And the floor beneath her feet gave way to nothing as Zee’s code activated the trapdoor mechanism on the emblem. Mrs. McCall disappeared, and then the emblem came back up into place, just as I crashed to the ground.
Remember when I said that some of the entrances to the Quad were less convenient than others?
This was one of them.
If you were standing within a six-foot radius of the center of the gym when the mechanism was engaged, you fell down and landed on the world’s largest trampoline in the middle of the Quad. Lucky for me, the floor mechanism was blindingly quick—otherwise, I would have fallen, too, and if I’d fallen with Psycho Mom and the bots, I’d be dead.
“They can’t get through the floor, can they?” I asked.
Brooke gave me a look. “Puh-lease,” she said. “You think we’re not equipped for nanoattacks? What do you think we are, amateurs?”
Her hands shaking, Brooke lowered the gun to her side even as she smirked in my general direction.
“Shouldn’t someone go after her?” I asked. “I would, but I’ve got this funny fondness of living.”
“Yeah,” Zee said, managing to keep a straight face. “You have a real love of life. It’s a major contributing factor to that sunny disposition of yours.”
Considering she’d just saved my life, I refrained from retorting.
“And we don’t need to go down there,” Brooke said. “The others are already there. Chloe’s working on something to catch the bots, and the others are all ambush-ready.”
“All of them?” I asked. Brooke nodded.
“How?” I opted to stick with simple, one-syllable questions. As the reality of the situation sank in, I couldn’t handle much more.
“Amelia took Connors-Wright down. We took her down. It was all very food chain–like.”
Zee picked up where Brooke left off. “Then we confiscated the weapon.”
“Did you realize it was a decoy?” I asked. After all, Brooke had never seen the real deal. Mrs. McCall had stolen it before she’d had the chance.
“Not at first,” Brooke said, “but then Connors-Wright came to and started babbling about how much he’d paid for the right to kill his father, and we realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t nearly as much as a professional would have charged for the real deal.”
“Of course, the fact that the payment was funneled through the Bayport PTA was a pretty big tip-off, too,” Zee added. “So we started thinking about what you said, about it being a rogue operative, and then it finally occurred to us to look at things from a different angle. Connors-Wright’s motivation for getting the nanobots was personal. What if the enemy operative’s was, too?”
“What if,” Brooke said, “that person just really didn’t like you?”
Oddly enough, this was apparently a really easy idea for Brooke to wrap her mind around.
“What if Kann was never the target?” Brooke continued. “What if you were? What if the whole purpose of stealing the weapon from Ross’s office was to discredit you?” Shepaused. “And then there was that minivan that tried to run you off the road …”
“If you were the target all along, and the enemy realized we’d left you alone …” She shrugged. “We hurried back.”
“What about Amelia?” I asked.
Brooke smiled. “Let’s just say that this time, my mom came through. Amelia won’t be playing any games any time soon.”
I couldn’t help but wonder how long it would be before Amelia would find her way back out into the world. Somehow, I didn’t think she was the type to roll over and die, just because she’d been apprehended. In fact, she’d probably just see this as the next stage of the game.
Beside me, Brooke looked down at the gun in her hand, as if realizing suddenly that it was there, and her skin went very pale. I tried to figure out a way to say thanks, but couldn’t quite form the words.
“You okay?” Zee asked Brooke. Apparently, our profiler had already come to the conclusion that I was going to be just fine. Forget the fact that I’d almost died …
“I’m not,” Brooke said, the gun still in her hand. “But I will be. My mom was right. I had to get over the gun thing eventually.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold up there, I thought. There were lots of take-home lessons from what had just happened—for instance, “Never underestimate the PTA” and “Don’t put Toby on banner duty”—but none of those lessons involved even the hint of the suggestion that Brooke’s mom had been right about anything.
I opened my mouth to say this, but Zee shook her head. Ibit back the words and almost choked on them, but figured that Zee had her reasons. She always did.
