Later that afternoon, Piper slipped the key Graham had given her into the metal door that opened off the alley behind Spiral. The small hallway had battleship-gray walls and smelled like French fries, but the floor had been swept clean. A door at the end appeared to lead to the club’s service areas, while the staircase on her right led upstairs.

As she began the climb to the third floor, she was glad she didn’t have much to haul. She reached the top and stepped onto the landing.

It happened fast.

A shadowy figure jumped out... A gun pointed right at her head... A sting to her temple...

“You’re dead!”

5

Piper reacted instinctively. She grabbed the arm of her assailant, kicked out her leg, and brought him down with a loud thud. Only as she heard the woof of pain did she realize the voice that had declared her dead had come from a female instead of a male.

A teenage girl sprawled on the bare wooden floor clutching her arm. A bright yellow Nerf gun lay beside her, the hard foam bullet that had hit Piper coming to rest against the landing’s painted baseboard.

The girl was one of America’s ethnically ambiguous: with tawny skin; bright amber eyes; long, dark curly hair; and a promise of beauty when her adolescence was behind her. “Ohmygod, I’m sorry!” she cried, revealing a set of silver braces.

Piper went to her knees. “Are you okay?”

“I thought you were an assassin!”

“A lot of them around here?” Piper reached out to check the girl’s arm.

“I’m okay.” She pushed herself into a sitting position.

Piper was relieved to see the arm wasn’t broken, but she was also pissed. “What did you think you were doing?”

“I thought you were someone else.” The girl reached for her Nerf gun, which had been modified with red rubber bands to intensify the firing mechanism.

“You have a license to carry that thing?” Piper asked.

“I know. It’s stupid. It was, like, kind of embarrassing buying them.”

“Them?”

“You need more than one. It’s kind of a game. But it’s, like, serious.” She scrambled up from the floor. She was nicely proportioned, although—being a teenage girl—she probably thought she was fat. “You must be the new neighbor. Coop told Mom somebody was moving in, but I, like, forgot about it. I’m Jada.”

“Piper. So what’s with the sneak attack on an innocent person?”

“I go to Pius now.” Piper recognized the name of a city parochial high school. “I’m one of the Pius Assassins.”

“Does the pope know about that?”

“You’re funny.” She said it seriously, as if she’d assessed Piper and now had a category to fit her into. “We only moved here from St.Louis right before school started, so it’s kind of a way for me to, maybe, like, get to know kids.”