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Before he could contemplate the matter, she said, “Why are you here? I thought, you know, we weren’t supposed to…”

“I need your help,” he said.

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“I hacked into the phone of a Secret Service agent.”

“Well, whoop-dee-do,” Joey said. “I bet you can also program your DVR.”

She bit down a grin. He was glad to see her, too.

“Nice haircut,” he said.

She used to keep it shaved on the right side, but now she looked schoolgirl-proper.

“Hey. You’re the one who put me here. The Third Commandment: Master your surroundings. Well, this is me mastering some shit. Plus, look.” She pulled up her tumbling black-brown locks to reveal the thinnest strip of shaved hair just above her ear. “I’m still in here, bitches.”

He said, “Language.”

She broke out that smile at last, the one that changed everything, like a light switch flicking on inside her.

She let her hair fall, and once again she was Vera, somber heiress to a middling trust fund. “All right, all right. You need my help. With what?”

He presented the Boeing Black smartphone on his palm. “I’ve mirrored the agent’s phone,” he said. “Using a Stingray.”

Joey stepped forward and pinched his cheek. “Look at you, all grown up.”

“Joey.”

“Okay, okay.”

“I need to get into the Secret Service databases.”

She bit her lip. “To kill the president.”

“Yes.”

“Who wanted to kill me.”

“Yes.”

Joey said, “Okay.”

“The problem is, all Secret Service computers are air-gapped on a private secure network. No connection to the Internet or the outside world. Which means no way to get in.”

“Certainly not for a lesser brain like yours. You know how hard it is to keep an entire network hermetically sealed? Ask the DoD — they squirted epoxy into the USB ports of a hundred thousand PCs in the Pentagon to try’n block flash-drive exfiltration.” Joey plucked the phone from his hand. “Leave it to the trained professional.”

They were standing close, and she was looking up at him and he down at her. She wound her hand into a fist around the phone, and then she leaned into him, hard, and it took a moment for him to catch up to the fact that she was hugging him.

He could feel the heat of her through his shirt, her hair soft and thick against his chin. He patted her shoulder, breathed in the scent of her — sweat and citrus — and realized with equal parts alarm and concern that she owned a small piece of him.

A brisk knock at the door startled them apart, and then the door opened and a portly man with ruddy cheeks and round eyeglasses entered. He wore a uniform with a nameplate that read CALVIN BLICKENSDERFER, SCHOOL PORTER.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Vera. I was checking in to tell Ms. Sara that the offensive graffiti on her locker has been removed.” He cleared this throat. “And this is your…?”

“Uncle,” Joey said at the precise instant that Evan said, “Cousin.”

The porter gave a confused smile to fill the silence.

“My Uncle-Cousin,” Joey said. “You know. It’s weird, with my parents, the accident — some distant relatives have stepped up.”

“Oh,” the porter said, brightening, swinging his focus to Evan. “You came to fill in for the father-daughter dance? How thoughtful!”

Evan felt the blood leave his face, saw the points of Joey’s jaw flex as she clamped her teeth.

He said, “Um…”

“The welcome reception for all parents kicks off in”—the porter consulted his polished silver watch, which no doubt kept exemplary Swiss time—“twenty-three minutes. I’ll make sure seats are held. You’d best hurry and get ready.”

“Yeah,” Joey said. “Great.”

The porter gave another twinkly grin and withdrew, easing the door shut so it barely clicked in the frame.

Evan said, “Fuck.”

Joey regarded him flatly. “Language.”

26

Celebrating Individual Strengths

Evan and Joey sat in the rear of the dark auditorium as the PowerPoint continued, urged glacially onward by a matronly headmistress who seemed intent on reading every last bullet point.

“—our philosophy of fostering community while celebrating individual strengths.”

Evan leaned over. “Is this really what school is like?”

Joey rolled her eyes over to him. “She’s gonna say ‘climate.’ Wait for it.”

A mother in flaking maroon lipstick and a mink stole turned around to hush them. Her kid shrugged apologetically at Joey.

Onstage the headmistress raised her remote control and another slide appeared: Diverse Kids Playing Frisbee in Quad.

“We seek to provide a climate that focuses on the individual student’s interests, abilities, and educational goals.”

Joey muttered, “Nailed it.”

Evan had once sat a sniper post in a tree in Sierra Leone for fifteen hours without moving. He’d lain in wait beneath a bridge in Kirkuk, sipping from a CamelBak, eating protein bars, and pissing on the same spot on the wall for three days.

But this? This was actually going to kill him.

Not that the preceding twenty-three minutes and change had been any easier. On the way over, they’d run a gauntlet of teachers and administrators, each one stopping Evan to tell him what a wonderfully well-behaved student Vera was.

Now the headmistress was talking about mission statements and institutional values, pacing the stage like a charisma-challenged stand-up.

“How much longer?” Evan whispered, keeping his voice even lower so as not to draw the wrath of übermom in the row ahead.

Joey slid out of her seat and crooked a finger for him to follow. They moved in stealth mode out of the auditorium and into the corridor.

He hustled to keep up with her. He was still adjusting to seeing her wearing the school uniform — white polo, navy blue slacks, navy blue sweater, saddle shoes — rather than torn jeans and a loose flannel.

They turned the corner, running smack into an austere gentleman in a no-shit three-piece suit. He was lanky and tall enough to regard them down the length of his nose. “Vera, what are you doing out here? The itinerary’s very specific about—”

“I’m really sorry, Dean Anders.” Joey bent her knees slightly inward. “It’s just — I need to get to the bathroom. Girl problems, you know.”

The dean and Evan stiffened in uncomfortable tandem.

“Okay,” the dean said. “And this is your—?”

“Cousin-uncle,” Evan said, recovering and shaking the dean’s bony hand. “It’s nice to meet you, sir. Vera was in some pain from, you know … cramps, so I thought I’d see her to the bathroom.”

“Very well,” the dean said. “Hurry back.”

Evan wondered what kind of upbringing a person had to have to say “very well.”

The dean coasted past them on an effluvium of aftershave. As the sound of his loafers clicked away, Joey’s posture transformed and she grabbed Evan’s arm. “Move it.”

They cut up another corridor and paused before a locked door, Joey fishing a thin tension wrench and a hook pick from somewhere in her hair. She was through the dead bolt in seconds, and they were inside. She closed the door behind them and relocked it.

The windowless computer lab hummed with electricity from the monitors, a few dozen screen savers projecting patterns onto the walls. The room held the hot-metal scent of outlets working overtime.

“You’re looking at my own personal robot army,” she said. “After hours I reconfigured the network and code for all these stations to make it a compute cluster and harness all the computing power in the lab. Of course no one’s figured it out yet ’cuz, you know, I’m me.”