I shut the door to my bedroom behind me and think about what Alpha said. I clench and unclench my fists, but that doesn’t release my tension, so I do what I always do when I have excess energy. I drop down and start doing pushups. I only get through twelve when I sit up and cradle my head in my hands. Is it really that big a deal that they haven’t told me about the genetic thing before? Why am I so upset over this?
I don’t know the answer to either of these questions.
CHAPTER 12
Alpha doesn’t mention my jaunt through the Common the next day at breakfast. He just hands out assignments as if nothing’s wrong.
“Orange, solo mission that we have previously discussed,” he says.
Orange nods his head, and his mop of orange hair falls in his face.
Alpha looks back down at his notepad. “Green and Blue, historical prep today.”
Green nods his head, but Blue doesn’t. Instead he stares at me from across the table. He’s been doing that since I sat down this morning. Staring. It’s kind of creepy.
“Indigo—where’s Indigo?” Alpha asks. It’s like he’s just noticed that there’s an empty chair beside me. Funny. It’s the first thing I noticed this morning.
“I’m not sure, sir,” Red says. “He didn’t tell me he’d be absent this morning.”
“He’s not feeling well today,” Zeta says as he clears his throat.
“Nepotism at its finest,” Blue mumbles under his breath. Most people in the room gasp and turn to look at me. Only Alpha, Zeta, and Violet don’t flinch. But that’s because they already know that I know the truth.
“Oh, shut up, all of you,” Blue says. “She knows.”
Alpha folds his napkin and sets it down on the table. Then he straightens his tie and stands. “Blue, a word.” He jerks his head toward the door. “The rest of you have your assignments.”
I guess breakfast is now over, even though I have no idea what my assignment is. No one’s assigned me anything in days, except “study the early-twentieth century.” I guess I’ll do more of that today. I scoot my chair back and stand along with everyone else. But Green backs away from me, as if I’m a lion in a cage and everyone just figured out the door is open. Orange makes eye contact and quickly looks away.
Okay, guys, I get it. I’m an outsider here. I’m not one of you because none of your time-traveling mothers expelled me out of her uterus.
I turn to head toward the library.
“Iris,” Zeta says. “Where are you going?”
“Library,” I mutter, not bothering to turn around.
Zeta sidesteps in front of me. “Uh-uh. It’s mission day. Your first real one.”
I whip around. Real one? As in nontraining? “No one told me about this.”
“I know,” Zeta says. “Alpha only decided you were ready last night.”
Weird. Did he make that decision before or after gave me that good verbal spanking?
Zeta whips his head over to the door. “Yellow and Violet, you’re going, too.”
Yellow clucks her tongue in disgust while Violet gives me an icy stare. I stare right back. If she thinks I’m going to blink first, she’s got another thing coming.
“Come with me.” Zeta walks toward the back staircase that leads to the basement. Yellow turns on her heel and prances toward the staircase, while Violet stomps behind her. Stomps. Like a toddler.
“I hate fire missions,” Violet mutters to Yellow on the stairs, and I have no idea what she’s talking about.
Zeta holds the door open for us and gestures to the classroom on the right. We all file in. There’s a projector and a screen set up in the front of the room. I slide into one of the dozen or so desks, each of which has a yellow legal pad and a sharpened number 2 pencil set atop it. Violet leaves a desk between us, and Yellow sits on the other side of her, away from me.
“Ladies,” Zeta greets us, then he looks right at me. “Iris. I believe in trial by fire. You’re not going to learn until you’re thrown into the flames and made to find your own water. All first missions are designed to be high pressure, high stakes, high risk. The chance of failure is great, the chance of violence even greater. It’s, quite literally, do or die. You ready?”
My heart is thumping against my chest. This is what I’ve been trained for. It’s what Peel excels at: training its students for missions such as this. I’ve been on dozens of high-stress simulations but never anything real. Ever. I always got the jitters before, but I’m shaking now. I feel weightless.
“I’m ready,” I say.
But inside I’m crumbling. Because this is just great. I’m about to go on a high-pressure mission with an excellent chance of violence, and my team members don’t even want to sit next to me.
Zeta flicks the light switch and snaps on the projector. The screen becomes awash in a glow of white light before there’s a click and an image pops up. It’s a painting. There’s a woman sitting at a piano and another woman standing behind it, her arm raised slightly and her mouth open as if she’s singing. A man sits with his back turned. It’s pretty. So pretty. I squint my eyes and examine the detail on the singer’s dress.
“The Concert,” Zeta says. “Painted by Johannes Vermeer around 1660, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on March 18, 1990, along with twelve other pieces of art. The Concert alone is valued at two hundred million dollars.” My mouth drops open. “The total value of all art stolen that night is about five hundred million. None of the stolen works has been recovered.
“And, ladies, tonight the president himself has authorized us to prevent that burglary from ever happening in the first place.”
I sit up straight in my chair and lean my elbows on the desk. I glance over and see that Yellow and Violet have done the same. My heart is beating faster, but now there’s excitement mixed with nerves. This is what I’m talking about. Forget causing someone to miss a cab. This is what I want to be doing.
Zeta clicks the remote again, and a cross-section of the museum pops up on-screen. He grabs a pointer and aims it at a corner of the first floor.
“At precisely 1:24 a.m. on the morning of March 18, 1990, two thieves disguised as uniformed police officers knocked on the museum’s service entrance door. They told the guard—a young, poorly trained college student—that they had been alerted to a disturbance at the museum related to the St. Patrick’s Day revelry that was still taking place on the streets of Boston. The guard buzzed them through the door.
“The two thieves then told the guard that he looked familiar and that they both had seen a warrant issued for his arrest. The guard stepped out from behind the desk, leaving the only panic button that would have alerted the real police force. The thieves then forced the guard to summon the other guard, and when he arrived, both were handcuffed and led to the basement. The thieves then wrapped the guards’ hands, feet, and heads in duct tape, and secured them to posts forty yards apart.”
Yellow and Violet are just sitting there listening, but I’m scribbling notes like crazy.
Zeta continues. “At approximately 1:48 a.m., the two thieves made their way up the main staircase into the Dutch Room on the second floor.” Zeta moves the pointer to the top right corner of the second floor. “For the next forty minutes the thieves tripped alarms as they traveled between the rooms on this floor. From the Dutch Room, they stole three Rembrandts, a Flinck, The Concert, and a nearly three-thousand-year-old Chinese bronze beaker. Across the floor in the Short Gallery”—the pointer whisks to a room on the left—“they stole five Degas drawings and a bronze finial that sat atop a pole holding a Napoleonic flag. At some point, a Manet was stolen from the Blue Room on the first floor as well”—the pointer falls on a room on the first floor that looks to be almost directly below the Short Gallery—“but investigators have not been able to determine the precise time it was stolen.