United We Spy (Gallagher Girls) (21 page)

N
umber of hours I was in surgery: 5


Number of hours I was unconscious: 9


Number of times I dreamed about the night before: 7


Number of times that, in that dream, I did things differently: 0


I woke to the sight of a dark figure standing at the window, watching.

“Zach?” I said and tried to move, but my left arm was too heavily bandaged.

“Sorry.” Preston leaned into the light. “I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed.”

He looked like the dorky boy who’d been standing in his father’s shadow, on the verge of becoming the country’s first son. He looked like the terrified kid who had jumped off a roof and had never heard the words
Circle of Cavan
.

“How do you feel?” he asked me. “Do you need the doctor or—”

“No.” I shook my head. “I’m fine. I’m okay. Just…sit. Talk to me.”

I watched him pull a chair closer to my bed, lean into the light of the blinking machines and hanging IV bags. He moved like someone who was afraid that I might break.

“How are you, Preston?” I asked. It was a question I’d been wondering for days, but there had never been a good time to ask it.

“I guess I’m great in comparison.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” I told him.

He smiled. “Deal.” Then he took my hand. “It’s good to see you up. I was hoping you’d be awake before I had to go.”

“You’re leaving?” I asked.

He looked down at the bed, at my bruises and my bandages. “Yeah. I think it’s probably for the best, you know. Your mom has been great. She offered to try to get me enrolled or whatever—finish out the school year here with all of you, but…” He trailed off. It seemed to take forever for him to look at me again, and when he did it was like I was seeing him for the very first time.

“Thank you for getting me out of that place, Cammie. Have I thanked you yet?”

“You don’t have to say that,” I told him, but Preston just shook his head.

“No. I really do. I might have died in there. It could have killed me,” he said, and I knew he wasn’t talking about his body. That place was a prison, but it was designed to kill your soul. “Anyway, now I think I have to leave.” He stood slowly.

“No. You don’t.”

“Yeah.” He smiled down and squeezed my hand. “I think it’s time for me to go be with my family.”

“Preston, wait!” I tried to sit up, to reach for him, but the movement was too much.

“You’re in pain,” he said. “Let me get the doctor to give you something.”

“There’s a button for the morphine, but I don’t like it. It knocks me out.”

“You know, it’s okay to admit a little weakness now and then, Cammie. It won’t kill you. In fact, I hear it makes you stronger.”

“Cam!” Mom cried and held her arms out wide. She acted like she was going to hug me, then thought better of it at the last minute. “How are you, kiddo?” she asked instead. Her hair was longer and, if possible, shinier. She had more color in her cheeks, like she’d been on a beach or a ski slope—maybe both. I’m not going to say she was glowing, except…well…she was totally glowing. She looked alive and at peace and…happy. My mother looked happy.

I hadn’t realized until then the degree of sadness that had always loomed around her before. A subtle, constant hum that coursed through everything she said and did. But it was finally gone.

“How do you feel, sweetheart?”

She pushed my hair away from my face, and her voice was like a cool cloth on my forehead.

“Fine. I think.”

I tried to sit up, but my mother pushed me back down.

“Easy, now. You had a close one.”

“Am I…”

“You’re going to be fine,” my mother told me.

“Amirah?” I asked.

Mom smiled. “She’s going to be fine too. She left this morning. We have a team of Gallagher Girls on her. She will be held in a secret location for the time being, but then… She’ll be fine, Cammie. We’ll keep her safe.”

And only then did I really let myself believe it.

I watched my mom straighten. It was almost like flipping a switch as she transitioned from mother to headmistress.

“I’d say you dodged a bullet, but you didn’t,” she told me. “Still…you were lucky.” She smoothed my hair again. “Dr. Steve shot you in the arm. The doctors expect you to regain full use of it with a little physical therapy. You get to wear that sling for a while, though.”

“And the other bullet…” I tried.

“It could have been bad, Cam. It could have been really bad, but somehow Agent Edwards managed to miss all the major organs. You were lucky,” she said again.

I shifted on the bed. Pain shot through me, and I winced.
Lucky
wasn’t the word I would have used, but my mother was right. She usually is.

I heard her talking about security protocols and the chances of attack. Part of me listened to every word as she talked about what Zach’s mom had said, the threat the little girl who called herself Amy was probably under at that very moment.

But another part of me—the girl part, not the spy part—just kept looking at the simple diamond ring on my mother’s left ring finger.

“Mom…” I heard my voice crack.

“Hello, Ms. Morgan.”

I turned and saw Mr. Solomon walking into the room. He looked like the most handsome man alive as he put his arm around my mother’s waist and kissed her cheek.

“Well, kiddo.” Mom blushed as she looked up at Mr. Solomon. “There’s something we need to talk about.”

I looked from my mother to my CoveOps teacher—my father’s best friend. Once upon a time, he had sworn to take care of me and my mom should anything ever happen to my dad. And he’d done that. Joe Solomon loved me, I was sure of it. But he was
in love
with my mother. And part of me knew that he always had been.

“Ms. Morgan,” Mr. Solomon started cautiously, “if you’ll—”

“Yes,” I blurted. Tears ran down my face. “Yes, I give you my blessing to marry my mother.”

Things were supposed to return to normal after that, but they didn’t.

Maybe it was because, once again, I was lying in a hospital bed. Maybe it was because we’d seen how fragile peace was, how delicate a line we walked. Maybe it was because we were seniors, and Liz had stopped worrying about the fate of the world and started worrying about college admissions. (Thus far, she’d been accepted at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford, MIT, and six other schools she hadn’t technically applied to.)

But my worries looked different than they had before.

“What do I call him? I mean, I can’t exactly call him Mr. Solomon. Or do I? Do I call him Mr. Solomon? Or Joe?” I looked from Bex to Macey, who shrugged in response, and I talked on. “I mean, he’s still my teacher. But he’s also going to be my stepfather. Do stepfathers get called ‘stepfather’?”

But then I saw Zach walking down the hall toward my room, and I couldn’t finish. It felt wrong worrying about my new stepfather when his own paternal issues were still so totally up in the air.

“Hey,” I said. “How are you?”

Liz moved from the end of my bed and Zach eased closer, carefully, like I was still entirely too fragile.

“I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be asking
you
that.” He leaned down and kissed the top of my head. “Remind me to kill you later for going off like that.”

“It hurts when I laugh,” I told him.

“Good. Because I’m not joking.” He didn’t smile but he kissed me again, on the lips, and moved to the window, almost like he was standing guard. He looked like Agent Townsend, but I didn’t say so.

There was a TV in my room, and the newscasters kept talking about how the riots in Caspia were dying down. The film crews that had surrounded the UN were gone. All that remained, it seemed, were two dead traitors in the streets of Roseville and a bullet-riddled teenage girl. No one seemed to know how close we’d come to World War III—how it might have really happened if Catherine had never come in from the cold.

Catherine.

“Where is she, Zach?” I asked. “Where is your mom?”

“Mommy dearest is in Sublevel Two for the time being,” Zach said. “There has been some debate about what to do with her. The CIA wants her, of course, but until all the moles are out of the agency, your mom and Joe don’t want to let her out of their sight.”

I couldn’t blame them.

“What about you, Bex?” Liz asked.

“What about me?” Bex wanted to know.

“Well, if you go to Oxford, then maybe I’ll consider going there too. What are you going to do after graduation?”

“MI6,” Bex said with a confident nod. “I don’t want to wait anymore. I want to get to work.”

Liz looked at Macey.

“Secret Service,” Macey said. She fingered the samples of fabric she was holding, looking down at them as if she couldn’t face us while admitting her deepest, darkest secret. “I’m going to join the Secret Service. The president has a teenage daughter. And I can’t help thinking that maybe I can do for her what Abby did for me.”

Finally, Liz looked at me, but I didn’t have an answer to her question.

On the TV, a reporter was outside the Capitol building, talking about the days we’d just lived through. Iranian forces were moving away from the Caspian border. The unrest was almost over, and the Iranian ports would soon be reopened for business. The world at large knew that we had come close to tragedy, but would they ever know exactly how close? And wasn’t that our job—to make sure they didn’t have to?

“So does that mean it’s over?” I asked, the words only for myself, but the smartest girls in the world were beside me, and in unison they turned to look at the screen.

“I guess,” Liz said. She didn’t sound hopeful, though. We’d all seen how tenuous the peace was. We knew too well how easily it could all be broken—how quickly it could all happen again. There would always be people who wanted war and power and dominance. They would always be there but, luckily, so would we.

“Periwinkle or persimmon?” Macey asked. She held two scraps of fabric out for me to examine, but I was heavily drugged and more than a little skeptical.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Bridesmaid dresses. Your mom said I could plan the wedding. She doesn’t care, and between you and me I’m so relieved. It was going to be really hard to manipulate her into letting me make all the decisions anyway. So, periwinkle or persimmon?”

I pointed to one, and to tell you the truth I didn’t care which one it was. That’s the thing about getting shot twice, almost kidnapped twice, really kidnapped once, and banged on the head more times than anyone can imagine: It tends to put your priorities in order. And I didn’t care what color my dress was as long as the members of the wedding were happy and healthy and…there.

As long as everyone I loved was there.

“Spring in the gardens,” Macey said. Outside the windows, I could see the first sprinkles of green starting to cover the trees. The sun was shining and the sounds of laughing, running girls filled the halls. “After graduation.”

She nodded as if that were our most important mission yet—maybe our final mission on those grounds, all of us together. In periwinkle gowns.

“H
ello, Cammie,” Catherine said as she stood in the shadows.

Sublevel Two was empty. I’d walked without a sound down the spiraling stone walkway to the room that had become a cell. The door was gone, replaced with a massive clear barrier that was no doubt blast-proof and bulletproof, and the only way in or out of the room that had been Zach’s mother’s home for the rest of the semester. But the semester was ending. Graduation was coming.

It was time to say our good-byes.

“This is such a nice surprise,” she told me. A harsh light burned overhead, casting her face in eerie shadow as she sat on the small mattress that lay on the floor. “But, of course, I knew you’d come eventually. I knew you had to come.”

It was my turn to speak—to say something. I wanted to ask her where I had messed up the previous summer—exactly how and when and why I’d gotten caught. I might have begged her to tell me if betraying our sisterhood was worth it. I might have yelled and cursed and cried for all she’d done to me. To Zach. To us. I might have done any of those things, but I couldn’t speak. So I stood, wordless, watching her, almost like looking at a dream.

“How do you like my room?”

She gestured to the stone walls and floor. There were big pads of paper and crayons, two blankets and a pillow without a case, but no chair and no window, just a bare lightbulb that swung overhead.

“Don’t feel bad for me, Cammie,” she told me. “I’m home, after all.” She stretched out on the narrow mattress, looked up at the ceiling. “I always knew I’d come home.”

I hated that fact, and she must have seen it in my eyes, because she straightened.

“What’s the matter, Cammie? Did you forget that we are sisters?”

I couldn’t speak. Words formed inside my mind, but I couldn’t will my mouth to say them.

“How is Zachary? He hasn’t come to see me. Will you ask him to come? I would consider it a personal favor.”

I’m not doing you any favors.

“Your mother comes and sees me every day. She has lots of questions.”

As she spoke, she looked like an insane person. Like she had a child’s mind inside that fully grown body. I wondered if it was an act, but then I didn’t care.

“Look, Cammie.” She picked up one of the pieces of paper. “It’s the mansion, see? It’s our home.” She unrolled the paper and held it toward the glass to reveal a drawing of the mansion made with crayons. “I made it for you.” She rolled the paper up again and slid it through the narrow opening in the glass. I took it, but I didn’t say a word.

“Doesn’t our home look like a castle in my picture?” she asked me. “I always thought it looked like a castle.”

And then she started to sing.

“Above the plains up on the hill there stood a castle bold

A gleaming palace made of white, a pillar to behold

The horsemen lived in service to the castle and the crown

But the knights rose up and killed the kings

And it all burned down.”

“That song.”

I hadn’t realized I’d said the words aloud until Catherine’s eyes widened.

“Do you recognize it, Cammie?” she asked. “Did I sing it to you last summer in Austria?”

Honestly, I didn’t remember. Maybe she had. But that wasn’t why I knew it.

“Oh,” Catherine said, realization dawning. She pressed her fingers against the glass. “I sang it to Zachary. Tell me, dear, does he sing it to you now?”

I didn’t answer. I just inched farther from the glass as if she might reach out, touch me with a spark.

“They are going to take me away tonight. Did you know that, Cammie? Did you know I’m leaving?”

I didn’t tell her that I did know. I didn’t say that that was why I had come—that I needed to close this final chapter. I wanted to see her there—frail and fleeting and locked inside those walls and the unhinged balance of her mind. I needed to see the woman from the roof in Boston, from the streets in D.C., from the nightmares of Austria that still invaded my mind. I needed to see her caged like an animal and know that it was over.

But I didn’t say that. I didn’t dare admit that she still had any power over me. I didn’t give her that one little bit of satisfaction.

She looked up at the walls and the ceiling—the stone that surrounded her.

“They promised me that this would always be my home. That girls like you would always be my sisters. But they weren’t my sisters, were they?” Catherine asked, but then the lunacy broke, a quick and fleeting crack, and through it I saw anger and bitterness and rage.

I saw the girl who had come to the Gallagher Academy looking for a home and found only a thing to hate. I saw the Catherine who had found, in the Circle, an outlet for her anger. I saw the woman who had tortured me once and who would gladly do it again.

“Why did you come to us, Catherine?” I asked her, finally. “You knew you would end up here—like this. Why did you do it?”

She smiled, but I guess it was her turn not to answer, to withhold a small sense of power. Instead, she just sat cross-legged on the cold stone floor and began to sing.

“But the knights rose up and killed the kings

And it all burned down.”