Dont Judge a Girl by Her Cover

by Ally Carter

  And then the whole world faded to black.

  Chapter Four

  Not all sleep is equal, of that much I am sure. After all, I've experienced many varieties of it firsthand. There's Bex-challenged-me-to-a-round-of-kickboxing sleep, where exhaustion is matched only by the aching of your body. There's Grandma-Morgan-made-a-huge-dinner-and-there's- nowhere-I-have-to-be-for-three-weeks sleep that only comes in places where you feel utterly safe. And then there's the other kind—the worst kind—when your body goes someplace your mind can't follow: the Mom-just-told-me-Dad's- never-coming-home-again sleep. Your body rests, but your heart… it has other things to do, and you wake up the next morning praying, hoping, willing the night before to have been a terrible dream.

  I'd never known it was possible to have all three kinds at once. But it is. I know that now. "Don't move," a deep voice said.

  I felt the light first, burning through my closed eyes,

  forcing me to turn my head away from the glare. As I moved, a rush of white-hot pain seared through me, and a deep voice chuckled.

  "I know you're not big on following rules, Ms. Morgan, but when I tell you to stay still, you might want to do as I say.

  I blinked and swallowed, but my mouth felt as if it were full of sand, my eyes like burning embers. I tried to sit upright, but a hand eased me back down onto soft pillows. I looked up at the blurry face of my mother—my headmistress—and the best spy I've ever known.

  And then somehow I found the strength to say, "That wasn't a test, was it?"

  I didn't know where I was, or even the day or the time, but I knew my mother's face, and that was enough to tell me the answer to my question.

  "Welcome back," I heard the deep voice say, and I turned to see Joe Solomon standing at the foot of my bed; but for the first time since I'd met him, I wasn't worried about what my hair looked like in his presence.

  "Mr.—" I started, my voice rough.

  "Here." My mother brought a glass of water to my lips, but I couldn't drink.

  "Macey," I cried, sitting up too quickly. My head swam and my throat burned, but nothing could stop me. A thousand questions came to mind, but right then only one really mattered. "Macey! Is she—"

  "She's fine," Mom said soothingly.

  "Better than you, actually," Mr. Solomon said. "A broken arm isn't quite as scary as…" He trailed off but tapped his temple, and for the first time I felt the bandage that covered my head. I remembered the fall through the shaft, the blood in my eyes, and then, spy training or not, I felt a little woozy and lay back down on the pillow.

  "Where am I?" I asked, noticing that instead of the skirt I'd been wearing in Boston, I had on my oldest and softest pair of pajamas. Instead of the soreness of fresh bruises, my body ached as if I hadn't moved in years, so then I knew to modify my question. "When am I?"

  "You've been out for a little more than a day," Mr. Solomon said. "We brought you here as soon as we could."

  "Here?" I looked around. The log wall beside my bed was rough beneath my fingers. The floors were solid wood. I was in a cabin, I realized, probably belonging to the school or the CIA. "Is this a safe house?"

  I didn't have a clue how safe it was until I heard my teacher say, "It had better be. I own it."

  Mr. Solomon owned a house. Mr. Solomon owned this house. On any other day I might have absorbed every detail of the place—the patchwork quilt, the tackle box, the smell of fresh pine and old mothballs. I might have marveled that Mr. Solomon lived anywhere, that he had roots.

  "I don't use it much," Mr. Solomon said, as if reading my mind. "But it has come in handy"—he seemed to be considering his words—"on occasion."

  I didn't stop to think about the "occasions" of Mr. Solomon's life. I knew my imagination could never do them justice, so instead I just sat there trying to summon the courage to say, "Charlie?"

  Mom smiled. She smoothed my hair. "He's going to make it, Cam. He's going to be fine."

  It should have calmed me, but it didn't. The sun broke through the heavy trees outside, and rays fell across the bed. I sat up a little straighter. "Is Macey here too?"

  My teacher nodded. "Outside. It took a little doing to get her away from the Secret Service after everything, but"— he trailed off, glanced at my mother then back to me— "we've done harder."

  Sometimes it seems like we Gallagher Girls spend half our time wondering about the things that our teachers have seen and done. But that day I didn't ask for details. That day, I had seen enough to know that maybe I didn't want to hear the stories.

  "What happened?" I asked. I didn't look at my mother or my teacher. My fingers traced the pattern of the quilt. I was the one who had been there, and yet all I could do was say, "I mean, was it…"

  "A kidnapping attempt?" Mr. Solomon finished for me, and I nodded, trying to act as professional as my teacher sounded. "These things, they happen—or almost happen— more than you'd think." I tried to nod and smile. After all, the true measure of covert operations lies in how much nobody ever knows. But people were going to know about this. "Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it doesn't get that far, but—"

  "They were good," I said, almost shaking with the memory.

  Mr. Solomon nodded. "Yeah," he said, as if a part of him couldn't help but be impressed. "They were. Secret Service and FBI are going to have some questions for you. Ms. Morgan, these agents will have Level Six clearance at the most—so you know what you're going to have to tell them?"

  I nodded. "My roommate invited me to the convention. We were attacked on the roof. We got away." I felt myself reciting the cover story I'd have to tell; I found myself remembering that I know fourteen different languages and yet my life is ruled by the things I cannot say.

  I glanced out the window, saw the trees that surrounded us, a clearing, and in the distance a sparkling lake. Macey stood on the end of a long pier, looking out at the water.

  "We got lucky," I added softly, and at that moment my cover story didn't feel like a lie at all.

  My mother's cell phone rang and she rushed to take it. I heard her whispering to someone she called Sir. I turned and looked out the window at the girl on the pier, and then I got up slowly and stepped toward an old-fashioned screened door.

  "There's nothing wrong up there," Mr. Solomon said. I stopped and turned to see him pointing toward my groggy head. "Trust me, Cammie, everything's gonna be fine." He touched a faded scar on his temple. "I know a little something about these things."

  Mr. Solomon was the best teacher I'd ever had, and I didn't want to disappoint him. So I lied and said, "I know."

  "Hey," I said as I reached the end of the pier. Macey was still standing there, staring out at the still, quiet lake. Scrapes ran down her left cheek. Her right eye was rimmed with black, and her left arm dangled from a totally unflattering sling. As I walked toward her, I couldn't help but think that if that was what Macey looked like, then I probably never wanted to see a mirror again.

  "Welcome back," she said.

  "Thanks."

  "How's the head?"

  "Hurts. How's the arm?" My roommate didn't answer. She didn't comment on my hideous hair or the bruises on our faces that no amount of concealer could hide.

  There were too many things to say, so I didn't press her. Instead I shifted and listened to the boards creak beneath my feet and thought about how our school had taught us how to get off that roof, but nothing in our exceptional education had told us what we were supposed to do next.

  I wanted to sit in the CoveOps classroom and listen while Mr. Solomon dissected every move, every clue, every punch.

  And I wanted to block it from my mind and never think about it again.

  I wanted to know who had done this and why and how.

  And I wanted to believe that it was over, and those

  were the kinds of details that didn't matter now.

  I wanted to take the greatest training I had ever received and learn from it, and be better because of it.

  An
d I wanted it to stop being real.

  I wanted a thousand different things as we stood there, but most of all, I wanted the girl who had been beside me in Boston to turn and realize that I was beside her now.

  "I heard Charlie is going to make it," I said, but Macey didn't smile.

  "Have you talked to Preston?" I tried, but her gaze never wavered.

  "Macey, do you want to talk about it?" I asked, but her breathing stayed steady, her gaze didn't move.

  "Macey," I tried, "please say something. Please say—"

  "It's nice," she said as the late-summer breeze blew through the trees. "I like this. I like the water."

  "Don't you have a house on Martha's Vineyard?" I asked, wondering how a rickety shack on a quiet lake could ever compare; but Macey kept staring at the stillness and said, "This is better."

  "We're going to have to answer questions. We're going to have to be very careful about what we say. We're—"

  "They briefed me already," Macey said, her eyes never leaving the horizon. "This feels like a safe house." She finally turned to look at me. "Doesn't it feel safe, Cam?"

  "Yeah, Macey," I said softly. "It does."

  It was getting late. My internal clock had rebooted, and something in the way the sun dipped behind the tree- covered hills that surrounded us on all sides told me it was nearly eight o'clock.

  "It's almost time," Macey said as if she'd read my mind. "They're coming. My parents want me with them—"

  "Of course," I blurted.

  "—on the campaign trail," Macey finished. I stared at her, forgetting my aching head and sore muscles for a moment. She forced a smile. "We're up ten points in the polls."

  I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say a thing. Instead, we stood there until we heard the screen door behind us screech and slam. A minute later a helicopter appeared on the horizon and dipped, its whirling blades sending ripples across the quiet lake before landing somewhere in the forest.

  The wind grew cooler. Macey wrapped her good arm around herself and shivered in the breeze, but she didn't move from the end of the dock.

  Her name was probably on every newscast in America. It wasn't hard to imagine that, back in Boston, a room full of interns was buzzing about speeches that had to be rewritten and commercials that had to be recut. The campaign had a new star—a new angle. But all of that felt like another world, so I just stood by my friend and thought for the first time ever that Joe Solomon was wrong about something.

  I hadn't come away in worse shape than Macey McHenry.

  Not by a long shot.

  Chapter Five

  I know the sounds my school makes—the squeaky steps and creaking doors, the hushed voices during finals week, the noisy chaos of the Grand Hall before dinner. The first day of a new year has a sound all its own, as limos turn down the winding lane and car doors slam, suitcases bang against banisters, and girls squeal and hug hello.

  But the first semester of my junior year…That semester started with a whisper so quiet I almost didn't hear it.

  "Is Macey taking the semester off?" one senior asked another as they stood huddled in the hall outside the library.

  "I heard they had to amputate Macey's arm and replace it with a bionic limb that Dr. Fibs made in his lab," an eighth grader said when I passed by the door to their common room.

  Gallagher Girls spend their free time scattered throughout the four corners of the world, but that year every girl who returned from summer break brought back the same questions. So I kept moving, roaming the quiet halls like a shadow, right up until the point when I turned the corner and ran into Tina Walters.

  "Cammie!" Tina cried, and in the newfound quiet of our school, the word echoed. She threw her arms around me. "You're okay!" she proclaimed, and then she reconsidered. "You are okay, aren't you?"

  "Yeah, Tina, I'm—"

  "Because I heard you killed one of them with a campaign button?"

  Tina is a teenage girl, and a spy-in-training, and the only daughter of one of the country's premiere gossip columnists, so it's not surprising that she has crazy theories. A lot of them. All the time. But in that second, my mind flashed back to the sunny roof. I saw the shadows of the spinning blades, felt the hands that gripped my shoulders, and then heard the pained cry as I jabbed the Winters-McHenry button into a hand wearing a ring that I was sure I'd seen before.

  "Cam?" Tina asked, but I just nodded.

  "Yeah, Tina." My throat felt strange, as I said it. "Something like that."

  And then I walked away.

  When you're known as the Chameleon, sometimes it can feel like your whole life is just an elaborate game of hide-and- seek. Fortunately, I am very good at hiding. Unfortunately, my best friends are very good at seeking.

  "Cam!" someone called through the shadows. "We know you're in here." The voice was soft and Southern, the footsteps so dainty that I knew there could only be one person tiny enough to creep over those particular floorboards without making a sound.

  "Oh, Cammie," Liz practically sang, as she crept down the ancient corridor that (I think) had once been a pretty important part of the Underground Railroad, and had more recently served a far less noble covert purpose.

  "I thought we'd find you here," another voice said. My second roommate pushed her way out of the shadows.

  If possible, I think Liz had gotten even tinier and Bex had gotten even prettier over the summer break. Liz's blond hair was almost totally white from spending all summer in the sun. Bex's accent was stronger, like it always is after spending months with her parents in England. (Of course, Bex swore that she'd spent a good portion of that time actually doing surveillance with MI6 in an African nation that shall remain nameless.) Her dark skin glowed and her hair was longer than it had been at the start of the summer.

  "Isn't it a tad early in the semester for hiding, darling?" Bex tried to tease. I tried to smile.

  "What gave me away?" I asked.

  "Irregular dust patterns outside the entrance," Bex said. "You're getting sloppy." And then she stopped. Strong Bex, brave Bex, seemed to recoil when she realized what she'd said- "I didn't mean…"

  "It's okay, Bex," I told her.

  "You weren't sloppy!" Bex blurted again.

  Then Liz jumped in. "Everyone's talking about how great you were—about how, if you hadn't been there …" But she didn't finish, which was just as well. No one wanted to think about how that sentence had to end.

  Bex eased onto one of the overturned crates and boxes that filled the room. "Have you seen her?"

  "Not since the day after. They brought us to Mr. Solomon's lake house, but then they took her back to her parents."

  "She is coming back," Liz asked. "Isn't she?"

  "I don't know," I said with a shrug.

  "I mean … they wouldn't want her to stay with them all the time, would they? They'd want her here, where she's safe?"

  "I don't know, Liz," I said, sharper than I'd meant. "I mean … I don't know if she's coming," I said, more softly. "I don't know who tried to do this or why or … I just don't know," I whispered again, then turned to look out the tiny circular window.

  "She invited me." Bex's voice cut through the silence. "Before the convention, she called our flat and asked me to come, but my mum and dad were home, and I…" Bex trailed off, not knowing, I guess, that wanting to be with your parents isn't actually a sign of weakness. "I should have been there." She didn't sound envious about missing out on a good fight. Instead, she sounded guilty.

  "Me too," Liz said, sinking to the dusty floor. "When she called, my mom said I could go, but I only had a few days left with my parents, so I said no."

  I nodded. We all thought we'd have the better part of a year to spend together, hut in any life—especially a spy's life—tomorrow is never guaranteed.

  And there you have it—the most important thing any of us had learned over our summer vacation.

  "Tina Walters says Macey's parents have hired an ex- Navy SEAL to pose as a Sherpa and
hide Macey out in the Himalayas until the election is over," Liz offered.

  "Yeah, well Tina Walters says a lot of things. Tina Walters is usually wrong," Bex replied. But I thought about how close Tina had been with her campaign button theory; I remembered that Tina had been saying for years that there was an elite boys' school for spies, and we'd all thought that was a crazy rumor until last semester when a delegation from the Blackthorne Institute had moved into the East Wing, just a few feet from where we now sat.

  So I looked around the empty dusty space and said, "Not always."

  Last spring, finding out who those boys were and whether or not they could be trusted had seemed like the most important mission of our lives. Charts of surveillance summaries and patterns of behaviors still lined the walls of our former operation headquarters, but the tape was starting to lose its hold. The wires still ran to the East Wing, a reminder of the days when boys from the Blackthorne Institute had seemed like a mission—back when missions had been about getting us ready for the real world; before the real world cornered us on a rooftop in Massachusetts.

  Liz must have followed my gaze and read my mind, because I heard her say, "Have you heard from…you know…Zach?"

  I thought back to the swirling images that had filled my mind before I'd blacked out, and almost asked, "Do hallucinations after a head injury count?" But I didn't because A) I may very well have been going crazy. And B) for a Gallagher Girl, "Boy crazy" might be the most dangerous kind of crazy there is.

  So instead I turned to look out the window and watched the long line of limousines winding down Highway 10, carrying my classmates back to the safety of our walls.

  It was the same scene I'd witnessed for years—the same cars, the same girls. But in the next instant the scene totally changed. Vans—dozens of them—sped down the highway, skidding into ditches on the side of the road. People bolted out and started adjusting satellite dishes and equipment. Helicopters swarmed around the school.