“Top of the class,” Elliot said in his matter-of-fact way that used to annoy me but didn’t anymore. I’d always thought that he was showing off, but really, he was just stating the facts. The facts were that he was the best. Which was fantastic, considering I’d barely scraped by in that class. All those wires and buttons had intimidated me, especially since they were so often strapped to a living person I was trying to cuff. I’d never understood the mentality of the Butterflies who didn’t mind blowing themselves up as long as they took George Washington or Martin Luther King out with them. Although, I realized, if you’d told me a year ago that I would become a Butterfly myself, I never would have believed that either. It was funny, I’d always thought that the older I got, the more I’d understand and know. But as time went on, the only thing I was figuring out was how much I didn’t know.

“Here,” I said, thrusting what I now knew to be a bomb out to Elliot, “disable it.”

Elliot took it gingerly, and peered down at the mess of wires. “That may take a while,” he said.

“How long is a while?” I asked.

Elliot shrugged. “Maybe ten minutes. How many of them are there?”

“Too many to spend ten minutes on each one,” I said. “What we need is the schematics map for the installation of these things. Then we’d know exactly where to look.”

“This is like the worst Easter egg hunt in history,” Elliot muttered, and I almost laughed. He turned the explosive this way and that and then looked at me, eyebrow raised. “Do you think Salzburg didn’t know?” he said, voicing the very thought that kept bouncing around my own head.

“I have no idea,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Pretty convenient that he left the Academy the morning before it was destroyed,” Elliot said.

“Yeah,” I said, gritting my teeth. “A little too convenient.” We both stared at the camera that wasn’t really a camera for another second, and then I shook myself, forcing myself to refocus.

“Come on,” I said, already sloshing my way out of the fountain. “We have to go break into my house.” If one person had a master plan of where all these cameras were hidden, it would be my mom.

“What about this?” Elliot asked, holding up the camera.

“Bring it with you,” I said.

“Great,” Elliot muttered, shoving it in his pocket so he could use both hands to climb out of the fountain. “Just what I wanted to do. Break into the commander in chief’s house with a bomb in my pocket.”

“It could be worse,” I said.

“Really?” he asked. “How?”

“I have no idea,” I admitted. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Thirty-One

Elliot