“Friday? That’s still two days away.” My mind races. Who knows what might happen in two days?

>>Tobias’s party sounds like the best shot we’ve got.

“We can’t go any earlier. We can’t skip school,” Kai says. He might give off a tough-guy attitude, but even he values his place at Profectus.

“Neither can we,” says Zora to me, gently placing her hand on mine.

“We’ll leave on Friday,” Toby reconfirms. “But we’ll only have a couple of days to look for Lake Baku—then it’s Christmas Eve, and you’ll all have to go home,” continues Tobias. “It’s tight timing but…”

“No, that sounds like it will work.” I say. Then I turn to Zora. “Do you think your parents will let you?”

“Are you kidding?” Zora replies. “If you can make it happen, Tobias, I’ll be there.”

“Right. And you, Lacey?”

At first I’m hit with an almost uncontrollable urge to yell at him: My mom won’t care, her brain has been taken over by the update! But instead I force myself to take a deep breath. The reality of what we’ve learned hasn’t sunk in for Tobias the way it has for me. It’s my mom’s brain that has been altered, not his. I just nod.

“Great. I’ll message you once it’s all confirmed.”

Slick buzzes up against me, butting up against the duct-taped end of my leash. I jump out of my skin and bat him away.

“Whoa, what’s wrong with your bug?” Kai asks.

“He wants to update me,” I say. “But not only that. Slick is the reason I was in the coma. After I let Jinx go, he injected me with something that paralyzed me. Jinx saw it all. Eric Smith’s orders.”

“Seriously?”

“That’s unbelievable!”

“No way!”

They all turn to stare at the beetle.

Tobias is right there, pulling me into a hug. “It’s all right, Lacey. We’re going to find a way to stop this and get all these bakus acting back to normal.”

I smile up at him, but then that smile dips into a frown. “I feel like I’ve dragged all of you into this when you could be living your own lives and focusing on school, not this kind of end-of-the-world, conspiracy-theory, bakus-turning-on-humans stuff.”

He grabs my hand, and warmth floods my body. “We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t want to be. Stop worrying, Lace. We’re going to find Monica.”

“Thanks, Toby.” I reach up and kiss him on the cheek, bolder than I’ve been in the past. Heck, if I’m thinking about taking down the founder of the biggest tech company in North America, shouldn’t I be brave enough to kiss the guy I have a crush on?