“Ah. Well, Lee, I can already—”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got this. Thinking is my realm—I need you as my field agent. Especially now that you’ve managed to blend in with the natives.” A pack of students pressed themselves up against the wide mirror above the sinks near my vent. Time to cut the chatter. “Let’s start with the obvious, partner. A nun, by her technical pedigree, must be a geek. So, we’re looking at the newcomers in the long list of computer clubs. We’re already booked solid!”

  The bell rang. Ali was about to head out. “Speaking of which, I was supposed to hit the word barn with some friends tonight, and—”

  “Don’t worry! I’ll signal you when I need your intervention!”

  With Ali in class and excused from the evening, I was free to resume my investigation unencumbered. The school boasted several computer clubs, but thanks to a backdoor into the school’s archiving system I later isolated the most promising subjects. My first lead took me later that week to a Star Trek fan night and a peculiar Chicken-Handling Chess club, then a gathering of cypherpunks.

  Bingo! Suspect No. 13 vaulted to the top of the list: Heather Finney—hanging on every word of her mathematics teacher. From my spot in the air duct, I waited, watching for some sign of her allegiance to the Convent.

  The evening dragged on in the professor’s personal laboratory. One by one, the other students of the club filed out, yawning their way into the night, until only Heather remained with her mentor drawing confusing equations on an old board. And it soon became apparent that her interest in cryptographic algorithms was not purely academic. The morally dubious situation on the sofa, however, was mercifully brief—the married teacher quickly dozed off in the arms of what would become his future courtroom disaster.

  “Probably another dead end,” I muttered, sour.

  But the night had not played its final card. Below me, Heather had disentangled herself from her Romeo, unconscious after his three minutes of sweaty efforts. She seated herself at the bulkiest computer, which she quickly got access to thanks to a curious little device she had slipped into one of its exposed motherboard ports.

  “What mischief are you up to, young lady. I wish I could see more…” I whispered, my snout pressed to the vent grate.

  The Universe heard my plea. But, as it often does, it betrayed me altogether. The grate detached from the wall with a clang. I tumbled out. Fortunately, a cat always lands on its feet. Unfortunately, those feet landed squarely on the belly of the libidinous mathematics teacher.

  He gasped awake, struggling upright, trousers around his ankles and dignity nowhere in sight. “Miss Finney? What are you doing on—wait, it’s you!” He lunged towards his computer, but entangled in his tweed, he tripped and crashed backwards onto the glass coffee table, nose first into an ashtray the size of a casserole dish.

  I had ducked behind a cushion and, still dazed, could only watch what unfolded next.

  The diskette in hand, Heather seated herself on the edge of the desk, a triumphant smile stretching across her face. “Unfortunate, Mr. Escalante. You should have taken the deal.”

  “Goddamn MIA!” the professor howled, nose powdered with ash, clawing at his pants to restore some shred of authority.

  The MIA? What was the Martian Intelligence Agency doing here stealing from a cryptographer? In any case, Suspect No. 13 wasn’t our nun. Far from it—she was a government agent. An infiltrator! Just like me.

  The spy departed the room, not without first threatening to forward the school board a generous selection of documented extramarital exploits—courtesy of the MIA’s extensive archives. The Techno had what she came for, and her victim had been effectively silenced.

  And then—he noticed me. “Who the hell are you?” he asked, fumbling with his buttons. “Oh misery… I’m talking to a cat.”

  “Such a clueless mark,” I replied coolly.

  “You speak! Wait—did you see everything? You must help me! You must tell the board she was an agent! She robbed me! She—”

  “My dear professor,” I interrupted. “I can forgive adultery. Even theft. But I draw the line at—” My eyes fell, to my deepest horror, on the stained undergarment still peeking out above his trousers, “—tighty-whities.”

  No time for pity. No time for pedo-mathematicians and their noxious miscalculations either. The investigation had to go on.

  “Wait—she actually did him?” Ali asked, eyes wide. “Lucky bitch. This algebra teacher’s so thermic…”

  “Ew, gross!” one of her friends chimed in, slurping noisily on her Citrus Hill—a forgettable girl draped in unforgettable neon layers.

  “Why were you even creeping, anyway?” asked the only robot of the gang, who looked like Christian Slater.

  A few of Ali’s friends had stayed over for the following Saturday night, but I held my tongue. I waited until they were gone before delving into the finer details.

  I then allowed myself a week to reflect before arriving at a new conclusion. I shared it with my partner just as she was about to leave for a game night. “By following the most obvious lead, we’ve overlooked the most obvious solution.”

  “Seems obvious,” Ali said, closing her workbooks on her bed.

  “Indeed! We’re not looking for a geek. The nun wouldn’t do something that reminds her of her potentially traumatic time at the convent. Now that she’s free, why not go for the utter opposite?”

  “Uh-huh,” Ali nodded. A car horn blared outside.

  “What’s the opposite of the computer club, partner? The football team!” I exclaimed. “Which means—cheerleaders.”

  “Your logic has more shortcuts than a maze drawn by a blind hamster. You should know that I could just—”

  “The simplest answers are always the best.”

  “Whatever…” she added. “After our shift tomorrow, we’re heading to the premiere of Presumed Innocent, like with Charline and the others. And actually—”

  “Later!” I cut her off, already back at my command station, eyes fixed on the probabilistic equations running across the screen.

  “Don’t strain your eyes…” And off she went. Who knows where.

  Conclusions are the combined fruit of observation and deduction. I was still in the first phase, perched atop the digital scoreboard bordering the synthetic football pitch. I took a strictly scientific approach: binocular surveillance of the cheerleaders at practice. The mission? Spotting behavioral patterns.

  I came up empty the first fortnight. But I made an interesting discovery near the stadium. During my lunch break in the bleachers, I overheard the head janitor in the middle of a most curious conversation. Thinking he was alone, he revealed the true purpose of his daily presence on the premises.

  “I’ve got her in sight, no doubt about it!” he said between two bites of nutri-bagel. “The nun will be ours before the city jumbotron switches to night mode. Praise be to King Bill!”

  Sacrebleu! Ali and I weren’t the only ones on the case, then. The Microsoft Secret Service—yes, the Jupiter LXIX corpo-nation—was also on her trail. Of course, the Kingdomlands dreamed of getting their hands on a nun from the nexus of the Interwebs!

  I had to act fast. I darted to the nearest phone booth. At this hour, Ali had likely left her lame glee club and would be at the Kitty. Alas, all I got was a busy tone. She must still be deep in conversation with her new best friend whose name I had completely forgotten! I was starting to think her deep cover had been a bit too successful.

  “I guess I’ll have to handle this myself!” I growled, scanning for the cheerleaders. They were already on their way to the locker room. The janitor had vanished from the stands. “Pronto-up!”

  I dashed across the field, just as a whistle blast tore through my eardrums. Oh surprise! A helmeted titan—120 kilos of unrefined fury—charged straight at me. His gaze? Vacant. Driven solely by primal instinct.

  I sighed inwardly. Would I truly stoop so low as to flee?

  Yes. With an aerial leap worthy of Nijinsky, I danced around the brute, slashed the air with baroque precision, cut at an angle Newton himself couldn’t have predicted, and launched myself towards the end zone with a velocity no cheetah would dare claim. The small crowd rose in absurd uproar. “The beaver! Get the beaver!” Such vulgarity. I had barely time to smooth my whiskers when a second player lunged at me—this one with all the grace of a fridge hurled down a staircase. Another dodge. He crashed to the ground, lovingly embracing the turf. I crossed the white line—an absurd symbol of their tiny world of rules and points—and stopped, as etiquette demands, to lick my front left paw. Dignity, above all. I cast a condescending glance at the coach, shrieking incoherently. Poor man. He would never grasp the epiphany he had just witnessed: the incarnation of beauty, movement, the transcendental feline.

  Then, tail held high, I trotted straight towards the girls’ locker room. I slipped by an open window, leaped from a cracked locker onto the beam overlooking the maze of showers. Through the mist, I meandered in search of Carrie Shalter, head cheerleader and Suspect No. 95 on my list. I found her alone, facing the boards where choreography diagrams were pinned.

  Too late! The janitor emerged from behind the lacrosse gear shelves reeking of sweat and white privilege. Microsoft had beaten me to the punch.

  “Hey there, kid…” he croaked. “You’re going to come with me, nice and easy.”

  The redhead cheerleader turned. Visibly unimpressed, she snapped back: “You wish, creep! Don’t you have a job, like scrubbing the coach’s office. He must be done jerking off on Sports Illustrated.”

  “Don’t play with me, nun…” he replied, sliding a box cutter from his sleeve. He pointed it straight at the exposed runaway. “I only need a few circuits from your brain. Don’t make me harvest them here.”

  Darwin! The Jovian spy was a psycho. I had to act! Where was Ali when you needed her?

  Carrie took a step forward. “Did you say nun, toad face?”

  “That’s right. Come on. We got to motor…”

  The cheerleader suddenly stepped forward again—and impaled herself on the blade. Blood soaked into her black and orange uniform.

  “What the—?” reacted the spy, trying to pull his blade free. But it was lodged deep in the high schooler’s sternum. The man leaped backward, hand reaching for his comm-gadget.

  That’s when Carrie Shalter—still very much upright—yanked the blade from her own chest and plunged it into the assailant’s hand, right as he raised the device to his ear, and nailed it to his face.

  “It’s rude to call for backup,” she sneered, her voice now thick with a Russian accent you could slice with a chainsaw. “What org’ are you from, toad face? The Guild? Mars?” She twisted the blade, just enough to draw a scream—one that was quickly muffled as half the locker room showers sputtered to life in a hiss of steam and gurgling pipes.

  “You’re not a nun!” sobbed the terrified spy. “You’re KGB!”

  “The nun belongs to the Soviet Union, toad face.” With a casual flick of her thumb, the Red Mole deployed the full blade, driving it clean through the unlucky man’s skull. He dropped into the puddle that started spreading from the locker room drains. She knelt beside him, drinking in every moment of his suffering while wiring him.

  From my perch above, I was frozen in place. This institution, masquerading as a high school, revealed itself to be nothing less than an epicenter of clandestine activity: a veritable crucible of espionage, buried identities, and ideological subterfuge. Worse—Ali and I were definitely not the only ones searching for the nunByte. And the remaining players? The Soviet secret services! What kind of vengeance could they be engineering from their remote and frozen lair in the Kuiper Belt?

  The next day, I met Ali at a drive-in off Olympic Boulevard. “So, the Belt’s Sweetheart prodigy was actually a Soviet spook-agent?” she said, grabbing some hot sauce from the outer conveyor belt. “You sure you didn’t just doze off watching Scarecrow and Mrs. King?”

  “Tell me about it. I’ve got the feeling the Moirai have landed us in deep trouble,” I replied. “By the way, since when do we have a car?”

  Ali pulled out of the drive-in with her cargo of squared burgers stacked in the backseat alongside a pile of damaged books and the cocktail dress she just bought. “One semester of night shifts covered our expenses and left me with a little nest egg. Pooling with the others, we scored this old curb crawler—oops! What a jerk that guy is.” Judging by her more-than-questionable driving skills, my partner did not have a license. “Hanging with us tonight to toast the semester, or still on a stakeout?”

  “I’m off to mobilize the pedo-teacher’s supercomputer. I have a hunch about how to tie this story up.”

  “You—whatever…”

  Three red lights run later, my partner dropped me off at the high school. After a bit of blackmail, I’d gotten the teacher to work for me for five straight days, combing through the entirety of the local data-core. And I unearthed quite a few surprises…

  According to the patterns, no fewer than one in ten students was a cop, mercenary, gangster, or undercover agent. Among the staff, it was closer to one in seven. Their objectives were wildly diverse—from mild narcotics rings to the smuggling of uncanny robotic Christian Slater look-alikes. Yet a significant portion of them appeared heavily tied to the data business, which made them a tangible threat to the nun. That’s when I had a stroke of genius: by cross-referencing the communications data intercepted from the agents, I could compile and align the advances of each operative.

  “There!” the pedo-teacher exclaimed, spraying sunflower nutri-seeds across his monitor. “The paths converge.”

  Through the haze of cigarette smoke that cloaked the lab, I could barely make out the screen. But when I finally turned on the air-conditioner, the answer leaped out. What a fool I’d been.

  Wishing to reunite with my partner as swiftly as possible, I dashed across the locker-lined corridors, empty due to the late hour. And yet, laughter and music echoed through the building. The closer I got to the main gymnasium, the louder they became.

  Balloons, streamers, and orange-and-black flower arrangements. Seniors in ill-fitting rental tuxedos and dresses with second-hand lace. Aqua Net and cheap cologne. It was prom night.

  “Ali!” I shouted as I crossed the basketball court, transformed into a ballroom for the occasion.

  Clad in an iridescent dress, my partner jumped, dropping a brick that reeked of alcohol. I had caught her and her accomplice in the act of customizing the punch bowls behind the faculty’s back.

  “Darwin, Lee! You scared the shit out of me!” She snatched up the evidence and quickly tucked it into her bodice before the stern principal could come sniffing around.

  “Ali, I know who the nun is!”

  She rolled her eyes. “About fucking time…” Beside her, the neon-clad friend took a loud sip of Sheba’s rhum punch. “Y’know I could’ve told y—”

  “The librarian!” I cried, leaping onto a table. I landed among the lethal-smelling punch bowls. “My program was clear. She’s quiet. Above suspicion. And with full access to the data core!”

  “Miss Bailey? Miss Bailey the spinster librarian?” my partner pointed towards the old lady wearing a faux fox stole and punching tickets under the entrance’s balloon archway. “That Miss Bailey?”

  “Did I misjudge everything?” I meowed, realizing the absurdity of my conclusion. Should I ask the Maiden for future private computer lessons? Perhaps my code was flawed. “No, of course not, it’s the other infiltrators who’ve got it wrong!”

  “Sure. Including your incoming KGB buddy?”

  I jumped onto my partner’s bare shoulders. “Carrie Shalter! The cutter-wielding psychopath!” The Kremlin cheerleader had just entered the ballroom. Her smoldering gaze immediately locked onto us. She had done her homework. She knew who we were. She knew what we were after.

  “I’ll get Charline to safety. Then we rumble with the Soviet,” Ali said.

  “Charline?” I asked, confused. Who was this Charline?

  “Geez, Lee! You’re hopeless!” Ali snapped, tilting my head towards her oddly dressed friend still sipping her cocktail. “Here’s my classmate Charline! She’s the nun, you mop!”

  The nunByte from the Convent? Nonsense! Nonsense? Maybe… Fine. Let’s just say Ali seemed right—then. I was just… less right.

  “Th—the Soviet’s gone, Ali…” stammered Sister Charline. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this!”

  “Change of plans, Lee! Take her backstage. Find the side exit to the cafeteria parking lot, near the Kitty. I’ll handle the borscht muncher.” Ali started patting under her arm in vain—her holster was, alas, resting in the Kitty trunk. Under the welfare state’s jurisdiction, Las Pallas had banned firearms from educational facilities. Swearing, my partner grabbed a skewer from another student’s hand, leaving him mid-bite into his nutri-salmon. “Go!” she bellowed over the music.

  Without much thought, I darted towards the makeshift stage where the band stopped performing. Charline at my heels, we slipped under the partially folded bleachers and reached the backstage area.

  Unfortunately, in the shadows and chaos of cables, I missed the exit I had hoped for. Instead, we climbed a flight of stairs and emerged into the control room—where the press and weekend commentators usually perched. Behind a large bay window, I overlooked the entire gymnasium from above, invisible to the crowd below.

  “Bogus! We’re stuck in a dead end, Mr. Lee!” the nun said, scanning the ceiling for a potential roof exit. “Let’s head back!”

  “We’re safe here! And I’m not leaving Ali alone in a spy-infested arena!” I growled, watching the crowd that paid us no mind.

  Below us, the sea of bodies swayed to the haunting notes of The Sound of Silence, everyone caught in a trance. Thanks to the boozy punch, most were half-blind, drunk, and floating gently in time with the music—blissfully unaware of the unfolding denouement.

  For at the center of it all, Ali and the Soviet were facing off. The Soviet’s icy stare locked onto her prey. Her grip tightened around her thin, glinting cutter that shimmered faintly under the dimmed lights. Her expression was sharp, focused—ready to strike. And strike she did, with the speed and precision of a deadly snake. Ali remained calm, evading each slash with feline agility. Every movement was tight, calculated, taut with tension.