Orica blew her away. She fired six times, coating the elf in blue, then pointed to the sidelines. "Nice try, newbie. But you're out."

The elf now looked like a Smurf. A really angry one. "You got lucky this time," she sneered at me. "Next time, your girlfriend might not be around to save you." Then she stormed off toward the "morgue" on the sidelines, where her fellow paint-splattered corpses watched the battle play out.

"I'm not his girlfriend!" Orica yelled after her.

I staggered back to my feet, brushing myself off. "Man, that girl was devious."

"She was," Orica agreed. "She'll do well here."

I watched the elf trudge past the reviewing stands. Instructor O, who taught advanced gadget weaponry, appeared disappointed in her performance, while Instructor O, who taught counterespionage, seemed to be giving her some words of encouragement. Next to them, Instructor O, who taught self-preservation, had dozed off in his chair.

"You know," I said to Orica, "when normal kids go back to school, their first day is all about getting oriented and meeting their teachers. There's no paint guns or fighting or pretending to freeze one another."

"Really?" Orica asked. "It must suck to be normal."

I pried a clod of dirt from my ear, then scoped out the battlefield around us. "I'd probably better get back in the game before I get dinged for slacking off."

"Hold on," Orica said. "How'd you end up with all those newbies after you in the first place?"

"Orca and O'Shea set up an ambush for me. I thought I had a chance at the objective, but it was a trap."

"You're sure it was their doing?"

"Definitely. I saw them sic the newbies on me." Although they were on the opposing team, Orca and O'Shea were two of my closest friends at the academy. Orca was extremely smart. O'Shea was extremely sneaky and underhanded. Together, they made a formidable combination.

"They didn't come after you themselves?" Orica asked.

"They probably knew you and I would be working together," I said.

"So let's work together to take them out." Orica started sketching a plan in the dirt with the barrel of her paintball gun.

She'd drawn only two lines when an emergency call came over my headset: "Smokescreen, you out there? We need your help."

It was Ozo, another of my close friends, only she was on our team today. Ozo had christened me "Smokescreen" shortly after my recruitment because she had mistakenly believed that my initial incompetence was an act designed to catch my enemies off guard. ("No one could be that inept," she'd once explained. "I've seen turtles that could fight better.") Since then, I had gained a considerable amount of skill and savvy, but the nickname had stuck.

I radioed back. "What's the situation?"

"Chameleon doesn't know how to work the cannon," Ozo reported.

"Yes, I do!" shouted Ores—aka Chameleon—in the background. Ores was gifted at camouflage but mediocre at just about everything else.

The Cannon was the latest thing to come out of the science department, gadget data would be turned into liquid and stored and launched using the tube mechanisms allowing for a much larger range

I chanced a look out of the foxhole toward our cannon base, a makeshift bunker atop a slope at one end of the firing range. From what I knew, the Cannon was an actual working one; only the ammunition had been altered. Instead of gadget blasts, it fired paint bombs big enough to take out a dozen people at once.

There were several red enemy agents between us and the base.

Orica got on the radio with us. "No dice. Smokescreen is assigned to target acquisition, not heavy artillery. You'll have to work this out yourselves."

"No can do, Ice Queen," Ozo replied. "The situation is dire."

"How dire?" I asked.

"Hold on," Ozo said. "You're about to see."

A second later, I heard Ores yell, "Fire in the hole!" followed by a loud explosion. A paint bomb blasted out of the bunker. Only, I could immediately tell something was wrong. Instead of arcing toward the enemy base at the opposite end of the battlefield, the bomb soared almost straight up, then began screaming downward—right toward us.

"Take cover!" Orica yelled.

For once, I was already ahead of her. We threw ourselves into the protected side of the foxhole just as the bomb detonated on the ground above us. A wave of blue paint sailed over our heads and splattered the rest of the hole.

I peered back out of the foxhole. The ground for thirty feet in every direction was a ring of blue. A third-year red team member on her way to time out had caught the worst of it. She was now coated with paint.

"That's not cool!" she howled. "I was already dead!"

Several of our own team members had been hit as well. Most had been caught only in the arm or the leg, but that was enough to remove them from the game. They were all shouting things at our mortar base that would have gotten them detention at a normal school.

I got back on the radio. "You guys nearly killed us just now!"

"Sorry," Ores said. "My bad."

Orica took in the carnage and sighed. "All right," she radioed. "I'm bringing Smokescreen in."