The head office was silent, but not empty. It was dark in London, and the omnipresent clouds blocked the moon. Tulip Jones sat across from Alex, flipping through a dense packet of papers with a grim look on her face. Alex himself sat straight in his seat, his back carefully hovering a few centimetres from the chair. His face was schooled in a blank expression, but his mind raced.

Finally, Tulip looked up. "We'd have to get a trained psychologist to back your assertions."

Alex snorted, and he caught the surprise on Jones' face. "That none of these children are suited for fieldwork? That some are even psychologically unstable? You would say the same, if you watched them."

She unwrapped a peppermint almost mindlessly. "It doesn't really matter what I have to say." She placed the mint flat on her tongue and Alex watched in mild revulsion as she slipped it into her mouth like a snake. "It's been decided that these teenagers are the future of MI6, whether I like it or not." The smell of peppermint, always present in this room, strengthened. Alex had come to associate it with bad news.

She stood, closing the folders and locking them in a desk drawer. "Trust me, I like it even less than you do."

Alex stood and looked down into her eyes. "I doubt it."

The door swung closed quietly as he left the room.

The lights in the bunkroom shut off automatically at 21:00 each night. Maggie waited ten minutes until she snuck down her ladder as quietly as she could manage—but the bunks were unstable and unfortunately creaky. She didn't have far to go, only the bunk beneath hers.

"Olivia," she whispered, barely above an exhale. Her bunkmate turned over and rested a head on her elbow. Maggie could see her raise an auburn eyebrow, but she remained thankfully silent.

Maggie leaned in. "Meet me in the loo in five." She didn't wait for a response, and turned around right away, heading for the girls' toilet. She hoped Olivia's curiosity had been piqued. Maggie was counting on the fact that everyone in the program was drawn to mystery like a moth to a flame—or, if you were being less generous, was drawn to danger like a lemming was drawn to the edge of a cliff.

The concrete floors were cold, even though it was late summer. Maggie curled her toes under her feet when she stopped in the loo. She rubbed her hands on her goose-pimpled arms and tried to settle in to wait. The sinks didn't have mirrors, but Maggie knew what she would see: a brunette of average height and average looks looking a little less skeletal than she had when she'd arrived. Who knew what Aaron saw in her—maybe just the only girl his age.

Maggie almost scoffed at herself. She wanted to scream at herself that she didn't need a guy in her life, and had been surviving just fine with her brothers and sisters. Who was she to worry about what Aaron thought of her, when the both of them were training to be spies?

She wanted to think all of this, but it seemed like her brain wasn't calling the shots when it came to Aaron. Her heart—or more likely, her hormones—was doing all of the thinking.

Olivia opened the door quietly. Even just a few weeks ago Maggie would have jumped in surprise, but now she noticed everything. She pushed her stray thoughts out and smiled at the redhead. Maggie mentally catalogued everything she had learned about the girl since beginning training. Olivia was short, quick and good with computers. She had beaten Chloe and Charlie in hand-to-hand combat by the skin of her teeth, but fought extremely dirty against everyone else. Maggie had bested her, but it was far from a clean bout. She thought she might still have healing scabs on her shoulder from Olivia's fingernails.

Olivia leaned against the door with her arms crossed. Arching an eyebrow, she asked, "So why am I out of bed right now?"

Maggie tried to force out a smile. "How do you feel about a challenge?"

Aaron was nervous. He lay on his back on his bottom bunk, trying to count the seconds, but his jumpy heartbeats were throwing off his count. What they were planning on doing tonight was stupid and very dangerous. But not once did it cross his mind that he would call it off.

After what felt like an eon, the door opened and a sliver of light illuminated the room. Aaron turned his head very slightly toward the door. It was Maggie. He let out a breath and his already-racing heart skipped a beat, as it always did when he saw her. So the plan was a go. It was almost relaxing, to know for sure that they were going to do it.

Maggie walked past his bunk and smiled briefly without looking at him. He wished she were coming with them. But it didn't make any sense—she said herself that she wouldn't bring any necessary skills to the party. In this operation, Olivia was going to be the brains, and Aaron would be the brawn. And this way, he thought to himself, Maggie wouldn't be in any danger. If he and Olivia were caught, they would likely get kicked out of the program for good—which was not an attractive possibility, but at least neither of them had siblings who depended on them.

Maggie didn't talk about her family much, but he knew she had quite a few younger brothers and sisters—three? four?—and that so long as she remained in the training program, they would be taken care of. And so he reasoned that he was glad she wasn't accompanying them, rather than disappointed. That's what he told himself, anyway.

Olivia emerged from the toilets not long after Maggie climbed back into her bed, but went to her dresser rather than her bottom bunk. She slipped her trainers on and pulled her hair back out of her face. She was very carefully not looking in Aaron's direction. With hardly another sound, she slipped out of the bunkroom and toward the training centre. According to the plan he and Maggie had hashed out a few hours earlier, Aaron would wait at least twenty minutes before following. Then he could at least claim to any of their peers, should they wake up to question him, that he hadn't known Olivia was already gone.

He knew that leaving their dormitory unnoticed was going to be the easy part, but his heart still raced. Their plan mostly ended when he met up with Olivia. From that point, the two of them would need to think on their feet and desperately avoid detection.

He stared at the metal supports that crisscrossed under Ben's mattress above him. The boy rolled over in his sleep and the whole bed squeaked. Aaron held his breath and tried to make out the clock across the room. It was the only source of light in the dormitory, and he almost groaned when he saw that only five minutes had passed.

This was going to be torture.

Olivia was doing yoga, of all things, when he finally made it into the training room. He grinned as she tumbled out of a pose that had her contorted so oddly that she looked like a pretzel.

"Stretching is good for your muscles," she offered, even though he hadn't asked. "Keeps them from getting as sore."

"You'll have to teach me sometime," he said. "Rider's a bit of a taskmaster, isn't he?"

She flushed, and with her light colouring, it looked like every inch of skin was turning as red as her hair. He nearly grinned again, until he remembered why they were both standing there in the middle of the night.

"Maggie explained what the plan was?" he asked, moving to sit on a desk not far from the wrestling mat where she was standing.

Olivia snorted and moved to sit at a desk next to him. "She said that you wanted to find out more about Rider and asked me to help because I'm good with computers. Not much beyond that."

He laughed a little. "Well, there isn't much of a plan beyond that, really. Maggie and I are pretty convinced that the security in the building itself won't be much to speak of. I mean, once you're in, you're in, right?"

He didn't wait for her to respond before continuing. "You saw that day we went outside that there weren't even keypads on doors or anything. If anything, they just looked like regular locks, and I can handle those."

Her eyebrows rose, but she didn't ask about his unusual skill. For a minute she sat back, leaning on her hands, eyes focused on something far away. Her lips moved, as if she was talking, but no sound came out.

Suddenly she stood, looking tense but ready. "I already told Maggie I was in. Are we gonna go, or what?"

The hallways were deserted. Aaron knew this should be a comfort, but his whole body was a bundle of nerves. Their plan was to find a room—any unlocked room with a computer in it—and let Olivia do her thing. He expected the protection on the computers to far surpass the physical security, but Olivia seemed confident enough.

They were two floors above their basement bunkroom when they found an unlocked office. Crawley, the nameplate read. Crawley kept a neat ship, and there were no personal effects on his desk. At the same time, everything was arranged so precisely that Aaron knew he would notice if a single pen was out of place.

"Don't touch anything," he told Olivia. "Except the computer, of course."

She snorted and pulled out the desk chair before settling in. She didn't look at him as the computer screen turned on and illuminated her face so it was a milky white. She immediately started tapping on the keyboard lightly, her fingers flying. "Are you gonna stare at me, or are you gonna watch the halls?" she finally asked, distracted.

"Oh, sorry," he muttered. He padded lightly to the doorway, unsure if he should peek his head out or just stay in the room and listen carefully.

He decided on the latter and stood tensely next to the door. He could hear everything—the slight whirr of the computer; Olivia's fingers clacking on the keyboard; the slight rumble of the heating system as it pumped out warm air; his own breath, slow and steady.

Olivia's voice, when she spoke, was so unexpected he almost jumped.

"I'm in! They really need to work on their protocols, that was too easy…." Her words faded as she blitzed through menus, eyes quickly scanning.

"Print what you can," he said. "We can take it back with us to the training centre. The sooner we get out of here the better."

She nodded, but he didn't know if she was really listening. Her eyes were wide and her hands finally still, trembling slightly over the keyboard. Aaron wanted desperately to read what she was gaping at, but knew what could happen if he left his post.

A heavy silence settled in the air as her eyes skimmed the screen. He couldn't read her face. It was angry and scared and sad all at once.

"Olivia!" he finally hissed. "Print it! We need to get out of here!"

She snapped out of it and finally looked at him, nodding. In a moment, the printer was jolting to life and Aaron didn't think he'd ever heard anything louder. He tightened his fingers against his palms and turned toward the door again, trying to listen for footsteps.

The floor in the hallway was a dense carpet, and Aaron thought he heard light padding coming closer. For a second, he panicked, his fists shaking. They were caught! But the footsteps faded away, and he let out an unsteady breath. Olivia shuffled papers behind him.

The printer spat out its last page and whirred until it finally sat quiet once more. Sudden darkness fell onto the room and the computer screen was off as well. Olivia had a thick stack of paper in her arms, thicker than the largest book Aaron had ever read.

"Let's go," she whispered, and he knew that she was as tense as he was.

He peeked out of the door for the first time, hoping that the owner of the footsteps from before was long gone. Thankfully, as it had been when they'd first arrived, the hallway was quiet and deserted.

They descended the stairs in utter silence, though Aaron was sure that his heart was audible through the thick concrete walls. It was truly late now, the middle of the night, and when they finally arrived it was evident that everyone in the barracks was deeply asleep.

All except Maggie, of course. She didn't bother climbing most of the ladder down her bunk, choosing instead to leap lightly to the ground, her feet bare. Her hair was mussed, as if she'd tossed and turned waiting for them. He finally let out his breath.

Olivia was still carrying the dictionary-sized stack of papers. Maggie pointed toward the bathroom and he and Olivia both nodded silently.

They had things to read.