Laney
I waited until eleven o’clock,when the sky was pitch black, and then I crept toward Royal Hall, ducking behind hedges and trees whenever I saw flashes of light from the patrolling security guards.
When I reached the west wing, I crept into the darkness along the side of the building, stopping every few seconds to check the windows in the hope that one would be unlocked.
No such luck, of course. They were all sealed tight.
I made it around to the south wing just as a flashlight swept over the area. I gasped and ducked behind a rhododendron bush in the garden, hoping the guard hadn’t spotted me.
For once, I was lucky. He walked right past, humming softly under his breath.
I waited for him to turn the corner, heart in my mouth. When he was gone, I stood up and promptly tripped over a garden sprinkler, almost knocking the wind out of my chest as I fell onto the soil.
“Shit!”
This really wasn’t my day.
I was about to get up when I noticed something on the bottom of the stone wall to my left. It was a window set low in the ground, half-hidden behind the flowers and shrubs.
Royal Hall had a basement level.
My spirits instantly soared. Figuring it was much more likely that one of those largely-unnoticed basement windows would be left unlocked, I crawled over to it and tried to pry it open. Nothing happened.
“Ugh…”
Refusing to give up, I moved to the next one a few feet away. I dug my nails between the edge of the pane and the window frame and pulled with all my might. With a slight creak, it slid open.
Yes!
I opened the window as far as I possibly could, and then I shimmied through backwards, grateful for my petite frame. I dropped down onto a carpeted floor with a soft grunt and found myself in a storage room.
I headed past the shelves and filing cabinets until I found the door. Then I slipped down the hall, heading for the teachers’ offices.
The note referred to the teacher as a ‘he’, so that ruled out at least half of them, making my task slightly easier.
I checked the first door I came across that had a male name on the brass plate, only to find it locked. Not a keycard lock, like the rest of the school buildings, but a regular old metal lock.
“Of course,” I muttered to myself. The Princes wouldn’t have given me an easy break-in task. No, they wanted me to fail as epically as possible.
Too bad they’d forgotten to account for my old school. Good old Silvercreek High.
As disreputable, unsafe and grimy as it was, it had some benefits… and one of those benefits was the free lock-picking tutorial I received from Danny Stewart, back in the day when I still had friends in Silvercreek.
Danny came from a family of petty criminals—something he was very proud of for some reason—and he was always bragging to the girls about the tips and tricks he’d picked up from them, clearly hoping to impress us.
“Thanks, Danny,” I whispered, smiling widely. “Maybe you weren’t so bad after all.”
I reached into my hair and pulled out a bobby pin. After yanking the two ends apart, I poked one piece into the lock to act as a pick and used the other as a makeshift wrench to control it.
Danny had taught me that the key—no pun intended—to picking a lock like this was to apply the right amount of tension to the outside wrench to make the lock plug rotate slightly while the pick lifted the pins inside the lock. When all of them were in the right position, the plug would rotate properly, unlocking the door.
Chewing on my bottom lip, I worked at the lock, and within a couple of minutes I had it open.
Luckily, Mr. Johnson didn’t have any locks on his desk drawers or filing cabinets, so it was smooth sailing from there. Using the moonlight streaming through the windows to guide me, I rifled through his stuff and found nothing but books, papers and stationery.
Onto the next.
I picked the locks on seven more offices, finding nothing, and then I finally hit the jackpot in Professor Fox’s office. My laptop, phone, and keys were all sitting in the top drawer of his filing cabinet.