Desert Dark

Holiday House / New York

Copyright
^©
2016 by Sonja Stone
All Rights Reserved
HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
www.holidayhouse.com

ISBN 978-0-8234-3586-9 (ebook)w
ISBN 978-0-8234-3587-6 (ebook)r

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stone, Sonja, author.

Title: Desert dark / by Sonja Stone.

Description: First edition. | New York : Holiday House, [2016] | Summary: Sixteen-year-old Nadia Riley enrolls at a prestigious boarding school, but finds Desert Mountain Academy a training ground for undercover CIA agents, so Nadia undergoes a punishing regimen of elite physical training, foreign diplomacy and target practice, but then a double agent is reported on campus . . . and Nadia is the number one suspect.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015022317 | ISBN 9780823435623 (hardcover)

Subjects: | CYAC: Boarding schools—Fiction. | Undercover operations—Fiction. | Spies—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction.

Classification: LCC PZ7.1.S755 De 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015022317

To Morgan and Elizabeth

Before she formulates a plausible lie, shots explode into the canyon. Splintered limestone sprays like shrapnel. Nadia drops behind a boulder.

Noah must have found us
. She scans the walls for movement.

Another shot. Alan screams. He's down.

Nadia bolts across the riverbed. “Help me with him!” Damon rushes to her side. They drag Alan toward the cliff face.

She pulls her Beretta. “Alan, stop crying! It's a tranquilizer dart. It doesn't hurt that much.”
What a baby. You didn't hear me screaming when I got shot
.

“No—look!” he shouts.

She turns back. Blood seeps through his torn pant leg.
Of course it wasn't a dart. Tranq guns are silent
. “Damon, on point.” Nadia holsters her gun, applies pressure to the wound.

“Is it bad?” Alan's panicked eyes search her face. He grabs her shirt. “Answer me!”

“I need you to calm down.” She forces a confident tone. “You're fine. It's just a scratch.”

“Where is Jack?” Alan yells. “I need Jack!”

“I'm right here.” Jack climbs down from an overhanging ledge. “Those shots weren't from Noah's team.” He pushes Nadia's hands
away, wipes the blood with a square of cotton. “It's grazed, not deep at all. Wrap it up,” he orders Nadia. “We need to move.”

Her eyes meet Jack's. A sick fear crawls through her like fire ants on a dead coyote. She knows what he's thinking, because she's thinking the same thing.

Someone messed up. That bullet was meant for me
.

As requested, Nadia Riley waited for her calculus teacher in his classroom after the final bell. By the time Mr. Milligan arrived, she'd finished her chemistry homework and was halfway through history. He dropped a packet of papers on her desk: the extra-credit assignment she'd completed during lunch. A dark red zero covered her name.

“My answers were wrong?” Nadia asked. “I double-checked my work.”

Milligan leaned on the edge of his desk. “I can't give you credit for this. I specifically instructed your class not to use online resources.”

“I know. I didn't.”

“That simply isn't possible. This was meant to be a month-long project. There's no way you finished it in one day without outside help.”

One hour, actually, but that's nitpicking
. “Mr. Milligan, I promise you: I solved the puzzle on my own.”

“Nadia, cheating is a serious offense.”

“I completely agree. I didn't cheat.”

“You're telling me you finished this
by yourself
in one day?”

“Yes.”

“How? How did you find the answers so quickly?”

“I don't know. I'm really good at puzzles. I've been doing them since I was a kid,” she said. Milligan raised an eyebrow. “Do you have another one? I'll show you.”

“All right.” He pulled a worksheet from his briefcase. “Let's see what you've got.”

Nadia took the paper. Mr. Milligan circled behind the desk, watching over her shoulder. She instantly recognized the formula. The problem looked like an algebraic equation, but she knew a Vigenère cipher when she saw one. “Give me a minute.” She stared at the equation, calculating in her head.

“If you can't do it, just say so.” He reached for the page.

Nadia slapped her hand onto the paper, pinning it to the desk. “I can do it.” This particular code, designed to disguise letter frequencies, had been around for three centuries.
If I can't solve this, I deserve to be expelled
. She scribbled the final steps. “Earthworm,” she said. “The answer is earthworm.” She held up the worksheet.

Milligan took the paper from her hand and moved slowly toward his desk. “This is remarkable,” he mumbled. “How . . . ?”

“It's your basic polyalphabetic cipher based on letter substitution. I solved for X, used modular arithmetic and found the remaining letters.” She stood and grabbed her bag.

His eyes didn't leave the page. “It took me an entire semester at graduate school to solve this equation.”

“Oh.” Nadia heaved her backpack onto her shoulder. “Please don't feel bad. I really have been doing these all my life. It's kind of a hobby.”

“And I was a
math
major.”

Enough about me
. “Mr. Milligan?”

“With a minor in engineering!”

“Mr. Milligan?”

“What?” Milligan looked up.

“Can I go?”

“Oh, yes. My apologies. You'll receive full credit for the assignment.”

“Thank you.” Nadia didn't care about the extra credit. But
being called a cheater? She earned her grades; she didn't steal them.

“Listen,” Mr. Milligan began, “have you considered supplementing your education at the university level? Or maybe joining the math club?”

She nodded, pretending to consider.
Yeah, I'm gonna join the math club. Why not? I'm already a social pariah
. “That's an idea.” Nadia glanced at the clock above the door. “Can we talk about it another time? I should probably get going.” On the bright side, he'd grilled her long enough that she wouldn't run into anyone on the way to her locker.

“Of course.” He looked back to her worksheet. “I'll see you in class tomorrow.”

“See you then.” Nadia stepped into the empty hallway: wide and exposed, with hideous fluorescent lights. Metal boxes lined the walls like rows of vertical coffins. To spare herself the misery of running into her ex-boyfriend between classes, she loaded her backpack every morning and carried all of her textbooks until the end of the day. Her locker was right beside his, and three down from her ex-best friend's.

They'd become exes on the same day.

She rounded the corner and saw a flash of dirty blond against the grey metal. Her chest tightened. Matthew looked up before she could turn back. Nadia continued at a casual pace.

“Hey, Judas,” she said. “Where's Delilah?”

“Those are two different stories.” He leaned against her locker, blocking access. “We need to talk.”

“No, we don't.” She stopped in front of him. “We are no longer dating, so I don't have to pretend to be interested in your opinion. Move.”

Matthew pursed his lips. “Don't be like that. I'm sorry about Hannah's party.” He didn't look sorry at all. “I didn't tell her to throw you out.”

“Nice to know your minions have your back, huh?”

“Paige says you won't take her calls.”

“Why would I?” Nadia dropped her bag. It hit the floor with a solid thud. She kicked it against the metal wall and imagined it was Matthew's head.

“So you're just gonna ignore us for the rest of your life? Not even you can pull that off.”

“I'm pretty sure I can.”

“We didn't mean for this to happen.”

Her eyes rolled away from Matthew's gaze.

“Paige really misses you.”

Like I care?
She studied the Exit sign over the stairs.

“This is so stupid.”

Nadia glared at him. “I trusted you.”

“It was an accident.”

“An accident?” she scoffed. “How does that work?”

“Quit being stubborn.”

“No, I'm really curious. You saw each other at the mall and some invisible force magnetically pulled you together?”

“People don't want to choose between you and Paige, but they will.”

“Or maybe you were at the movies? And suddenly your clothes just
fell off
. I've heard of that phenomenon. Happens all the time.”

“She's lived here her whole life. You've been here two years. Who do you think they're gonna pick?”

“You might want to see a doctor. That could get embarrassing.”

“You know as well as I do, if you and Paige make up you'll be back in with everyone else.”

Nadia narrowed her eyes. “What's with the sudden interest in my social standing?”

“It's not just about you. Paige is devastated.”

“Fortunately, she has you to console her. Lucky girl. Now get off my locker.”

“I'm not moving until you agree to talk to her. She's outside.”

Nadia took a deep breath and leaned toward Matthew. She stopped an inch from his face, and spoke slowly, enunciating each word. “If you do not move, I will forcibly move you.”

Matthew hesitated a second before leaning to the right.

“Good call.” Nadia opened the lock.

“Look, it's been two weeks. I understand if you can't forgive me, but you guys were like sisters. And she's been miserable
for days
.” He dropped his head back and stared at the ceiling.

“How inconvenient for you. Let's recap: first you hook up with my best friend. Then you tell everyone about it—well, everyone but me. Next, your jackass cousin kicks me out of her house in the middle of a party.” She felt the heat rising up her neck, over her cheeks, through her scalp. Thinking about the party made her sick to her stomach.

Nadia shouldn't have gone to Hannah's house. She'd wanted to show her face, like she didn't care about Matthew and Paige. In retrospect, she was sure everyone knew she wasn't invited. No one would go with her. They all had “pre-party plans.” They didn't want to align themselves with the loser, show up with an uninvited guest. Two years of her life, and she was still an outsider. She took another breath.

“I really didn't know she would do that,” Matthew said.

“Whatever.”

“Paige and I wanted to tell you sooner. But we didn't want to hurt you.”

“Obviously.”

“Knock it off.”

“
You
knock it off. You're with Paige and that's fine. I don't care.” It wasn't fine. Nadia loved Matthew and Paige knew it. The whole school knew it. It was one thing to lose her boyfriend to some random girl, but to her best friend? She couldn't be more humiliated. “But leave me alone. I'm not interested in a friendship with either of you.”

Nadia slammed her locker and walked toward the front door, praying he wouldn't follow.

“You're just mad because you hate to lose.”

“Not much of a loss,” she called over her shoulder. But it was.
A horrific loss. Not just Matthew; her friendship with Paige had been the center of Nadia's life. And now she felt a constant void.

Nadia pushed through the double doors into the humid afternoon. She used to look forward to the short walk home. Paige had joined her almost every day. They'd do homework together and Paige would stay until dinnertime.
I miss her so much
.

Nadia clamped her lips together and lowered her head.
Don't you dare cry
. The sidewalk blurred as she wiped at her tears.

Drew Anderson had just finished her second agonizing day of classes at Desert Mountain Academy. Now she was headed into town to treat herself to a pedicure. Her new roommate, Libby Bishop, had declined Drew's invitation to the salon. Instead, she had insisted on meeting the other members of their study group at the library to quiz each other about some random war that took place a thousand years ago.

She could already tell this would be a tough year. Academically she'd be fine, but her roommate was kind of—oh, what was the word—
fastidious
. Libby followed Drew around their bedroom, cleaning up after her with disinfecting wipes. She tried to do it when Drew wasn't looking, but Drew had already caught her. Twice.