Ari Callahan has no idea how to talk to boys -- or how to talk to anyone for that matter. Enter Zac, the cute new guy in town who won't stop texting her. But is his interest real, or does he have a hidden agenda?
...
Zac sat cross-legged on the gritty tile floor of the rental house, trying his best to avoid the sticky spots left over from spilled drinks. He'd shown up for the post-party debriefing just as it was getting underway, but all the seats were already occupied by other members of the Disruption team.
He probably should stand, he thought to himself. This floor was downright nasty. Zac wrinkled his nose and lifted his knees, pulling them with one arm against his chest. He'd get up in a minute or two, as soon as he could summon up the energy to move. It had been the longest day of his life: first making the rounds on the beach all morning, then getting chased, and finally manning the party tonight. Now it was well after midnight, and every muscle of his body felt weak with fatigue. He just needed to make it through this meeting, and then he could sleep.
Zac sighed and forced his attention back to the wicker couch where his grandfather and cousin Cyrus were seated. He didn't know why this meeting had to take place tonight, immediately after the last stragglers from the party headed out. It wasn't like the group had anything to talk about. The party had been a failure. They hadn't found the girl that they were seeking.
Or maybe they had, Zac thought. A mirthless smile twitched his lips. He had a feeling he knew exactly who it was, and his suspicions had only grown stronger after the text message exchange. He flicked his phone back on and glanced down at the last few messages of the thread.
Zac: Wait! Is it Pier 18? Is that where you swim? . . . Ari? Is it?
Ari: You can't come.
Zac: OK, I won't. I'm not a party crasher. Just tell me if you swim by Pier 18.
He remembered the way her replies had paused after he mentioned the pier, and then she cut the conversation short with that final one-word reply.
Ari: No.
Zac knew a bald-faced lie when he saw one.
Just then the lights went dim, and a rectangle of blue light appeared on the ceiling. Cyrus had his iScroll unfurled, and he used it to project an image for the rest of the group to see.
"OK, Cyrus," Grandfather said in a voice of quiet authority. "Take us through the data."
Zac squinted up at the blurry image, waiting for it to come into focus. Finally, he could make out the crisp outlines of a bar chart.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"Right," Zac's cousin responded. "So, I restricted the analysis to females within the target age range of 16 to 19 years old. As you can see here, we were able to record voice samples from a total of 52 singers, each assigned a score on a scale of zero to 100. The distribution follows a rough bell curve, as we might expect, with the median score at 36 and the mode at 34."
One of the sound techs interrupted. "How are you arriving at these scores, exactly?"
"I was able to reverse engineer the algorithm that SirenSong used for their sing-off against Adele," Cy explained. "I worked on it at Stanford for my final project this spring. Basically, SirenSong can outperform any human voice that scores below this green range here." He tapped the screen as he spoke, and the chart on the ceiling updated.
