Page 10 of The Dauntless (Spy Girl 5)
“Did you just get a yoga outfit from that guy?” the female agent asks.
“Um, I think so,” I reply, knowing what’s coming next. As soon as I walk out of the warehouse, I find myself in a new location.
“Where are you?” Daniel asks. “This is the strangest game ever. I’m not sure I’m liking this update.”
“Me either,” I agree. “I’ll just quit.”
“No!” everyone watching shouts. “You have to keep going!”
I take another swig from the bottle in front of me, trying to calm the unease I feel.
Did Black X do this because I quit? Are they trying to get at me through this game, and what message are they trying to send me?
My avatar stops to take a look around, the view confirming where I am.
“Is that the South of France? It looks like the Côte d’Azur,” an agent behind me says.
“It’s Cannes,” I say.
“How do you know that? It could be Nice.”
“She just passed Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren sitting in the sand,” Daniel adds. “Gotta be Cannes.”
Merde.
I walk through the town, passing a street named Dumond. It isn’t the name of the street where The Priest lived but rather his fake last name.
Clever.
I change my skin, donning the yoga outfit, and then run up to the door of the house on the corner, taking a gun from my cache of loot.
I ring the bell, and when a man answers, I point the gun at him. I take a deep breath, wondering what will happen next. If Black X knows about Chauncey …
Please don’t let them know about Chauncey.
“It looks like a nice house,” Daniel says. “Kill him, so you can get his loot!”
As soon as he gets the words out of his mouth, we hear the sound of helicopters.
“Abort!” one of the agents says. “Stuff’s about to get real.”
Since no child has come out, that means my secret is still safe. It also means they don’t know that I didn’t kill The Priest. That means, anything I do to him will work in the game because Black X probably wants to know how I killed him.
Although I hate to do it, even in a game, I shoot the person in the game representing The Priest. I don’t want Black X to question his death. I move over his body, taking his loot, and then rush into the kitchen.
Not surprisingly, I find what I need in the cabinets, throw it all in the microwave, and set the timer. I quickly run back into the living room, open the bookcase to reveal a secret passageway, and jump down the stairs as the house explodes.
“Wow! How did you know that would work?” Daniel says in awe. “I never would have thought to do that! Seriously, this is why you are the amazing X.”
I’m still going through the motions of playing the game, going up the stairs into the other home and out the back, but I know there won’t be any more danger until I switch locations again.
And I know what’s next.
Something I don’t want to relive.
But then a car pulls up to the curb next to me. Inside are a man and a young girl. She rolls down her window and yells at me to give it back.
“What do you have that she wants?” Daniel asks. “Little kids are creepy. I bet it’s a trap. She’s probably going to whip out an Uzi!”
I pull up my cache on the screen, wondering what she could be talking about.
“Is that a puppy?” the agent from behind me asks. “Did you get a dog added to your loot when you killed the dude in the explosion?”
I click the dog, putting it in my hand and closely studying it.
My throat goes dry.
And I feel like I can’t breathe.
The little girl in the car is … me.
How would Black X know about the dog?
A conversation I had with Terrance and Ari flits through my brain.
“Did you spend much time with your uncle Sam?” Ari asks me. “Do you know his full name?”
“I didn’t meet him until I was about ten. He and my mother seemed fond of each other. She always hugged him tightly. He was nice to me. Bought me a stuffed dog that year for Christmas. I lost it, um … when the car blew up. My dad was acting strange after my mom died. Not just in mourning. Like scared, which I guess he had good reason to be.”
How could they know about this?
I give the stuffed dog to the young girl and then grab her hand to pull her out of the vehicle as the car explodes. We’re knocked to the ground, stunned, just like I was that day. Tears fill my vision, and I want so badly to stop the game, but my desire to know more keeps me going.
I make my avatar stand up, and the background behind it goes black.
“Whoa! What’s going on?” Daniel says as pixels flash across the screen to stitch together a new location. One where you can see the Washington Monument in the distance. “That’s DC.”
The girl sits up and hugs the stuffed dog. When she lifts her head to look up at me, I notice the glint of a dainty golden locket dangling from her neck. I move my avatar in front of her, hoping no one else notices it, although I’m not sure why. Actually, I am. If Daniel saw it, he’d want me to steal her loot.
And I just can’t.
But I do know where she needs to go next. She holds out her hand, so I take it, helping her to her feet. As I’m leading her to Uncle Sam’s loft, I wonder why I haven’t gone there since.
My focus is quickly brought back to the screen. The outside of the loft looks exactly like I remember it from that day. But before we can go inside, the child disappears, and a man comes out of nowhere, takes all my loot, and shoves me into a cage.
When the door is shut, the screen goes dark again. I know what will happen next. I rub my hand across my forehead, feeling sick.
“It’s okay,” Daniel says, patting my leg. “If you lose, we’ll just start over.”
Of course, he has no idea.
Fortunately, I don’t have to relive Anna’s death. I’m simply taken out of the cage and escorted upstairs to an obviously opulent home that looks nothing like the actual one other than there is a table set for dinner.
“I don’t get it. This is supposed to be like an adventure,” Daniel says. “This game is driving me nuts. Nothing makes sense.”
“At the same time, it’s awesome,” one of the agents says. “You never know what to expect. It’s like the game designers were high when they created it. It’s so disjointed. I mean, like this could ever happen in real life.”
His comment makes me chuckle.
A corpulent man with a scowl joins me at the table.
“He looks like a really bad guy,” Daniel says. “I think you should engage him in hand-to-hand combat.”
“I’m not sure,” I say, taking a steak knife off the table. “I think I’ll wait and see what happens.”
What happens is the man makes it halfway through dinner before he starts making suggestive comments and stands way too close to me—I mean, my character in the video game.
Merde.
I know what I have to do, but I don’t want to do it in front of Daniel. Or the agents.
But the man in the video starts caressing my shoulder.
Then, he drops his pants.
I take a deep breath and do what I know I have to do.
“AHHH!” Daniel and the men who are watching yell out when I do it, although the female agent whispers, “That. Was. Awesome.”
The second I do what I did to The Moneyman, my character enters a new setting.
My loot is gone. My skin has changed to a designer dress. All I have is an empty champagne glass in my hand. I walk over and engage in conversation with a man at the bar. My flute is filled, and we toast.
“What the heck? Now, you are celebrating cutting off a man’s …” Daniel starts to say, but his words fade out when a team of mercenaries burst into the room and start shooting.
“Take cover behind the bar!” one of the agents yells.
“No!” Daniel says. “Rush th
em. Take their guns. Shoot them all.”
I don’t do either.
Instead, I drop to my knees. The whole time I’ve been going through this, I’ve been keeping track of what Black X knows. And who I know who could have told them. I’ve whittled the list down to only Terrance or my brother as the moles who are in contact with Black X and reporting everything they know about my missions.
But I didn’t tell Terrance about this.
For a brief moment, I wonder if it’s all a hoax. If Ari is really even my brother, really even my twin. I never saw the DNA results. They forged my background. They could have forged his. Maybe my brother really did die. Maybe Ari really is a Bradford, but with his parents both gone, they decided to make him my twin.
“Are you crazy?” Daniel yells. “They are going to shoot you!”
