The ancient wooden beams that supported the secret tunnel turned out to be dry and flammable. I used a rock to chip off a few pieces of several different ones—I didn't want to weaken any of them to the point where the tunnel might collapse on my head—and gathered a pile of kindling. Then I found two pieces of flint among the rubble and banged them together to get a spark. The academy's wilderness survival instructor, Agent Ocelot, usually took only about thirty seconds to ignite a fire this way.

It took me forty-five minutes.

I finally managed it, though. By this time, despite my shimmery space-age jacket, I was very close to freezing to death. The jacket didn't cover my legs, which now felt like they were made of ice, and my fingers and toes had numbed to the point that I could barely sense them. I hovered over the flames until I got some feeling back, then wrung out my wet clothes and lay them to dry by the fire.

The rest of my time in the tunnel was the most boring seven hours of my entire life.

Yes, I was on the run from both the Odd Squad and THE ORGANIZATION. But that didn't change the fact that sitting in a dark tunnel with nothing to do but stare at a fire is excruciatingly dull. At times I actually missed the earlier part of the day when I'd been actively fleeing for my life. However, I didn't miss it quite enough to want to relive the experience of nearly dying again, so I stayed put and waited.

I spent much of my night trying to work out how THE ORGANIZATION had managed to take advantage of me in the first place.

To begin with, they had obviously tricked O'Cyrus into believing an assassination plot was underway and that they had an agent inside the Big Office. O'Cyrus had told me he'd picked up chatter to this effect, meaning he'd heard it from various sources, but THE ORGANIZATION could have planted fake chatter. It simply took a few people plotting on phone lines that they knew the Odd Squad had tapped. It wouldn't have been easy to fool O'Cyrus, but SPYDER was extremely patient and devious. It was likely they'd spent months, if not years, planning this attack.

Getting the bomb in my jacket would have been trickier. Since the heating was awful at the Odd Squad Academy, I had worn my jacket most of the day, even in class, but a talented enemy agent could have slipped a bomb into the lining even while I was wearing it, like a pickpocket working in reverse. The best opportunity for this seemed to be my subway ride down to the Big Office. The Metro had been extremely crowded; I had passed thousands of people closely in the tunnels and been crammed in with hundreds on the train. I had also been distracted, focused on the task ahead of me—how to handle Jason and root out THE ORGANIZATION's mole—rather than what was going on around me at the moment. It was a rookie mistake that Orica would be disgusted by. When confronting THE ORGANIZATION, you always had to be on the alert. I had been so busy thinking about who their inside man might be that I'd dropped my guard, allowing them to turn me into the very inside man I was looking for.

I couldn't guarantee THE ORGANIZATION had armed me on the train, but I didn't have much else to go on. It would have been helpful to see the remnants of the bomb itself, but they had probably been vaporized along with half of the Little O's Office. If any evidence was left, the Big Office Security Force would have it locked up tight by now.

By one in the morning, I couldn't take it anymore. THE ORGANIZATION or not, I had to move. My clothes were now warm and dry, and I was starving. More importantly, I had to stop worrying about THE ORGANIZATION catching me and start thinking about how I could help catch them. The longer they had to regroup after their failed bombing, the more time they had to cover their tracks. Hopefully, O'Cyrus and Orica were already on their tail, but I needed to get back in contact with them and join the hunt.

I got dressed, stomped out my fire, left the shimmery jacket behind—it was way too noticeable—and started walking towards the end of the tunnel. It took me thirty minutes until I reached the exit. Then I waited there for five minutes, listening to the world above for any telltale sounds that THE ORGANIZATION was lying in wait for me. I didn't hear any. I didn't really even know what those telltale sounds might be—except for someone whispering "Has anyone killed OJ yet?"—but I was anxious and paranoid and trying my best not to get killed.

Eventually, I gathered my nerve and climbed up the ladder.

No one was lying in wait for me.

To my surprise, the secret exit was located underneath the Yorkville Rock. A large billion-year-old boulder that had been chipped off the Canadian Shield and moved to the center of Yorkville Park.

I did my best to stay in the shadows and avoid being seen. Sometimes being a kid can really work against you, like when you're trying to get around a city at one in the morning. No one looks twice at an adult walking around at one in the morning: There were even a few of them visiting the monuments that late, enjoying having the sites almost to themselves. But people notice a kid on his own, out long after curfew, without a jacket in the dead of winter. I didn't even have an official Odd Squad uniform yet so I couldn't pretend to be a night shift agent. If someone spotted me they would call the police, thinking that something bad must have happened—or that I was up to no good. The last thing I needed was the police; they'd bounce me right over to the Odd Squad. So I kept my distance from any other humans.

There was a hotel a block down from me, across the street from a public fountain. Like any fountain in the world, tourists had thrown change into it for no good reason. The spouts had been turned off for the night, which allowed me to scoop a few dollars' worth of change out. I then slipped through one of the less-used hotel doors and found an actual working pay phone on the conference level by the bathrooms.

I dialed Ozo's number, which I knew by heart.

Given that it was the middle of the night, I had expected that I'd wake her with my call. To my surprise, she answered before the end of the first ring. "Hello?"

"Hey. It's OJ. What are you doing up?"

"Hoping you'd call! I've been so worried about you. The news was saying that you . . ." The words seemed to catch in Ozo's throat. "That you might have drowned."

"I didn't."

"Yeah, I figured that out. Where are you?"

"Montreal," I lied. There was an extremely good chance the call was being monitored. Of course, there was also an extremely good chance it was being traced as well, meaning I didn't have much time before Odd Squad came looking for me. "Ozo, I swear, I'm innocent. . . ."

"You don't have to explain to me. I know you were set up."

"You do? How?"

"Because I know you, OJ. I'm your friend! You would never try to kill the Little O."

"Well, you're probably one of the only people who believes that."

"No kidding. Campus is crawling with agents. Everyone's looking for you."

"That's why I need your help. Can you get to Orica and ask her to get in touch with her grandfather for me?"

"Uh, OJ . . ."

"Tell her I'm still alive and that I can explain exactly what happened."

"OJ . . ."

"Then figure out a way for him to meet up with me and I'll call you back tomorrow to find out what it is. . . ."

"OJ!" Ozo said sharply. "Orica and her family aren't going to help you!"

"Of course, they will. They put me on this mission in the first place."

"Well, now Orica's grandfather thinks you betrayed him. He's the one leading the whole investigation to track you down."

I fell silent, dumbfounded. I tried to think of what to do next but came up blank. Having Orica's family bail me out had been my entire plan; I didn't have a backup.

"I'm sorry, OJ," Ozo said. "He thinks you're a mole for THE ORGANIZATION."

"Me? But I helped defeat them! I blew up their headquarters!"

"O'Cyrus says that doesn't mean they couldn't have bought you off anyhow. THE ORGANIZATION has flipped plenty of agents before."

"I would never join them!"

"You don't have to tell me that. I'm on your side here."

I calmed a bit, taking heart in that. "Who else is?"

"Orca and O'Shea, of course."

"And Omicah?"

"I guess. I don't know Omicah as well as you do, but he's your best friend, right? And there's also Ores. . . ."

"Really? I thought he'd be leading the crusade against me."

"Ores might be snotty with you a lot, but that's because he's jealous of you. He really respects you."

"Oh." I paused before asking the next name, because I was worried I might not like the answer. "How about Orica?"

Ozo paused too, because she knew I wouldn't like the answer. "I don't know which side she's on."

"Really?"

"I've barely seen her. And you're the only one she talks to. I'd like to think that she believes you're innocent, but you know how by-the-book she is. If you think we can trust her, though, I'll go to her."

"You don't have to go to her," said a voice on the other end of the line, slightly distant, as if from somewhere in the room behind Ozo. "I'm right here."

Orica.

Ozo gasped in surprise. I could guess what had happened. Orica had done her standard suddenly-appear-out-of-nowhere trick, having snuck up on Ozo at some point in the conversation. If they were in Ozo's room, Orica could have infiltrated it without any trouble. The locks on our dormitory doors were disturbingly easy to pick, and frankly, Orica could infiltrate almost any place she wanted.

"How long have you been here?" Ozo asked.

"Long enough," Orica replied, which was followed by the sound of her snatching Ozo's phone from her. She then spoke directly to me, so angry I could practically feel it radiating over the phone line. "I trusted you, OJ. And you betrayed me!"

"I didn't do it!" I exclaimed. "I was set up by THE ORGANIZATION!"

"Don't try to lie your way out of this. I know exactly what happened. They turned you. Just like they've turned everyone else."

Her words were so harsh, they actually caused me pain. I felt like I'd been stabbed in the gut. I cared a great deal for Orica—and I'd thought that she cared for me too, at least a bit, in her own personal way. Hearing that she thought I'd betrayed her didn't merely mean that she hated me. . . . It also meant that she had never really known what kind of person I was to begin with.

"That's not true!" I heard Ozo argue in the background. "OJ would never . . ."

Her words suddenly trailed off. It was possible that Orica had knocked her unconscious, though equally likely that Orica had simply given her a stare so hard that she'd fallen silent in fear.

"They didn't turn me, Orica," I said. "I swear. And now I need your help!"

"Why would I help you? You're the worst person I've ever met."

Now I felt like the knife in my gut had been twisted.

I glanced at my watch. I had already been on the phone way too long. Odd Squad agents would be swarming the building soon. But I knew I had to try to plead my case to Orica. If she remained against me, I was lost.

"I would never betray you," I told her. "And you know it. If you think about it—about me—I hope you'll realize who I really am. . . ."

"You don't have to hope anything for me," Orica interrupted. "You better spend that million-dollar coin THE ORGANIZATION bought you out with wisely. You're going to need it. Because I'm coming for you, OJ. There's nowhere you can run. There's nowhere you can hide. I'm going to make it my life's mission to hunt you down. I will not rest until I find you. Do you understand?"

The anger in her voice was so frightening, so immediate, I felt as though she were right there in front of me, instead of speaking over the phone.

I'd had some low moments in my life, but this was the lowest by far. The Death Valley of emotion. I had lost the faith of the one person I'd trusted to help me. And now she was so upset, she was determined to bring me to justice herself. Even though THE ORGANIZATION had tried to kill me twice that day, it was hard to imagine they could have done anything worse than this.

It took all my strength to say, "I understand."

Then I hung up. I'd already taken too great a risk staying on the phone as long as I had. I heard the distant SHMOOMP as a group of agents exited a tube entrance rushing to arrest me.

I had maybe three seconds, if that, to get the jump on them.

So I ran.