by Ally Carter
“Maybe she really is a walk-in. Maybe she has information for us and we can—”
“We can’t listen to her, Liz,” Bex said.
“But—” Liz started, until Zach cut her off.
“She’s just as dangerous in here as she is out there. You got that?” he asked. He looked at Bex and Liz in turn. “Do you understand?”
Macey took a deep breath and crossed her arms. “Well, I vote we bind her hands and feet and kick her out of a fast moving vehicle in front of the gates of Langley.”
“We can’t do that,” I said.
“Why not?” Zach asked, like he was seriously considering the idea.
“Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” I started for the small room where we’d tied Catherine up the night before, but Zach lunged in front of me, blocking my way.
“I can’t let you question her, Gallagher Girl,” he told me.
“Isn’t that why she’s here—to talk?” I asked.
Zach shook his head. “She’s here to lie.”
“She’ll talk to me.”
“No, Cam,” Zach said. “It’s not a good idea.”
“Maybe it’s our only idea,” I said back.
“Well…” I heard a tiny voice behind me and turned to see Liz standing there, a truly guilty look on her face. “Maybe not our only idea…”
Catherine sat in her chair, hands and feet bound, yet she looked like she was waiting on a train, like she’d wait forever if she had to.
“Hello, Catherine,” I said, easing closer. She was across the room, but like a snake, I could feel her coiled, constantly ready to strike.
“You don’t have to do this, Cammie,” Zach said.
“Hello, darling,” Catherine told him, but it was as if she’d never spoken at all.
“Gallagher Girl,” he started again, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of his mother.
“Liz,” I said, and then my smallest roommate walked forward. She didn’t tremble or shake, but I knew she must have been terrified as she pulled up the sleeve of Catherine’s shirt and injected a clear liquid into the woman’s arm.
“Truth serum, girls?” Catherine said. She sounded so disappointed. “Isn’t that a tad cliché?”
“It’s stronger,” Liz said, then stepped quickly back. Zach moved between Liz and his mother until Liz was safely out of range of the woman tied to the chair.
“Really?” Catherine asked as Liz’s concoction entered her bloodstream. It was like she was growing drunk and sleepy. Her eyelids were heavy, and when she told Zach, “You’ve gotten so tall,” her words were slurred.
“Why are you hunting down the leaders of the Circle?” I asked, and Catherine looked at me for a long time, the tiniest of smiles playing at the corners of her mouth.
“It’s good to see you, Cammie, dear. It’s been too long.”
“Are you sure we shouldn’t hit her again?” Bex said from over my shoulder. “Because I totally think we should hit her.”
I crouched on the floor, looked her in the eye. “You can talk to me, Catherine. Or you can talk to the CIA. Maybe the moles the Circle leaders have within the agency won’t find you. But maybe they will.”
“They’re all dead, you know. The leaders. We just have one left.”
“We?” I asked.
“Your mother and Joseph and I,” Catherine said.
“She’s lying,” Zach said. “Joe would never work with her.”
“Oh. Of course he would,” Catherine told him. “He’d never admit it, but we want the same thing. We’ve always wanted the same thing. We just have different…methods.”
“Like torture,” I said.
Catherine looked right at me. “I didn’t want to hurt you, Cammie. I really didn’t. But it was the only way. I had to stop them, don’t you know? I had to stop this. You had to help me. And you did help me. And now we’re down to one.… Gideon Maxwell had one son and no grandchildren. His line stops there. There were no other heirs. So it’s possible that there is no Maxwell descendant in the Circle now. Maybe there are just six Inner Circle members instead of seven. Maybe we’re finished. But I doubt it. It doesn’t feel finished.”
Catherine seemed to think on that for a moment, and I had to admit that I agreed. Something in my bones told me it was still a long way from over.
“Maybe Maxwell appointed someone else to take his place before he died. But I honestly don’t know.” Catherine’s gaze shifted onto Preston. “Why don’t you ask him?”
Her hands were bound, and still Preston flinched, almost like he’d been slapped. I expected Macey to lash out at Catherine, but instead she turned to the boy beside her.
“Pres?” she asked. “Do you know?”
“No!” Preston’s voice cracked and he shook his head. “I’ve never heard of Gordon Maxwell.”
“Gideon Maxwell,” Liz corrected.
“I don’t know him! I don’t know any of my dad’s friends. Or…I don’t know which of his friends might be in the Inner Circle.” Preston seemed sad when he said it, as if he too had been living a lie. It was just that no one had bothered to tell him. “I don’t know anything.”
“Why are you doing this?” I turned back to Catherine. “Why did you betray the Circle’s leadership?”
“I’m in the betrayal business.” Catherine laughed. “Besides, I like the world the way it is. A world war is a highly inconvenient thing. I prefer my destruction on a much smaller scale.”
“What do they want? What are the Circle leaders planning?” I asked.
“You know what they’re planning,” Catherine countered. She sounded almost bored, like we were wasting her time. She looked around Zach, to where Liz stood. “It was her plan, after all.”
Liz shuddered but didn’t speak or cringe or cry. I couldn’t shake the feeling that our little roommate was growing up. We all were.
“Who is the mole at the Gallagher Academy?” I asked, but Catherine only looked at me as if I were crazy. “How did the Circle get Liz’s test?”
“Oh, that.” She shrugged. “The school has to file all of its admittance tests with the CIA. From there, it was easy enough for the Circle to acquire them just to see if there were any students we wanted to recruit…” She looked at Liz. “Evil plans we wanted to steal.”
“Why?” Zach asked. “World war…what’s in it for them?” He leaned down to his mother’s level. “What do they want?”
Then Catherine looked at her son as if he were the most naive boy in the world. “They want everything,” she said, and then she cackled. She was insane—there was no denying it. But she was also oddly lucid as she said, “The government is so big—so powerful. Cavan wanted the Union to fail—that’s why he tried to kill Lincoln. It’s the same agenda. They want what they’ve always wanted. Chaos. Fracture. Pieces so disorganized that no single player can ever have too much power.” Then she laughed. “Of course, what they really mean but never say is that they don’t want anyone to have more power than they have. Personally, I like power. It’s one of many reasons I want to see them fail.”
“Tell me what they’re planning,” Zach said.
“You know what they’re planning,” she countered. She was staring at Liz. “Don’t you, Liz?”
“They want war,” Liz said, her voice surprisingly strong.
“But is there war?” Catherine asked.
No. The answer swept over us all. Not yet.
“King Najeeb was a charismatic leader, but he was a grown man in a dangerous business. He still had enemies. His death, while sad, was not that tragic in the bigger scheme of things. And besides…it’s not like he doesn’t have an heir.”
“The princess,” I said, and Catherine nodded.
“A grown man blown to bits is sad. A small girl killed just days after her father.… An entire line wiped out.… That will cause the world to burn. The Iranians will have to break the treaty. And when the Iranians invade Caspia, Turkey will invade, and…boom.”
“We have to fi
nd her,” I said, turning to Zach.
“No.” Catherine shook her head slowly. I don’t know if Liz’s drugs were finally becoming too much, but her voice had a hazy quality as she looked at me. “No. You don’t.”
“But we…” I started, then something in her eyes made me stop. She shook her head.
“You know where she is, Gallagher Girl.” The words sounded different when Zach’s mother said them. Haunting and dangerous and cruel.
“Amirah.” I whispered the princess’s name and thought about my first night back at school, about the tiny seventh grader with the big brown eyes and utterly royal countenance. “Amy. She goes to the Gallagher Academy, doesn’t she?”
A dreamy smile spread across Catherine’s lips. “Good girl,” she told me. “It is a school fit for a queen. Now, go. Stop them.”
“Step away from the psychopath!”
I knew the voice as soon as I heard it, but still part of me was almost afraid to turn around.
My aunt Abby’s eyes were on fire, and she crossed the room in two long strides, grabbing my arm and physically pulling me farther from Zach’s mother.
“Abby!”
At first, I was terrified—afraid my friends and I had been caught playing hooky. But then my fear turned to relief as I realized Abby and Townsend had found us. We didn’t have to be on our own anymore.
“Abby, you’re here! How did you find us? Did you get my messages? Were you—”
“We weren’t following you,” Townsend told us. “We were following her.” He pointed to the woman tied to the chair, eyelids fluttering.
Finally, Abby released me and moved to examine Catherine.
“What did you do to her?” Abby asked. She picked up the empty syringe, smelled it. “Is that truth serum?” she asked, but Townsend just shook his head.
I could tell he was thinking about his own experience with that particular concoction when he huffed and said, “It’s stronger.”
“Well, isn’t this precious?” Catherine smiled weakly and forced her eyes open, almost like she didn’t dare drift off in the middle of the party.
“Abby, Catherine says the Circle is going to target Princess Amirah next,” Bex said.
“Yes,” Zach’s mother said with a decisive nod. Then, just as quickly, she shrugged. “I think so. No one knows exactly what the Circle leaders will do. They are capable of anything, after all. But I believe that is their next move. So I came here to tell the good guys so that they can save the day. Isn’t that what you do, darling?”
“Shut up! Just shut up!” Zach snapped. “I will never believe anything you say.”
She looked at him and shook her head, smiled a little as she told him, “You are so like your father.”
Then she looked past me and Zach, past Bex and Abby, to where Agent Townsend stood by the door with his arms crossed.
“What do you think, Townsend, darling? Isn’t he like you?” She looked at Zach again. “I think he’s just like you.”
And then she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
Things my aunt said: She lies.
Things my boyfriend said: She lies.
Things my gut said: She lies.
Things I couldn’t deny: She was under the influence of truth serum.
Things we all had to admit: She wasn’t lying.
“Zach?” I asked, my voice too quiet in the darkness. The wind was strong and I could hear the waves crashing on the beach. Another storm was blowing in. I could feel it in the air. And as I stepped off the creaking porch and across the yard I tried again. “Zach.” But he didn’t answer.
I saw a dark shadow moving against the waves, leaning into the wind, so I walked down the tiny path, careful not to trip any of the alarms that had been set inside of him. I rubbed my arms and wished I’d brought a sweater, but Zach just stood in the blowing mist, his gray T-shirt growing steadily darker in the damp.
“Townsend is looking for you.”
Zach laughed, a cold, cruel sound. “Well, eighteen years, folks. Glad he finally got around to it.”
“Zach, he didn’t—”
“Did you know?” he asked but didn’t turn to face me.
“No, Zach. Of course not. Why would I know that?”
“Did Joe say anything to you? Did your mom?”
“My mom didn’t know, Zach,” I told him. “No one knew.”
I thought about how Zach and Townsend had always reminded me of each other. They had the same posture, the same grin, the same earnest, serious nature. And now I knew why. I wished I’d seen it before then, and I also wished we could go back in time to before we knew. But we couldn’t do either.
“She never told me!” Townsend’s voice echoed from inside. Abby slammed a door, and the whole house shook.
“Has Abby killed him yet?” Zach asked.
I shook my head. “She’ll get over it.”
Then he turned to me, the moonlight slicing across his face. The wetness in the air grew heavier and water clung to his hair as he said, “Maybe I won’t.”
“Zach—”
“He left me. With her.”
“He didn’t know about you, Zach.”
“He should have known! He’s a spy. An operative. It was his job to know.”
I eased forward, reached out to touch his arm.
“You should go talk to him, Zach. He’s a good guy,” I told him. “You’re a good guy.”
But Zach just shook his head. He looked like the saddest boy in the world when he told me, “I’m never having kids.”
Let’s get one thing straight. I’m eighteen years old as I write this. Kids? Totally not on my radar. In that moment, living through the next week was pretty much my only goal. But I can’t say that Zach’s words didn’t stop me. That a part of my brain—the part that was trained to see fifty steps ahead—had to wonder what it meant. For me. For us.
“You aren’t?”
“I wouldn’t do that to a child.”
“You’d be a good dad.”
But Zach just laughed. It was a cruel, mocking sound. “Because I had such good parental role models?”
“You had Joe.”
Then Zach turned back to the water and the darkness and the crashing, breaking waves. “I didn’t have anyone.”
I could have said, You have me. I could have taken his hand and told him everything was going to be okay—that there was no way the past would repeat itself. Not with us. But I learned a long time ago not to make those kinds of promises. I knew better than anyone that life can change on a dime. That even the best dads sometimes go away forever.
So instead I just asked, “What are we going to do about Amirah?”
“Who?” he asked, like he hadn’t heard his mother at all.
“The princess, Zach. She’s just a little girl. And that little girl is going to die. They’re going to kill her.”
Zach sank down to sit on a rock. He kept his gaze locked on the sea as he told me, “No, they aren’t. We’re not going to let them hurt anyone ever again.”
“Cam.” I felt a kick against my leg. A bright light burned my eyes.
“Get up,” Abby snapped. She stood above me, sunshine from the window spilling across her shoulders.
“What…what time is it?”
“Showtime.”
I pulled my tennis shoes on over bare feet and raced after her down the creaky stairs.
“Where?” I asked, taking a few steps more. “Where are we going?”
Abby smiled. “Home.”
You don’t really appreciate things until they’re gone. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s also true. I’d always known that someday I would leave the Gallagher Academy. We were just months from graduation when my friends and I decided to flee, after all. But even then I didn’t realize how much I’d miss falling asleep in the common room with my classmates, some chick flick playing on the TV. I didn’t know how much I’d miss my classes and my teachers—even homework would have been a welcome change from my new
reality. (And don’t even get me started on our chef’s awesome crème brûlée.)
But most of all, I missed the building and the grounds. Some people say the Gallagher Mansion is a house. Some say it’s a school. But for me, in that moment, all that really mattered was that it was my home. And I was coming back to it. But as excited as I was, that didn’t mean I wasn’t nervous.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Bex asked. It wasn’t the first time that I had to wonder if she and I might share a brain. “I mean, I’m pretty sure fugitives from justice aren’t supposed to go home.”
“We’re not going to stay long, girls,” my aunt told us. “We’re going to lock that woman in the Sublevels.” Abby choked on the words. She refused to utter Catherine’s name. “And then we’re going to pick up Amirah and get her out of there. After that, we hit the road and lay low until this is over. Deal?”
“Deal,” we all said in unison, and I couldn’t resist turning around to eye the car that followed us.
Abby had insisted we split up—boys in Townsend’s car, girls in the van. Maybe she had wanted to give Townsend a chance to bond with Zach. Or maybe she just couldn’t stand the idea of being in the same vehicle as Catherine. (Even if Catherine was locked in the trunk.)
“Abby,” Macey said carefully, “where will Amirah go?”
“Someplace safe, girls.”
“But can’t she stay here?” Liz asked. “The school is one of the most secure buildings in the country.”
“Not until we know your mom and Joe have taken out the last member of the Inner Circle. Even then, she’s still the queen of Caspia. She will need protection for the rest of her life. So the best thing for now is to take her someplace where no one will find her.”
Of course my aunt was right. It was what we had to do. But I thought back to the girl I’d met the first night of the semester. She seemed so young and happy in our halls. I hated that we had to take her away from her school and from her friends. I hated that she was having to grow up so quickly. Largely, I guess, because I totally knew the feeling.
“Patricia!” Aunt Abby yelled, throwing open the front doors. “Dr. Fibs! Madame Dabney, we’re back!”
It wasn’t a terribly covert entrance, but I wasn’t complaining when I saw Madame Dabney appear at the top of the stairs.
