Spy Ski School Read Online Free PDF Page B

experiments on me.”
    â€œThat’s not always so awesome. . . .”
    â€œAre they working on anything with radioactive spiders? So that you’ll be able to shoot webs out of your wrists like Spider-Man?”
    â€œEr . . . no. And so you know, spiders don’t shoot webs from their wrists anyhow. If someone really shot webs like a spider, they’d do it from their butt.”
    â€œOh,” Mike said, sounding daunted. But only for a second. “See? I said you were smart. I’ll bet there’s lots of other cool stuff they’re working on. Like super-strength and X-ray vision and teleportation and the ability to stay clean forever and never have to bathe.”
    â€œWhy would the government be interested in having people stop bathing?”
    â€œWater conservation. Plus, it’d be awesome to never have to shower again. So win-win for everyone. Dude, you have to get me into this school. . . .”
    â€œI’ll try, but . . .”
    â€œOr at least see if you can get me on the ski trip. If cost is an issue, I could maybe even work out my own place to stay. I have an uncle in Colorado. . . .”
    â€œI’ll see what I can do,” I told him, although I didn’t mean it. Because there was no way I could get Mike enrolled in a top-secret government program that didn’t actually exist. I felt bad about lying to him, although part of me was strangely happy as well. Not about the lying, but the fact that for once, Mike was jealous of me, rather than the other way around. In our entire lives, Mike had been jealous of me only one other time, and that was when he had mistakenly believed I was dating Erica Hale. (A misunderstanding I had never bothered to set straight.)
    I was so distracted by all this, I had forgotten about being hyper-attentive. Which was a big mistake. Because I’d missed something important.
    And it was going to come back to haunt me in a big way on my mission.

ACCLIMATIZATION
    The Ski Haüs
    Vail, Colorado
    December 26
    1530 hours
    The town of Vail sat at the bottom of a valley in the Rocky Mountains, smushed between the base of the ski mountain and Interstate 70. The small downtown had a German theme—probably to evoke the European history of skiing—with covered bridges, buildings straight out of a Grimms’ fairy tale, and lots of businesses with unnecessary umlauts in their names. Around this was a sprawl of expensive luxury hotels with fancy spas and heated swimming pools and attentive staffs who catered to the guests’ every whim.
    Unfortunately, we weren’t staying in one of those hotels.
    Instead, we were staying in the only motel in Vail, the Ski Haüs. It was a ramshackle one-story building with a crooked line of rooms that all opened onto a parking lot, and it sat on the opposite side of the freeway from the ski area, so close to the on-ramp that the whole place shook when trucks rumbled past. The Ski Haüs had been built back when Vail was founded in 1969 and the owners hadn’t sunk another penny into it since. The beds were lumpy, the pipes were balky, the bathrooms smelled funky, and cold air seeped through the cheap windows, rendering the entire place as cold as a meat locker. And yet it was still nicer than our dorms back at spy school.
    The only real problem was that we had to share the rooms, rather than having them to ourselves. Which meant I had three roommates: Chip Schacter, Jawaharlal O’Shea, and Warren Reeves. Chip, being two years older, was the biggest, toughest, and sneakiest of us. Jawa was the smartest and the best athlete. Warren wasn’t really a very good spy at all. I’d invited him along only because Zoe said that if I didn’t, we’d never hear the end of it. (He was pretty talented at camouflage, though. It came naturally to him. He was wearing a white outfit that blended in with the snow so well, we’d already lost