I didn’t know how we’d do it, only that we had to. So we would.
I pushed my sunglasses onto my head and leaned back in my seat, rolling my neck, saying aloud for the invisible audience that constantly trailed our every move, “I’m in the mood to beat shit.”
“The treehouse it is, then,” Brady said, and he gunned Bonnie. The sleek blue Shelby surged forward.
We’re coming for you, Griff. Just hang on a little longer.
2
I Do Love It When You Get Murderous
Dear ol’ thoughtful “Uncle Magnum” had told Homer, Yolanda, and Armando—collectively our “ninja instructors”—to give us a few days off from training to recover from Griffin’s death.
As if a few days would cut it.
As if any amount of time would soothe over our devastating loss.
Since our ninja instructors, along with every other fucking weasel of a person in our small hometown of Ridgemore, were in Magnum’s back pocket, they didn’t show up this afternoon to kick our ever-loving asses like they had for the last several days—that we remembered. Who knew how many reboots we’d forgotten? How many times we’d trained with them over the years that were pocked full of holes vast enough to swallow entire months of our lives?
I carried a constant morass of disgust deep within my gut. Every day I woke it was with the same churning sensation, as if a strange creep were in bed with me, his curdling leer and hard-on attesting to the fact that I’d experienced a violation of the worst magnitude.
Brady, Hunt, Layla, and I had vented our despair on our punching bags and dummies, sparring till we were bruised and bloodied, chests heaving as if our instructors had led us through one of their grueling workouts after all. And afterward we’d gone for a long, fast run until our lungs had burned and Layla had bent over, begging us to stop. All that hadn’t done much to ease the wrath seething inside us. But it had helped to pass the time.
Under the cover of darkness, with Hunt’s “mother” Alexis, aka scientist-superspy Marisa, asleep in her room on the second floor of the house, the four of us huddled atop a twin mattress in the sleepover room. When we dragged our usual mattresses from the walk-in closet, we didn’t have the heart to leave the fifth behind. All five of them lay spread out across the large room, as if Griffin had just stepped out for a minute and would be returning soon. Since we were young kids we’d had countless sleepovers here. Always the five of us. The whole crew.
We sat with our backs against the wall, low in a corner, where we were likely concealed from whatever cameras the room hid.
Layla leaned her head on my shoulder and said aloud, “Pull up that vid I sent you last night. It’s fucking hilarious. The orangutan drives a golf cart like a fuckin’ boss while he’s playing with his dick and flippin’ off his caretakers, who’re chasing after him the whole time. It’s the best, and I know I could use a laugh.”
“Me too,” I said on cue. “Def me too.”
“You got it.” Hunt pulled up the video on the laptop he cradled across his legs. It would play in the background as a decoy while he walked us through our parents’ secret files.
For hours, he’d been typing away in a flurry of keystrokes. After he and Griffin had busted through our not-parents’ security when we’d discovered the secret lair in my house, they’d beefed up their defenses.
While Hunt hacked, the rest of us did our best to pretend we weren’t about to jump out of our skins. It had been one thing to waita few days since the race under the assumption that Magnum and our parents would unveil a healed and resurrected Griffin—ta-da!It was quite another to wait after realizing we’d been dolts for assuming Magnum and our parents would have Griffin’s back, if for nothing more than he was one of their precious, irreplaceable experiments.
We knew Magnum was testing the limits of our immortality. Maybe being blown to fiery bits exceeded those limits. Maybe we’d been wasting time while sitting on our hands, time Griffin didn’t have.
Hunt’s industrious hacking seemed endless. But then—he broke through.
He stopped just before unleashing the mother lode so we could do it together.
Always together.
Forever together.
The grunting of an ape flared to life through the laptop’s speakers, though I saw no sign of him, his golf cart, or his agile fingers. A black background with strings of code layered across it covered the screen.
Hunt asked us.
Come on, Griff. Be alive. You’ve gotta be alive.
I said into our private chat after Brady and Layla had already agreed.
With his finger poised above the enter button, Hunt sucked in a ragged inhale, another, and yet a third before he finally tapped that command.
The black screen vanished, instantly replaced by a bland desktop with a workflow neatly organized atop it that appeared entirely ordinary for a team of eager-beaver scientists, except for the folders that bore our names in big, bold letters.
