It was a long wait until morning.

I watched the agents, searching fruitlessly for me until they got fed up and went back into the tubes. Then I spent another hour on the lawn, keeping an eye out for any other agents. I spotted a few in the distance over the first fifteen minutes, but eventually they all seemed to give up the search. So I got to my feet and skulked back across Yorkville to the secret tunnel. I didn't know where else would be protected enough—or warm enough—for me to hide out. True, Orica could find me in the tunnel, but by this point, I was relatively sure she was on my side. And if she wasn't on my side, well . . . I was screwed anyhow.

Once back in the tunnel, I made another fire. This time it only took me thirty-five minutes to get it going. Then I made a pillow out of my stolen hotel jacket, covered myself with the silver jacket, and tried to get some sleep. That didn't work out so well: The floor was stone, I was cold, and my mind was racing, coming up with thousands of scenarios of how things could go wrong. When I actually did nod off, I was plagued by nightmares about THE ORGANIZATION that startled me awake.

By seven a.m. I had given up. I spent the next two hours pacing around the tunnel before feeling it was finally safe enough to reemerge. I had spent so much time underground that I was starting to feel like a mole. I was almost blinded by the sun after going so long without seeing it.

It was a surprisingly warm day for mid-October. I didn't even need my stolen hotel jacket, so I left it in the tunnel. There were already lots of people out: tourists visiting the monuments and locals jogging of schoolkids poured out of tour buses. It was easy to blend in with them.

I worked my way towards a Shmumbucks, intending to grab a quick bite, but as I was about to enter, I spotted my face on the TV mounted above the counter.

I was on the morning news. The crawl at the bottom of the screen read: HUNT CONTINUES FOR JUVENILE SUSPECT IN BIG OFFICE BOMBING. Even worse, they were displaying the lousy photo from my fake school student ID. So not only had I been outed as the assassin, but it had been done with the least attractive picture of me possible.

Lots of people were watching the TV—and those who weren't were reading the newspaper. The same photo of me was on the front page of the Shmumber Times, above the fold. So pretty much everyone in the coffee shop knew who I was and what I looked like. Given that the bombing had occurred close by, all of them seemed on the alert for any sign of trouble. I quickly turned away before anyone spotted me and called the authorities.

I decided to pass on breakfast all together. Even though I hadn't eaten since lunch the day before, my stomach was now so knotted up that I doubted I could keep anything down.

I wondered what my parents must be thinking. I was pretty sure they knew I would never have done such a horrible thing and suspected that I'd been named by mistake, but whatever the case, they must have been dismayed that I'd been named at all (as well as confused as to why everyone thought my name was AJ). I desperately wanted to reach out to them to let them know I was all right, but the Odd Squad surely would be waiting for me to try. Any line of communication into our home was certainly tapped. Any attempt I made to reach my parents—e-mail, phone calls, texts—would be intercepted and traced. It was a risk I couldn't afford to take. Sadly, for the moment I had to let my parents suffer and focus on proving my innocence.

The Royal Ontario Museum opened at ten o'clock. By nine-thirty, crowds of schoolkids had already amassed on the front steps. I blended back in with them, trying to keep a low profile. Thankfully, that wasn't hard. The kids were all too busy goofing around with one another—and their chaperones were too busy trying to wrangle them all—to pay any attention to me. At ten, I joined the crush as everyone piled around the museum entrance, jostling to get indoors. I let most everyone else go through first, wanting the crowds to build inside before entering myself.

The school had already paid for the trip in advance, so there was no need to buy a ticket, and while there was security, the guards were far more focused on the adults than the kids. None of them seemed concerned that the most wanted bomber in North America might want to spend the day at a museum. I passed through the metal detectors with ease and found myself in the great, soaring rotunda. Most of the tourists had made a beeline for the dinosaurs. I headed up the stairs to the second floor, then circled the rotunda on the mezzanine level to the gems and minerals collection.

Given that the museum was full of amazing things like dinosaur bones, taxidermied animals, and mummies, the gems and minerals weren't most people's top priority.

I passed blocks of pyrite, a cylinder of sturmanite,. . . and found the Big Maple Leaf.

One of six coins worth a million dollars made of solid gold each with Queen Elizabeth's face on them, It weighed 100 kilograms and was about 3 centimeters thick. The few tourists who'd chosen to come here first were all gathered around it, gaping at the enormous coin in amazement. Everyone spoke in hushed, reverent whispers—if they were even speaking at all. The room was amazingly quiet compared to the clamor of the echoey, crowded rotunda.

Orica wasn't there.

Did I make a mistake? I wondered. Was it possible that I had misinterpreted what she'd said? Maybe she hadn't been giving me a coded message to find the coin at all. Or had I simply come too early? Orica hadn't specified a time, but I had assumed she'd meant to get there as soon as I could. Was it possible that some misfortune had befallen Orica herself? Had the Odd Squad caught her, suspecting that she was helping me? Or worse, had THE ORGANIZATION gotten to her? My heart began to race as panic gripped me.

"Hey," a voice behind me said.

I whirled around, startled, to find Orica standing there. As usual, she had approached without making a sound. It took me a fraction of a second longer than normal to realize it was Orica, though, because she didn't look like Orica.

Orica had a way of doing this without needing masks or hair dye or so much as a fake nose. Instead, she had an incredible talent for altering her entire personality when she needed to, and this, in turn, made her seem to be a completely different person. She looked like an everyday middle school student. She wore trendy clothes, had her hair done up, and was chomping on a wad of gum the size of a walnut. Even more importantly, her whole persona was different, from the way she talked to her posture to the slightly vacant look in her eyes.

I was at once struck by her transformation—and the brilliance of her choice of where to reconnect. The museum was the one place in the city that was crawling with kids our age in the middle of a school day. The other people in the gallery weren't paying any attention to us at all.

"real cool, huh?" she asked, indicating the coin. "did ya hear the one in berlin got snatched?"

"huh." I did my best to sound like an average preteen boy, but probably didn't. I wasn't an average preteen boy, and I couldn't hide my relief that Orica was actually there. I had never been so happy to see anyone in my life. I had to fight back the urge to hug her.

"Let's go see something else," Orica said, like she was already bored of the world's most expensive coin. She turned and headed out of the gallery.

I followed her. Once we were back on the mezzanine around the rotunda, it was loud enough for me to feel comfortable speaking about my current situation. "Thanks for coming."

"Don't thank me yet," Orica said, dropping her ditzy character. "We're still not in the clear."

"I don't think anyone's recognized me yet," I assured her. "And I know you're too good to let anyone tail you."

"I am," she agreed. "But you have a lot of enemies right now, and I can guarantee you some of them were eavesdropping on our phone call last night. I didn't give you the most clever clue about where to meet me. . . ."

"Why not?"

"I was afraid that if I was too clever, you wouldn't get it."

"Oh, right."

"Point being, there's a chance that someone else could put two and two together as well." Orica froze by the mezzanine railing, looking down into the rotunda. "In fact, I'd say about a hundred percent chance."

I followed her gaze. Sure enough, four kids in suits and sunglasses had just entered the museum. Every other person was dressed in tourist casual. The kids stuck out like penguins in a flock of chickens.

Orica and I both ducked back from the railing right as the agents glanced our way. It seemed like we had been quick enough to avoid them, though I didn't know for sure. At the very least, they were now blocking the main exit.

"Looks like we're not getting out the easy way," Orica said with a sigh. She continued past the stairs and around the mezzanine, sticking close to the wall so that the agents below couldn't see us.

Three started coming up anyhow, heading for the Big Maple Leaf. One stayed down by the entrance.

"Who do you think they are?" I asked. "Odd Squad or ORGANIZATION?"

"Could be any either of them. They're all looking for you. You screwed up pretty big yesterday."

"THE ORGANIZATION tricked me."

"Well, you, me, and THE ORGANIZATION are pretty much the only people on earth who believe that." Orica led me off the mezzanine and into the hall with the butterfly pavilion. It was an enormous, cocoonlike structure inside of which hundreds of butterflies and moths flitted around an indoor rain forest.

"I hope you're ready to fight."

"Why?"

"Because THE ORGANIZATION wants me dead. They tried to kill me yesterday."

Orica gave me a look that indicated I was the world's biggest idiot. "That wasn't THE ORGANIZATION. That was me."

"You?" I gasped. "Why would you try to kill me?"

Orica's look hardened, now indicating that I might be the biggest idiot in the entire universe. "I wasn't trying to kill you. I had to do something to get you free."

"So you opened fire on an entire convoy of agents?"

"It wasn't like I had a whole lot of options." Orica led me through the invertebrate zoo, where display cases were filled with an array of the world's biggest, slimiest, and most revolting (non-odd) insects . "I had to act fast. If they'd gotten you to the Odd Squad Defense Headquarters and locked you up there, it would have been almost impossible for me to free you."

"Almost impossible?" I echoed.

"Nothing's completely impossible. But some things are awfully close. So I improvised. Lucky for you, I was keeping an eye on you again at the Big Office yesterday when the bomb went off."

"Really? I didn't see you."

"Because I didn't want you to see me." Orica cut through a demonstration where a museum employee was removing insects from Tupperware containers and showing them to a crowd of riveted children. "After the explosion, I temporarily jammed the tube system so it would be easier to follow you. Then I grabbed a jetpack and raced over to the construction site."

I thought back to the flash of movement I'd seen among the construction workers, moving toward the crane. I now realized it had been Orica. "So, you swung that hook at the car on purpose?"

"Yeah. I realize that was a bit dicey, but I'd never operated a crane before. It's harder than you'd think."

"A bit dicey? You realize if you'd been off by even a little bit, you would have killed me?"

Orica considered this, then shrugged. "Well, we all make mistakes. I would have asked you to do the math, but you were tough to reach at the time."

Behind us, there was a commotion. I glanced back that way, worried the agents had spotted us, but it was only the museum employee from the demonstration, expressing concern that some of her insects appeared to have escaped. Panic rippled through the group of children watching the presentation, who were all now terrified there might be a rogue tarantula crawling on them.

Orica and I passed out of the invertebrates and into the mummies.

"If you went through all that trouble to engineer my escape," I said, "why didn't you come find me in the secret tunnel?"

"First of all, I wasn't positive you would go there. It's not that well known of a landmark and you wouldn't know how to open it."

"I got lucky."

"I couldn't guarantee that. And given that I'd just opened fire on an Odd Squad motorcade, I couldn't exactly go for a stroll around. I had to make sure I didn't end up getting locked up. So I took evasive action."

We entered the dinosaur exhibit, cutting underneath the massive skeleton of a brachiosaur. "And you couldn't get back down there anytime last night?" I asked.

"Grandpa was keeping tabs on me. I had to be careful. I wasn't even supposed to be down at the Big Officee in the first place, remember? If he found out I'd engineered your escape, he would have made sure I was grounded for life. Thankfully, he also thought THE ORGANIZATION was behind the attack."

"But now he's even more convinced that I'm working for the bad guys."

"Yes. He feels extremely betrayed by you. The whole thing made him look like a patsy. So he's pretty much runnng the show to bring you down. And he was definitely suspicious that I might help you. I had to put on a major act to prove I was on board with him, right down to that phone call last night."

"You couldn't even tell Ozo that you're helping me?"

"No way. Everyone knows Ozo's loyal to you. The squads have been questioning her all day. I know you're pals with her and all, but it's not like that girl can keep a secret. Once you threaten to do something horrible to her family, she spills her guts. So I had to keep her in the dark. . . . Plus, I needed to make some additional arrangements for today in case we ran into trouble."

"Like what?" I asked.

Orica didn't answer me. She had frozen next to a life-size model of a triceratops and was staring at two tourists across the room. "You're about to find out," she said. "Trouble dead ahead." She then spun on her heels and ran back the way we'd come.

Apparently, we had been spotted and there was no longer any point in pretending to be normal kids.

The tourists bolted after us. A man and a woman, they blended in amazingly well with the standard musuem visitors. Both wore souvenir T-shirts and jeans and looked as though they had just stepped off a bus from Mississagua. Neither seemed particularly threatening as they came after us, but given Orica's reaction, I had no doubt that it would be very bad if they caught us.

"THE ORGANIZATION?" I asked as we raced back under the brachiosaur.

"Yes." Orica didn't backtrack through the mummies, but hooked a left into the Hall of Bones.

She could run extremely fast. It took everything I had to keep up with her.

To my surprise, THE ORGANIZATION agents didn't do as well. They fell behind us as we dashed through the rooms full of animal skeletons. I was just starting to feel proud of myself when we emerged onto the rotunda mezzanine again—and nearly ran right into one of the Odd Squad agents. He instantly recognized us and yelled to his partners across the rotunda, "Hey! They're here!" Then he took up the chase.

Orica darted right past the stairs that led down to the first floor and charged into the next room. This wasn't a gallery, but a small gift shop. It appeared to be a dead end to me.

"Why didn't we go down the stairs?" I asked Orica, failing to hide the desperation in my voice.

"Because the squad could have followed us down the stairs," she explained, in a way that indicated our alternative route was going to be much less traditional.

We passed a large bin containing rocks and minerals for sale. They were inexpensive, but pretty: thousands of polished round pebbles in a cavalcade of colors. Orica deftly upended it behind us. The pebbles cascaded across the floor.

The Odd Squad agent slipped on them, skidded wildly out of control, and careened into a rack of dinosaur toys, which promptly collapsed, burying our pursuer in a pile of plastic velociraptors and pachycephalosaurs.

We arrived at the back of the store. It was a dead-end—almost. There was no way to walk out, but there was an open space in the wall that looked out over the Hall of Ocean Life. The viewpoint was one story above the main floor; a railing spanned the gap to prevent dumb tourists from taking a header into the exhibits below.

The hall was filled with exotic displays ranging from stuffed anglerfish to an actual giant squid encased in a huge vat of formaldehyde. The centerpiece was an enormous model of a humpback whale, which hung from the ceiling, suspended by thin steel wires. An only-slightly-less-enormous skeleton of a bowhead whale sat on a metal framework below us.

"You're not expecting us to jump to that?" I asked, worried.

"I'm not expecting anything. We're doing it." With that, Orica sprang over the railing onto the whale skeleton.

She sailed through the air and landed perfectly atop the skull with an agility and finesse I knew I didn't have in the slightest.

I looked around for another way out. The only other exit was blocked by the Odd Squad agents, who were digging themselves out of the dinosaur toys. One of them had a livid glare in his eye and a plesiosaur jammed in his ear.

The ORGANIZATION agents appeared to have lost us, but the Odd Squad agents were threatening enough.

I jumped over the railing.

To my surprise, I landed deftly atop the whale skull. Only, the perfect balance thing was completely beyond me. I pitched forward and nearly took a header into the piranha display below. Orica caught me at the last instant and steadied me, but my weight had thrown her off balance too. She now pitched forward herself and had no choice but to leap from the skull and catch onto the lip of the model humpback whale. The cables supporting it strained under the sudden jolt. One snapped free from the ceiling and the whale shifted wildly.

Orica swung from the whale's lip, launched herself into a backflip, and stuck the landing in the middle of the hall.

The tourists gathered there all applauded, impressed. As though they figured the museum had started hiring circus performers to spice things up.

Orica looked to me expectantly.

So did all the tourists.

Now I had potential death and performance anxiety to deal with.

Knowing I couldn't possibly do what Orica had just done, I carefully shimmied down the metal framework that supported the whale skeleton—and still biffed the dismount. I fell backward and landed on my butt atop a large sea turtle.

The tourists groaned, like I had let them down.

Above us, an Odd Squad agent appeared at the giftshop viewpoint, realized there was no way he could follow the way we'd gone, and dashed back toward the stairs.

The remaining cables that supported the humpback groaned ominously.

The tourists around Orica were still staring at her expectantly, as if hoping she would perform another stunt.

"Clear the room!" she ordered them all. "Now!"

Despite her young age, the tone of her voice made them all instantly realize this wasn't a show. They did exactly as she'd said, bolting for the exits.

Another whale support cable snapped above us.

"Guess that wasn't part of the plan," I said.

"Of course it was," Orica replied. "We need a blockade." She pointed across the room, to where THE ORGANIZATION tourists had just entered the exhibit hall. Apparently, we hadn't ditched them at all; they had simply circled around down the stairs to ambush us.

They probably would have been successful—if the humpback hadn't torn free from the ceiling and crashed down to earth between us. It shook the entire building, totaled a dozen exhibits, and shattered the case that held the giant squid, releasing it along with a tidal wave of formaldehyde.

"See what I mean?" Orica asked, then yanked me toward the exit from the hall.

Unfortunately, the three other Odd Squad agents who hadn't been buried by dinosaur toys raced in that way, blocking our escape. Orica snapped the nose off a model swordfish and hurled it like a javelin, spearing one of the agents to the wall through the sleeve of his sports coat. Then she tossed me a small Tupperware container and said, "Spider."

She then grabbed one of the giant squid tentacles, lashed it out like a whip, and took the second Odd Squad agent down at the knees.

She was too busy to handle the third, though. I looked into the Tupperware container she'd given me and finally realized what she meant. There was a gigantic, hairy spider in it. Apparently, Orica had pilfered it from the insect show as we'd gone by.

The third Odd Squad agent was quickly closing in on me. I popped the lid off the Tupperware and flung the spider at him. It landed right on his face. The agent screamed in terror, backpedaled away as though he could actually run from something that had latched onto his head, then slipped on the squid and tumbled into what was left of the formaldehyde bath.

In the ensuing chaos, Orica and I fled. We charged out of the exhibit hall, but instead of heading for the exit, Orica made a sudden turn through a door marked STAFF ONLY. She then led me down two flights of stairs and through a door marked STORAGE.

We emerged into an enormous underground cavern. It turned out, all the amazing things on display in the museum above us were only a tiny fraction of the museum's collection, much of which was mothballed around us. We moved quickly through miles of shelves containing everything from stuffed lemurs to mammoth tusks. There were thousands of insects mounted under glass, millions of meteorites, billions of bird feathers, trillions of trilobites. It seemed to go on forever, a labyrinth of artifacts from around the world.

Orica appeared to know exactly where she was going, as though she had not only been down here before, but had also rehearsed the route and committed it to memory. Which, knowing Orica, was a distinct possibility. After only a minute, an exit door appeared ahead of us, at the end of an aisle full of dinosaur bones.

Before we could get there, though, THE ORGANIZATION tourists stepped into our path.

They apparently knew the museum as well as Orica. Both had their gadgetss drawn.

"Nice try," the woman taunted. "But this is the end of the line for both of you."

Orica froze. For once it looked like we were facing something she hadn't anticipated.

At which point, someone dressed in black attacked THE ORGANIZATION agents from behind. Our savior whacked the woman on the head with what appeared to be a tyrannosaur femur, instantly knocking her out cold.

The male ORGANIZATION tourist wheeled around, but before he could get a shot off, his attacker whipped the bone around like a ninja staff, thwacked him in the chin, and laid him out like a bearskin rug.

The entire battle had lasted five seconds.

Our savior then set the bone down carefully and turned to face us, finally allowing us a good look at her.

It was a woman. A lithe, athletic woman. Although I had never seen her before, there was something incredibly familiar about her. It was partly her looks—and partly the bizarre calm she exuded, despite having just rendered two highly trained enemy agents unconscious with a prehistoric weapon. She took a packet of wet wipes from her pocket and dabbed a bit of blood off the tyrannosaur bone, then spoke to Orica in a clipped British accent. "Hello, darling. I see you've gotten yourself into a spot of trouble per usual."

Orica smiled. "Hi, Mom," she said.