I added this entire conversation to my list of reasons why cheerleaders were actually freakishly suited to life as operatives. Our cover even worked to explain injuries incurred in the line of duty.
For a little while, Tara and I were silent, but I finally had to ask. “So what have you come in here for?”
“Last time, it was a fractured pelvis.”
“Ouch. Somebody drop you?”
“Nope. Herkie.”
I tried to figure out how exactly one could fracture a pelvis doing a cheer jump, but Tara just shook her head, a wry smile on her face. “Don’t ask.”
We fell back into silence then, and I made a mental list of questions I’d ask my partner once I was in the clear to talk about the more classified aspects of our lives, starting with whether or not she’d ever been injured as an operative, and concluding with how exactly she’d managed to get me from the parking lot to her car, presumably without anyone noticing.
“Toby?”
Tara nudged me when Nora called my name. “Let’s go.”
By the time we were situated in a small exam room, I was half-convinced that I was still dreaming. Just to make sure that I was awake, I looked down to confirm that my clothes had not suddenly disappeared.
Still there.
Tara took a seat on the exam table and I did the same. After a moment, she took an iPod out of her backpack and offered me one earpiece.
“Nora’s great about getting us in quickly,” she said, “but the doctors usually take forever.”
I accepted the earpiece somewhat suspiciously. On the whole, I had not been impressed by the musical preferences of my cheerleading cohorts, and there was at least a five percent chance that she’d make me listen to the words to some new cheer we were getting ready to learn.
Instead, I watched as Tara hit several buttons, and a few seconds later, Brooke’s voice came through our earpieces, loud and clear.
“Took you guys long enough. How’s the security reading on your communicator, Tare?”
“There was a wait,” Tara explained. “And it’s good.”
I processed this conversation and then spoke up myself. I had no idea where the microphone was on this not-really-an-iPod, but I decided to go on the assumption that Brooke would hear my words.
“Yes, I’m okay, Brooke. Thank you for asking. Your concern is sweet, but really, you don’t need to worry about little old me.”
“If you weren’t okay,” Brooke said, “you wouldn’t be in the emergency room.”
Her logic seemed counterintuitive, but given the conversation I’d had earlier with Tara about how procedure was different for serious injuries, Brooke’s words made sense.
“So what’s up?” Tara asked, careful to keep our side of the conversation generic and innocuous enough that if the doctor walked in, he wouldn’t notice anything out of the norm.
“No word yet from the special unit the Big Guys sent in to check out the blast,” Brooke informed us.
“I can’t believe they wouldn’t even let me look at it!” That was Lucy, speaking from somewhere in the background. “Totally unfair.”
There were few things our weapons expert loved more than a good explosion.
“Sorry, Luce,” Brooke said. “I tried.”
I thought I heard a note of strain in Brooke’s voice and inferred that trying—and failing—wasn’t something Brooke was overly fond of. If she’d tried to get Lucy in on the explosion recon and hadn’t been able to, that meant that the Big Guys had forbidden it, which meant that maybe Brooke wasn’t exactly as in charge of this mission as she had been this morning.
Knowing her as I did, I could imagine just how well that was going over.
“So how did everyone else’s thing go?” Tara asked, still keeping with the quality vagueness.
“You know how when you called in Toby’s injury, you mentioned that you’d found a chip in Kann’s phone?” Brooke asked.
