She climbed right up the rope ladder with her son following sheepishly behind and found Simon sitting in his chair surrounded by squirrels.

“Are you the one taking advantage of my son?”

Simon set down his bag of nuts and sat up in his chair. He eyed her closely. It was clear to Mama the boy was not used to being confronted.

“Excuse me?”

“My son, Albert, says you hired him to build a doomsday device and all you’re offering him are some silly superpowers,” Mama said.

“I’d hardly call superpowers silly,” Simon replied. “When all is said and done, your son might be able to fly or lift a car over his head. He might have heat vision.”

“Albert does not need heat vision. What he needs is a future.”

“Mom, you’re embarrassing me,” Albert whined.

“Hush, honey. The grown-ups are talking,” Mama snapped, then turned her attention back to Simon. “My son has squandered the last twenty years of his life on comic books, and now he is finally doing something that could turn it all around.”

Simon frowned.

Mama reached over and snatched Albert’s machine from his hands. “Let’s be honest. You can’t take over the world with that little pop gun he built.”

“That’s the prototype, Mama,” Albert cried.

“Albert, it’s clear that your mother understands exactly what is going on. So, yes, Ms. Nesbitt, now that we know it works, I intend to have Albert build one a thousand times bigger that we can aim at the planet from space. One little zap and every machine from here to Australia will be under my control.”

“That should be worth more than being able to leap tall buildings.”

“What are you proposing, Ms. Nesbitt?” Simon asked. One of the squirrels climbed up in his lap and then onto his shoulder. It hunched forward as if it too wanted to hear what the strange woman wanted.

“Call me Mama,” she said.

“OK, Mama,” Simon replied.

“Let’s just say that Albert builds you something that lets you take over the entire world.”

“Let’s say that.”

“The world is a big place. It would be hard to manage it all by yourself. You might want to give some of it away just to avoid the headaches. Who better to take that problem off your hands than my son?”

Simon frowned. “When you say ‘some of it,’ I assume you have specific places in mind.”

“I’ve taken the liberty of making a list,” Mama said, handing Simon a slip of paper.

He scanned it. “You want your son to control half the United States, including Arlington, Virginia?”

Mama nodded. “Yes.”

“Why Arlington?”

“What’s the point of having a son who helped take over the world if you can’t brag to the neighbors?”

Duncan’s fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Pfeiffer, was not good at his job. He spent too little time teaching and too much time talking about his personal life. He rambled on and on about lifting weights, his steady stream of girlfriends and how he had been in a commercial for toilet paper when he was a baby. He knew nearly nothing about anything. He once told his class Abraham Lincoln had died when he slipped in the shower. Most of his students and, if he was honest, he himself, wondered how he had gotten a job as a teacher. After all, he didn’t even have a teaching certificate. But Duncan and his teammates knew that it was Pfeiffer’s lack of focus that made him the perfect man to teach a group of secret agents who were frequently absent from his class.

“The key to looking strong is not about lifting heavy weights, kids,” Pfeiffer said as he rolled up his sleeve to show his biceps. “It’s lifting light weights and doing lots of repetitions. Also, you can’t forget the three magic words—protein, protein, and protein.”

As Duncan struggled to stay awake, he heard a familiar voice in his head. Mr. Brand was calling. “Team, we need you in the Playground on the double.”

Duncan looked over at Matilda. Now that Heathcliff and his mind-bending incisors were gone, it was up to her to come up with a way to distract the class.

“Hey, everybody!” Matilda cried. “There’s a pony outside!”

The entire class, with Mr. Pfeiffer in tow, raced to the windows to see. Matilda always found a clever way to get them out of their seats. Duncan marveled at her imagination as he raced with the others to the lockers.

In no time, the team was plopping into their leather chairs, present and accounted for in the Playground.

“We’re sending you out,” Agent Brand said.

Duncan could feel panic rising in his belly. “Out?”

“Yes, nothing too dangerous. Just a little evidence collecting,” Brand said. “Your and Flinch’s tip about our mystery villain appears to be correct. After Ms. Holiday and I spoke to his mother, our suspect flew the coop. We need you to go and search his place for anything that will lead us to Simon.”

“But—”

“Yes, Gluestick?”

“Our upgrades are down,” Duncan cried.

Agent Brand looked as angry as Duncan had ever seen him. “You’ve been trained as secret agents, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve been on evidence-collecting missions before, correct?”

“Yes.”

“This will be easy, D,” Flinch said.

“It’s just, our upgrades make us—”

Brand leaned in closely. “If you need some fancy gadgets to make you feel better, we have a whole room full of them. Otherwise, take your team to Albert Nesbitt’s house and collect some evidence.”

“Albert and his mother must have disappeared in the night,” Ruby said as she and the rest of the team walked down into Albert Nesbitt’s basement lair. “Ugh, this is where he slept. My whole body is itchy. I’m allergic to sweat and desperation.”

“Well, I’m humiliated,” Matilda said as she used a broom handle to move a pair of dirty socks. “Now that we’re off-line, Brand’s giving us jobs for babies. How many times do we have to save the world before we get a little respect?”

Duncan was too busy navigating the stairs to speak. He was loaded down with gizmos. He had taken Agent Brand’s advice seriously and packed his pockets with all manner of electronic tools. He needed Flinch’s help down the stairs, but he was ready for whatever might occur.

“Gluestick, can I have a chat with you?” Braceface said as he pulled the boy aside.

“Sure, what is it?”

“That little speech Brand was giving in the Playground before we left. You know he was trying to teach you something, right?”

Duncan blinked. He had no idea what his teammate was telling him.

Jackson smiled sympathetically. “Pal, that speech was what we used to call the ‘man-up’ speech when I played peewee football.

“Man up?”

“Yeah, it’s a speech coaches give players who are crying and whining.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Yes, you were,” Jackson interrupted him. “He wasn’t telling you that you should carry off every device they have in the HQ. He was telling you that you didn’t need them to do your job. In fact, he was telling you that you are perfectly fine to do this mission and that you should stop blubbering about your upgrades.”

“Oh.”

“It’s OK,” Jackson said. “Everyone gets the man-up speech once or twice in their lives. I’ve just never met anyone who didn’t understand it was a man-up speech.”

Duncan looked at his teammates. They were all nodding in agreement.

“I’ve disappointed him, then,” Duncan said as he looked down at all his gadgets.

“A little,” Matilda said.

“And I’m going to give you my own man-up speech, right now,” Ruby said. “Brand is nervous about sending us to do anything. Heathcliff’s betrayal hit him like a ton of bricks. He’s questioning his decisions and his leadership now. On top of that, the big mistake at the Bank of Scotland has him wondering if we can get the job done. He has the power to dismantle this team, Gluestick. He could refuse to replace our upgrades and send us back to class to be normal. If we want to continue to be the coolest geeks in the world, we all need to show him that we can get the job done, powers or no powers.”