by Ally Carter
“I’m sorry.” He smiled a condescending smile. “What I meant to say is that he refuses to speak to anyone…but you.”
And at last I was surprised. For all of his experience and training, Agent Edwards and his task force needed me.
“As I told you earlier, Agent Edwards,” Mom began, “my daughter does not have to go anywhere with you. She doesn’t have to help you. She will not—”
“I’ll do it.”
“Cammie,” my mother said, “you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to go and you do not have to help. It could be dangerous,” she added, the last part a warning.
“That’s true, Cammie,” Agent Edwards said, walking toward me. “Your mother is right. So what do you say?”
“Yes,” I told him. “I’ll do it. I’ll—”
But I never got to finish, because in the next second a syringe was in Agent Edwards’s hand, and the needle was in my arm, and just that quickly my mother’s office began to spin, the whole world spiraling quickly into black.
The room was black around me. A pounding, throbbing ache filled my head. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but they didn’t. Instead, I was swallowed by the hollow emptiness, uncertain how to break free.
I shivered and realized I was freezing cold. My uniform felt familiar against my skin, and I knew that no one had bothered to change my clothes in the time that I’d been unconscious. But how long had that been? A few hours? A few days? The last time I’d woken up in a strange place, I’d just lost months of my life, and that memory came pounding back then. My head hurt. My arms and legs ached. I felt something churning in my stomach, and I couldn’t help myself, I was sick—vomit covered the floor, and I started to cry. I started to scream. I wanted out. I needed out. So I stood and pressed my hands against the walls.
I felt cold steel. Metal. Something man-made and foreign. And I knew that even though I was no longer being held by the Circle in Austria, I most certainly wasn’t in the Gallagher Academy anymore, either.
Slowly, I eased down the wall, feeling my way as I went, forcing myself to breathe deeply, steadily.
“I’m okay,” I said aloud to no one but myself. “I’m not lost. I’m not lost. I’m not—”
And then I found the lever. And then I turned it and felt the door shift against my hands. Light poured in, and I shut my eyes as I stumbled forward, out of the back of a van and into a massive, empty hangar. Bright fluorescent lights hung above; but inside there was nothing but the plain, unmarked van…and me.
“Hello, Cammie.” I jerked my head upward and saw Max Edwards standing on the catwalk that ran across the top of the room. “Welcome back.”
“Where are we?” I asked, my voice groggier than it should have been. My head pounded and swirled.
Agent Edwards was coming down the stairs, strolling easily toward me.
“I’m sorry you had to wake up alone like that, Cammie. I thought you’d sleep for at least another hour. Good thing I came to check on you.”
I rubbed my aching head. “My grandma says I have a high metabolism. Besides, I’m really, really good at being knocked unconscious. I have a lot of experience with that.”
Agent Edwards chuckled like he thought I was making a joke. I wasn’t.
“You’re not going to tell me where we are, are you?”
“No, Cammie. I’m not.”
“Or when we are?”
“No again. A smart girl like you can use time to calculate distance, Cammie, and you know I can’t let you do that. That wasn’t part of the deal.”
“Because this is need-to-know, and I don’t?” I asked.
He smiled and shook his head. “Because you wouldn’t believe me.”
Max Edwards led the way down a long, narrow hallway. Cameras hung at regular intervals. It was all steel and concrete, and I felt the chill that seeped through the walls. “So how far underground are we?” I asked the man, who didn’t say a thing.
We passed beneath a series of strange grates.
“Biohazard detectors?” I asked. “Air vents?”
Again, the man was silent, but I didn’t need him to reply. I just needed him to take me to Preston, so I kept counting our steps, noticing the gradual incline of the hall. I wasn’t exactly new to covert underground facilities, so wobbly head and upset stomach or not, I was starting to feel like I might be on slightly familiar ground. But then the hallway turned, and I came to an abrupt stop in front of the most intimidating door I’d ever seen.
“Well, this is special,” I said while Edwards waved up at a security camera that was stationed overhead. “If I didn’t know any better”—I talked on while Edwards placed his palm on a scanner and looked into a retinal image camera—“I’d say this is a door fit for a…”
The door sprang open, swinging wide, as I finished, “…prison.”
I glanced up at Agent Edwards, but again he said nothing. Still, I could see in his eyes that I was right.
There were guards and thick walls. Cameras covered every angle, not hidden, not disguised. It was a place built to remind you that Big Brother was watching.
The doors were made to lock down in a flash. It was all steel and chrome and concrete, and even if Edwards had had the forethought to pack me a jacket, I’m pretty sure I would have shivered.
“He shouldn’t be in prison,” I snapped at the man beside me. But Agent Edwards only laughed, a condescending huff that, despite the chill, burned me.
“Preston Winters is the next generation of one of the most powerful and notorious criminal families in the history of the world. Put your hand here, Cammie,” he instructed, almost as an afterthought, but I did as I was told.
My palm stung, but I didn’t let him see me wince.
Finally, the guards cleared us to go through yet another massive door. I felt Agent Edwards’s hand on my back. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn he was worried for me as he instructed, “Once in the room, Cammie, do not leave your chair. You cannot carry anything in your pockets or in your hair. Do not mention the day of the week or the time of day.”
There, among those windowless rooms and artificial lights, I knew the game they were playing.
“I don’t know the day of the week or the time of day,” I reminded him.
“Of course.” He didn’t scold me. He sounded too nervous.
“This is wrong,” I told him. “He doesn’t deserve to be here.”
“These are the rules, Cammie. Now, you can abide by them, or you can leave and we will have gone to a great deal of trouble for nothing. It’s your call.”
There comes a time in every spy’s life when you don’t have the luxury of caring. Emotion is a rarity, a commodity so precious that you have to dole it out in special, secret batches. Agent Edwards had passed that point. This was a place for people who had to be immune to what they did, to what it meant. And I didn’t know if the chill inside the prison came from being underground or from the cold hearts of the people who filled it.
He looked at me as if I were still young and innocent, as if part of him envied me because I was still able to feel. A part of me wondered how much longer I had before my heart froze over too.
“Come, Cammie.” He reached for the final door. “Your country needs you.”
The first time I met Preston Winters he’d been twenty pounds too light for his frame, wearing clothes that were chosen by some focus group somewhere. He’d been too quick to smile—too easy to laugh. He’d been all about bad jokes and good eye contact, and I’d liked him. I’d liked him a lot.
But walking into the small, sterile room with a lone metal chair and a window of darkened glass, I couldn’t imagine the boy I knew inside that place. The Preston Winters I’d met had been normal. Helpless. Free.
“I can stay with you, Cammie.…” Agent Edwards sounded nervous, afraid for me, as if part of him were starting to regret bringing me here and making me a part of this world. But it was my world too.
I thought about the sca
rs on my body.
It was my fight.
So I turned to him. “Get out.”
I walked nervously to the heavy metal chair in the center of the room and sat down like I’d been told to do. In the reflection of the glass I could see the cameras trained on me. I had no illusion of privacy. Preston and I would be recorded from every angle; they wouldn’t miss a single word. But at least I’d get to see him. At least I’d get to tell Macey he was okay.
I sat alone for ten minutes, but I didn’t shift. I didn’t waver. I wasn’t about to let the men on the other side of those cameras see me sweat.
Then a buzzer sounded. The glass went bright, and I looked through to the other side at Ambassador Winters, who sat smiling back at me.
“Where’s Preston?” I lunged forward and was almost off my chair before I remembered Agent Edwards’s warning. I scooted back slightly but didn’t dare let my gaze leave the ambassador’s eyes.
“I don’t know, Cammie,” Winters told me. “You’d know better than I.”
“I thought he…” I started before the truth finally settled down on me. “You wanted to see me?”
“Don’t sound so surprised.” The ambassador crossed his ankles. He looked perfectly at home there in a room exactly like mine. But he wore shackles around his hands and feet. “You’re a very intelligent young lady. Maybe I missed your company.”
“Don’t be coy with me. And don’t waste my time.”
“Fine,” he said.
“Why am I here?”
“I’m sorry about what happened, Cammie,” he said, not answering my question.
“Sorry that you tried to have me killed, or sorry that I had enough dumb luck to avoid it?”
He shook his head—a tsk, tsk, tsk gesture that made my skin crawl. “You’re very lucky, my dear. But you are anything but dumb.”
“They said you wanted to talk to me—that I was the only person you would talk to.… So, what is it? What do you want to tell me?”
Despite the handcuffs and shackles, Winters leaned closer, looked into my eyes. “How are you, Cammie?”
He sounded like the man who had welcomed me into the embassy, embraced me like a friend. And I hated him for it. I hated him so, so much.
“No,” I said. “You don’t get to ask me that. You don’t get to act like you’re one of the good guys. Don’t forget. Do not forget that I know better.”
I watched the words sink in, and for a second I could have sworn a degree of sadness crossed his face. “I know you do, Cammie. But I’m still interested in your welfare.”
I started to stand. “Good-bye, Mr. Winters. I wish I could stay and chat, but we’ve got this big test, and I’d really better be getting back to—”
“Wait, Cammie. Please.”
“Tell me why you brought me here, or I go. Now. And I never come back.”
“What do you know about the Circle, Cammie?”
He shifted then, not with his body but with his tone.
“Stop wasting my time,” I told him again.
“I’m serious,” he said. “Do you know when we were founded? By whom? Why?”
He put a special emphasis on the final word and that, at last, made me wonder.
“Cavan was a proud man,” Winters went on. He didn’t wait for me to answer. “He hated anyone who might have more power than he had.”
“Get to the point,” I snapped, and Winters talked on.
“Cavan wanted—no, needed—the Union to fail. A divided America was the only America he could stomach. And that meant he needed Lincoln to die. For the country to splinter, shatter. So the question is, Cammie, what does the Circle need now?”
For a second, I forgot he was a man who’d tried to kill me, and I looked at him like he was one of my teachers, like it was just another day back at school.
“The Circle wants power. They need profit.”
“No, Cammie.” Winters shook his head, but he didn’t scold. “I’ll admit, we allowed ourselves to stray from Cavan’s original mission. We got greedy, hungry for physical wealth, and Cavan’s original goal slipped from our minds. I do so admire the Gallagher Academy. It is still what your founder wanted it to be. Of course, Gillian Gallagher did it all without government involvement. I wonder what she would say if she saw the way the agencies have the run over your school today.”
“You were a governor, an ambassador. You were almost president—and you mean to tell me that you hate the government?”
“Why should governments have more power than the people they’re supposed to govern?”
“Is this supposed to be a social studies class? Because I haven’t had one of those in ages.”
“We strayed from our mission, Cammie. Zach’s mother—Catherine—she’s just one of our operatives who became greedy. But people like Catherine were only reflecting what they saw in our leadership. We lost sight of our ultimate goal, and now the Circle is crumbling. And so those of us in the Inner Circle decided that it is time to finish Cavan’s original mission.”
I thought back to Cambridge, the mad terror in Knight’s eyes as he talked about whatever it was the Circle was planning. I had thought the truth had died with him, but there it was again—staring back at me through three inches of reinforced glass.
“What mission is it?” I asked, lurching forward. “What is the Inner Circle planning? Tell me how to stop it.”
He leaned a little closer. The shackles on his wrists jangled as he pointed in my direction and said, “Elizabeth Sutton is a very smart girl.”
The abrupt change in subject knocked the air out of me. I had wanted answers and I got games. “Don’t talk about Liz,” I snapped. “If that’s some kind of threat—”
“I would never hurt Ms. Sutton. And you…well, you would do well to listen to her. She is wise beyond her years.”
I shook my head and spat, “What does Liz have to do with this?” I was racked with confusion and fatigue. “Why am I here? Why are you telling me all of this? Why aren’t you telling them?” I pointed to the cameras that lined the room, covering every possible angle.
“Because I have a favor to ask of you, Cammie.”
I watched his eyes grow darker. Any trace of happiness was gone. I no longer thought he was enjoying himself, playing with me. He was a desperate man. And he looked at me as if I were his only way out.
“What?” I snapped.
The ambassador looked down at his bound hands. “My son. He’s not part of this, you know?”
“Preston will be fine. He’s in custody. Catherine can’t get to him now.”
The ambassador’s eyes iced over. “None of us will ever be fine again. But my son can help you stop it.”
“What have they done?” I asked again, more urgent now. I thought about what Knight had told me. “The Circle leaders got together and put something into motion. What was it?” Impatience and fear were breaking through my voice. “Tell me what I have to do!”
He was opening his mouth to speak—the words were almost there. A few moments longer and Winters would have told me everything we needed to know, but they were moments we didn’t have. Because before Preston’s father could say another word, the glass that stood between us went black.
“Ambassador?” I yelled and glanced at the door, expecting a guard to knock—come in and tell me that my time was up. But no knock came. I looked at the cameras, but the tiny lights were out and I knew that they were off. No one was watching. No guards were monitoring our conversation. I was alone in the quiet room, and I felt the hair on my arms stand on end. Everything was too still, too quiet, as I broke with protocol and rushed toward the glass.
“Ambassador! Ambassador, are you—”
I raised my hand and started to bang, but then I heard the sounds of a struggle on the other side. Sharp cracks filled the air—twice, in rapid succession, and I bolted away just as a third crack sounded.
The thick glass that separated the two rooms must have been bullet resistant—but not bulletproof�
��because the glass began to splinter, cracks spreading out like a spiderweb.
“Help!” I yelled into the cameras, but I knew no one would hear me.
I ran to the door and peered out the tiny window just in time to see the door to the next room open.
There was a small, basic lock on my door. It seemed out of place there in that high-security fortress; but I turned it anyway and backed away slowly, hoping that whoever had shot the ambassador wouldn’t care about me. I was a visitor—a kid. There was nothing trapped inside of me that anybody wanted anymore. I was nothing, I told myself.
But then the doorknob moved.
Someone pushed against the door, but the lock held, and I jerked backward just as something heavy crashed against the door.
In my head, lists were forming. Plans. Options. But the fact remained that I was locked in a room with no weapons and no…
Window.
I picked up the metal chair and took aim at the center of the web that filled the heavy glass.
Out in the hall, someone banged against the door, so I hit harder.
“Come on,” I said to no one but myself. “Come—”
And then the glass shattered, falling to the floor. I jumped over the partition and into the other room, where the ambassador was still bound to his chair as he lay on the floor. Blood stained the concrete. His face looked almost peaceful as he stared up at me and gave me one last smile.
“Save Preston,” he whispered, eyelids fluttering.
And then he died.
Even as I watched the life drain out of Preston’s father, I knew that I should run. And yet I felt like I should wait, hold his hand, tell him that his son was going to be okay. But there are some lies even spies can’t tell a dying man.
The door to the room where I’d been sitting banged open, and I didn’t wait for the shooter to realize I was gone—to see me on the other side of the shattered glass and follow. I leaped over the ambassador’s lifeless body and hurled myself into the hall, running away from the interrogation rooms as quickly as I could.
But my breath came harder than it should have. I told myself that I’d eaten too much of Grandma Morgan’s fudge over Christmas—that maybe the drugs they’d used to transport me there weren’t entirely out of my system. Whatever the case, my legs didn’t move as quickly as they should have. My breath was labored and heavy, and after a hundred feet, I wanted to double over and catch my breath, but I didn’t dare slow down.
