I didn’t want to play favorites, but I definitely had an opinion. “I’m not sure my vote should count either.”

  “Sure it does. Mrs. H said you were part of the team.”

  “My vote would go for you and Dean.”

  “Told you,” Li said. “Exactly the suggestion I made.”

  They went back to their debate. They didn’t ask me anything else, so I stood by. After a few minutes, Mrs. H called an end to the day’s meeting.

  Everyone left quickly, except Dean, who scowled at me from his desk. I packed up my laptop and jerked my head toward the door so he’d follow.

  “See you tomorrow, Mrs. H,” I called as I left.

  “Have a good afternoon, Theo.”

  Dean wasted no time once we were a few steps from the classroom in the empty hall. “Locking my phone, really?”

  “It got your attention,” I said, keeping my voice low while we walked side by side. “And we need to talk.”

  “I told you I wasn’t going to try to break your security again, what’s the—”

  “I analyzed your hacks and saw something familiar. You’re Locksmith.”

  Dean stopped, and I turned to face him. Color drained from his face, and I thought for a moment he might pass out. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice became monotone.

  He started walking again, faster. I had no trouble keeping up.

  “Yeah, you do.” I grabbed him by the shoulder and forced him to stop. “That’s why you can attack my phone, and why you can send out email like it’s from Wes. It’s also why you’re so valuable to the team.”

  “I told you, I don’t want that kind of visibility.” He tried to shrug me off.

  “Look, I’m not going to tell anyone that you’re Locksmith. I know you never stole anything. Frankly I think you should consider going into security.”

  “Like you?”

  “You’ve got the skills.”

  “You make it sound like I could start tomorrow.”

  “It’s not that easy, but once you’re in college, there’ll be plenty of internship opportunities.”

  He snorted a laugh. “College. Right. I don’t catch the breaks you do.”

  “Have you talked to anyone? Mrs. Robbins or Mrs. H?”

  “Mrs. Robbins only wants to help people she can get placed. My grades are shit, except for Mrs. H and math because there’s nothing I can’t handle there. And I gotta help—”

  We stared at each other for a few moments. “Help what?” I finally asked.

  “Nothing.” He pulled his jacket tighter around him. “Just leave it. I gotta go. Unlock my phone or don’t. I don’t care.” He spun on his heel and headed back the way we’d come.

  I let him go. There was more to Dean than I’d first guessed. Could I even help if he told me the problem? He certainly wouldn’t tell me anything while he was angry. I pulled my phone out and sent the unlock command.

  I headed for the school office. If Ms. Cohen was still there, I’d solve one problem—Wes.

  Fourteen

  The director’s talk was incredible. He discussed the making of Moonlight and screened some of his earlier work. We’d been to a couple of programs like this before, but this one went above and beyond because he stayed to talk with the audience after the official program had ended.

  “I can’t believe we got to see that.” Eddie slipped his hand into mine as we exited into the chilly evening.

  “I loved it.”

  “Sometimes I forget the perks of dating a college boy.” He squeezed my hand as we headed for the car and I squeezed back.

  “Can we walk for a little bit?”

  “Sure.”

  We went past where he’d parked, and after a while in silence, I finally decided to tell him what I’d done. “I reported Wes Lockly after the comp-sci meeting.”

  Eddie turned his head and raised his eyebrow. “That’s a surprise. Did something happen?”

  I hadn’t gone into this before our date because I didn’t want him distracted during the show. I laid out everything, although I tried to underplay my takedown of the three. There were no lies, though, because I didn’t want any awkward moments if he discussed any of this with Mitch.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything, but then I decided I had to because it might put a stop to it.” I left a pause for him to respond. When he didn’t I continued. “I mean we should’ve told Ms. Cohen when we caught him wailing on Dean. At least this time, I can bear the brunt of any fallout without involving Dean or you. At least I hope so.”

  He, somewhat awkwardly, kissed my cheek while we walked. “As if you don’t have enough going on already, you take up the cause to stop the school bully. Do you actually sleep at some point?”

  I raised his hand to my mouth and kissed his knuckles. “I had to say something. If he’s willing to take on a jock, who knows what he does to some of the students who can’t defend themselves.”

  “Well, if you need me to say anything, I’ll do it.”

  “I know.”

  After a few quiet moments, Eddie looked at me. “Seems like you want to say more.”

  He had no idea. I decided, for once, that I’d talk. “Remember I told you about the woman I worked with that died?” I took a deep breath. “Sometimes it’s… I don’t know… it’s surreal. I don’t always know what to think about it. I’m going to her wake tomorrow night. I’ve never been to a wake and….” I sighed. What else was there to say?

  Eddie stopped us, forcing people to go around before he gently pulled me toward the grassy area that ran next to the sidewalk. He wrapped me in a hug and kissed the top of my head. He simply held me. It felt good. Even more, it felt safe.

  “Is there anything I can do?” he finally asked.

  “Honestly, the hug has been pretty good.”

  “You can have those anytime.” He kissed my head again and I stepped back, keeping one of his hands in mine so we could walk again. “I’m glad you told me. Do you want company for the wake?”

  “I wish I could. It’s a private thing.”

  He nodded and we got back to our walk. “You guys ready for the competition this weekend?” Eddie shifted topics at the right time.

  “I think so. I really liked what the team had today. They’ve paid attention to what I told them and it showed.”

  “Is there something I can come watch on Sunday? See you guys take the championship?”

  “I actually don’t know.” It occurred to me that, other than the competition happening on the Amherst College campus, and that it went for thirty hours straight, I was kind of clueless. “Why would you want to watch a bunch of people sitting around computers anyway?”

  “Because you’re one of them, silly. I like the look you get when you’re thinking super hard.”

  “You’re weird.” He stuck his tongue out at me and I smirked back. “I’ll see what the deal is. Be cool to see you and make silly faces at you that’ll confuse everyone else.”

  The team planned to leave for Amherst Friday afternoon to settle in and be ready for Saturday morning. Since I had a game Friday night, I’d catch up with them around midnight.

  “Maybe I should come with you Friday and we can share a room. That was awesome in Denver.” Eddie grinned and wiggled his eyebrows at me. He was ridiculously cute and it made my insides tingle in the best way.

  While a lot of bad stuff had gone down in Denver, spending alone time with Eddie always made me happy. It’d said a lot about him that he didn’t get too weird when things got super chaotic. I suspected most people would’ve run from the mess, but he stayed right there.

  “Unfortunately I’ll have roommates Friday. And once we start Saturday morning, we go straight through into Sunday afternoon.”

  “If I can get there on Sunday, maybe we could make the trip back together?”

  “That would rock. Dad and I were already debating the best way for me to get there. If he drives me up, maybe you could bring me back. We’ll figure it out.”

  “You really got into doing this thing, didn’t you?”

  I cocked my head and looked at him, trying to figure out what he meant.

  “Coaching the team,” he coaxed.

  “I’ve enjoyed it more than I thought I would. And I didn’t give them the credit they deserve.”

  “I figured you’d end up liking it.”

  “Why?”

  “You like helping people. I can tell it when you help me with a computer thing, or if you’re explaining something. There’s never a condescending tone that you know more than someone else.”

  “I think the team would disagree with that,” I said, kicking a pebble along in front of me. “I’m not always as modest as I should be.”

  “But I bet you’re usually happy to give them the information. I bet you’ll be a teacher someday.”

  “Nah. I like doing the actual work too much.”

  “Lots of people teach and work.”

  “What about you? Mr. Getting Me Through Science Class.”

  “It’s possible. Maybe college level one day.”

  “I can totally see you as the sexy teacher everyone wants. You’ll teach a few days a week and cure diseases the rest of the time.”

  “That’s me—Doctor Teacher.”

  We chuckled. We knew what our basic futures looked like—me continuing to study cyber security at MIT and Eddie in biochemistry at UMass Boston. But we rarely talked about what might come next.

  We tended to be practical. We knew the odds of still being together in four or five years were not exactly in our favor. We’d had that talk once, shortly after we started going out and we got our first SAT scores back—we’ve already got a date planned in the spring for us to retake them, so the topic might come up again. Even though we planned to go to college in the same city, we knew we couldn’t predict everything that could happen in the year and a half before we graduated high school much less when we got to college. We might be a love that starts in high school and runs forever, but we could also find that college pulls us in different directions.

  “What do you want to do for your birthday?” The topic change came out of nowhere. “We’ve got that double celebration in a few weeks.”

  Wow. There were less than three weeks before Valentine’s and another ten days before I’d turn seventeen. Eddie almost never planned in advance. That usually fell to me.

  “I hadn’t really thought about it yet.” Eddie’d been super sweet last year—the first birthday/Valentine’s combo we’d celebrated together. He’d treated me to pizza and cupcakes. It’d been very sweet because he orchestrated everything. He even asked my parents if I could go out on my birthday, just in case they’d planned something.

  “Can I put it together again?”

  “Hell yeah!” I said, perhaps too loud because the couple walking in front of us turned to stare. We looked at each other and laughed quietly.

  “What’d you have in mind?” I asked.

  He made a face that I caught out of the corner of my eye. “You don’t get to know.”

  I made my best disappointed expression. “Okay,” I said, sounding disappointed even as I broke into a smile. “I look forward to it.”

  “Cool.” Eddie looked at his watch. “I suppose we should get you home. Don’t want your coach mad at me for keeping you out too late.”

  We had a leisurely walk to the car. I knew I’d be fine for practice in the morning if for no other reason than this evening was so perfect.

  Fifteen

  It’d been a long time since I’d shown up for practice early. As I’d gotten busier, I’d stopped doing something I truly enjoyed. But now bike rides weren’t doing the trick anymore to let me relax and clear my head, I hoped time on the ice would bring me some clarity.

  It’d felt good talking with Eddie about some things last night. The talk, however, only added to the list that demanded processing time in my already overworked brain. That talk made me so happy, though.

  Across the center line, there were pucks ready to go. I sprinted from one end of the rink, picked up a puck, and drove in on the empty net. Approaching the net, I’d decide where I wanted to hit. To make it challenging, I aimed the shots to ping off a post and land behind the goal line. The game was not only fun, it helped improve my shooting accuracy.

  I loved the sounds of being the only person on the ice—my skates scraping the surface, the pop of the puck on my stick, the pings off the posts. Perhaps more than wheels on the road and the wind whipping around me, these were Zen moments.

  Keys and the job offer filled my thoughts while my skating went on autopilot. I still paid attention to my shots even while I mulled over what to do. Keys was the first person I’ve worked with who’d died. It’s possible agents I had assisted on missions have been killed in the line of duty, but it didn’t happen while I worked with them. The way TOS was set up, I didn’t have routine contact with agents I’d worked with. My parents were the exception to that. Field agents were dispersed around the world, and for security purposes, no one had access to the full agent list. Security around that only increased after the tracker breach last year.

  The only people I knew well worked in IT because we were a team that constantly worked together. We also weren’t in the line of fire often. After the Denver trip last year, I’d talked more to Lorenzo because I wanted to know about his field experience. While he traveled a few times a year, he was usually only in close proximity to make the work easier, exactly like he’d been with me on the tracker mission. He’d never been the primary agent like I’d ended up being.

  What I didn’t know, and might never, is why Keys went on the mission. If I’d been able to get in and make it seem like Cocoon had finished the job, why couldn’t Keys have worked from afar with another agent in the chair? It wasn’t that I wished someone else dead in Keys’s place, but a trained field agent might have managed the situation better, and maybe no one would’ve been killed.

  Did Keys go by choice or was she ordered to go? I’d gone by choice. It was the only solution I’d seen, because Dad’s life was on the line, and maybe Mom’s too. Would I eventually be ordered to go somewhere too and possibly end up like Keys? Could I do that?

  My speed on the ice picked up. I got a puck on my stick. I wasn’t sure I could go fast enough to help me figure out the answers. Driving toward the net, I shot from the top of the slot and got the clank as I watched the puck drop from the top right corner to behind the line. Going around the net, I picked up one of the pucks I’d shot and missed with. Sprinting hard toward center ice, I bypassed the rubber disks there and kept what I had. As I crossed the blue line, I unleashed an anguished cry at the same time I sent a slap shot toward the net.

  The shot caused a loud thud off the boards since I aimed wide of the goal.

  Where had the scream come from? I didn’t feel a meltdown was imminent like on the bridge. Why the howl? Luckily no one was around. I’d talk to Shields about it in case I was losing my mind or something.

  I dug my skates into the ice, coming to a hard stop near the puck.

  Maybe I needed to approach Lorenzo’s offer like I did a decryption scenario.

  There were facts that I knew.

  Keys had more experience than I do.

  I’m very good at my current job, maybe better than anyone else currently at TOS. Lorenzo seemed to think I met that criteria.

  Working with a team, even leading one, I could do. I’d been on teams for years, and now I coached one and seemed to be doing okay.

  Could I truly manage people in their jobs, though? Ones who would be older, sometimes much older, than me? I had no idea.

  I pulled a puck toward me with the stick blade and took off toward the other end of the rink.

  What if I sent someone to their death? Did Lorenzo know that’s what he was doing with Keys, or had Keys put herself in that position?

  Crossing the far blue line, I didn’t curve in to the net, choosing to stay along the boards. Making the turn behind the net, I wanted to move the puck and skate fast.

  It was possible I was overthinking. I tended to do that when there wasn’t a logical conclusion to be reached. As far as I knew, Keys was the first from IT to be killed in the line of duty.

  I charged up the other side of the ice, pushing like I had an entire team chasing me. My legs had a good burn happening. This time as I crossed the blue line, I made for the net and I made the pipe at the far left my target. I made a hard stop at the top of the circle and fired. The clank was very satisfying.

  Three hard taps on the glass startled me.

  “Hey!”

  It was Mitch.

  We both headed for the rink door.

  “Damn, man, you’re early,” he said, opening the door from the outside.

  “Yeah.” I peeled off my helmet and wiped my sleeve across my face to make sure sweat didn’t drip into my eyes.

  “And you’ve apparently been at it for a while. You’re gonna have something left in the tank for the actual practice, I hope.”

  “For sure.” I stole a look at the scoreboard clock, and Mitch was about thirty minutes early too. “What about you? You usually get here with just enough time to hit the ice.”

  “Wanted to sharpen my skates, but that can wait. You want some company?”

  Mitch and I going one-on-one would be a blast from the past.

  “For sure.”

  Mitch’s face lit up far more than expected. “Five minutes.” He jogged off to the locker room.

  I slowly skated over to the bench, picking up a puck along the way to move with my skates as if I played soccer rather than hockey. Once there I grabbed my Gatorade and took a long drink. The cold beverage was delicious after so much skating. After the drink, I toweled my head off again and took a moment to breathe.

  Storing the towel next to my drink, I slipped my helmet back on and lined up a bunch of pucks at the top of the slot. I proceeded to rapidly aim and fire slap shots toward the net. Every clank made me happy since this was all about rapidly hitting any metal around the net. About 75 percent seemed to hit where I wanted.