The Inside Job Read Free

lifted my eyebrows.
    â€œOkay, then, wiring schematics for SRS-localized missile-launch controllers. Just
something
. Your room is depressing,” Walter said, rolling his eyes at me. I ignored him, ducking to grab my shoes from under my bed. The truth was, Walter was right. We were all living at League headquarters now, and everyone else’s rooms were decorated. Kennedy’s was covered in neon cartoon animals and nine billion shades of pink. Walter’s was covered in posters of the stuff he’d mentioned earlier—cars, sports teams, and bikini girls—even though I knew he had a stuffed frog hidden under his blankets. Ben’s was full of wires and pictures of Nikola Tesla. Beatrix’s was full of spare computer parts. Even Otter’s room was probably decorated, though who knows what with—I didn’t want to think too hard about what Otter looked at as he fell asleep at night.
    And mine was white. White walls, white bedspread, white floor.
    When we left SRS for good last year, I hadn’t thought to take anything with me. In my head there wasn’t
time.
I’d been so caught up in getting myself, Walter, and Kennedy out that I hadn’t thought about taking
things
. Walter, however, had remembered to pack his stuffed frog, some T-shirts, and a telescope his parents gave him. Kennedyhad grabbed her favorite set of pom-poms, a few photos of Mom and Dad, and Mom’s wedding ring.
    I didn’t have anything. I mean, I had
them
, and I knew that should have been enough, but still. I wish I’d grabbed something. Like one of Dad’s ties, or maybe his grappling hook set . . .
    See? Wallowing again.
    â€œYou’re going to be late,” Walter said, nodding at my alarm clock.
    â€œThat’s four minutes fast,” I said. “And besides, what’s Otter going to do—give me pushups?”
    Walter grinned as I finished tying my shoes. I joined him at the door, and together we walked down the hall and upstairs to The League’s mission control room.
    Mission control was looking good these days. Or better, anyhow. We’d spent ages sourcing old television sets and video equipment, Frankenstein-ing computers together under Beatrix’s careful eye, and now we had a pretty decent control center. It still smelled a little like corn chips, but to be fair, most of the building did. Otter was sitting at a giant metal desk in the back of the room, poring over papers and maps and folders, while my sister and Clatterbuck—Stan Clatterbuck, to be specific, who was Beatrix and Ben’s uncle—raced around in rolling chairs. Beatrix was at the command desk, typing hurriedly on her Right Hand, her name for a device that looked like three cell phones welded together but had more computingpower than anything else in the building. Ben, meanwhile, was sketching something on a legal pad, face mashed into hard, thoughtful lines.
    â€œWhat’s that?” I asked as we walked up.
    â€œThe BENdy Straw,” Ben said triumphantly, showing me the drawing. It looked like some sort of camera device on a wire, but you never could tell with his inventions. Sometimes stuff that looked like, say, a plastic boat, wound up being a miniature flamethrower. Walter learned that the hard way, when he went to play with the aforementioned plastic boat and lost three-fourths of his eyebrows.
    â€œYou’re going to run out of words that have ‘Ben’ in them, eventually. You know that, right?” Kennedy said, rising from her rolling chair after thoroughly trouncing Clatterbuck. She’d traded her black spy suit for a fluffy pink skirt and a shirt with a cartoon dog wearing sunglasses. Ben either ignored or didn’t hear her because he was busy writing “The BENdy Straw” across the top of the paper.
    â€œAll right, all right—we’re all here?” Otter grumbled, like he wanted to get this meeting over with as soon as possible.