I didn't hear back from Orica about the photos I'd sent her until the next morning. That was unusual. Orica wasn't a big fan of human contact, but when she had a mission, she never wasted any time following a lead. However, there had been only silence from her until she caught up to me on the school obstacle course during PE.

At my old, normal middle school, physical education had generally meant running laps around the school track. At the Odd Squad Academy, we ran a gauntlet of potentially harmful obstacles, pitfalls, and booby traps that our sadistic trainer, Coach O, regularly altered for maximum torment. The administration claimed this was to prepare us physically and mentally for the strenuous and unpredictable demands of being an investigation agent, but I was quite sure that, in reality, the administrators simply enjoyed watching us get pummeled. Quite often, I caught glimpses of our teachers laughing at us from the sidelines.

To make matters worse, PE was always the first class of the day, when it was freezing outside. This was a major concern, as a large number of the obstacles on the course involved mud. Crawling through mud at two in the afternoon on a sunny day was bad enough; doing it at nine a.m. in October was repugnant.

All classes had PE at once, although Coach staggered our starting times for the obstacle course so that no one got trampled—and so he had plenty of time to enjoy each student's humiliation. When Orica found me, I was scrabbling through one of the course's many mud wallows on my hands and knees with Ozo and Ores. The mud was the consistency of slightly melted ice cream, which allowed it to ooze into our clothing and refrigerate our various body parts. Our dull gray academy shirts were now stained brown—as were our faces. As if this weren't bad enough, Coach had rigged a devious set of sensors above the pit; anyone who raised their head too high and tripped one would be immediately blasted with a stink-inator. The entire experience was awful—and I wasn't the only one who thought so.

"Honestly, what is the point of this?" Ozo was griping. "The Odd Squad does most of its work in cities. I don't know of a whole lot of cities with mud pits in the middle of them."

"Sector 34 is one big mud pit," Ores pointed out. He was so covered with mud that he was camouflaging himself without even trying. I could barely see him except for the whites of his eyes.

"Maybe so," Ozo said, "but the Sector 34-ians still don't crawl through it. They go around it. We ought to be learning useful stuff, like how to do car chases on city streets and have gadget fights on the tops of speeding trains, not this garbage."

"No Odd Squad agent has had a gadget fight atop a moving train since the moon landing," Orica said, catching us all by surprise. As usual, we hadn't even known she was near us. She was simply there beside us in the mud, as though she'd spontaneously popped into existence. "And it wasn't even a speeding train. It was only a freight hauler moving at 8 kilometers an hour."

Ozo, Ores, and I turned to Orica, stunned by her sudden appearance—and by the fact that she was engaging in normal conversation.

Orica joined us in wallowing through the muck. Orica said, "I looked at those photos you sent me last night. The sketchy scientist was just a guy who caught eyebrow raise-itis.

We finally reached the edge of the mud pit. To get out of it, we had to scramble over a wooden wall while Coach O and some other professors took potshots at us with silly string-inators. Orica vaulted over with the ease of an Olympic, landing gracefully on her feet.

I vaulted over it with the grace of a diseased elephant. I tried to stick the landing but lost my balance and face-planted in the dirt.

I still did better than Ores, though. While clambering over the wall, he caught his pant leg on a shard of wood, leaving him at the mercy of the silly string brigade. His rear end might as well have had a target painted on it. The professors shot him again and again before he finally managed to free himself—although to do it, he had to wriggle out of his pants altogether. He landed with a painful thud on our side of the wall in only his tighty-whities. The top half of him looked like multi-colored spaghetti.

"that was pathetic!" Coach O shouted. "Do that in the real world and you'll get your legs blown off! Put your pants back on and start over!"

Ores whimpered at the mere thought of having to go through the mud patch once more.

Ozo hopped down from the wall and handed him his pants, which she'd dislodged. "It's not your fault," she said encouragingly. "Exactly when in real life are we ever going to exit a mud pit by climbing a wall? Even if there was a wall next to a mud pit, wouldn't we just go around it? The whole concept for this course is preposterous."

"Maybe, but I'm still flunking it." Ores glumly took his pants from Ozo and slouched back toward the starting line.

Orica proceeded onward. The next obstacle was a balance beam that stretched over a pit of bouncing blobs squirting streams of their own being onto the beam making it extremely slippery. Almost everyone who'd gone before us had slipped off and splatted into the blobs. Orica calmly sauntered across it, as though it were a city sidewalk. Under most circumstances, she probably would have darted across it in seconds, but she took her time because I was following her.

At least, I was trying to follow her. The best I could do was edge slowly across the beam, desperately windmilling my arms to keep from toppling into the blobs.

"I think whoever is trying to assassinate the Little O is using a Bombay Boomerang."

"A what?" I asked.

"It's an old assassination ploy," Orica explained. "You don't schedule only one meeting with your target; you schedule several over a few days. The first time you come in, the security is really on guard around you, because they don't know you or trust you. So they go over you with a fine-tooth comb, scrutinizing everything you're carrying, everything you're wearing, and so on."

"Right," I said, recalling how aggressively the security agents had gone through my coat the day before.

"But then you come back again and again. By the second time, the security force isn't quite as concerned about you, and by the third or fourth, it's getting routine, so they drop their guard around you. . . ."

"And that's when you can sneak in a weapon?"

"Exactly. You convince someone that you're not dangerous—and then you hit them." Orica stepped onto the solid ground at the end of the balance beam.

I still had quite a bit to go.

Behind me, Ozo was also edging her way along, muttering sarcastically the whole time. "Balance beams. That makes sense. I'm sure our guys in the field confront blob-covered balance beams every day."

Orica checked her watch impatiently, as though I were going slowly for no good reason.

"Yes. Are you ever going to get off that balance beam, or should I have your meals delivered there today?"

"I'm almost done." I finally sidled off the end of the beam. "What about those other two people I sent you pictures of? Who were they?"

"Only aides to the multiversal ambassador. They're nobodies."

"So? THE ORGANIZATION likes nobody. They don't draw any attention. I'll bet those guys are in and out of the Big Office with ambassadors all the time."

"It's possible." Orica set off on the course again, and I followed her. A narrow trail plunged into a thick copse of trees.

"I happened to notice you in front of the Big Office yesterday."

Orica gave me a sidelong glance as we darted through a maze of undergrowth. "You didn't 'happen' to notice me. I wanted you to notice me."

That explained why she'd been right out in the open. "Why?"

"So you'd know I was keeping an eye on you. In case you ended up in danger."

I was quite sure that wasn't the whole story. Knowing Orica, she probably thought I couldn't handle the mission on my own. Even though I wasn't sure I could handle the mission on my own, I still felt insulted, and this combined with my annoyance at having to run through a dangerous obstacle course with frozen mud in my underwear. Before thinking better of it, I said sharply, "You mean, you were keeping an eye on me in case I screwed things up."

"No. I was there to protect you."

"I was inside the most secure building in the Odd Squad! I had the entire security force there to protect me."

"The job of the security force is to protect the Little O, not you. If anything goes wrong on this mission—and when THE ORGANIZATION's around, things always go wrong—they won't give you a second thought. Heck, they'd throw you on top of a bomb like a human blast shield if they thought it would save the Little O."

I clammed up, realizing Orica was probably right—as usual. Although I still wasn't completely convinced she believed I could handle the job. "Does O'Cyrus know you were down there?"

"No. And you'd better not tell him I was."

"Why not?"

Before Orica could respond, we exited the copse of trees to find the final obstacle on the course. It was a doozy. Yet another balance beam stretched over a blob-filled pit, only this time Coach O had rigged six enormous logs to pendulum back and forth across our path. Not one student had made it to the other side safely. As we watched, my friends O'Shea and Orcam both among the better athletes at school got clobbered by logs simultaneously and went flying into the water.

Even Orica seemed daunted by this. She actually appeared to forget about my question so she could focus on navigating the obstacle. Or maybe she was simply using the obstacle as an excuse to not answer me. Whatever the case, she cautiously headed out onto the beam, ducking around the first swinging log.

Ozo emerged from the woods behind me and gasped in dismay. "Okay, this is completely ridiculous! There is no possible scenario where we are ever going to have to face giant pendulums! What's coach think, someday we'll to have to fight a villain inside an enormous cuckoo clock?"

Below us, O'Shea and Orca scrambled out of the pit, shaking off bits of blobs, then staggered across the finish line and raced for the locker room, where they could towel off and change out of their soaking clothes.

I summoned my courage and set off after Orica.

The obstacle was even more terrifying than I'd expected. The logs whizzed past with surprising speed. There was barely any time to rest on the beam between them. I dodged the first with a millimeter to spare, then slipped past the second with even less leeway.

Ahead of me, Orica was being careful but still exuding incredible calm, as though she were merely avoiding feather pillows, rather than hurtling tree trunks. She strolled casually past one pendulum, paused briefly, then ambled past the next and reached the end of the obstacle course.

"Nicely done, Orica!" Coach yelled.

There were no other students at the finish line. Orica was the only one who'd made it through the entire course unscathed.

Orica looked back at me. There seemed to be a challenge in her gaze, as though she didn't believe I could make it through the final obstacle on my own. The same way she didn't believe that I could handle my mission without her. I steeled myself, determined to prove her wrong on both counts. I watched the pendulums carefully, using my gift for mathematics to assess the exact speed each was moving and deduce the timing I'd need to get past them. Calculating quickly, I realized that if I waited six seconds and then ran full out, I'd be able to avoid the remaining four pendulums without even having to stop.

I counted the six seconds, then bolted down the beam. The first pendulum whooshed right behind my back as the second swung out of my way. I squeaked past the third, then ran for the finish line.

And tripped over my shoelace.

My calculations had been perfect, but they didn't mean squat if I couldn't stay on my feet. I stumbled, nearly pitched off the beam, struggled mightily to regain my balance—and found myself directly in the path of the final pendulum as it raced toward me. It nailed me dead-on, sending me pinwheeling off the beam and into the bouncing blobs.

I emerged stunned, sputtering, and chilled, but surprisingly all right.

At which point, Ozo—who had also been clobbered by a pendulum—fell right on my head.

Ozo wasn't that big, but she came in fast, driving me so far down in the blobs that I hit the squelchy, lemon-scented bottom of the pit.

We both resurfaced, gasping for air, and floundered to the edge of the pit. As I clambered up the side, someone reached out to help me up.

Omicah. He, too, was at the end of the obstacle course, only unlike Orica, he was completely clean, unsullied by even a drop of mud or blob.

"How . . . ?" I gasped. "How'd you get here?"

"I ran," Omicah replied, helping me out over the edge.

"Through the course?" I asked.

"Of course not!" Omicah laughed. "I went around it. Why on earth would I go through the course? It's dangerous."

"But . . . ," Ozo said, as startled as I was, "that's what our mission was."

"No," Omicah corrected. "Our mission was to get to the end of the course. No one said how we had to get here."

"That's not true!" Coach O stormed over, looking extremely peeved at Omicah. "This is my class, and I gave everyone a direct order to do this obstacle course."

"Well, those orders were questionable," Omicah informed him. "If this were a real mission and our lead agent told us to take an incredibly dangerous route to a destination when there was a perfectly safe alternative, that agent would probably get booted out of the Agency for recklessly endangering our lives. Following orders doesn't do us any good if they're going to get us all killed. I realized there was another way to achieve the objective without putting myself in harm's way, took the initiative to act on it, and successfully completed the mission."

"Yes, but . . . ," Coach began, but then seemed unsure how to argue his point any more. "You can't . . . I mean . . . The whole point of this class is to get some exercise!"

"Oh, I did," Omicah said. "I had to run at a good pace to circle all the way around the course. I got my heart rate up and my endorphins flowing. Nice work."

"Er . . . thank you," Coach said, and then, not knowing what else to do, he wandered back to the obstacle course to yell at some other students who'd actually followed his orders and been knocked off the balance beam.

"Interesting thought process," Orica said, and gave Omicah one of her rare smiles.

I was instantly overcome with jealousy again. Orica had definitely been intrigued by Omicah, and now it appeared to be developing into something more serious. I had just done everything I could to impress her and ended up looking like a nincompoop, while Omicah had simply broken the rules and won another compliment and a smile. It didn't seem fair. I found myself shaking violently, although I wasn't sure if it was anger or hypothermia kicking in: I was soaked to the bone and it was below twenty outside.

"Uh, OJ," Ozo said. "You're turning blue."

Apparently, it was anger and hypothermia.

"You'd better go dry off," Omicah told me. "You too, Ozo."

Ozo raced for the locker room before her fingers and toes froze off. I probably should have done the same thing, but I didn't want to leave Omicah and Orica alone together. Instead, I turned to Orica and said, "You never answered my question."

"What question?" she asked, even though I was quite sure she knew exactly what I was talking about.

"The one I asked you right before the final obstacle."

Orica weighed her options for a moment, then grabbed me by the arm and marched me toward the locker room. The moment we were out of Omicah's earshot, she lowered her voice and said, "I don't want you to tell O'Cyrus I was at the Big Office because O'Cyrus doesn't want me on this mission."

"Why not?" I said, my teeth beginning to chatter. "He thinks you're a way better agent than I am. He could have just as easily sent you in instead of me."

"He thinks it's too dangerous," Orica said coldly, like she was offended.

"Too dangerous?" I repeated. "For you? O'Cyrus thinks you can handle anything."

"Not this. OJ, O'Cyrus believes this mission is far more dangerous than he told you. He's pretty sure you can handle it, but if you can't . . . Well, you're . . ." Orica turned away suddenly. "You're expendable."

Even though I was desperate to get into the warmth of the locker room, I stopped walking and stared at Orica. "You mean he thinks I could die?"

"Yes." Orica seemed to realize how upset I was and made an attempt to comfort me. "Look, it's not like he wants you to die. And if it happened, he wouldn't be happy about it. . . ."

"Gee, that's reassuring."

"It's the nature of the business. This mission is crucial to the safety of the Odd Squad."

"But not so crucial that O'Cyrus is willing to risk your life?"

"I'm his granddaughter," Orica said bitterly. It was probably the first time I'd ever seen anyone angry about having their life not be in danger. "He's always told me to never let emotions cloud my decisions, and now he's doing it. I'm completely capable of handling this mission, but he's refusing to activate me."

"So you're activating yourself? Without authorization?"

"I'm not sitting on the sidelines while you get all the glory. Now go inside and warm up, will you? You're not going to be any use to this mission if you catch a cold." With that, Orica shoved me through the doors into the locker room.

It was blessedly warm inside. In truth, it probably wasn't really that warm at all—the heaters at the Odd Squad Academy were powered by fire dragons but I had accidentally released them all into the wild last month—but it was still considerably warmer than it was outside. Plus, steam from the showers created a nice humid fog. Orca and O'shea were already cleaned up and happily swaddled in new clothes.

I still felt chilled, however, and in a way that had nothing to do with the cold weather outside or my wet clothes.

The revelation of how dangerous the mission was had clarified things for me. What had seemed like the biggest flaw in O'Cyrus's plan suddenly made sense. O'Cyrus had never suspected that I could actually move about the Big Office without THE ORGANIZATION's inside kid noticing. In fact, he was probably counting on my being noticed. If THE ORGANIZATION's agents tried to get rid of me, then they'd reveal themselves.

I was being used as bait to flush out the enemy.

And bait was usually dead meat.