Friday, April 28

  Location: YMPA (various)

  Operation: Survive

  Time: Unknown

  I was in disbelief.

  At that exact second I was sprinting through the academy with four full-grown agents pounding after me, and a tide of students surging to the walls, shouting, filming, and narrating like they were live-streaming an estatic nature documentary. It was an audience I had never imagined I’d earn—and definitely not for this.

  I took the central staircase two steps at a time. Students scattered from my path; backpacks swung, trays clattered to the floor, someone yelled my name like it might slow me down. The agents were right on me, boots a metronome of doom. I cut left at the landing and tore down the long east hall. Voices rose behind me—warnings, insults, “this kid is cooked,” all the encouraging classics.

  A quick glance over my shoulder showed them clearly now: the closest was a bald caucasian guy with a runner’s build and zero humor in his face; beside him, an African-American officer with tight waves and eyes that missed nothing; behind them, two Latino agents, both with straight black hair, moving in sync like they’d trained together for years. No suits, no Hollywood trench coats—just practical gear, tactical vests and duty belts, the kind of kit SWAT would wear if they’d lost the helmets and the dramatic lighting.

  I hit the end of the corridor and shouldered through a door that should’ve been locked. It wasn’t. Poor door. Poor me. Poor renovation crew.

  I burst into what used to be Mr. Drails’s office—a construction zone now—with ladders, drop cloths, toolboxes, and three very offended workers staring at me like I was a tornado they hadn’t ordered. I didn’t stop long enough to apologize. The far wall was mostly glass, and momentum plus fear made engineering choices for me. I braced, tightened my core, and crashed through.

  Glass screamed. Air grabbed me. I hit a semi-truck below but my Perk had bloomed a heartbeat before impact, so the landing felt like colliding with a stack of overstuffed couches instead of a truck grille. Pain flared and faded. I rolled, came up on a knee, and sucked in a breath that tasted like dust and panic.

  They wouldn’t follow me that way—not immediately. Thirty seconds, maybe a minute, before the net dropped again. I needed cover.

  This level wasn’t student space anymore. It was the real organization’s spine—an abrupt shift from academy to agency. You could see it in the faces, in the gait of the people moving between buildings. No uniforms like ours, just the quiet confidence of working agents who’d seen enough to keep their voices low. Heads turned as I sprinted across the courtyard. Curiosity rippled outward: a kid moving like a loose firework, agents pivoting to track him.

  Where? Where?

  Two semitrailers idled near a loading strip, the heat shimmer rising off their hoods. Nearby, a cluster of matte-black transports squatted like beetles, each ringed by a yellow band that circled the body. Military style, but cleaner, as if the paint job itself outranked me. I dove behind the nearer trailer and pressed my back to steel. My chest heaved. Every inhale scraped my throat raw. For three blessed heartbeats no one saw me.

  Then all the surrounding heads snapped at once, the way lions’ heads snap when a gazelle stumbles. The truckers looked startled, then calculating. The nearest agents shouted. Someone pointed. The spell broke; the hunt resumed.

  They came at me as a wave. A sharp crack rang; a round smacked the trailer near my shoulder, spraying paint and rust. Another thudded into rubber with a dull whunk. I scrambled up the truck’s steps, hauled onto the bumper, then the hood, boots skidding on heat-baked metal. Two agents leapt and grabbed the grill, hauling themselves after me. Ahead, open ground ran like a dare toward the glass tower on the other side of the courtyard—a sheer face of reflective panels that climbed forever.

  No path left. No path right. Only through.

  I didn’t think. My brain had already overloaded and flipped to instinct. I filled my legs with everything my Perk would give and launched into the air. For a weightless breath the world went silent, and then glass gave way with a crystalline shout. I tumbled into an office and slid across carpet, a constellation of shards pattering around me like hail.

  If I had to guess—completely unprofessionally—I’d say I’d jumped to around floor thirty-two. Give or take a traumatic foot.

  This building belonged to the same organism, just a different organ—sleek corridors, soundproofed doors, frosted partitions. The alarms hadn’t caught up yet, but the people had. Agents moved at me from both ends. I juked left, then right, weaving past reaching hands. One man lunged from a doorway and I barely cleared his grip. Another stepped out ahead of me on the stairwell landing. I didn’t bother with polite. I kicked him square in the chest, felt him fold around my boot, and watched him tumble backward down the stairwell like a bad dream.

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  I took the steps three at a time. A loop of cord—no, a lasso—whistled from above and bit around my ribs. The yank stole my breath; my feet went out; I slammed down the next flight on my side. The world flashed white, then hot, then white again.

  When my vision steadied, she was there: Principal Renner, at the top of the stairs, framed by the sterile light. Her silhouette was dagger-straight.

  “Alpha, we have him,” she said into her mic. My pupils fought the glare. Everything had the overexposed look of a bad photo, and my eyes rebelled by closing. My body refused to open them for a while.

  For a blissful second I thought I was at a waterpark—the cool hiss, the rushing patter, the echo of tile. Then memory corrected me: that waterpark had been six years ago, and I hadn’t left with a concussion.

  My eyes snapped open to a waterfall up close. A gallon—at least—of cold water crashed over my head and shoulders. I yelped, sputtered, gasped. Droplets stippled the floor in wild constellations.

  The floor was tile. White. Yet dirty. And yes—this was a bathroom.

  Resourceful? Sure. Humane? Debatable. Were they hoping the smell would break me? Joke’s on them; it only smelled like sterilizer and plumbing. The bad part was the humidity, a clammy blanket around my face.

  “Yes. You’re in the bathroom,” a man said dryly.

  I blinked water from my lashes. Agent Lloyd White sat on a folding chair opposite me, neat as a sermon. Principal Renner stood to his right, arms folded, expression a thesis on controlled fury.

  “Kind of figured that out,” I croaked. “Why are there two of you?”

  “We each have our own questions,” White said. His tone did not invite banter. “Now, although child abuse is a very sensitive topic nowadays, I will not hesitate to break you enough to get what I need.”

  I swallowed. Hard. Silence settled like extra weight. Principal Renner’s gaze felt like it could etch glass.

  “So, can I—” I began.

  “Based on intel from one of our brave students,” Renner said, crisp as a gavel, “you attempted to assassinate Mari French.”

  “No, no, no, no,” I blurted, lunging forward as far as the chair let me. “I did not try to assassinate her. I promise on my life I did not.”

  “That’s hard to believe, y’know,” Renner said evenly. “According to what he saw, you were on the academy’s food level, Mari caught you, and you nearly killed her with one of our own MP weapons.”

  “Looks very bad,” White added, almost conversational.

  “Definitely is bad,” Renner said.

  “But—listen.” I forced my voice steady. “You’ve had moments where things aren’t what they look like. I know you have.”

  White inclined his head. “I have. That’s why you get a minute to explain.”

  “Oh.” My brain skidded. “Okay.”

  “Now fifty-five seconds,” he said without looking at his watch.

  “Okay, okay—Jamal was down there stealing pastries, alright? I wasn’t following him for the food. We had suspicions about—”

  The bathroom door opened. The scent of hallway air broke the sterile bubble. Mr. Drails stepped in wearing a black-and-brown tuxedo that somehow made him look both formal and ready for a fist fight. Two older men in gray suits followed. Drails’s gaze swept the tiles, took in the situation, and landed on me with an expression that mixed disgust for the setting with concern for the thick-headed bum in the chair.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, voice low and dangerous as he approached. “Why is Connor here?”

  “Because he tried to assassinate Mari French,” White said smoothly. “She’s a second-year agent.”

  Drails exhaled through his nose. “I doubt he attempted to assassinate anyone,” he said. “But even if you believe that, why are we conducting an interrogation in a bathroom?”

  “Because he might be the mole,” Principal Renner said, and the word might had never worked so hard to sound like is.

  My eyes blew wide. The whole mess tumbled in my head, finding the steepest path downhill. “Whoa, whoa, whoa—I didn’t do anything.” My voice cracked on the anything.

  “You talk a lot for a suspect,” White said mildly, turning back to me. “It is rather convenient that you were present on the mission whose entire point was to get Lowman caught.”

  “Principal Renner assigned me that—” I began.

  “Hush.” White didn’t raise his voice; the word simply closed the door on mine. “He mentions the MP system—knowledge that should have been internal—but they knew within days of launch. And I’m willing to bet Malachi wasn’t the intended target. It was Mari.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head hard enough to throw drops from my hair. “If Mari were the target, she’d be top of the leaderboard—she’s visible. Everyone would have noticed.”

  “Or that’s what you wanted,” White said. “Distract us with the obvious. While everyone focused on Malachi, you would remove Mari quietly. Shift the threat. Evaporate the witness.”

  “My son is allegedly a TSA asset now?” Mr. Drails asked, voice flat. “An assassin? The son I recruited myself?”

  “Recruiting him doesn’t preclude a later switch,” White said. If he felt the gravity of the accusation, his face didn’t show it.

  “But Principal Renner assigned him the mission,” Drails said. “The team was selected randomly.”

  “With respect, Captain Drails,” Renner said, the edge on respect sharp enough to shave with, “we should remove our feelings from this.”

  Drails’s jaw worked once. Then he stepped closer to me, hands on his hips, the tuxedo suddenly looking like armor. “Connor. Talk.”

  So I did. I told them everything I could, clean and quick. That we’d flagged Jamal as a possible link because of his orbit around Malachi. That I followed him to the food level. That what I found was him boosting pastries like a raccoon with a sweet tooth. That Mari arrived, misread the scene, and moved to report me. That if she did that, Jamal would learn I was on him and everything we’d built would implode. That I panicked. That the mallet—a thing I barely trusted—was the only lever I had in that second. That it connected harder than I meant. That she flew. That I froze.

  Renner glanced to White. White glanced to Drails and then to the two men behind him, who had been silent long enough to seem like furniture. Their eyes said they were not.

  “So,” Principal Renner said at last, “what intel did you get?”