Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover (13 page)

"Staring
deeply into his eyes?" Liz guessed, because while security breaches might
be serious, eye-staring-into is something that should
never
be
ignored.

"Maybe
Blackthorne was there for an assignment too?" Bex asked.

"Maybe,"
I said, but my heart wasn't in it. I thought about his cryptic postcard—his
warning—and the way he'd looked at me that day. "It's just that something
about him seemed…different."

"What?"
Bex said. I could feel her moving toward me. Like a tiger. She was lethal and
beautiful and very, very catlike in the curiosity department. "What are
you thinking about?"

I
didn't know what was more concerning—that there had been a gap, however small,
in Macey's security perimeter, or that Zach had slipped through it.

I
thought about the boy who had kissed me last spring and the one who had looked
at me under the bleachers. "He seemed"—I started slowly, still trying
to put the pieces together—"worried."

"Ooh!" Liz squealed.
"He wants to protect you!"

"I
don't need protecting," I told her, but Liz only shrugged.

"It's the thought that
counts."

"Well,
there is
another
option," Bex said, with a very mischievous grin. "Maybe he went under
the bleachers knowing you wouldn't be able to resist
following him
under the bleachers…"

She
let her voice trail off as she stared at me, the possibilities lingering until
Liz felt the need to blurt: "So you could be alone!"

Okay, I don't want to sound braggy.
Or unprofessional. Or naïve. But is it wrong to admit that I'd been kind of hoping
all day that was the reason? (Partly because, as a girl, that's a good reason,
and as a spy, it meant he wasn't conspiring to commit high treason.)

"No,"
I blurted. "No. That can't be possible. He wouldn't leave school and go
all the way to Cleveland and sneak into a restricted area and everything just
to see…me." I turned to Macey, our resident expert on all things
boy.
"Would he?"

"Don't
look at me," Macey said, waving her hands (which were, by that time,
holding a pump, a jacket, and a "walk the walk" campaign button).
"I have a whole other kind of boy problem."

Wait.
MACEY McHENRY HAD A BOY PROBLEM? I couldn't be sure I'd heard correctly, and
evidently I wasn't alone.

"Boy"—Liz
stammered—"problem. YOU?"

Macey
rolled her eyes. "Not
that
kind of problem. Preston."

"Oh,"
Liz said, sounding way too matchmakery, if you want to know the truth. "He
is kind of cute. And really socially aware. You know, I read this article
in—"

"He's a dork," Macey
said, cutting her off.

"But
you have so much in common," Liz protested. Macey glared. "I mean,
besides the dork thing."

"'Common'
is overrated," Macey said with another sigh.

"Well then," Liz said,
"what's the problem?"

"The
problem is that we were attacked by three highly trained operatives and lived
to tell the tale," I said without even realizing that I'd known the answer
all along.

"Bingo,"
Macey said. "And Preston was impressed. Very impressed."

"So boys really
do
make
passes at girls who kick—"

"Bex!" I cut my best
friend off.

Can
I just say that it's really pretty hard to deal with boys who may want to…

A.
             
Date you, or

B.
             
Kill you, or

C.
             
Learn the
origins of your freaklike self-defense capabilities!

And
that day it was highly possible that we might have been dealing with ALL THREE!

Will
the boy drama in my life ever go away?! Seriously. I'm asking.

"Even
after you left, he wouldn't shut up about it," Macey told me.

"You could have shut him
up," Bex suggested.

"Don't think I wasn't
tempted."

A group
of eighth graders passed by, singing at the top of their lungs, but the four of
us stayed quiet and still inside the dark alcove.

"You're
smiling," Macey blurted, no doubt accusing Bex of doing something Bexish.
"Why
are
you smiling?"

"Nothing,"
Bex said with a shake of her head. "I just keep thinking…"

Bex
isn't one for trailing off. She always knows what comes next and never starts
what she can't finish. So maybe it was that fact, or the way the smile faded
from her face, but something made me hold my breath as she found the words to
say, "I just keep thinking how shocked they must have been. You know…
them.
They thought they were coming
after a girl. But instead they got…"

"Gallagher Girls," Liz
finished for her.

The
two of them smiled at each other. But Macey and I—we just stared through the
shadows, a new realization dawning on both of us as I said, "But they
weren't
surprised."

I've
told the story here; I don't want to tell it again. This is my official
record—hopefully the last time I'll have to answer the question, "So what
happened last summer in Boston?"

I've
told it now so many times that it comes out automatically, like a textbook
I've memorized, like a song stuck in my head.

But after that…

After that the story changed.

The
facts were still the same—I'd remembered them correctly all along. But I
understood something else then. When the film played in my mind I didn't focus
on the hits or the kicks. That night I saw the eyes, the way arms were ready to
parry our punches. The way no one seemed shocked as Macey performed a textbook
Malinowski Maneuver on a guy twice her size.

A
spy is only as good as her cover—as her legend. The

bad guys weren't supposed to know
the truth about us.

But they did.

"You're
sure," Bex asked me. Again. We huddled together in the nearest, quietest,
safest place I could find, surrounded by the remnants of the first-ever covert
carrier pigeon breeding program. Liz sat on an overturned pigeon coop. A soft
wind blew through the open gaps in the wall, which looked out into the night.

Roseville
was just two miles away. And Josh. And normalcy. But somehow my first boyfriend
and his perfectly ordinary life seemed like a different world entirely as I
looked at Bex and then at Liz and, finally, at Macey.

"They
really weren't surprised," Macey said again, almost laughing now. She
looked at me. "Why didn't we see that?"

It
was as if we'd both missed an easy question on a pop quiz and Macey couldn't
help having a good laugh at our stupidity.

"So …" Bex spoke slowly,
carefully. "They know."

She
looked out the glassless windows as if
they
might have been out there even
as we spoke, because if they knew who we were…they knew where we lived.

"But
that can't be," Liz protested. "No one knows the truth about the
Gallagher Academy."

But
I just followed Bex's gaze into the darkness and thought about another night in
another room, when Zach had asked me about the mystery surrounding my father's
death. I found his words coming back to me as I wrapped my arms around myself
and whispered, "Somebody knows."

"So
they knew Macey would have training, and they came after her and Preston
anyway?" Liz asked.

I
saw my best friends looking at me—and even in the dark I couldn't hide the
truth any longer.

"Well
…" I started slowly, "on the roof, Preston was with us."

"Yeah,"
Bex said. I could feel her impatience building, so I spoke faster.

"I
got him out of there—got him off of that roof—and they didn't really…care."

"What do you mean,
Cam?" Liz asked.

"She
means they didn't want him," Macey said. "They didn't want us,"
she added, growing stronger. And then she stopped. She shrugged. "They
wanted me."

I'd
been fearing that moment for days, thinking about the girl at the lake. I'd
worried what the knowledge might do to her—to us. But from the time she'd
stepped foot out of her parents' limousine, Macey had been a surprise, and this
was no exception.

She
squinted at me. She shook her head. It was the exact same look she got when she
mastered a formula for Mr. Mosckowitz's class, as if things were finally
starting to make sense.

"I'm
gonna get my mom and Aunt Abby." I started for the door, but then Macey
spoke.

"You think they don't know
already?"

And
it hit me—the truth. Of course they knew. They'd
always
known.

"So
either they came after Macey in spite of her training…" Liz started.

"Or because of it," Bex
replied.

But
the strangest thing was happening. The moon was rising, full and clear. The
lights of Roseville shone in the distance. Everything felt alive again, and I
could see that in Macey. It was as if she knew it wasn't random anymore—there
was purpose. And that made all the difference.

"So
I guess the question is," Bex said, crossing her arms, "what are we
gonna do about it?"

Covert
Operations Report

By
Cameron Morgan, Macey McHenry, Elizabeth Sutton, and Rebecca Baxter (hereafter
referred to as "The Operatives")

During
a routine civilian engagement, Operatives McHenry and Morgan were attacked by
figures representing an unknown organization with unknown affiliations and
unknown goals.

After
two weeks of extensive research (and some particularly fine computer hacking by
agent Sutton), The Operatives learned the following:

There
are no fewer than two dozen international lawsuits filed against McHenry
Cosmetics (even though the Eye

Rejuvenation
cream clearly states on the label that temporary blindness is a possible side
effect).

Much
to Macey's shock, Senator McHenry does not appear to have any illegitimate
children (that The Operatives know about).

No
one holding a significant amount of stock in Macey's mom's company made a
significant gamble that the price of the stock would go down following the
kidnapping attempt.

The
McHenry family has approximately seventy-six disgruntled former servants (of
whom, Macey swears, only seventy-five have cause to be really, truly angry).

It's
easy to imagine that a family of spies would have a lot of enemies. Well, turns
out we've got nothing on politicians and people who manufacture semi-dangerous
cosmetics. By the time we'd run down every shady business deal and political
scandal, the list of suspects was long—like, the number of digits of pi that
Liz knows by heart, long—and I wasn't sleeping any easier.

"It's
impossible," I told Bex one day in P&E, but Bex, sadly, misunderstood,
because instead of commiserating, she grabbed my arm and executed the most
perfect Axley Maneuver I'd ever seen.

"Ow," I said, looking
up at her. But Bex just laughed.

"Wuss,"
she said, then stepped back to illustrate. "It's not impossible. All you
have to do is shift your weight in a counter—"

"Not
the move," I snapped as I climbed to my feet, shifted my weight, and
showed her. "Macey," I whispered as she landed on the mat.

"Oh," Bex said, staring
up at me.

Outside,
the first hints of color were appearing on the trees, and the wind was growing
cooler. Fall was coming soon, and yet the mysteries of summer were still alive
and well.

"I
touched them, Bex," I said, my voice low against the steady din of grunts
and kicks that filled the loft. My breath came harder. "I heard their voices
and smelled their breath and I can't tell you anything about them except…"
I trailed off. But Bex, who is excellent in both the spy and best friend
departments, read my mind. "It's the ring, isn't it?"

Beads
of sweat
ran from
my forehead
to
my
chin, but
I didn't wipe them away. "I've seen that emblem somewhere before."

"I
believe you, Cam," Bex started slowly. "But didn't you sketch it for
Liz and have her run it through the CIA database?"