Gallagher Girls 5 - Out of Sight, Out of Time (11 page)

I
didn’t want to watch any more. I couldn’t bear to listen. So I pulled away and pushed farther into the tunnels, deeper and deeper into the belly of the school. Zach was taller and stronger, but I had a body that was made to disappear, and I could hear him chasing after me, struggling to keep up.

Eventually, the tunnel widened. Pale, predawn light sliced through the room from a dusty, narrow window, and I stood, panting, the trustees’ words echoing in my head.

“Don’t do that.” Zach grabbed my hand and spun me toward him. “Don’t ever run away again.”

“I killed someone,” I said.

“You saved Bex,” he countered.

“They think I’m dangerous. They think—”

“They don’t know you!”

My hair was almost its normal color. My uniform didn’t swallow me quite like it had a week before. Slowly, my body was starting to feel more like my own. But I wasn’t the girl I’d been when I left, and I knew it. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the best spies in the world would know it too.

“They don’t know you,” Zach said again. He grabbed my hands. “
I
know you.”

“They’re strangers,” I told him.

“Yeah,” he agreed, as if that should make me feel better.

“Impartial, informed, unbiased strangers.” I pulled away and looked up into his eyes. “And they think something is wrong.”

I wanted him to argue, to say that everything was going to be fine. It was a lie I was ready and willing to believe. But the words didn’t come. Instead, Zach ran a hand through his hair and asked, “Why did you kill him, Cammie?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t even remember doing it. I was—”

“Why didn’t you let
me
?”

Okay, now’s probably the time to say that I totally wasn’t expecting that.

Zach leaned closer to me, covering the minuscule space in a step. “They teach us how to do those things. At Blackthorne.”

It felt strange to have him volunteer anything about his school—his life. It felt even weirder to have him get things wrong.

“The Gallagher Academy doesn’t exactly leave its graduates clueless on the subject, you know.” I didn’t mean to sound offended, but I was.

But Zach was shaking his head. “They teach you how to
save lives
. They teach us how to
take them
. And then, how to live with ourselves after…” He touched the cool glass of the window. “It’s all my fault.”

“Nothing is your fault.”

“I told you to run away.” Zach shook his head. “I gave you the idea.”

“No you didn’t,” I said. “I’d known for a long time that it was my best option.”

“You should have taken me!” Zach didn’t seem to realize he was shouting. And if he had known, I seriously doubt he would have cared. “You needed me.”

He reached for the spot on my head, but I sidestepped his touch and moved away.

“Why? So I could watch Mr. Solomon’s protégé throw himself on another bomb to protect me? So that I could watch someone else get hurt?”

“So we could keep each other safe.”

“News flash, Zach. I am safe!”

He looked at me like I was a crazy person. Trust me. I’m a teenage amnesiac. It’s a look I know pretty well.

“You could have died, Cammie.”

“I’m breathing,” I said, defiant. “And I’m home and—”

“You could have died,” he said, easing closer.

“I’m fine,” I said just as Zach reached me.

“You could have died,” he said just as my tears finally came.

I kept shaking my head, saying over and over, “I don’t remember. I don’t remember.”

Was I talking about my summer, or about picking up the gun? Pulling the trigger, or assembling the rifle on my first day back to school? I didn’t know. Everything ran together in a blur.

“I killed someone.”

“I know.”

“I killed someone, and I don’t even remember pulling the trigger. That can’t be normal. You take a man’s life, you should remember it. You should think about it. You should know what you’re doing and…”

But I never finished because then Zach’s lips found mine. His hands burned as they left my arms and moved through my hair, bracing the back of my neck. My head still hurt, but there was no music playing.

“I remember this.” I felt my hand run along his chest, his breath warm on the side of my face. I breathed him in—Zach. “I remember this.”

And then he kissed me again, and the kiss was all that mattered. He pulled back, traced his lips across the tender place on my head.

“I…” I heard my voice trail off, my thoughts centering on the single thing I really had to know. “Are you afraid of me, Zach?”

“No.”

I looked at him, felt my hands shake and my voice break as I whispered, “I am.”

Y
ou might think being the target of an international terrorist organization, an amnesiac, and a girl with hair dyed in the middle of the night by Macey McHenry would make people stare at you. Well, try walking into the Grand Hall with seriously puffy eyes while holding hands. With a boy.

“Well, how are
you
this morning?” Tina Walters said, and I knew she had no idea what had happened on our field trip, or who had come to our door before the sun had risen. Or why.

I hoped they would never know why.

“Scoot,” Zach told her, and Tina smiled, sliding down to make room for the two of us on the bench.

He reached for the bacon in the center of the table, handed the plate to me.

“No thank you,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”

“I thought you wanted waffles,” Bex said, eyeing me.

“I—”

“Here.” Zach dropped a waffle onto my plate and reached for the butter.

“No, I’m really not—”

“You’re too skinny,” said Liz, a girl who I swear once bought a pair of pants that were a size double zero and had to have them taken in.

“It’s true,” Macey added. “Some girls look better with some fullness in their face.”

So I buttered my waffle and took a piece of bacon from the plate.

Bex smiled at me from across the table. “The hair looks good.” She turned to Macey. “Good call on the trim.”

“Yeah,” Macey said, eyeing her handiwork. “It’s a patch job, but it’s better.”

Everything looked normal. Everything sounded normal. But I still had cobwebs on my sweater and dust on my skirt, and the words I’d heard were still there, rattling around inside my head so loudly I thought that I might scream.

Zach must have sensed it, because he moved his hand to the small of my back and rested it there.

“Did you see your mom?” Bex reached for the carafe and poured herself a cup of hot tea as if nothing were wrong; but all I could think about was what I’d heard her say on my first night back:
They’re pretending
.

I didn’t say what I was thinking—that I was pretending too.

“Um…” I mumbled, stumbling over the answer. “She was busy.”

Everyone nodded. No one thought to ask,
Busy with what?

So I ate my waffle and drank my juice and didn’t say a word about what Zach and I had overheard in my mother’s office.

“I’m stuffed,” I said ten minutes later, and nobody argued as I stood and started for the door.

With my friends and Zach around me, it might have been easy to pretend that we were typical students starting a typical day. But then Liz dropped her backpack.

Trust me when I say it was a sight I’d totally seen before. The floor was littered with textbooks and note cards, piles of paper and an extensive collection of highlighters that Liz herself had patented. But then I looked past the mess to the things I totally
didn’t
expect—bills and magazines, a whole bunch of thin circulars boasting pizza prices and going-out-of-business sales.

“What’s that?” Macey asked, picking up a flyer about an upcoming local election.

“Mail,” Liz said. Bex raised her eyebrows, and Liz lowered her voice. “I got it from the
cabin
,” she whispered. “I thought I’d go read it to
him
.”

She didn’t use Mr. Solomon’s name—she didn’t dare there, in the middle of the Grand Hall. But we all knew who she meant. When a pair of eighth graders stopped and tried to help us pick everything up, Macey said, “We’ve got it,” in a
There’s nothing to see here
tone, and the girls walked on.

“Oh, I’m sure he’s very interested in”—Bex reached for a flyer—“the prices of fertilizer at the local feed store.”

“It might help.” Liz sounded offended, and I couldn’t blame her. She had the biggest brain of anyone I knew. She was going to use all of hers to fix Mr. Solomon’s. “According to Strouse and Fleinberg, normal interactions, conversations, and activities can stimulate the unconscious mind to…”

Liz went on, citing obscure studies and unproven hypotheses, but I’d stopped listening. I was too busy staring down at a padded manila envelope that had fallen to the floor with the rest of the letters. There were Italian stamps and an airmail sticker from France.

“Who’s that from?” Bex asked, following my gaze.

My voice was tight and low as I whispered, “Me.”

I
t happened in a flash.

One moment we were staring at an envelope bearing rows of familiar handwriting and a postmark from Rome. The next, Bex was grabbing the package and running between the tables, bolting through the foyer and up the stairs.

She was practically flying. Something was coming over my roommates, pulling them toward my mother’s office, and it didn’t take a student at spy school to know that that something…was hope.

But Bex hadn’t seen the trustees. Macey hadn’t heard the deep voices on the phone. Liz didn’t know the questions that swirled around me—the ones not even she could answer. They just knew there was a clue, and so they ran faster.

“Bex,” I said just as my best friend yelled, “Headmistress,” and ran past Gilly’s sword in its gleaming case. “Headmistress!” she called again.

“Bex, I think she’s—”

My mother’s office door flew open.

“Busy,” I finished, the word more exhale than whisper.

“What?” Aunt Abby asked, and the look on her face made me skid to a stop, frozen in my tracks. Liz actually ran into me, stumbled, and knocked over a display of hat pins-slash-poisoned daggers that had been used by a Gallagher Girl during the First World War.

Zach reached down and pulled her effortlessly to her feet, but all I could do was stare at Abby, who was coming toward me through the Hall of History. She neither smiled nor joked. “This is not a good time.”

“We need to see Headmistress Morgan,” Bex said. “We need to talk to both of you.”

“Not now.” Abby started to turn and go back to my mother’s office, but Bex thrust the package toward her.

“This was at the cabin!”

Abby’s eyes got wide as she stared down and whispered,
“Rome.”

“Show me,” Mom ordered, and Bex laid the package on the coffee table in front of the sofa—the very place where I’d eaten supper almost every Sunday night since I’d started at the Gallagher Academy in the seventh grade. It was a table normally reserved for spaghetti and bad burritos, but that day we all sat staring down at the only real clue we had about my past.

“You found it…” Mom started.

“At the cabin,” Liz said, answering the unfinished question. “It was with the rest of Mr. Solomon’s mail. I guess Cam must have mailed it to him or something.”

I felt the couch shift as my aunt sank to take the seat beside me. “That was good, Cam. Smart.”

The CoveOps teacher looked proud; the aunt sounded prouder. I know I should have said thank you, but it felt like cheating to accept a compliment I didn’t remember earning—like taking credit for somebody else’s hard work.

“Cammie,” Zach said, “are you
sure
it’s your handwriting?”

For a second, the question seemed strange. Zach had been my sorta-boyfriend for a long time, and yet he didn’t know what my handwriting looked like. I guess we weren’t exactly love-notes-in-the-locker people. We were too busy being terrorists-want-to-kidnap-us people. It’s easy to see how one would get in the way of the other.

“Oh,” Bex said with a laugh, “it’s hers. I’d know that crazy-person scrawl anywhere.”

I ran a finger along the words I had absolutely no memory of writing. The postmark was so foreign, so strange. The stamps seemed like works of art.

“It’s a package
I
sent from Rome,” I said, then laughed softly to myself. “I’ve always wanted to go to Rome.”

How many covert conversations had my roommates and I had in the past three years? How many hours had we spent staring down at some mysterious clue? I couldn’t even begin to count. It felt somehow like they’d all been leading up to that moment—that place. We seemed a long, long way from my first boyfriend’s garbage.

“I guess we should start by X-raying it,” Liz said slowly. “We’ll need to scan it for biohazards, of course, and—”

Abby lunged forward, cutting Liz off. She didn’t hesitate as she grabbed the package and ripped. Scraps of paper and packing material flew everywhere, but no one said a thing as Abby turned the envelope upside down and dumped the contents onto the table.

“Or we could do that,” Liz finished.

I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it seemed a little anticlimactic, to tell you the truth. There were no bombs, no treasure maps where X marked the spot—just a small pile of bracelets, each with thin wires twisted into the words
Bex
,
Liz
, and
Macey
. I reach for each and handed them to my best friends, who gazed down at the delicate wires that spelled their names.

There were two small brown paper packets, the names
Mom
and
Abby
written across them in my familiar scrawl, and I handed them to their new owners, watched them pull out beautiful pendants hung on delicate chains.

The last package was simply labeled
Me
.

I could barely breathe as I tipped the tiny envelope upside down and immediately felt something cool and metal land on my palm. On the end of a very fine chain, I found a small pewter crest almost like the one from the Gallagher Academy, but different. And still it was close enough that I could see why it would catch my eye and make me choose it for myself.

“Well, Cam, I guess you were wrong that day when you came back,” Bex said slowly. She held the bracelet up. “You got us something after all.”

But I barely heard my best friend’s words. I was pushing through the scraps of paper and packing material, searching, but there was nothing else in the pile.

“It’s not here,” I said.

“What’s that, kiddo?” Mom asked me.

“Dad’s journal. I hoped maybe I’d sent it back, but it’s not here. It’s just…jewelry,” I said. Suddenly, I wanted to hurl the necklace across the room, throw it out the window, do anything but sit there holding proof that I’d been to Rome and had nothing to show for it but some trinkets. For the first time since waking up in Austria, I actually wanted to cry. “It’s just stupid souvenirs. It doesn’t tell us anything!”

I tried to get up, but Bex was already taking the seat on the arm of the couch beside me, the bracelet around her wrist.

“You didn’t just send us souvenirs, Cam,” she said, smiling.

“Yeah,” Liz agreed. “You sent us souvenirs…
from Rome
.”

I think every Gallagher Girl in history has fantasized about the places her job will take her. In my dreams, Bex was beside me, Liz was somewhere running comms. There was usually a prince, a count, and a rogue arms dealer of some sort. And my dream, believe it or not, had always taken place in Rome.

I was in Rome
, I had to think. I racked my brain, looking for memories of the Colosseum. I swallowed hard, searching for the taste of truly authentic pizza. It was the kind of thing I shouldn’t have been able to forget. The irony was almost too much.

Macey slapped her hands together and turned to my mother. “So when do we leave? I can call Dad’s secretary and get a jet here by the end of the day.”

I watched Bex and Liz begin to mentally pack and plan as Macey talked about the advantages of private jet travel. Zach and I were the only ones who saw the look that crossed Aunt Abby’s face.

I’d only seen that look twice before. Once in my mother’s office during Abby’s first few days as Macey’s guard. Another time on a moving train outside of Philadelphia, barreling through the night. It had been almost a year since I’d seen my aunt wear that expression, and I knew it wasn’t anger. There was no rage. It was simply a mixture of guilt and regret so deep that neither word could do it justice.

The only word that came to mind was heartbreak.

“What is it, Abby?” I asked. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Rome…” Abby said, just as my mother said, “Abby, no—”

“She has the right to know, Rachel,” Abby snapped, but then lowered both her voice and her gaze. “Cam deserves to know that it’s all my fault.”

“You’re wrong,” Mom said, but Abby shook her head.

“Am I?”

“What does Rome mean?” Zach asked.

“Someone tell me,” I demanded.

“About a month before your father disappeared, he called me,” Abby said. “He was excited about something—more excited than I’d heard him in years. He didn’t want to tell Joe or even your mother, but he was close to something that could bring the Circle down. Those were his words: ‘Bring the Circle down.’ And he wanted me to come meet him—to help him. But I was late…” She turned to look out the window. “He was calling me from Rome. That’s what Rome means.”

“Matthew didn’t disappear for another four weeks, Abby. My husband
did not
disappear in Rome. It
is not
your fault.”

“He wanted me there, Rachel. Whatever it was, he needed me there.”

“So when do we leave?”
Macey said again, fresh emphasis on every word.

“That’s the thing, Macey.” Zach stood and walked to the bookshelves. “We don’t.”

Liz looked at him as if he were crazy. “But it’s a clue. It’s a piece of the puzzle, a—”

“Risk,” I finished for her. “It’s a big risk.” I looked down at the envelope with its frayed edges. “
I’m
a big risk.”

“But…” Liz sounded utterly confused. “We went to the cabin and we found this. It has to matter. It has to mean something.”

“We went to the cabin, and the Circle found
me
.” I took a deep breath. “And then I killed someone.”

“But…” Liz started, and then realized that even she didn’t know how that sentence was supposed to end.

“They sent someone to kill her, Liz,” Zach said. “And they’ll keep sending people until they succeed.”

I watched Bex, saw her weighing the risks and rewards in her mind, but my mother was the only one who spoke.

“We’re going to have to think about this.” She stood, gently cradling in her hands the small packet I’d given her.

“But—” Liz started.

“But they don’t need me alive anymore.” I started for the door. “Everything is different now that they don’t need me alive.”

No one told me I was wrong.

“Go to class,” Abby said. “We’ve got a lot to think about.”