I practically ran back to the suite after class was over, then slammed into Scout’s room.

I probably should have knocked.

She was on her bed and wearing gigantic headphones. She’d already changed into a bright green tank top and pajama bottoms, and in her hand was a hairbrush she was using as a microphone to belt out a Lady Gaga song at the top of her lungs.

I slapped my hands over my ears. Was Scout generally cool? Yes. Unfortunately, she was also pretty tone-deaf.

She yelped when she saw me, then fell to her knees on the bed. She dropped the brush and whipped off the headphones. “Seriously—knocking?”

I chewed my lips to keep from laughing.

“Parker, if you so much as snicker, I will bean you with this brush.”

I turned my head into my shoulder to stifle the snort and winced when the brush hit my shoulder. “Ow,” I said, rubbing it.

Scout sniffed and put the headphones on the floor. “I spend my days in class and most of my nights saving the world. I’m allowed to have a little Scout time.”

“I know, I know. But maybe you could, you know, focus it in a more productive direction. Like drawing.”

“I don’t like to draw.”

“I know.” I shut the door behind us. “But you know who does like to draw?” Don’t you love a good segue?

“You?”

I rolled my eyes. “Other than me, goofus.”

“I give up.”

“Our intrepid leader. Daniel’s my studio teacher.”

“No. Freaking. Way.”

“Totally.” I dropped my bag and sat down on the edge of her bed. “He walks in, and I was like, ‘Holy frick, that’s Daniel.’”

“You would say that. Is he good at drawing?”

“Well, I didn’t see a portfolio or anything, but since Foley hired him, I’d assume so.” And then I thought about what I’d just said. “Unless she hired him because he’s an Adept. Would she do something like that?”

Scout frowned. “Well, she does know about us. I wouldn’t put it past her to offer an Adept a job. On the other hand, the board of directors would have her head if she hired anyone less than worthy of her St. Sophia’s girls.”

“True. I can tell you this—he likes to give out homework in studio just like he does in the Enclave.”

“What do you have to do?”

“Draw a building downtown.” I pulled up my legs and crossed them. “I had an idea—I’m thinking about drawing the SRF building.”

“Really?” I saw the instant she realized what I was up to. “Your parents,” she said. “You think you might learn something?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. And Foley basically told me not to ask questions about my parents. But it seems like a way to get a good look at the building, maybe glance around inside, without causing trouble.”

Scout bobbed her head left and right. “That is true. I don’t know how they could connect you back with your parents, anyway.” She gestured toward my skirt. “They might guess you go to St. Sophia’s, but they’re practically next door. They probably see the uniforms all the time, so they wouldn’t think too much of it.”

“That sounds reasonable. You can actually come up with pretty good ideas when you put your mind to it.”

“Even though I’m not going to win a talent contest anytime soon?”

“Well, not at singing anyway.”

She hit me with a pillow. I probably deserved that.

“So, at lunch today, Jason didn’t ask me to Sneak.”

“Lils, you’ve barely even planned Sneak yet. Give it time. He’ll get there.”

“He did ask me out on Saturday.”

“OMG, you two are totally getting married and having a litter of babies. Ooh, what if that’s literally true?”

I gave her a push on the arm, then changed the subject. “Did Michael ask you to Sneak?”

“Not exactly.”

She sounded a little odd, so I glanced over at her. “What do you mean, ‘not exactly’? Did it come up?”

“Yeah, I mean, we talked about it . . .”

It took me a minute to figure out what she was dancing around. “You asked him, didn’t you?”

Her cheeks flushed. “Maybe that was discussed in a general sense.”

I poked a finger in her shoulder. “Ha! I knew you had a thing for him!”

I’d expected a look of irritation; instead, she was blushing.

“Oh, my God,” I said, realization hitting. “You guys totally made out behind the concrete things.”

“Oh, my God, shut up,” she said.

We spent the next couple of hours like true geeks. We studied trig, then rounded out the night with some European-history review, and I sent messages to my parents. I walked a weird line between missing them, worrying about them, and trying—like Foley had suggested—to keep them out of my mind. But I was surrounded by weirdness, and that just made me think of them even more. There was so much I wanted to tell them—about Scout and Jason, about being an Adept, about the underground world I’d discovered in Chicago.

Maybe they already knew some of it. Foley had hinted around that they might know about the Dark Elite. But they didn’t know about Jason or firespell, and they certainly couldn’t know how my life had changed over the last couple of weeks. I wasn’t going to break it to them now—not over the phone or via text message and not when they were thousands of miles away. For now I’d trust Foley. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to check out the SRF building. After all, how much trouble could drawing a building get me into?