As she began the climb to the third floor, she was glad she didn’t have much to haul. She reached the top and stepped onto the landing.

It happened fast.

A shadowy figure jumped out . . . A gun pointed right at her head . . . A sting to her temple . . .

“You’re dead!”

5

Piper reacted instinctively. She grabbed the arm of her assailant, kicked out her leg, and brought him down with a loud thud. Only as she heard the woof of pain did she realize the voice that had declared her dead had come from a female instead of a male.

A teenage girl sprawled on the bare wooden floor clutching her arm. A bright yellow Nerf gun lay beside her, the hard foam bullet that had hit Piper coming to rest against the landing’s painted baseboard.

The girl was one of America’s ethnically ambiguous: with tawny skin; bright amber eyes; long, dark curly hair; and a promise of beauty when her adolescence was behind her. “Ohmygod, I’m sorry!” she cried, revealing a set of silver braces.

Piper went to her knees. “Are you okay?”

“I thought you were an assassin!”

“A lot of them around here?” Piper reached out to check the girl’s arm.

“I’m okay.” She pushed herself into a sitting position.

Piper was relieved to see the arm wasn’t broken, but she was also pissed. “What did you think you were doing?”

“I thought you were someone else.” The girl reached for her Nerf gun, which had been modified with red rubber bands to intensify the firing mechanism.

“You have a license to carry that thing?” Piper asked.

“I know. It’s stupid. It was, like, kind of embarrassing buying them.”

“Them?”

“You need more than one. It’s kind of a game. But it’s, like, serious.” She scrambled up from the floor. She was nicely proportioned, although—being a teenage girl—she probably thought she was fat. “You must be the new neighbor. Coop told Mom somebody was moving in, but I, like, forgot about it. I’m Jada.”

“Piper. So what’s with the sneak attack on an innocent person?”

“I go to Pius now.” Piper recognized the name of a city parochial high school. “I’m one of the Pius Assassins.”

“Does the pope know about that?”

“You’re funny.” She said it seriously, as if she’d assessed Piper and now had a category to fit her into. “We only moved here from St. Louis right before school started, so it’s kind of a way for me to, maybe, like, get to know kids.”

And try to fit in, Piper thought.

“I’ll show you your place,” Jada said. “It’s smaller than ours but it’s okay.” She pointed to one of the three doors that opened off the small, square hallway. “That door goes to the club. There used to be, like, an Italian restaurant where Spiral is now.” She indicated the door in front of them. “Me and my mom live there. It’s not as nice as our place was in St. Louis, but Mom wanted to leave, and Coop invited her to move in here. My dad died in a car wreck when I was nine. He was a private trainer for a while, and him and Coop were, like, best friends. Coop paid for his funeral and everything.”

“That’s tough. I lost my mom when I was young, too.”

“So did Coop. This is your place.” Nerf gun at her side, she headed toward the farthest door and twisted the knob. It was unlocked.

The space wasn’t big, but it was decent, with mustard walls, parquet floors from the seventies, and a pair of small windows that looked down over the alley behind the club. A white Formica counter separated the modest kitchen from the living area, which had a matching moss-colored couch and recliner as well as a couple of oak end tables and lamps.

“The bedroom is the best part.” Jada disappeared through the opposite door.

Was it ever. Piper stopped just inside to take it in. Most of the space was occupied by a king-size bed with a padded headboard and off-white duvet. The opposite wall held a large flat-screen TV. A state-of-the-art electronic charging station occupied a bedside table, and a pair of funnel-shaped pendant lights hung from the ceiling on each side of the bed.

“Wow.”

“Coop sleeps here sometimes.”

Not anymore, he doesn’t, Piper thought.

“He likes to be comfortable,” Jada explained.

“No kidding.” Piper sat on the end of the bed and felt the cushy support of an expensive foam mattress.

Jada, picking at some already tortured black nail polish, gazed with longing at the iPad in the docking station. “Coop is really rich.”

“Rich isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Piper said, which was a total lie.

“I guess.”

“Tell me about the Pius Assassins.”

Jada pushed a long lock of hair behind her ear. “It started a couple of days ago. It’s kind of like a class bonding exercise for all us sophomores.”

“Those nuns get zanier every year.”

“The teachers don’t really like it, but as long as we don’t bring Nerfs on school property there’s nothing they can do about it. Everybody in the sophomore class who wanted to play had to pay, like, five dollars. We have a hundred twenty kids in our class and ninety-two signed up.”

“And the goal is . . .”

“Be the last person standing.”

Piper was starting to get the drift. “Like The Hunger Games.”

“And win the four hundred and sixty dollars.” Jada pulled her curly dark hair into a ponytail behind her head and then released it. “I really need the money because my phone is, like, embarrassing. I never say that to my mom, but she knows, and it makes her feel bad because we can’t afford anything better.” She dipped her chin. “I shouldn’t have told you that. Mom said never to talk about money.”

Piper’s heart went out to her. “So how does the game work?”

“You can’t kill anybody on school property or, like, at a school activity or if they’re at work or from a moving car because kids get hurt that way.”

“Comforting.”

“No kills if you’re on a bus or the El going to or from school, but any other time is okay.”

“I can only imagine how the commuters feel about dodging Nerf bullets. Especially in Chicago. You’re lucky nobody has shot real bullets at you.”