The Doublecross (15 page)

“Oh, no, I don't . . . I don't think it's The League,” I said, trying to keep the visible relief off my face. “Maybe one of my friends planted it in here as a joke.”

Kennedy's face twisted, and I could tell she knew this was a lie but didn't want to come right out and say,
But, Hale, you don't really have any friends anymore
. Instead she stared at the jewelry and clenched her small hands into fists.

“Well, if that's the case, I'm reporting them. They can't keep acting like this—”

“No! No, don't report it.” I was torn between horror that she might report the bracelet, and humiliation that my little sister was now trying to stand up to bullies for me. This was a new level of lame.

Kennedy put her hands on her hips. I could tell she wanted to get much louder, perhaps even yell, but she didn't dare while stranger ears were listening. “Hale, they
bugged our house.
What if they
are
from The League, and this is how they got Mom and Dad?”

“Why were you going through the linen closet anyway?”

Kennedy gave me a sour look but then cracked. She ducked her head to the ground and seemed to shrink before
my eyes. “I didn't want to go snooping around in Mom and Dad's room, since it smells like Ms. Elma now and that freaks me out. But the blankets in the closet still . . . They still smell like Mom, and so . . . wait.” She froze. Then she lifted an eyebrow. “I never told you I found them in the linen closet.”

I exhaled.
Well. Way to be a great spy, Hale. You just burned yourself to your little sister.

“Come over here,” I said. Kennedy and I walked to the bed. We sat down on the edge together, and I reached back to pick up the jewelry set. “You don't need to be afraid of these. I put them in the linen closet.”

“
You
bugged our house?” Kennedy asked.

“No. I was hiding them in our house. I didn't want Ms. Elma to find them. I didn't want you to find them either, but I figured you would if I left them in my bedroom. So . . . don't freak out, but—you're right. These do belong to The League.”

Her eyes widened. She was freaking out, but she was doing so silently, and I didn't admonish her for it. I continued.

“Kennedy, when I was in the League building, they told me that . . . Well . . .” I launched into the entire story—how SRS were the bad guys, how The League were helping me figure out Project Groundcover, how I was officially a double agent. I ended it all by showing her the printout of Mom and Dad's file, the one that showed them listed as In the Weeds.

I didn't think it was possible, but her eyes widened even
more. I poked her in the stomach, forcing her to breathe, which seemed to do her some good.

“Are you sure, Hale? Really, really sure? Because this is big. Like . . . huge,” she whispered.

I nodded. “I'm positive. I wouldn't do it if I weren't positive. I think working with them might be the only way to get our parents back.”

“In the Weeds. They listed The Team as In the Weeds,” she said breathlessly. I thought she was about to cry, but then Kennedy reached over and picked up the jewelry from my hand. She somewhat shakily wrapped the bracelet on her wrist and clipped the earrings to her earlobes. She looked ridiculous—like a little girl playing dress-up with her grandmother's costume jewelry. She lifted the bracelet to her lips and whispered.

“Hello?”

“They might not answer if it's not me. They're underfunded, but I don't think they're going to just talk to any old person who comes across the com—”

“My name's Kennedy,” she said, her voice warming a little. I put my head in my hands.
Seriously, Clatterbuck? What if she was someone from SRS looking to bust me?
“Yeah,” she continued, now growing more enthusiastic. “That was me! Hale and I wrapped all those guys up in the sign? And I tied that girl up in a net trap? Oh! Yeah, I would like to talk to her—I felt a little bad about the whole thing. She seemed nice.”

I tried to feel bad, tried to make my gut twist with guilt
for bringing Kennedy into all this insanity. But, as she kicked back on my bed and bicycled her legs absently at the ceiling, talking to Beatrix—or was it Ben on the other line now? I wasn't sure—I couldn't help but feel relieved that there was one less person to keep my secrets from.

“Kennedy, no. You can't come with me. If I get caught, I'm not taking you down with me,” I said. Again. And again. And again. It was starting to sound like a song.

“You just never want me to do
anything
,” Kennedy said. Or someone with Kennedy's voice said. It was a Disguise Day, and she'd been made up to be a brunette with zero freckles and thick eyebrows. She looked nothing like Kennedy, but she still bounced around like a deer that'd had too many sodas. I was halfway through applying my own disguise—a very old man with droopy eyes. It was a difficult one, and talking to Kennedy kept making the silicone wrinkles on my cheeks crack off. I reapplied a wrinkle and gave Kennedy a pointed look.

“What? It's not my fault you're becoming an old man. No one else picked one that hard,” she said, nodding toward the rest of the SRS student body. All together there were about seventy-five of us, and we were spread out around the cafeteria. The Disguise Department, which was usually carefully tended to and cataloged by a handful of agents, appeared to have exploded on us—tables were
covered
in
wigs and makeup pots and spilled spirit gum bottles—which was exactly why Disguise Days only came once every few weeks. I watched a group of eight-year-olds being taught how to put wigs on.

“Hale! Please!” Kennedy whined.

“No. It's too dangerous,” I said, fixing one of my wrinkles again.

“More dangerous than staying here with the people who want our parents dead?” she asked, and I nearly tackled her to quiet her down. She looked pleased to have my full attention now, and she dropped her voice to continue seriously. “I'm going to take my junior agent exam soon, Hale, and then I'm going to be a double agent like you. Because you're my brother, and if something happens to you, I'll be stuck here all alone.”

I frowned, because this actually hadn't occurred to me. Kennedy was
never
alone—she was almost always surrounded by friends—but she was right, of course. She'd be all alone, and in the way that counted. I sighed. “But I also can't just let you—”

“Let you what?” a male voice said behind me. I didn't have to turn and look—I saw them reflected in my mirror. Walter and the Foreheads. All three of them were wearing padded suits underneath their standard SRS uniforms, and they'd used silicone to plump up their cheeks.

They'd disguised themselves as me. Well—a hilarious,
super-fat, super-geeky version of me. Their eyes glowed, and they cracked up when they saw the look of recognition on my face.

“You like them? We used all the padding they set out,” Walter said. How could this possibly be the same guy who told me he was sorry about my parents just a few days ago? It was like he'd gotten eaten by jerk aliens.

“Love them,” I said. “You look like someone who might do an amazing job improvising on a mission. Maybe someone that Fishburn would make a special announcement about?”

After the hospital mission for Evergreen, Fishburn had made a point of coming to my class to tell everyone what a great job I'd done improvising, and how I'd really saved the day. Otter repeated the sentiments, though he didn't appear happy about having to call me “the hero of the day.” Fishburn
never
came to classrooms, so there was a lot of speculation as to why our mission warranted a visit. I heard everything from “Hale actually took a bullet for Otter, but we're not supposed to know” down to “Fishburn just wanted to make Hale feel good, since his parents are missing.”

No matter what the theory, no one debated whether or not I'd done an excellent job. It didn't make me popular or faster or a junior agent, but it did make me a lot better armed for conversations like this one.

“We look like
losers
,” Cameron corrected me.

“So I see,” I said.

“Because we're dressed as you!” Cameron added, growing frustrated that I still didn't appear offended. “Get it? Because we're fat—”

“Just shut up,” Walter said, shoving Cameron. I wondered if SRS had a specialty program for people who would make especially good doorstops. Cameron seemed like a contender for a spot.

“Yeah,” Kennedy said, putting her hands on her hips. “All of you shut up. Hale is twenty times the spy you are.”

Walter laughed hard. “He's twenty times the spy we are, that's for sure,” he said, grabbing his fake stomach. Kennedy looked wounded; I gave her a weary look and she trudged back to join her classmates, clearly more embarrassed than I was about the whole thing. I glued another piece of silicone on, ignoring Walter and the Foreheads, who looked disappointed with the short lifespan of their joke.

“Hale,” someone said in a gravelly voice. Walter and the Foreheads stepped away to reveal Ms. Elma and Otter, though I wasn't totally sure which one had said my name. Ms. Elma's scar made the plastic ones the ten-year-olds were applying look ridiculous.

“I need some measurements,” she said. “Disguise for your next mission.”

Jaws dropped. I went ahead and dropped mine, too, because even though I wasn't surprised, given how good my dirt on Otter was, I needed to look it.

“He's going on another mission?” Walter asked, voice cracking. “But he hasn't even tested into junior agent yet!”

“It was Fishburn's decision,” Otter said immediately, which I know was supposed to mean
I didn't do this
. He still couldn't look me in the eyes. I was pretty okay with that.

Ms. Elma was flickering around, her tape measure whipping me like a lizard's tongue. She scribbled some information onto a pad and then turned to Walter. “You too.”

“What? I'm going on another mission?” Walter grinned but then realized what this meant. “Wait—I'm going on a mission with
him
?”

“Stop fidgeting,” Ms. Elma said, oblivious to Walter's social concerns. She wrapped the tape measure around Walter's head as he looked pleadingly at Otter.

The Foreheads were laughing so hard that the padding in their Hale costumes was jiggling out.

“Please. Come on, man. Don't send me with him. Call it a favor. I'll clean your office. I'll take venom-collecting duty for a week.”

“I don't assign missions, Quaddlebaum,” Otter said, and then turned to walk away. He called back over his shoulder, “It's Operation Evergreen, just like your last mission, Jordan. Briefing files will be delivered tonight.” I saw a sort of pleased sneer on his face, which was never a good sign. Anytime Otter was pleased, I was miserable.

Kennedy won. I was taking her to The League.

She'd used a tried-and-true method of younger siblings everywhere: she'd begged and begged until I would rather have removed my own eyeballs than listen to her beg anymore. Plus, I was worried that if I didn't take her, eventually someone
else
would hear her begging, and we'd be in a real disaster. Since Kennedy didn't have an errand-running excuse to leave, and even I was concerned about drawing too much attention with dry-cleaning runs, we crept out through the garage.

“What did you tell Ms. Elma?” I asked her as we rushed past rows and rows of solid black bulletproof sedans, flashy convertibles, and more well-armored SUVs than I could count.

“That I'm hanging out with Ridley and Emily.”

“And if she asks Ridley's and Emily's parents?”

Kennedy gave me an exasperated look. “Emily's in the dorms, and I bet whoever is playing dorm parent for the weekend won't know the difference. And Ridley's mom will assume I
am
with Ridley, who is spending the weekend with Emily and Jordan—”

“Okay, okay, I just wanted to make sure.”

“I know how to build a cover story, Hale. I got the highest grade in my Emergency Undercover Ops class last year, remember?”

“Still not as high as my score in it was,” I said, elbowing her by way of apology. She gave me an even more exasperated look and then grinned.

“So what did
you
tell Ms. Elma?” she asked.

“That I was going to the library to practice my Arabic.”

“That's it? Studying in the library?”

“It's where I go every weekend, almost,” I said as we cut through a side door and emerged on the back side of the substitute teacher school, where the less fancy cars—like the one Otter and I took to the children's hospital—sat in the parking lot. The fact that I really did spend most weekends studying made my story both pathetic and believable.

“Hale,” someone cough-said as we approached the fancy toy store—today's meeting point. It was Clatterbuck, wearing a truly terrible fake beard and three different types of
plaid. He was also still wearing his emerald com unit. I glanced around to double-check for any roaming SRS agents and, seeing none, guided Kennedy toward him.

“Kennedy!” Clatterbuck said, clapping her on the shoulder. He was making his voice all round, like he was trying to be Santa.

“Why are you dressed like a crazy person?” Kennedy asked, though she was grinning.

“I'm not—I'm a logger! See!” Clatterbuck jerked his thumb over his shoulder. There was, indeed, a log truck idling in back of the parking lot. “You said I should use different cars when I pick you up, Hale, remember? No one will ever think a logger is an agent!” Clatterbuck was giddy, and every time he waggled his eyebrows enthusiastically, his fake beard shifted a little off-center. He pointed at Kennedy's owl-sticker-covered shoes. “Hey—I like those!”