

“You'd be the worst.” Mike snickered. “If anyone gave you a gun, you'd probably shoot yourself in the foot.”

I frowned. Not because Mike was being insulting, but because he was right. On my first day at the school artillery range, I'd almost blown off my own toes. I still didn't like carrying a gun on a mission. Luckily for me, no one else liked me carrying a gun either.

Mike's
laughter died down as we reached the elephant house. One of the elephants was actually braving the cold (chipped left tusk, three notches in right ear, mud all over its legs). Mike stopped to watch it. “So what's this ski trip really about, then? Are you getting some sort of secret medication to improve your balance? Or to make you faster? Or to keep you from getting cold? That'd be pretty cool. You'd never need mittens!”

“I don't know,” I said. “They never tell us anything ahead of time.”

“Any chance I could tag along?”

“You mean, to ski with us?”

“Yeah. And to get superpowers.”

I looked at Mike curiously. “You mean, you think being a guinea pig would be cool?”

“Better than cool! You wiped out Trey Patterson and all his pals at school. That was amazing! Can anyone get into this program, or does everyone have to be a genius like you?”

“I'm not a genius, Mike. . . .”

“Yes, you are. You're like Einstein when it comes to math. And I know no one gave you some super-secret formula to make that happen.”

I found myself smiling. The direction of the conversation had gotten much better. “I don't know if that had anything to do with me being picked. . . .”

“Well, could you put in a good word for me, at least? So I could transfer?”

“You mean, you'd want to leave regular school?”

“Yeah. Middle school sucks.”

“But you're popular!”

“Big whoop. It's still middle school. It's not like anyone's doing any top-secret experiments on me.”

“That's not always so awesome. . . .”

“Are they working on anything with radioactive spiders? So that you'll be able to shoot webs out of your wrists like Spider-Man?”

“Er . . . no. And so you know, spiders don't shoot webs from their wrists anyhow. If someone really shot webs like a spider, they'd do it from their butt.”

“Oh,” Mike said, sounding daunted. But only for a second. “See? I said you were smart. I'll bet there's lots of other cool stuff they're working on. Like super-strength and X-ray vision and teleportation and the ability to stay clean forever and never have to bathe.”

“Why would the government be interested in having people stop bathing?”

“Water conservation. Plus, it'd be awesome to never have to shower again. So win-win for everyone. Dude, you have to get me into this school. . . .”

“I'll try, but . . .”

“Or at least see if you can get me on the ski trip. If cost is an issue, I could maybe even work out my own place to stay. I have an uncle in Colorado. . . .”

“I'll see what I can do,” I told him, although I didn't mean it. Because there was no way I could get Mike enrolled in a top-secret government program that didn't actually exist. I felt bad about lying to him, although part of me was strangely happy as well. Not about the lying, but the fact that for once, Mike was jealous of me, rather than the other way around. In our entire lives, Mike had been jealous of me only one other time, and that was when he had mistakenly believed I was dating Erica Hale. (A misunderstanding I had never bothered to set straight.)

I was so distracted by all this, I had forgotten about being hyper-attentive. Which was a big mistake. Because I'd missed something important.

And it was going to come back to haunt me in a big way on my mission.

The Ski Haüs

Vail, Colorado

December 26

1530 hours

The town of Vail sat
at the bottom of a valley in the Rocky Mountains, smushed between the base of the ski mountain and Interstate 70. The small downtown had a German theme—probably to evoke the European history of skiing—with covered bridges, buildings straight out of a Grimms' fairy tale, and lots of businesses with unnecessary umlauts in their names. Around this was a sprawl of expensive luxury hotels with fancy spas and heated swimming pools and attentive staffs who catered to the guests' every whim.

Unfortunately, we weren't staying in one of those hotels.

Instead, we were staying in the only motel in Vail, the Ski Haüs. It was a ramshackle one-story building with a crooked line of rooms that all opened onto a parking lot, and it sat on the opposite side of the freeway from the ski area, so close to the on-ramp that the whole place shook when trucks rumbled past. The Ski Haüs had been built back when Vail was founded in 1969 and the owners hadn't sunk another penny into it since. The beds were lumpy, the pipes were balky, the bathrooms smelled funky, and cold air seeped through the cheap windows, rendering the entire place as cold as a meat locker. And yet it was still nicer than our dorms back at spy school.

The only real problem was that we had to share the rooms, rather than having them to ourselves. Which meant I had three roommates: Chip Schacter, Jawaharlal O'Shea, and Warren Reeves. Chip, being two years older, was the biggest, toughest, and sneakiest of us. Jawa was the smartest and the best athlete. Warren wasn't really a very good spy at all. I'd invited him along only because Zoe said that if I didn't, we'd never hear the end of it. (He
was
pretty talented at camouflage, though. It came naturally to him. He was wearing a white outfit that blended in with the snow so well, we'd already lost him twice in the motel parking lot.)