Spycraft Academy by B. Miles (little readers .txt) 📕

psychological torture but that probably wouldn't work either. Drina suggested blackmail, though her specific suggestion was too extreme for Sam to be okay with. Rosin suggested bringing a third party in, somebody who could worm into his mind, but Sam knew of no such person to begin with, never mind one he trusted.

He figured their best bet was blackmail, though they would not be using Drina's suggestion of putting him in an inappropriate situation, staged or not.

One thing was certain: they would have to do something, and they would have to do it well, because messing up meant expulsion if Apelles didn't exact revenge first. Neither expulsion nor death was an option, neither was forgetting about it and letting their entire country fall to ruin.

If worse came to worse, if Apelles got away and reported them, Sam would take the blame. He would tell everybody that he coerced the girls into doing it by blackmailing them.

Sometimes, lying was alright for the greater good. It was his idea, after all. He was the one that insisted on getting involved.

By the time dinner was finished, Sam was a mass of nerves. He became hyper-focused on the things immediately in front of him, his plate of food, his outfit, his hair as he combed it in the mirror. He kept saying to himself, you can do this, you can do this, you must do this. Everyone is relying on you right now.

He stared into the mirror until he could no longer see himself as he was but as the person he needed to be right now, somebody taller, broader, older, smarter, more dangerous. Fletch watched him get ready but he didn't say a word. He'd learned not to ask questions probably long before he met Sam.

Once Sam was as ready as he would ever be, he collected the girls and they went on their way. They seemed much more at ease, more natural as they chatted and walked down the hall like they were just out for a bit of socializing after supper.

They took the rarely used courtyard passage, the one Delcan cornered Sam in, and followed it out the back of the school and toward the forest. Sam wrapped his cloak of shadows around the lot of them. Stretching the shadows to cover four people moving at such inconsistent speeds made his eyes heavy and his brain foggy.

By the time they made it into the blackness of the trees, he was yawning. Granted, it probably didn't help that he didn't really sleep anymore. He was too busy with trying to trail Apelles. Whether or not it was Apelles was irrelevant. If it turned out the spymaster was innocent, then Sam could cross somebody off the list at least.

Sam slipped through the forest with his crew, walking heel-toe in line with Drina. She took point because she knew how to move through the trees better than the rest of them, having grown up in the thick-wooded countryside. It was only early evening, but without the moon, the canopy above cast them in absolute darkness.

It was like he was blind, his hand on Drina's shoulder, Mattie's hand on his shoulder, and Rosin's hand on Mattie's shoulder, forming a chain of blind people tiptoeing through the dead leaves of autumn. He considered it a good sign when Drina only made them stumble over one another four times.

They didn't walk for long, a few minutes at most, before Drina took a sharp right and slowly lead them toward a soft, blushing pinprick of light that got brighter the closer they got. By the time the soft light revealed itself to be a candle in a window, they were already crouching in the bushes.

Sam once again wrapped them in his shadows. The four of them bent low and snuck across the small expanse of grass between the forest and the administrative living quarters. They crept down the row of stone houses until they got to the very end, where Apelles lived.

Sam motioned for them to stay low while he slowly lifted himself and peered into the window he assumed to be in Apelles' bedroom. He assumed correctly. The candle on the small table beside the door was unlit. Sam rarely saw lit candles in Apelles' house—he was either out or asleep every time Sam watched the place.

Just as he thought, tonight would be no different. The bed was empty and uniformly made, everything was neat and tidy, nothing undisturbed. It looked like a staged room, like nobody lived in it, which amplified Sam's suspicion tenfold.

He formed the hand signal he'd practiced with the girls and Rosin quickly scampered past the rest of them, sliding around the corner of the house and disappearing to peer into the kitchen and the entryway. Apelles wasn't home, but one could never be too careful. He might have traps set for all they know.

A few minutes later, she scampered back and shook her head. All clear. For an academy made of spies and military specialists, they sure didn't take security very seriously. Every window Sam came across on the school grounds had been latched by the same device, one that was extremely easy to open.

He reached into the utility belt resting at the back of his hip and brought out one of his four lockpicks. It was quick work to slide it through the crack between the panes and lift the latch from the inside. He pulled the windows open and one by one, the four of them snuck inside.

They waited for a very long time. Sam counted the hours by keeping the seconds and then counting the minutes up to each hour. It was a memory challenge, and he lost track at one and a half.

It was nearing the dark hour now, and after that, there would only be six hours until dawn. Yet Apelles was still not home. Where could he be running off to every night? And how was it that he always managed to slip past