Hey guys! Yes, you read this right. I am restarting My Most Dangerous Secrets (and this is the same author that wrote it before, so no plagiarism going on here). I've come up with a completely different plot for it, much better planned-out, which I think is a lot better, so if you could read and review, that would be great!

I'm also working on the next chapter of To Steal A Heart (for those of you who ship Lily/James - Harry Potter - as well as Percy/Annabeth), and I should have it up sometime next month. Maybe.

I'm not going to update this very frequently, except perhaps the next chapter because I feel like this one just sets the premise instead of really getting into the story, so please don't expect weekly updates. With two stories going on (I'm not even sure this is a good idea, but I had a total oh-God-story-idea moment and had to start) I feel like each update time will be slower and slower. Sorry about that. I'm not very good with deadlines.

Otherwise, those of you who read MMDS last time (before I deleted it), trust me, this is a LOT better! PLEASE just try it out, it would make my day!

Thanks so much!

jackala345

Chapter One: Couples and Where I Fit In

I've always felt that this world can be divided into raw twosomes. Black and white (I prefer black). Coke and Pepsi (Coke, definitely). Day and night (night). Odd and even, fat and skinny, fast and slow, tall and short. Pretty and ugly. Perfect and flawed. Right and wrong. Yes and no.

There's a lot of couples in this world, I admit it. And many of them have applied to me in the past – but not the ones you might think. I'm not really the kind of girl you see everyday in the streets. Or maybe I am; maybe you've seen me before, but I'd hazard a guess and say that I haven't crossed your mind since.

Don't worry, I'm not offended. If you looked closely (although I've gotten very, very good at hiding my feelings, so you probably wouldn't see anything out of the ordinary) you'd actually say I'm rather relieved. The way I live, the more you blend in, the better, and believe me, I've had a lot of practice.

I know you're wondering where I'm trying to say here; sorry, I've never been good at getting to the point. Roundabout way of thinking and all that. Ha, there I go again with the tangents. You see, just like I've had a lot of practice with remaining incognito, I've also been trained fiercely in the art of lying. And you might be thinking, what kind of parents let their children learn to lie? Yeah, I'd agree. So telling you all this – straight facts, no embellishment or flashy fabrications – it's a stretch for me.

But driving straight to the core: basically, my life revolves around three pairs.

True and false.

ISS and GITC.

And, most importantly, life and death.

I know you understood the first and third, and don't look so surprised, because I'm not making any of this up. I told you – true and false. Now, I get why you'd be skeptical, because usually I deal with false. I fib. I invent stories. I worm my way out of situations by telling blatant lies to people's faces, and I don't feel any guilt afterwards. You can go tell my mom and dad what a horrible kid they've raised, and they won't ground me – actually, they'll side with me. Because I just told you: the way I live, true and false can sometimes be the extremely thin, wobbly tightrope between life and death.

But I'm getting off topic again.

I know you're still curious about pair #2: ISS and GITC. Of course, you don't know what they stand for. There are somewhere around two hundred people in this world that know the true meaning of ISS and GITC. And I don't mean to brag or anything… but I'm one of them. I've been there since the beginning. Four years – that's how long I've worked, that's how long I've fine-tuned my body and my mind until my reflexes are so keen I could spear a mosquito on the tip of my knife from ten feet away.

Yeah, I have a knife. And no, I'm not kidding – I could actually do that.

See, I'm a trainee of the ISS. Sorry, used the acronym out of habit. What I meant to say is: I'm a trainee, student, apprentice, whatever, of the ISS, more commonly known (but not by much) as the International School for Spies.

The name means exactly what it sounds like. The ISS recruits people they think have potential – "potential" being a broad term here. I was chosen for my brains and my smarts. My best friend here (although we don't get much girl-on-girl time. Did I say we don't get much? I meant we don't get any), Thalia Grace, was enlisted for her superb natural athletic ability. She's fast, and I mean fast – and then trains them. Hard. We run, we climb ropes, we climb trees, we climb smooth cliffs, we complete obstacle courses, we throw knives, we shoot guns, we learn, we memorize, we cram… and what for? C'mon, use your deductive reasoning skills. Yep, you got that right. The ISS trains us to become spies.

It might horrify you, it might intrigue you. For me, a small girl whose entire perspective on existence was changed at the age of twelve when a scary-looking man approached her in a tuxedo and swore her to secrecy, well, it provided me with an opportunity. I'm not what you'd call the most social person ever, and though I scored top grades on all tests in middle school, I wasn't… liked. ISS changed that. ISS let me flourish, expanded my knowledge and taught me to act appropriately in any situation, forced me through five-mile courses in the mud until I could complete them in under half an hour. ISS allowed me to really see my "potential", something I thought would never emerge from my introverted, 4'11" shell, and, when the chance to shine was handed to me on a silver platter, you can bet I took it for all it was worth.

I'm a spy, yes. I've been on missions and uncovered secrets that would make you shiver in your sleep; I've been in multiple (as in, more than one) life-or-death situations; I've army-crawled through a muddy forest laced in barbed wire in order to return my intelligence to my superiors, my knife held between my teeth. I've done a lot that you could never dream of doing, and a heck of a lot more beyond that.

Yes, my parents (parent, I live with my dad. Mom's off somewhere in Greece with her boyfriend) know about it. And yes, lovely daddy there still makes me do my homework.

I'm a spy, and it might be rough, but ask anyone here, and I swear to God, they'll all tell you the same thing. It's fantastic.

The not-so-fantastic part about it is, coincidentally, the other half of ISS's "pair". GITC. The Global Intelligence Training Center. They're just like us. They train recruits, too; they push them just as hard as us, they try to gather just as much information. So you might think, hey, maybe ISS and GITC could collaborate, get two times the amount of info they do now, right?

Absolutely, completely, and utterly wrong.

ISS and GITC are a pair for a reason. Hint: they're opposites. ISS trains for good. We work to collect knowledge in order to help the people, to help the community, to help the world. GITC, on the other hand, works for the people who care more about personal gain than they do for the sake of others. They might be just as strong (maybe even stronger) than ISS is, but they're led by those who are, in essence, the "bad guys".

To put it (very) lightly, you could call us rivals.

ISS and GITC have been in a feud that goes as far back as the establishment of both our schools. We've always been fighting, we've always been "at war", per say. We compete, in a sense, and by doing this, we've gotten into a lot of close scrapes with each other. Close, as in good apprentices on both sides have died, and others have just barely escaped death themselves.

Close here is not a relative term. Close means close.

Get the life and death situation thing now?

The thing is, though, despite the major antagonism between the two intelligence agencies, neither has really done anything that directly threatens the other. Sure, we might find out something vital before GITC does, and that will put us ahead; the next day, vice versa. Just like the spies we train, we tiptoe around things. We hide and we wait and we don't rush out into the open until we've found out everything we possibly can from lurking in the shadows. Which basically means never. (One of the sayings that's been drilled into our heads from the beginning: You can never know too much). ISS and GITC are almost entirely unknown for a reason, and that reason is because we are stealthy, and we are smart.

ISS has never endangered GITC. GITC has never endangered ISS. It's an unspoken rule; it just doesn't happen.

Until now.

I'm Annabeth Chase, and I'm sixteen years old. I can run a mile in quite under five minutes, I can gun down a man from forty yards away, I can climb over a smooth, ten-foot wall in the time it takes you to brush your teeth. I've learned to grapple up the side of a building and make my way down a shadowy corridor unseen. I can recite all the world's countries and capitals in backwards alphabetical order, I can do calculus like no one's business, and I can figure out all your petty little riddles while half-asleep.

I'm the ISS's top trainee. I'm 5'8", blonde and gray-eyed, and I can kill faster than you can say "Sally sells seashells by the seashore."

In all my years at the International School for Spies, I have never dealt with anything like this.

So, what'd you think? Have I lost my touch? Should I continue?

Reviews are white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies.

Love,
jackala345