The Art of Saving the World
already!”Carolyn’s grin faltered. “Mom asked her to keep hush-hush. Her, and like five other agents we saw. What’s with the extra security?” She hesitated. “Anyway, we wanted to surprise you.”
“And it worked!” Mom snuggled her face in the crook of my neck and blew a raspberry. I gave the required high-pitched yelp and shoved her off, torn between embarrassment and laughter. The laughter won. I hadn’t seen them in two days. Not only that, but as I straightened my glasses from Mom knocking them askew, I finally saw the decorations they’d put up. Streamers in all colors crisscrossed the living room, and garlands hung from the paintings and cupboards. A gigantic card shaped like the number 16 stood atop the table, big enough to bump the ceiling, and I caught a whiff of something sweet in the oven.
“Wow.” I guessed I was free from homeschooling after all. “I—Wow. This is awesome. I didn’t know they made cards that big!”
“Happy sweet sixteen.” Mom squeezed my arm. “Your dad’s on the phone with Grandma Yeo, helping set up her webcam. Grandma and Grandpa Stanczak will want to be next.”
“And Aunt Lina cleared some time for tonight,” Dad said from behind us. He leaned out from the office, holding the doorframe.
Webcam chats were the name of the game on birthdays. Only the MGA and the four people inside this house knew about the rift. Director Facet, the head of the MGA, insisted we kept it that way.
We’d stuck close-ish to the truth for the story we’d told the wider world, explaining the government had set up a base on the farm and no one was allowed on-site without clearance. Supposedly, we’d spent years entangled in legal battles, with my parents determined to keep the house and the government determined to relocate us, but in the end, we’d compromised: The base screened the hell out of the family, hired Dad for his (nonexistent) skills as an analyst, and let us stay.
That covered why no one could visit us at home.
Why I never visited anyone was harder to explain. At first, family members had tried to work around our excuses, but we’d turned them down so often they’d stopped asking.
The Stanczaks eventually settled for occasionally meeting me at the diner where we were holding tonight’s birthday party (one-point-three miles down the road), or spending afternoons at the mini-golf course (point-eight miles down the road—the staff probably saw more of me than their own families). Dad’s parents had taken longer to warm up: They’d barely even spoken to Dad the first years he was with Mom. They weren’t thrilled about his decision to move in with his pregnant girlfriend of a few months, raise a baby not his own, and live in a house that didn’t allow visitors. They’d turned around when my parents finally had Carolyn and married, although they weren’t shy about dropping hints about how we ought to change our names from Stanczak to Yeo.
Dad had stayed back while Carolyn and Mom pounced, and simply winked at me. We’d already gone through the birthday routine that morning. “Guess we’ll make up for today’s classes tomorrow.”
“Yes! But!” I said. “We could also not do that?”
Dad made a Nice try face, his smile wry. He’d been of the opinion that if normal kids didn’t get to skip school on their birthdays, I shouldn’t get to, either—so I should probably be glad he’d relented in the first place.
I gave in with a dramatic sigh. “Fiiine.” I took off my coat and rubbed my face warm.
“Grandma Yeo is almost ready,” Dad said. “Check the windows?”
Mom and I adjusted the curtains and the plants on the windowsills to hide the observation tower, fence, and a tank that’d arrived yesterday. (Tanks weren’t common. That kind of thing tended to upset Grandma Yeo.) I jogged outside to let the agents know to stay out of sight—especially since there were more people on-site than usual.
“Can I help?” Carolyn asked when I returned. She sounded lost. She came over from Philadelphia several times a week and every other weekend, but wasn’t normally around when we called family.
“Nah, we’re ready.”
“You do this when we video chat, too, right? I never see any MGA stuff in the background.”
“It’s just a security measure.” People knew we shared a home with a government base, but the less visual proof, the better.
Especially in the hands of teenagers with social media accounts, I thought with a pang of guilt. Carolyn knew the MGA didn’t trust her—there was a reason she no longer lived at the house—but she didn’t need it rubbed in.
“Sorry.” I felt my cheeks turn red.
It’d been two years since Carolyn moved into the Philadelphia townhouse the government bought us. She lived there full-time, while my parents rotated every two weeks. I was used to life with the MGA, but to Carolyn, all these precautions might’ve become alien by now. So much hassle, just to visit her sister.
Luckily, I could sweeten the deal.
“You want to play the Xbox after this? I have early access to the next Elder Signs.”
Caro’s eyes lit up, lifting a weight off my shoulders. “Heck yeah.”
CHAPTER TWO
The diner one-point-three miles down the road might be a nice diner—quality food, minimal grease smell, clean—but it was a diner nonetheless.
I’d invited a few friends and hadn’t missed the puzzlement in their expressions when I mentioned the party’s location was Franny’s Food. Still, they were used to worse from me, and we were friends—or at least friend-ly.
Maybe they wanted free food, maybe they wanted to pry for information about the government base, or maybe they were simply bored since West Asherton, PA, population 1,704, wasn’t exactly an entertainment hub. Whatever the case, they came.
There was Neil, Imani, Amber-Lynn, Marybeth (Marybeth!), and Carolyn. Dad had gone into town after dropping us off, and I knew two agents were sitting in a nearby van, hooked into the diner’s hidden-camera feed.
Normally only one agent accompanied me. Maybe it was because of that power outage. I wanted