Ten minutes later, I was in the principal's office. Or at least what was left of it.

It probably wasn't the best idea to be in a room that had just suffered severe structural damage, but the principal, who didn't think clearly on normal occasions, was so enraged that he'd apparently ceased thinking at all. I'd seen him angry plenty of times before (not to mention confused, baffled, perplexed, dumbfounded, and completely flummoxed), but those were mere drizzles of irritation compared to the thunderstorm of fury he was experiencing now. He was so determined to unleash his wrath on me that he hadn't even changed out of his scorched clothes. Bits of his tie were still smoldering, leaving tiny contrails of smoke as he paced around the remains of the office. His beret had been fried black and looked like an overdone steak perched atop his head. But then, the principal's beret was extremely cheesy, this was actually an improvement.

"Look at this room!" the principal shrieked. "Look what you did to it! BOSS-CON is being held here in a couple of weeks you expect me to host every odd squad director in the world in this building if I don't have a desk?"

"Er . . . no," I said. "Your desk isn't there anymore." Instead, where the desk had been, there was only blue sky and a massive hole in the floor leading to the dean of Creature warfare's office below.

"Exactly!" the principal screamed. "That desk was an extremely important piece of Odd Squad history. It was first used by agent O'baloney, the founder of this academy, and it has been used by every principal since! It was a priceless artifact—and you blew it to pieces!"

I snickered at the name then whimpered out an apology "I'm sorry.".

"I should say you're sorry! If it hadn't been for my keen ears and my lightning reflexes, I would have been roasted!"

This was a lie. Since I'd seen the principal emerging from his bathroom after the blast, I knew that he'd literally been caught with his pants down. It was only sheer luck that he'd been seated on the toilet, rather than at his desk, when the bomb struck.

It might be surprising that, even though the principal worked in intelligence, he wasn't actually that intelligent himself. Or that, of all people, he'd been the one selected to run a school. But the fact was, no one joined the Odd Squad to become a principal. It was a job no one wanted—and therefore, a dumping ground for agents no one wanted.

"I wasn't trying to hit your office," I explained. "I was trying to prevent some students from getting blasted by a gadget ."

The principal paused for a moment, as though weighing whether saving a few students' lives was worth the loss of his desk. "Why were you even firing gadgets during a fake battle in the first place?"

"I wasn't. Another student loaded the cannon."

"It's not very professional to shirk responsibility," the principal scoffed. This, from a man who'd swiped the dessert from his secretary's lunch bag for a year and then tried to pin it on the janitorial staff.

"I'm not shirking anything," I argued. "I'm telling you the truth. Ores was in charge of loading. Orica and I were helping him. Or trying to. Ores insisted he could load and fire the cannon by himself. But he put a live chip in, rather than a paint bomb . . . ."

"How?"

"I have no idea. You had me brought up here before I had a chance to find out." Less than two minutes after the misfire, two very important-looking kids from campus security had arrived at the cannon base and demanded I accompany them to the principal's office while the teachers had hijacked the red team's cannon and were trying to hit the dragons with sleep-inators. "Orica was the one who realized the ammo was live."

"And yet I notice that she didn't destroy my office."

"She was trying to stop the triggerman. While she handled that, I reoriented the cannon from the other students."

"And you aimed it at a building instead? Because the whole point of buildings is that they generally have people inside of them."

"Not today," I protested. "This building was supposed to be empty. The exams were mandatory for all students training for the investigation department and faculty."

"What idiot said that?"

"Uh . . . you did."

The principal was already crimson with anger, but now he shifted into a color of red I hadn't known humans could be. A kind of blazing molten-magma red. Before he could explode at me, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the letter that had been sent to my home. The one stating that attendance at the exams was mandatory for all investigation students and faculty. It was signed by the principal himself. "You see?" I asked, holding it up.

The principal froze, mouth agape, a half second from reading me the riot act. He was so red already, I couldn't tell if he was embarrassed or angry at me for revealing that he'd messed up. I could almost hear the wheels in his brain turning as he tried to figure out what to do next. Finally, he said, "You're expelled from school."