“Simple,” Tara answered evenly, and then without warning, she let out another cheer-yell. “WEAPONS, LAST TIME!”
More whirring, and the panels rotated and moved until the room settled back into its normal configuration.
“So ‘weapons, okay’ brings them out, and ‘weapons, last time’ puts them away?” It was meant as a rhetorical question, but Tara answered it anyway.
“No,” she said patiently. “‘WEAPONS, OKAY!’ takes them out.” Sure enough, at her call, the whirring began again. “‘Weapons, okay’ won’t do anything.”
“You have to yell it?” I asked.
Tara shook her head. “You have to cheer it. The voice recognition software is programmed to read both your voice identification and a combination of your tone, volume, and cadence. It’s an added security measure. It’s hard to cheer under duress. This way, if someone’s trying to force you to reveal our weapons supply, you probably couldn’t do it even if you tried.” She tucked a strand of stray hair behind her ear. “Your turn. And remember, don’t just say the words. Cheer them.”
“You’re telling me that this room knows whether I’m cheering or not?”
Tara said nothing. A few seconds of silence later, she looked at her watch.
I got the point. “Weapons, last time.” I did my best to sound less angry than usual. Nothing happened. Tara kept staring, so I tried again. “WEAPONS, LAST TIME.” I settled for loud instead of peppy, and still, nothing happened.
“WEAPONS, LAST TIME.” I put a little lilt in my voice, but the panels remained completely immobile.
“Smile,” Tara advised.
I glared at her.
“The holos have been gone for twelve minutes,” she said.
“T-minus three minutes left.”
“Holos?”
“Holograms. If anyone had happened to look in the door to the practice gym in the past hour and a half, they would have seen a very good facsimile of the cheerleading team practicing a pyramid. The technology is light-years ahead of anything currently on the market, but basically, imagine going to see a 3-D movie, minus the glasses, plus an absurd number of projection points too small for the eye to see, and you’ve got completely realistic-looking holograms. We keep the doors locked during practices, so no one has a chance to interact with them, and they’re configured with each of the possible outside vantage points—the windows on the doors and the ones on the north and south ends of the gym—in mind.”
My mind ran through the angles from which a viewer could potentially view the holograms, calculated the density of light needed, and went into overload when I started thinking of rendering real-time motion with that kind of quality. So this was where those hefty taxes my parents paid went to. Secret high-tech cheerleading holograms. Of course.
Tara, sensing my wonderment, patted me on the shoulder, but then continued talking in a tone so no-nonsense that I couldn’t have disbelieved her if I’d tried. “A little over twelve minutes ago, the holos went into the locker room. The showers are on timers. We have to be back before they turn off.” She glanced down at her watch.
“T-minus two minutes?” It was half guess, half sarcasm on my part. “And you want me to cheer.”
“Smile,” she told me, and I tried miserably to heed the advice. “You have to yell and bob your head a little and smile, and you have to mean it.”
I sighed, but considering the fact that if I didn’t smile and mean it, the Pentagon was probably going to swoop down and arrest me any second now, I had no choice but to give it a shot. “I feel so stupid.”
Tara patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said, her lips pulling up on the ends. “If you don’t feel stupid, you’re not doing it right.”
“WEAPONS, LAST TIME!”
As the weapons disappeared, I couldn’t help but think that my life had now officially hit an all-time low.
We walked back to the center of the room, and Tara handed me a towel.
“What’s this for?” I asked suspiciously. With my luck, it was probably one of Lucy’s explosives.
Tara opened her mouth to answer, but was cut off when the ground beneath us began to move. I looked down and realized that we were standing on another emblem—this one containing a shield embossed with a sixteen-point compass star and an eagle—and that this circular emblem, five feet wide to the other’s twelve, was rising slowly off the ground.
“Squad version of an elevator?” I guessed.
The ceiling’s panels spread apart, allowing our Squad-evator to deposit us in one of the locker-room showers. A shower which happened to be turned on, full blast. Tara jumped quickly out of the way, but I got the “refreshing” benefits of the spray, straight in the face. Within seconds, the shower turned off, and I stood there, fully clothed and sopping wet.
“Tara?” I said calmly.
“Yes?” She bit back a smile, which I met with a glare.
“I think I know what the towel is for.”
CHAPTER 8
Code Word: Boo
Trapdoors. Underground lairs, high-tech headquarters, and references to “the Big Guys Upstairs.” Bobby sock handcuffs and lethal orange thongs.
I tried to take it all in stride. Really I did. I pride myself on being the type of person who doesn’t get caught off guard, but the thing was, I’d been so soaking wet that the twins had somehow coaxed me into pulling the shower curtain closed, stripping, and giving them my clothes. I figured that the Squad had to have some kind of intense drying technology, but I’d been standing in the shower in nothing but my underwear and my combat boots for ten minutes, and Brittany and Tiffany still hadn’t returned so much as a single additional article of clothing. First period was about to start, and, quite frankly, even a bulletproof push-up bra was starting to sound good.
“Here.” A manicured hand thrust something over the top of the shower stall. It was pink and sparkly. Like I would be caught dead in pink.
“What’s this?”
“Your shirt.”
“No.” I dragged the word out, trying to be patient. “My shirt is much bigger. And black.”
“I suppose that’s one word for it.”
“Brittany!” I spat out one of the twins’ names, figuring I had a fifty-fifty chance.