I was only vaguely aware of being pulled from the water, the experience a jumble of images: the sensation of being dragged back up from the darkness and emerging into the light and noise once again; the roar of helicopter blades in the distance; the feeling of being hauled, wet and cold, onto concrete; the lights and honks of cars; Orica yelling, "Fight, OJ! Fight!" and then leaning over me; a woman with a stoic gaze looming behind her; the groan of stone against stone as a passage opened in a rock; a Komodo dragon in a pink tutu, doing pirouettes atop an elephant.

It's quite possible that I dreamt the last one, as I lost consciousness more than once.

I came to lying on a cold granite floor. A voice echoed nearby while footsteps paced. Orica. She must have been on the radio with someone, because I couldn't hear their half of the conversation.

"He hasn't regained consciousness yet, but he's stable . . . . No, I'm not going to try to rouse him. He needs time to recover . . . . Yes, I understand what's at stake. What's the situation there?"

I opened my eyes and gazed around the room. Moldy wooden desks and unlit candles laid scattered around.

"Where are we?" I groaned.

"He's up," Orica reported into her radio. "I'll call you back."

As soon as Orica turned around I got my answer. She had traded her soaked clothes for a souvenir Niagra Falls T-Shirt. I gazed around and spotted several paintings with the familiar symbol of a jackalope surrounded by stars and bananas.

I realized that my wet clothes had been removed as well. I was cocooned in souvenir towels, naked save for my underwear.

Orica hurried to my side, apparently relieved that I was conscious again. "How are you feeling?"

"All right, I guess." I met her eyes. "You saved me?"

She nodded. "The anchor rope snagged around your leg. By the time I got you free, you were . . . Well, it could have been bad."

"You had to resuscitate me?"

"Yes."

I felt my face grow warm as blood rushed to it.

Orica immediately understood why I was blushing. "Don't get all worked up. Yes, our lips touched. But it wasn't kissing. I was only forcing air into your lungs."

"I know," I said, wishing I could remember it better. The bizarre thought occurred to me that it was almost worth dying to have my lips touch Orica's. "How'd we get inside the falls?"

"There's a secret entrance. Granddad knew about it."

"Are you telling me that the Falls are really hiding a secret Odd Squad base?"

"It was hiding a secret Odd Squad base. They had to shut it down in the 1820s when the Journey Behind the Falls tour started for security reasons."

"Is there any iconic landmark around the world that isn't involved with the Odd Squad?" I asked.

Orica pursed her lips, considering this. "I don't think any arch bridges are. They're too wobbly.

Orica shrugged."How's your strength? Do you think you can climb?"

I took a few tentative steps. To my surprise, despite everything that had happened, I felt perfectly fine. "Yes."

"Then let's go up. They're waiting for us."

I'd been to Niagra Falls once before, on a family vacation when I was eight. I'd wanted to go on a boat tour, but my parents hadn't thought to get tickets in advance and it had been sold out. I'd had to settle for going to the Butterfly Conservatory and jealously staring at the tourists whose families had planned ahead. Now I was getting a private tour of the inside of the Falls. True, I'd been duped by THE ORGANIZATION, pursued by the Odd Squad, and nearly drowned, but for a few minutes, life was pretty sweet.

After picking out a T-shirt and fashioning a beach towel skirt for myself, Orica and I took the elevator up to Oshton and O'Cyrus. Both wore T-shirts and beach towel skirts as well. Oshton smiled warmly upon seeing me. The effects of the sleep-itosis appeared to have worn off. "Ah, OJ!" he exclaimed. "You're looking well, all things considered."

O'Cyrus, on the other hand, glowered at me. "Glad to see you've finally decided to join us."

"He wasn't slacking off, Granddad," Orica protested. "He was unconscious."

O'Cyrus waved this off, as though there wasn't a big difference. "You'd never catch me losing consciousness in the middle of a mission," he grumbled.

Orica frowned. "He almost died because of that stunt you pulled."

"I did what I had to do to shake our pursuers," O'Cyrus said. "I didn't know he was going to get tangled up in the anchor line."

"You could have at least given us some warning," Orica retorted.

"Wait," I said. "You blew up the boat? Not them?"

"I didn't have any other choice," O'Cyrus replied. "They had us surrounded. So I faked our deaths."

"Did it work?" I asked.

O'Cyrus shot me a nasty glance. "Do I look like an amateur to you? Of course it worked. I must've faked my own death fifty times over the years. No one can die like I can."

"The Squad is still searching Lake Ontario," Oshton said. He waved us over to the windows, then pointed almost directly down, to where five boats were sweeping the water with spotlights. "But Dad chose the perfect spot to blow the boat. The water's quite deep right there. Very tough to drag for bodies."

"Looks like they're searching near here, just to make sure," Orica observed.

Sure enough, a few teams of kids were moving about the plunge pool of the falls, scanning the island with flashlights.

"Of course they are." O'Cyrus sniffed. "But they won't search here. The front doors won't show any sign of a breach, because we didn't come through them, and they don't know there's any other entrance. They've been hunting for hours now and haven't found diddly-squat. Pretty soon they'll decide this is a goose chase bug off. That's when we'll make our move."

"How?" I asked.

"That depends." O'Cyrus turned me away from the window to face him. "Right before the boat blew, you said you knew what THE ORGANIZATION was up to. Care to finally share that with us?"

With all the excitement, I'd forgotten all about my revelation. Almost dying can have that effect.

"Oh, right," I said. "THE ORGANIZATION's going to launch missiles stolen from Shmumbers Defense at aboveground Odd Squad facilities."

Orica's family looked from one to another, then back to me.

"You're sure?" Orica asked.

"Ninety-nine percent," I told her. "You were right. THE ORGANIZATION did want me for something, but they were so sneaky, I didn't even realize what I was doing for them. The whole time I've been there, they've been giving me all these math problems involving missiles. I thought they were for class, because they were tucked away with a whole bunch of other evil math problems about ballistics and projectile parabolas and stuff like that—but they weren't for class at all. They were for real missiles."

"What kind of problems were they?" O'Cyrus asked.

"Complex targeting issues, mostly. Like, really complex. I gave THE ORGANIZATION everything they'd need to program their missiles to hit precise targets."

O'Cyrus scowled, not quite convinced. "And they recruited some rando to do that?"

"OJ isn't a normal kid," Orica told him. "When it comes to math, there's not many people who can do what he can. And we practically gift-wrapped him for THE ORGANIZATION."

I blushed. This was the closest thing to a compliment Orica had ever given me. "Plus, I had the added bonus of secretly working for you. Not only did they use me to feed you information, but they also got me to do their dirty work for them."

Orica frowned, angry at herself. "They're one step ahead of us. If not twenty."

I felt angry at myself too, upset at being used. But I was determined not to let THE ORGANIZATION get away with it. "We know what their plan is," I said hopefully. "So that's something, right?"

"We only think we know what their plan is," O'Cyrus muttered. "I haven't heard much evidence to support this idea yet."

Orica turned to me. "What else do you have?"

"I'm pretty sure The Oddfather programmed the missiles himself," I said. "I think that's what he was doing in the underground lair the night I saw him there, when he was using that secret code."

"But you don't speak code," O'Cyrus reminded me. "So you can't be sure." "True." I nodded, then thought of something. "But I do remember numbers well. Two of the ones The Oddfather entered were 43.7243 and 79.3579 If he was really programming missiles, then those are probably coordinates."

"Let's see." Orica tapped her training watch and pulled up a picture of the globe, and typed the numbers into it.

"Wait," I warned. "Can't THE ORGANIZATION or the Odd Squad find us through your watch's tracker?"

"I scrambled the GPS function," she told me. "Anyone tries to track us through this and they'll think we're in Parsippany. Okay. Got a match." Her face suddenly filled with concern. "You were right, OJ. They're coordinates, all right . . . for Section E of the Big Office Headquarters."

O'Cyrus now looked far more convinced I was right—and far more worried as well.

"Egad they're taking out the head of Odd Squad," said Oshton concerned.

"As well as every Odd Squad director in the world," said Orica grimly "BOSS-CON is today."

"I thought that was hosted at the Academy," I asked worried

"A building that's had hundreds of dragons scorch its interior isn't exactly the best place to hold a convention," Orica replied.

"They had me do problems about how much explosive was needed to blow up the buildings too," I said. "I worked out the payloads and the best places to strike the targets to provide maximum damage . . . ."

"Why would you give them that?" O'Cyrus demanded angrily.

"It was for class!" I snapped back. "I was trying to be a good student! You wanted me to fit in, so I was doing it! I didn't ask to be sent undercover to Villain Academy! That was your idea!"

"THE ORGANIZATION just destroyed the generator designed to protect the Big Office. So now there's nothing to stop them from attacking it. Except us."

"I can't believe this," Oshton said, stunned.

"It has to be what they're planning," I said. "All the evidence adds up."

"Oh, I get that," Oshton replied. "It's just that I don't know if this is in our jurisdiction anymore it's not strange, weird, or especially odd."

O'Cyrus rolled his eyes and swung back toward me. "So please tell me you know where the missiles are."

"Back at Hidden Forest," I said.

O'Cyrus narrowed his eyes. "That's not possible. We've been watching that place for weeks."

"The missiles have been there since the truck heist," I told him.

Oshton looked skeptical as well. "You're telling us that THE ORGANIZATION hid a bunch of stolen missiles in a suburban housing development?"

"It's not a real housing development," I explained. "It's camouflage for the missiles. THE ORGANIZATION's hiding them in plain sight."

"But there's no silos," Orica told me.

"There are," I countered. "They're just disguised as septic tanks."

O'Cyrus and Orica were taken aback for a moment but then nodded understanding. Oshton didn't. "What are you talking about?" he asked.

"There are huge holes all over the property," I explained. "Easily big enough to hold missiles underground. They're marked as being for septic tanks—and they even look like there are septic tanks in them—but the other night, I was on top of one, and there was a big hinge on the edge of it. The only reason you'd have a hinge there is if the top was supposed to swing open, and you don't need the top to swing open on a septic tank . . . ."

"But you do on a missile silo," O'Cyrus concluded, shaking his head in amazement. "You have to hand it to THE ORGANIZATION. They're clever. I looked at the satellite photos of that place a dozen times and never thought twice about the septic tanks."

I said, "I'll bet if you pulled up the sewer grid for the area, you'd find that Hidden Forest is attached to it and that they don't need a septic system at all."

"I don't think that's necessary. Your logic sounds right on this." Orica brought up an image she'd saved on her phone. "This is a satellite photo of Hidden Forest from two days ago. Looks like there are ten separate septic tank holes, meaning they've got ten missiles."

"that's enough to blow up the whole building with the directors in it." O'Cyrus stared out the windows."We can't afford to waste another moment. Let's move." He headed for the stairs.

Oshton glanced out the window himself. "But there's still a search party down there."

"That's only the shadow force." O'Cyrus started down. "Looks like most everyone else has been sent home. Besides, we need at least one team here so we can get off this island."

"How so?" I asked, following him.

"Because we're gonna steal their boat," O'Cyrus replied.

Orica fell in behind me. "How are the four of us supposed to infiltrate Hidden Forest by ourselves? The security there was tight enough, to begin with, and I can guarantee you THE ORGANIZATION's going to jack it up for D-day. The control center is in the middle of the whole complex, two stories underground. It'll be impossible for us to penetrate that."

"Plus, most of our gadgets are now at the bottom of the harbor," Oshton added.

"We'd need a whole platoon of agents to even make a dent in that place," Orica said morosely. "Is there any Odd Squad agent we can trust? Anyone we can explain the situation to?"

"Not that I can think of," O'Cyrus muttered.

I stopped on the stairs halfway down, struck by a thought. "I don't think we need to explain anything," I said. "I know how to get the Odd Squad there. We just need the right bait."

"And what would that be?" Orica asked.

"Us," I said.