Disclaimer: I do not own Alex Rider. Sigh. (But I own Lexi…whoopee!)

Warning: Contains Scorpia Rising spoilers!

Chapter 1

My name is Alexiana Rider. I am 14 years old and five feet five. I have reddish – blackish hair and dark indigo eyes. I am a MI6 agent.

"Alex Rider, meet…Alex Rider." Alan Blunt gestured to the boy in front of me. He was a year or two older than me. He had hair that was almost black and dark brown eyes, and he was slightly taller than me.

I smiled. "My name is Alexiana, but I guess you can call me…Lexi…"

"Hi…Lexi." He stuck out his hand, and I shook it. Our eyes met, and he blinked, startled.

"You have purple eyes!" he exclaimed.

"Indigo. I'm not that weird!" I said, shaking my head. Whenever anybody met me, that was pretty much the first thing they said. It was a bother to disguise, since they were so dark. Colored contacts wouldn't really work on eyes that were almost black.

Mrs. Jones, taking out a peppermint, said, "Are you quite done with introducing yourselves? This isn't a social visit. The only reason you two are actually meeting is because we need you for a mission."

I indignantly whirled on her. "You mean I wouldn't ever have known there was another kid working for you and that kid was him if I hadn't seen the gadget that Smithers was working on for him? Even when he has the same name that I do?"

"You knew I existed?" Alex said, startled.

"I go to your school! I'm in year 9. I've seen you around before. Everybody's heard about Alex Rider in year 11 and how he's got a really unstable health. I just didn't know you worked for MI6."

He scowled. "I don't work for MI6. They force me to do their jobs."

"Whatever."

"Do you work for MI6?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Let's not talk about it now." I said, gesturing to Blunt and Mrs. Jones.

Alex took the hint. "Okay."

"So what do you want from us now?" I asked Blunt.

He answered, "Have you heard of the Jonas Academy?"

By now you're probably wondering what the heck I was doing with British Military Intelligence. It runs in the family. My parents, Warren and Kate Rider, were the top two operatives for the CIA, and my older brother Asher was in training. And I was being trained in ways I didn't recognize. I'm an advanced archer, and I've been trained in the art of swordplay, not fencing. I'm a black belt in karate, and I can speak English, Chinese, French, German, and Italian, and I took Latin in middle school.

And then it all went wrong. It was the summer when I was 12. My parents went on a mission to Mexico, and took my brother along with them as a cover. They were found out, I still don't know how, and killed. I moved here to the UK to live with my aunt and uncle, who were working with MI6. Their car "mysteriously" blew up last year, with them sitting in it, and since then I've pretty much been living on my own, with money from MI6 and also friends to help. But nobody knows about my involvement with MI6.

The Jonas Academy is a private school on Long Island, for rich kids only. But lately, kids have been disappearing from it, only to return a month or two later, claiming that they had been kidnapped and saved by the agents at the Academy.

Blunt told us all this, and I shrugged. "So? What's wrong with that?"

Mrs. Jones leaned forward. "They've been giving all their inheiritance to the Academy."

Alex murmured something that I couldn't catch. "What did you say?" I asked.

"Sounds like Grief to me." Catching my puzzled expression, he explained, "It was my second mission. You've heard of Point Blanc, right? The school for rich trouble children up in the Alps? And how they all ended up perfectly fine, due to Dr. Grief's efforts? Well, they were actually Grief's clones, with plastic surgery to make them look like the kids. And the whole thing was just to earn Grief money."

"So you think the same thing is going on at Jonas?"

"Maybe. But the thing is that, there doesn't seem like there's a mastermind behind all this. It doesn't seem too weird. I mean, they're donating their money to the Academy, and it might just be used towards, say, scholarships for gifted children."

I asked Mrs. Jones, "So what do you want us to do?"

She answered, "Just blend in as two new kids. See what you can find, but don't put yourself in unnecessary danger."

I was shocked, and by Alex's expression, I could see that he was too. This was the first time she had ever shown concern for my safety. Before, it had just been "Do whatever you can to get the info we need. You're expendable."

I decided not to say anything about this. Or rather, I was about to say something when Blunt cut me off.

"Go see Ivy. You're too recognizable, Alex…I mean Lexi. You'll have to do something about those purple eyes."

"They're INDIGO!"

Ivy is the master disguiser here at MI6. She's amazing, but up til then, I hadn't had to disguise my ahem INDIGO eyes yet. But then again, it was only my third mission.

She had to apply three or four (what is the collective form of hair dye?) portions of brown hair dye to my hair to get it brown. Then, she gave me these contacts which were dark brown. Apparently they were to change my ahem INDIGO eyes into brown ones, though I don't think they were meant to turn my whole world brown as well. Which they did. But when I mentioned this to Ivy, she just shrugged and said, "As long as you can see perfectly fine. You might have to pretend you're colorblind." Lucky Alex. He didn't need these crappy colored contacts.

So when I looked in the mirror after Ivy was done, I almost couldn't recognize myself. I normally straighten my 50 – 50 red – black hair in the morning. So it came as a surprise to see that I had wavy brownish – goldish hair . And the contacts masked my ahem INDIGO eyes perfectly well. I looked like a stranger with the exact same face contours as me. Alex couldn't recognize me either, but he's only known me for like two hours, so I'm not sure if that counts.

Ivy rehearsed our stories with us. I was to be Alexiana Rachel Asher (I chose the name in honor of my dead brother). I was supposedly from Rochester, New York (actually I lived in Buffalo when I lived in America, just up the Erie Canal). Since nobody that's filthy rich comes from Rochester, I was on a full writing scholarship. Originally, we were both going to be from the UK, but then I pointed out that I can NOT fake a British accent. I've only lived here for two years! Alex was to be Alexander Edmund Talon. He was just from here, London. He actually "had the money" to enroll, unlike me little poor person. If anybody checked, we had people who would swear that they had known us their whole life. I was guessing the ones in London were MI6 agents, but I had no idea about the ones in Rochester.

As the two of us were walking out the door of Ivy's office, I turned back. "Does Smithers have anything for us?" Ivy nodded.

Smithers is the only person working for MI6 who actually cares about me. To everybody else, I'm just another agent. The only reason I'm even taken care of is that Blunt and Mrs. Jones are worried that I would crack under torture. Which I would. I'm not doing this because I'm a patriot. Heck, if I was a patriot, I would never have moved to the UK! But I don't see the point in keeping information that would get me hurt if the consequences didn't matter to me.

"So, you've finally met Alex, right…Lexi?" he asked. I nodded. He looked like himself. Apparently he hadn't gotten around to replacing the fat suit he lost in (hey angie? Can you look the city up in Scorpia Rising and replace this note? Thx I didn't want to spoil anything for u sorryz!) . I've known that he was in disguise for the past couple months, but I suspected that Alex had just found out.

Smithers spun around in his swivel chair, facing the blank white wall behind his desk. He pressed a button on the arm of his chair, and a section of wall sprang open, revealing a bunch of cabinets. Scooting over to the far left, he scanned the drawers. "Hmm…Rays, Reif, Ribson…aha! Rider male and Rider female." Opening this cabinet, he pulled out a pair of silver stud earrings. "Now, I know that Alex had a diamond stud back when he went to Point Blanc. Here, it will be perfectly normal for …Lexi to have earrings. These are explosives. They are activated by first pushing the backing into the slot, then twisting the stud. There is a ten – second time delay." Smithers handed the earrings to me. Then he pulled two black – ink ballpoint click pens out of the cabinet.

"The ink from these pens will shoot out from the tip like a water gun if you click the top and then push the clicker even further. So don't use the ink all up!" he said, giving the pens to us.

"I've also taken your iTouch and made some…modifications, Lexi." I started in surprise. So that was where it had gotten to! I had been looking for it for over a month.

He took my black and red iTouch out. "It will function normally, and nothing will show up if it's checked." He touched an app icon that I hadn't seen before. It was a golden key on a black and gray background, and underneath it it said Secret. He tapped on it, and up came a password entry. "The password is 'lemondrop', no spaces or caps. Be sure you get it right, because if you don't, it'll be locked for half an hour."

Smithers tapped the password in. The only thing that came up after that was a red button. "Tap the red button, and it will send an undetectable distress signal every ten minutes to our headquarters. It doesn't matter if you don't have any Wi – Fi access, because I've also installed a satellite transmitter and receptor." Noticing Alex's look of distrust, he added, "It comes right to my office, and you know that I won't ignore it like Mr. Blunt and Mrs. Jones did."

"But how will we communicate privately to each other?" I asked. "We're not supposed to know each other!"

"Ah. I was just about to get to that. I've read the information pamphlet about the Academy, and it says that you can bring cellphones. I'm not sure if that's true, but I've prepared cellphones for you two." He produced a black Motorola Razor for me and a iPhone for Alex.

"You won't find each other on the list of contacts, but if you go to the games, there's a version of Tetris. If you select that, then dial 5, you'll be able to reach each other." He explained.

"But what if they're confiscated?"Alex asked.

"Well, here." Smithers produced two pairs of what looked like wireless earbuds and two black slap watches. "The earbuds are very sensitive to sound, so there's no need for a separate mike." He took one of the clock faces out from the slap band and flipped it over.

"See this button? Pressing this will cause the earbuds to start transmitting, and pressing it again will stop. Either of you can terminate the 'call', just in case there's ANYBODY at all around you. This is just a scouting mission, and if there's anything going on, we don't want them to get suspicious."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Don't you think it'll be weird if it looks like you are talking to the air? People will ask you what you'll be doing."

"Should we always use the cellphones if we have them?" Alex asked.

"Well, actually, no. You should contact each other at least once daily, and it'll look less suspicious if you use different methods each day. Also, try to talk at different times each day. The pamphlet says that everybody will have one roommate, so you'll have to be careful. Oh, and I have one more thing for each of you."

Smithers spun back around and pulled out a charm bracelet and a gold chain with a large but simple cross. He handed the bracelet to me and the chain to Alex. "These charms are activated by squeezing the charm. The four-leaf clover will explode like your earrings. The horseshoe will shoot pepper spray out of both of the ends. The butterfly will act like a smoke bomb. The crown will inject truth serum through its points, though I don't know how on earth that'll be useful to you. And the flower will 'pop', in a way, and superglue will come out of it. There's a five-second time delay in all of these except for the pepper spray.

"The cross is removable, and the four ends shoot four different things. They're all activated by sliding off these rings." Sure enough, there were small rings on each end of the cross.

"The top shoots smoke, the bottom shoots superglue, the left side shoots pepper spray, and the right side will shoot one tranquilizer dart. So you'll have to be careful to aim correctly, because the dart is useless once it's shot."

"Is that it?" I asked.

Smithers replied, "Yes. Alan Blunt and Ms. Jones want to see you, to rehearse the last few details over with you. You should go see them now."

"We'll be coming for you tomorrow night at nine, so you should have all your things ready. Lexi, you'll be taking a plane to JFK and then to Rochester, where you'll live for a week under Lexi Asher before taking the train to Long Island. If anybody questions you, you just came back from visiting family in Cambridge. We'll have somebody take you there – Jenna Isaac. She's going to pretend to be your mother.

"Alex, you'll be going to LaGuardia and then taking a commuter train straight to the Academy. You'll get there a week before Lexi. Remember your backstories, because your life might depend on them. You'll both be staying at the Academy for a month, until school starts on September 6th. So you'll have plenty of time to familiarize yourselves with the campus.

"Also, the Jonas Academy requires uniforms during school hours and modest clothing outside of school hours. So keep that in mind when you pack Try to stay away from each other. You're not supposed to know each other. We expect you to stay at the Academy for the whole school year if nothing pops up, but if it does, we'll try to come for you as soon as possible.."

"Try?" I exclaimed. "What do you mean, 'try'? Do the transmitters even work? And why would you wait to come and get us if we're in danger? I'll never understand the way you work."

"That's all well." said Mrs. Jones icily. "You don't need to understand the way we work. You're just tools to help us."

Alex said, "But you do need us to help you, otherwise you wouldn't have defeated Scorpia." I was dying to know what he meant, but I decided to ask him later. It wouldn't do to hve Blunt and Mrs. Jones think that I didn't know much.

"We didn't need you to help. We had it under control without you."

"Yeah right. Then whatever happened to undermining Scorpia three times?"

"A trivial matter."

"Admit it, you couldn't have done it without me. So stop treating us like we're expendable, because we're not, to you. But we could still just move away and you could stop making us work for you."

I tapped Alex on the arm and whispered, "Alex. Alex! This won't get us anywhere."

"Lexi is right. Arguing with us won't get you anywhere." said Alan Blunt. "So why don't you just listen like good little children?" At this my fighting spirit rose and I almost stormed out the door, but I restrained myself, though not without difficulty. We needed to hear everything else.

"So is that all the information we're going with?" I asked.

"That's all you need to know. And now I would advise you to go home and pack your stuff. Oh, and also, try not to let anybody who knows you see you now."