Lisi Harrison may own the characters of the Clique, but we own the awesomeness of the FF-ed up characters. =)
—
shadowed secrecy
by
hans & nic
we never know what's wrong without the pain,
sometimes the hardest thing
and the right thing
are the same
{all at once; the fray}
—
"You do know that it's no use struggling."
The rough fabric—was that Polyester? God forbid, not polyester—pressing down on my eyelids kept me blind, and I could feel something trickling slowly down my wrists. I hope it wasn't blood, but I highly doubt it, since the rope was unimaginably thick and seemed to bite into every inch of my skin.
"Shut up," I growled, took a chance, and kicked.
Against the unnerving tick, tock of a clock nearby—I had been here exactly one thousand, two hundred and fifty two seconds, I counted—I heard a wheeze and something heavy hitting the floor. Result. I could feel a smile of satisfaction creep onto my lips.
Someone spoke up. He sounded exasperated. "Man up, Playa."
I nearly bared my teeth in frustration—weren't they going to rip off this… thing around my eyes? Torture me for hurting one of their 'playa's? Hear me scream?
Then, after humoring them for maybe five seconds or so, I could let loose a torrent of kicks and use the fact that they underestimate me to my advantage—I could get out of here. Escape.
"Don't call me that! I thought we had our codenames all picked out?"
"Well, Playa is one hell of a lot better than Plov Man!"
"And Hot Shot isn't just as bad?"
"Shut up, The Dude!"
I blinked in surprise behind my blindfold. Plov Man? Playa? Hot Shot? The Dude? And what was all that scuffling I heard?
What had I gotten myself into?
—
"Massacre!"
I winced as Alicia's voice floated through my earpiece, her voice magnified with undertones of Very Pissed Off. I could feel bodies moving against mine, some stopping for a fraction of a second to criticize my eyes/nose/hair/clothes, others not stopping at all.
"What is it, Holla Girl?" I muttered, heading back to my previous post—keeping watch. Not the best job in the world, but at least it was better than Claire: she had to stay in the van with Kristen.
I shook my bangs out of my eyes and tried to focus on the task at hand. But that boy had looked so familiar… I flicked that thought out of my mind and turned back to watching the elevators. "Holla Girl?"
"Big Red—I can't see her!" I heard some rustling in the background—maybe Alicia was checking her bag for the motion sensor devices. "She was blinking six seconds ago—and suddenly her tracker just disappeared! Poof. Gone."
"I get it, Holla Girl," I tried to say as patiently as I could. Spies are generally team players, but at that moment, I couldn't help but hate Mr. Myner for assigning Alicia as team leader for the day. If it had been me, I would have stolen back the stolen artifact (which had been stolen from the Guggenheim Museum) and had us out of this stuffy hotel by lunchtime.
Speaking of which… I raised a hand to my empty stomach. I didn't have to turn around to check that it was 1:42pm. We had been here for two hours. And yet, Alicia was still ambling around in the ventilation systems. And I still haven't eaten. I'm sure Mr. Myner would be really happy about this.
Oh, well. Not really my problem. After all, it's not like I was assigned leader or whatever.
"So Gummy Worm's going to cover your spot—you're coming in." Alicia clicked off.
"Wait—what?" I spluttered, before someone tapped my shoulder. I turned to see Claire, beaming happily, her eyes twinkling.
"I finally get to do something, Massie!" she said breezily and plunked down on the sofa next to me. I widened my eyes meaningfully, yet Claire remained oblivious.
I sighed, giving in. "You're not supposed to know me, Gummy Worm…" I bit down on my tongue to prevent me from saying anything that might scar our friendship for at least six years, and added, "And we use codenames for missions, Claire. It's Massacre."
Claire blinked her blue eyes at me, processing this information. "Yeah, I guess…" She waved her wrist. "Shouldn't you be up there?" She pointed to the ceiling.
I looked up.
—
"Couldn't think of a more conspicuous way to bring me up here?" I snapped, untangling a cobweb from my hair.
"You were taking your time, Massacre," Alicia whispered over her shoulder. "Besides, that way I get to see your acclaimed climbing skills."
I didn't have to have an IQ of 185 to know she was mocking me.
"Let's just get this over with, O Great Leader." I closed my eyes and cart wheeled past the motion detectors, while Alicia rolled her eyes and fiddled with the codes by the doorway to turn the lasers off.
I looked up at Alicia, annoyance melting away into excitement as she grinned at me. "We're in."
—
"Are you sure about this?" I wasn't uncertain—I just didn't want us to screw up. The light was dim in the van, but Kristen was grinning like a Cheshire cat.
"Of course I'm sure," she replied. "We're in."
"Alright, then." I slid open the door and skipped lightly out of the slow-moving van, Dylan and Alicia landing on their feet beside me with preciseness. "Let's do this, ladies. I wanna see results."
"Aye, captain," Alicia rolled her eyes as we tugged on the ivy and scaled the wall. That's how we were—bickering, arguing, putting each other down; but she was still my best friend. She was still the first face I see when I wake up each morning; she will always hog the bathrooms and finish all the toothpaste, but still. She was my sister.
I looked to the redhead beside me, then to the Spanish examining her nails nonchalantly. "We're going in."
—
"Careful." Alicia held her breath and pried the knife inside the glass the same time I lifted it, centimeter by precious centimeter. "There's a weight sensor embedded inside the metal. If weight shifts, this piece of crap detects it and we're goners."
"You mean it explodes?" I raised my eyebrows at her.
"Tchh, no." Alicia clicked her tongue, holding the knife in place with the gum she was chewing. "But the alarms start wailing like a bitch."
I looked back at the glass in my hands with newfound deference. "I see."
The glass was thick, heavy in my hands. Through the wavy glass, I could see what Mr. Myner asked us to retrieve as quickly as possible—the sacred papyrus, said to contain the right spells and incantations to revive a mummy.
The vault slid shut with ease—with Alicia's gum still in place, the artifact on our side, and my heart beating like one of those electro pop music Kristen insisted on playing while she decrypts codes and analyzes our homework.
I slid the old scripts into a leather case and into my bag, trying not to let my hands tremble too much. Missions like these don't come often—especially when we're on our own. Especially when we were treated like real spies, I chanted in my head. Something the hundred girls of Octavian Country Day School for Girls yearned for.
Alicia breathed a sigh of relief. Mr. Myner chose that moment to click through, after full silence for two and a half hours.
"Night Owl," Alicia chirped. "We've got it, it's sa—"
"Get out of there," Mr. Myner stressed, cutting Holla Girl off. But even through his urgency, he sounded oddly calm. He always did. "Get out of there, right now. The guards have been alerted of you. Looks like someone tripped the wires and caused a blackout in five floors. Including the floors that were supposed to be as secure as supermax."
"Big Red," Alicia and I groaned in unison. Dylan may have skills when it comes to kicking ass, but a tech genius she is not.
"Be back here in ten," Mr. Myner said before his line went dead.
Gee, thanks for the support, Night Owl.
I swung my bag over my shoulder as Alicia tightened her utility belt around her waist. I rushed to the window—it wouldn't open.
"Crap!" Alicia cried, and for once, I saw desperation in her eyes. I took a deep breath, and stepped back. Obviously we weren't going out this way. I was just about to suggest we go out the same way we went in—
until a redhead rappelled down outside our window, her face a stricken mixture of horror and exhilaration.
Oy vey, Dylan. Oy vey. I shut my eyes. "We're already in enough trouble as it is," I murmured to Alice. "They already know we're here."
"Yeah…" Alicia mulled over my words. And without warning, she kicked open the window, shattering the glass. And I was ready for her when she handed me a rappel-a-hook and we jumped for our freedom.
—
I heard a door crack open.
"Huh." One of the boys must have gotten up from the floor. "Now you're in for it," he said, his breath so close to my ear I couldn't help but knock him out with a sharp tilt of my jaw.
—
Sometimes, spies have off days, too. Just like bad hair days, sometimes our equipment has glitches that we overlooked. Sometimes the hard drives are unbelievably hard to crack. Or sometimes, your partner just lands on top of you after free-falling forty stories from the ground.
This was one of those days. Alicia says it was my fault, since "You're so stoned today!" And then she clapped me on the head, saying I really shouldn't be reminiscing on things that happened two years ago—I wondered how she knew.
But I blamed her and the freaking empanadas she made, or rather, had her maid deliver it by helicopter to OCD last night.
But most of all, I blamed the person who had cut off our ropes when we were just two floors away from not getting lectured by Mr. Myner.
I looked up, startled—it was that boy. That boy I saw in the lobby. That boy who looked so familiar. That boy…
—
The blindfold was ripped away from my face, and the momentarily blast of neon white light was so bright; it burned through my closed eyelids.
I blinked furiously, struggling against the ropes that tied me to the metal post. This sucks. My first ever real mission and I get caught by the bad guys. Mr. Myner is so going to be disappointed with me. The rest of my ninth grade would be hell.
"Guys, go easy on her, she's just a girl." My eyes flashed at this, and my vision cleared—a boy with big hair was on the ground, rubbing his temple, another in a Yankees cap was studying me silently, and the one in glasses—I recognized his voice as being 'Playa' or 'Plov Man' or whatever codename he had.
But mostly I saw him, the boy who has said I was 'just a girl'. Newsflash, we're not just girls. We're spies.
His brown eyes were mocking me the minute they met my ambers. He had that kind of face that would have looked handsome if he smiled more and smirked less—and I could see that mirth was an expression he liked to convey on his mocking, demeaning lips. My spy senses were so acute, I heard every breath that passed through his mouth, every raise of his eyebrow, that smell that I couldn't identify rolling off him in waves that smelled like they could easily seduce an unknowing girl. "Hey, there. I don't know how you knew about our plans, but I would really like to find out. They call me—"
He didn't have time to say it. A boy with dark hair burst through the door, landing on his back.
"Cyclops?" Their apparent leader turned, eyebrows furrowed. "What the he—"
But then he stopped short as he noticed Dylan's foot resting on Cyclops' chest, a satisfied smile on her face for knocking a boy out with her deadly combat boots. And Alicia was right behind her, eyes shadowed in eyeliner, lips curled into a small smile.
I smirked at Golden Boy—who in that moment suddenly looked unsure of himself—because us girls, the nothing special just-plain-old-normal girls they were referring to had plans to wreck and hearts to break.
—
He leaned over me, and his accomplice held down my shoulder tighter. And that was when I caught it.
His smell.
I forced my eyes to meet his as his smirk grew wider, in his hands the artifact Alicia and I had tried so hard to rescue.
"Harrington," I spat.
—
IF YOU CAN GUESS WHO THIS IS,
you must be awesomer than your review,
which will be awesome,
because I know it'll be filled with rambly goodness. (: