by Ally Carter
Chapter Twenty-five
With finals and the stress that comes with them, I didn't really see Liz again until supper the following night when she brought her slice of pizza and came to sit beside me. "So, where did you go last night?" she asked. But before I could answer, she said, "To see Josh?"
I nodded.
"You didn't break up with him, did you?" She sounded genuinely concerned.
"No," I said, shocked.
"Good." Then she must have sensed my confusion because she said, "He's good to you, and you deserve that." She looked around the Grand Hall at the hundred other girls who were like us. "We all deserve that."
Yeah, I realized, I think we do.
I stole a glance at Bex who sat beside me, laughing. We all deserve laughter and love and the kinds of friends I had beside me, but as I watched her, I couldn't help but wonder if she'd still find life so funny if she knew all I knew. I wondered if our fathers' fates had been reversed, would our personalities have switched, too? Would I be the one standing in the Grand Hall allowing Anna Fetterman to demonstrate how she'd defended herself against a mob of twenty angry townspeople (because, by that time, the mob had grown considerably)? Would Bex, beautiful Bex, be a chameleon, then?
"Ms. Baxter!" I turned to see Professor Buckingham starting toward us. I felt my heart stop—literally. (It can do that—I know, I asked Liz.) She was walking toward us, bearing down like the force of nature she was.
Macey was across the table from me, and we glanced at each other—an unspoken dread lingering between us like the smell of olive oil and melting cheese, but beside me, Bex was unfazed, and I remembered the power of a secret.
As she drew near, I tried to read something in Buckingham's eyes, but they were as cold and blank as stone.
"Miss Baxter, I just had a phone call…" Buckingham started and then, ever so slightly, turned her gaze toward me. "…from your father." Air returned to my lungs. Blood started moving in my veins, and I'm pretty sure Buckingham gave something that resembled a wink in my direction. "He said to tell you hello."
My elbows fell to the table, and across from me, Macey mirrored my relief. It was over.
"Oh," Bex said, but she hadn't even stopped chewing. "That's nice."
She would never know how nice.
I glanced toward the head table, and Mom raised a glass in my direction. Beside me, Bex didn't breathe a sigh of relief. She didn't say a prayer. She didn't do any of the things I felt like doing, but that's okay, I guess. Her father was still on his high wire. It was just as well she'd never looked up.
Almost everyone had gone upstairs twenty minutes later when Bex and I started to leave.
"So, what do you want to do now?" Bex asked.
"I guess we could do anything," I said, and it was true. We were leaving the hall, and it didn't matter where we were going. We were trained and we were young and we had the rest of our lives to carry the worry of grown-ups. Right then, I just wanted to celebrate with my best friend—even if she didn't know why.
"Let's get all the ice cream we can carry and …"
But then I saw Liz running down the spiral staircase, crying, "Cammie!" as if I hadn't already stopped. And then Liz whispered, or at least she tried to whisper, but I swear everyone in the entire mansion must have heard her when she said, "It's Josh!"
Wars have been won and lost, assassination attempts have been thwarted, and women have avoided showing up at the same event in the same dress—all because of really good intel. That's why we have entire classes devoted to this stuff. But as Liz dragged me into our suite, I didn't really appreciate its importance until I saw the screen. "These were here when I got back from supper." Poor Liz. She'd done this amazing job of getting us patched into Josh's system, and I could tell by looking at her that she would have given just about anything to undo it all right then. Ignorance is bliss, after all. But the problem is, for spies, ignorance is usually pretty short-lived.
From D'Man
To JAbrams
Have you come to your senses yet? I'm telling you—I saw her WITH MY OWN EYES. You've got to believe me now. SHE GOES TO THE GALLAGHER ACADEMY!! She's been lying to you!! How can you take HER word over MINE?
From JAbrams
To D'Man
I trust Cammie. I believe her. You probably just thought you saw her walking with a bunch of those girls on Saturday. She doesn't even know them. Trust me. Give it a break.
Dillon's response was a single line.
From D'Man To JAbrams Tonight. 9:00. WE'LL GET PROOF!
Now, at this point I was starting to panic, which isn't very spylike, but is pretty girl-like, so I figured I was well within my feminine rights. The "proof" to which I'd seen teenage boys refer in movies usually involved video equipment and/or feminine undergarments, so I yelled, "Oh my gosh!" and started looking around for Liz's flash cards. Surely somewhere in all that vat of knowledge there had to be instructions on what to do when your cover is completely and irrevocably blown.
Paced with the knowledge that the operation had been severely compromised, The Operatives formed a list of alternatives, which included (but were not limited to) the following:
A. Misdirection: in a variation of the "you must have seen someone who looks like me" approach, one of The Operatives could impersonate Cammie and climb the wall while Cammie looks on with Josh and Dillon and says, "Is that who you saw?" (Which is especially effective when The Subject is nearsighted.)
B. Sympathy: this technique has not only been used successfully by spies for many centuries, but it is also a staple of teenage girls. The conversation would likely resemble the following:
JOSH: Cammie, is it true you attend the Gallagher Academy, home of filthy rotten heiresses, and are not homeschooled, as you initially told me?
CAMMIE: (instantly bursts into tears—note: tears are very important!) Yes. It's true. I do go to the Gallagher Academy, but no one there understands me. It's not a school; (dramatic pause) it's a prison. I'll understand if you never want to see me again.
JOSH: How could I ever hate you, Cammie? I love you. And, if possible, now I love you even more.
C. Elimination: Dillon, aka D'Man, could be "taken out." (This alternative failed to achieve universal support.)
These were all pretty good options (well, not C, but I felt as if I owed it to Bex to at least include it), but as I weighed them in my mind, and nine o'clock drew closer, I knew there was another option. One we hadn't put on paper.
Josh and Dillon were coming to get proof, and even though the rumor that the security division had recently invested in poisonous darts probably wasn't true, I still didn't want to think about what would happen if Josh came looking for me—now or ever. And when I thought about it that way, I really only had one choice.
"I'll be back soon," I said as I shoved Josh's earrings in my pocket and reached for my silver cross, clinging to my legend till the end.
I walked toward the door as Bex called, "What are you gonna tell him?"
I didn't stop as I said, "The truth."
Chapter Twenty-six
Well. obviously I didn't mean "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" truth. More like Code Red truth—the abridged kind. Spy truth.
Yes, I go to the Gallagher Academy.
Yes, I have been lying to you.
Yes, you can't believe a single thing I've said or done.
But here's the thing about spy truth: sometimes it isn't enough to achieve your mission objectives. Sometimes you need more, and even though I didn't want to do it, maybe it's only fitting that a relationship that started with a lie would end with one.
No, I never really loved you.
No, I don't care that you're hurt.
No, I never want to see you again.
The mansion seemed especially silent and empty for so early on a Monday night. My footsteps echoed in the dim halls, but I didn't fear the noise. The tunnels were awaiting me, and Josh, and the end of something I had cherished.
&
nbsp; Still, before I climbed the wall one last time, there was something I couldn't stand to carry over it.
Mr. Solomon's office wasn't exactly on my way—but it was close enough. I reached into the back pocket of my jeans for the folded form that Mr. Solomon had given us—that everyone but me had long since turned in. It was creased and mangled, and I realized that I'd carried it with me almost everywhere I'd gone for weeks—unsigned, unfinished.
Twenty-four hours before, I had been afraid to even look at it, but so much can happen in a spy's life in that amount of time—a father can get reborn, a friendship can live and die, a true love can dissolve like the paper its love notes are written on. Twenty-four hours before, I had been sitting on top of our walls, but now I knew on which side I belonged.
The two boxes lay at the bottom of the page, like a fork in the road that I had grown tired of straddling. Beyond our walls was a boy I could only hurt, and inside them were people I could help. It was probably the hardest decision of my life, and I made it by drawing an X. That's one of the golden rules of CoveOps: don't make anything more difficult than it has to be.
It was true; things were hard enough already.
"Hi, Josh. Hello, Dillon, so nice seeing you again," I practiced as I paced the shadows of the sidewalk—waiting, not really thinking about what I had to do, but instead trying to figure out a way to accidentally-on-purpose kick Dillon in the head—hard.
Beep. Beep beep. Beepbeepbeep.
I glanced down at my watch and saw the red dot on the screen moving closer to my position as the tracker became a constant Beep-beep-beep-beep-beeeeeeeeeeeep.
I temporarily deactivated it just as I heard Dillon's echoing, "I'm telling you, this is gonna be off the—"
"Hi, guys." Okay, so my chameleon-ness wasn't entirely gone, because it was pretty obvious they hadn't had a clue I was there. Dillon even dropped his rope. (By the way, what kind of wuss needs a rope to climb a twelve-foot stone wall? I'd totally been doing that since second grade!)
But the fact that I'd caught him off guard didn't stop Dillon from being super cocky (once he'd managed to round up his rope and all). "Well, well, well." He strolled toward me. "There she is. How was school today?" he asked, as if he was going to be really clever and trip me up.
"Fine." I swallowed. I didn't want to look at Josh. If I did, I feared my nerve would crumble. More than anything, I wanted Dillon to pick a fight. I could yell at Dillon; I could scream; I could earn my Gallagher glare from him. Josh was another story.
"We were just coming to see you," Dillon said, inching closer.
"Really?" I said, adding an artificial nervousness to my voice. "But …" I glanced between the two of them. "You don't know where I live."
"Oh, sure we do," Dillon said. "I saw you Saturday. Walking back to school. With your friends."
"But… I'm homeschooled." And the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Teenage Drama goes to—Cammie Morgan! "I don't know what you're talking about."
The streetlight above us flickered off and on, and in that half second of darkness, Dillon stepped closer.
"Give it up, rich girl. I SAW you!"
Behind him, Josh whispered, "Dillon …"
"Yeah, you don't own this town, you know. I don't care what your daddy—"
"Dillon," Josh said again, growing louder.
Now I couldn't help looking at Josh. I couldn't stop looking at him.
"I'm so sorry," I whispered. It was the admission of guilt Dillon had been waiting for. He just didn't know it was for the wrong crime. "I'm so sorry. I'm so …"
"Cammie?" Josh asked, as if trying to recognize me. "Cammie, is it—"
I nodded, unable to meet his gaze through my tear-blurred vision.
"See!" Dillon said, mocking me. "I told you—"
"Dillon!" Josh cut him off. "Just… get out of here."
"But—" Dillon started, and Josh stepped in front of me. He was trying to shield me from Dillon, but really he'd just taken away the best chance I'd ever have to claw the little jerk's eyes out. (Literally, eye-clawing was going to be on the P&E final.)
"Dillon, just go," Josh said, forcing his friend to back away. But that didn't stop D'Man from smugly saying, "See you around."
I wanted to punch and kick and make him feel as much pain as possible, but I remembered that no amount of P&E training would help me make him hurt the way that I hurt. Even at the Gallagher Academy they don't teach you how to break somebody's heart.
As Dillon walked away, I thought of the lies I had planned to tell Josh, and for a second I thought I couldn't do it. I couldn't hurt him—then or ever. But just as soon as Dillon disappeared, Josh spun and shouted, "Is it true?"
"Josh, I—"
He stepped closer. His voice was harder. "You're one of them?"
One of them?
"Josh—"
"A Gallagher Girl." All my life, that term had been revered, almost worshipped, but on Josh's lips it was an insult, and in that instant he stopped being the boy of my dreams and started being one of Dillon's hoodlums at the pharmacy; he was ganging up on Anna; he was judging me, so I snapped, "So what if I am?"
"Humph!" Josh said then shook his head, staring into the dark night. "I should have known it." He kicked at the ground like I'd seen him do a thousand times, and when he spoke, it was almost to himself. "Homeschooled." Then he looked at me. "So what was I? Some kind of joke? Was it like, hey, who can make a fool out of a townie? Was that—"
"Josh—"
"No, I really want to know. Was it charity case week? Or date your local delivery boy month? Or—"
"Josh!"
"Or were you just bored?"
"YES!" I yelled at last, wanting it to stop. "Yes, okay. I was bored, and I wanted to see if I could get away with it, okay?"
Mr. Solomon was right—the worst kind of torture is watching someone you love get hurt.
Josh backed down, and his voice was almost a whisper as he said, "Okay." We'd both gone too far—said too much— but we both knew then that there are reasons Gallagher Girls don't date boys from Roseville. He just didn't know that the reasons are classified.
"Look, I'm leaving tomorrow," I said, knowing that I couldn't have Josh climbing the fence that night or any other. "I had to say good-bye." I reached into my pocket for the earrings. They glistened in my hand like fallen stars. "You should probably take these back."
"No," he said, waving them away. "They're yours."
"No." I forced them into his hand. "You take them. Give them to DeeDee." He looked shocked. "I think she'd really like them."
"Yeah, okay." He shoved the earrings into his pocket as I forced a smile.
"Hey, take care, okay?" I took a step, then remembered how he'd felt chained to one kind of life while I felt bound to another. "And you know free will?"
"Yeah?" he said, sounding surprised that I'd remembered.
"Good luck with that."
Free will. I used mine to walk away—back to the life I'd been bound to, the life I'd chosen—and away from the boy who had shown me exactly what I was giving up. I hoped he wasn't watching me go. In my mind, he had already turned a corner—hating me a little, allowing that to bridge the gap over his grief. I walked on through the darkness, but I didn't look back.
If I had, I probably would have seen the van.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Tires squealed across the pavement. I smelled burning rubber and heard shouting and the sound of metal against metal—a door, I think. Hands were around my eyes, covering my mouth, just like on another night, on another street, when another set of hands came from out of nowhere. Autopilot kicked on, and seconds later my attacker lay at my feet—but it wasn't Josh—not that time.
Another set of hands were on me. Fists were everywhere. I kicked—made contact—heard a familiar, "Oh, jeez that hurt."
But before I could process what I had heard, I was on my stomach in the van, and someone was commanding, "Drive!"
I lay there, motionless, rea
lly ticked off, because, even though Mr. Solomon had been hinting for weeks that our CoveOps semester final was going to be a practical exam, I hadn't realized how literally he'd meant it until Mr. Smith blindfolded me and bound my hands.
"Sorry, Mr. Mosckowitz," I muttered, feeling guilty about kicking him so hard. After all, it was only the second mission he'd ever been on, and I kicked him in the gut. Plus, I'm pretty sure he's a bruiser.
He wheezed a little before saying, "That's okay. I'll be … fine."
"Harvey …" Mr. Solomon warned.
"Right. Be quiet," Mr. Mosckowitz said, jabbing me softly in the ribs, sounding like he was having the time of his life.
Since it was a test and everything, I knew I'd better do as I was trained. I lay on the floor of the van, counting seconds (nine hundred eighty-seven, by the way), noting how we made a right-hand turn, two lefts, one U, and eased over some speed bumps that left me with the distinct impression that we'd detoured through the Piggly Wiggly parking lot.
As the van veered south, I was willing to bet my semester grade in CoveOps (which, technically, was exactly what I was betting) that we were heading to the industrial complex on the south edge of town.
Doors opened and slammed. People got out. Someone pulled me to my feet on a gravel parking lot, then two strong sets of hands dragged me onto a concrete floor and then into the artificial light and empty echo of a large, hollow space.
"Sit her down. Tie her up," Mr. Solomon commanded.
Do I fight now? Do I fight later? I wondered, then took a chance—I kicked and I made contact.
"You know, Ms. Morgan, that was your mother you just hammered," Mr. Solomon said.
"Oh, I'm so sorry!" I cried, spinning around, as if I could see my mom through my blindfold.
"Good one, kiddo."
Someone pushed me into a chair, and I heard Mr. Solomon say, "Okay, Ms. Morgan, you know the drill: there are no rules. You can hit as hard as you want to hit. You can run as fast as you want to run." His breath smelled like peppermint gum.
