“And the cops thought we were just playing Assassins the other night.” He paused outside of his third class of the day. “Great. Perfect. They definitely won’t believe me if they didn’t the first time.”

“We have to stop her,” Lia said. “She won’t wait long enough for them to figure out who she is.”

“It’s such a bad plan,” Gem said. “Of course she would get caught.”

“Maybe the scholarship is her excuse,” said Devon. “Maybe that’s how she justified it. She’s the most competitive person I know, and I know Lia.”

Lia couldn’t even bring herself to laugh. “Then why the alphabetical order?” she asked. “Why the pattern?”

Gem shrugged. “Who knows?”

Lia shook her head. “She’s overplanning it—the bridge, Ben’s allergy, stalking Cassidy, the stairwell. It’s like she joined Assassins with a step-by-step plan to win before finding out the rules and her target. There were much easier ways to kill you.”

“Comforting,” Devon said. “I assume that means you think you can stop her?”

Lia nodded. “We need to out-plan the overplanner.”

“We need to set a trap for her.” Lia took Devon’s hand, scared she would turn a corner later and find him dead. So long as he didn’t leave her sight, it would be fine, but he had to leave her sight. “We can lure her out after school, as long as she thinks you’re alone.”

“She plans for days.” Gem mimed writing in a journal. “She has color-coded bullet journals for each semester, makes lists upon lists of everything she needs to do, and uses stickers to mark her progress, but she never quite gets it all done. She spends all her time planning and then goes off-script. How do you trap that?”

“Even with Ben, which she clearly planned, it was a mess,” Lia said. “And with Cassidy, she used what she had on hand. She didn’t bring anything.”

“If we get her into an empty room, she’ll probably just try to strangle you,” Gem said. “You can probably take her.”

“No thank you,” Devon said. “I prefer a bit more than ‘probably’ on my side, especially since she’s been doing CrossFit.”

She had overpowered the others. They couldn’t risk that happening again. Lia let go of Devon and turned to Gem. “You should get that prop knife. Your fourth block is drama, right?”

Gem nodded. A junior glared at them as she shoved past Devon into class, and he squeezed Lia’s hand.

“We have two minutes until the bell,” he said, holding up his phone. “We can’t clear a room of everything deadly before the end of school when her list of weapons includes a table.”

“No, we give her several weapons that are too good for her to pass up but we make sure they can’t actually hurt us,” Lia whispered quickly. “Faith doesn’t just think she’s smarter than everyone but that she deserves everything. The world revolves around her. She won’t even question a knife if we make sure it fits in with the surroundings at least a little. She’s too self-centered to think it’s out of place if it’s for her.”