by Ally Carter
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.”
That night I woke up to the sounds of sirens.
“Code Black. Code Black. Code Black.”
Our graduation gowns hung on hangers from the bathroom door. A few of our things were already in boxes with labels like LIZ’S ROOM and MACEY STORAGE, but for the most part our suite looked exactly like it always did, books and clothes strewn everywhere, like the home of normal teenage girls.
Except we weren’t normal.
That was obvious as soon as the sirens broke through the air. Macey was already out of bed and pulling on her shoes. Bex was at the window, staring out across the grounds, but then in the blink of an eye, the view disappeared. Titanium shutters descended, covering the windows and blocking off all chance of us getting out. Or of someone else getting in.
“Liz,” Bex shouted. “Get up!”
“What’s going on?” Liz asked, voice groggy.
“Catherine,” I said, my blood going cold. “Tonight they’re moving Catherine.”
The halls were full as we made our way downstairs. The sirens boomed and the lights swirled, and I felt almost dizzy from the noise and the pressure. Protective cases covered all the archives, and I could hear the sounds of yelling, cries booming out through the chaos.
“Downstairs and into the Grand Hall please, ladies!” Mr. Smith yelled from the landing. “Down the stairs! Yes, please. Slowly, now. No need to rush. No need to panic. Into the Grand Hall!”
Calmly, my roommates and I fell into step with the tide of girls that was sweeping toward the Hall of History. It was organized chaos, with the swirling lights and meandering half-asleep crowds. It felt less like a drill and more like the zombie apocalypse.
“Gallagher Girl.” Zach came rushing up behind me.
“What’s going on?” Bex asked, and we stopped, stepping into the Hall of History and out of the parade of pajama-clad girls that still moved dutifully down the stairs.
“They were moving my mother when she got away.” He seemed out of breath. “All the security staff and most of the teachers are out looking for her. They’ve locked down the mansion, but it’s probably too late. She’s probably already escaped.”
“Yes, right this way!” Tina Walters was shouting from the base of the stairs. “Into the Grand Hall, munchkins. No. We’re not going to open up the waffle bar,” Tina told one over-anxious eighth grader. “Inside, now.”
“Do they really think she’s gone, Zach?” Liz asked, but I could see the answer in his eyes.
“I should have known it was too good to be true,” Zach said. “She never would have turned herself in if she hadn’t had a plan.”
The words hit me so hard, I actually had to lean against the railing. I’d been thinking the same thing for weeks—ever since the day when Agent Townsend and Zach walked a shackled Catherine back into our school and she had looked around as if she was exactly where she wanted to be. I thought about the woman behind the glass, the empty look in her eyes, and the cold fury in her words. And finally the song that she had sung to me.
Zach was right. She’d always known we were going to bring her back to the Gallagher Academy. But he was wrong about one thing.
His mother never intended to leave.
“It all burned down,” I sang.
Zach’s eyes went wide. “Where did you hear that song?”
“I went to see your mom last night.”
“You shouldn’t have done that, Gallagher Girl. You should never
have—”
“Zach, stop! Listen to me. She’s not leaving.” I gripped his T-shirt and made him look into my eyes. “She’s going to burn the castle to the ground.”
I waited for someone to tell me I was crazy, but then the floors shook. For a moment, the sirens stopped. An eerie, hollow silence followed and no one moved.
“We have to evacuate the mansion,” I said.
“It’s going to be okay, Cam,” Macey said. “I mean, the school has state-of-the-art fire protection mechanisms, right? Liz, right?”
But Liz didn’t hurry to agree. She had her fingers against her lips again, calculating.
“Liz, what’s wrong?” Bex asked.
“It’s probably nothing,” she blurted in a way that meant it was totally something.
“What?” I snapped again.
“It’s just that Dr. Fibs and I have been working on a new kind of power source. We want to take the Gallagher Academy completely off-line in five years, and we think that this has tremendous green technology implications if—”
“Liz!” Bex snapped, bringing her back into focus.
“It’s an energy source,” Liz said again.
“And…” Macey prompted.
“That means it can also be a bomb.”
Before any of us could process what that meant, smoke began to rise up the stairs, sweeping through the hallways and filling the Hall of History. The sirens came again, switching from Code Black to the shrill haunting sound of the fire alarms.
“Fire!” someone yelled from down below.
I watched the doors and windows, waiting for them to open, but the fire alarm must not have been able to override a Code Black, because they stayed barred, trapping us inside.
Panic was starting to grow. Girls rushed toward the doors. The windows. Yells turned to cries, screams that pierced the air. And the younger girls were pushing, going nowhere.
“Tina!” I yelled over the railing.
Down below she was struggling with the doors, trying to get them to open. Eva Alvarez and Courtney Bauer were trying to break the windows.
“They’re locked!” Tina yelled just as the sprinkler system sprang to life. Water erupted from the ceiling, spraying down on us, drenching us, but no one could move to escape it.
“They’re all locked!” Courtney yelled to me.
“Not all of them,” I said.
I ran down the stairs and to the old bookcase I’d first discovered during the spring semester of my eighth grade year. If you pulled out a book called Spymasters of the Ming Dynasty while pushing on the bookcase’s left-hand side, you could make the whole thing spin around, a revolving door into a dusty tunnel that spiraled down into the depths of the school and finally emerged just west of the guard tower on the north side of the grounds.
“In here!” I yelled and Tina rushed toward me. “Go down the corridor. Keep going. It will get you out of the mansion.”
“Munchkins!” Tina shouted, her voice echoing over the cries of the screaming underclassmen, and, instantly, the foyer went silent. “Follow me!” Tina yelled, and the girls did exactly as they were told.
I found another passageway and opened it too, sent Courtney and Eva into that tunnel, doubling the flow of girls fleeing the mansion. And as the halls filled with smoke, they cleared of girls until only my friends and Zach and I were left.
“Cam!” Macey shouted. She was half in the tunnel already, looking back at me. “We have to go.”
But I looked around the hallways. The smoke was so thick I could barely see, and yet I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving.
“I have to find my mom! And Abby! And—”
“They’re outside looking for my mom,” Zach told me, but I couldn’t believe him. I wanted to check her office—to go search her room.
“Gallagher Girl, we have to go. Now!”
In the Hall of History, there was a crash. A piece of the ceiling collapsed on one of the cases. Sparks rained down over the railing of the balcony like sparklers on the Fourth of July.
“Go,” I said, pushing Liz and Bex toward the opening. “Go,” I told Zach. “I’m right behind you.”
I always used to joke that I could walk down the secret passages of the Gallagher Academy blindfolded. Well, that night I got to prove it. Darkness swallowed us. The smoke was so heavy in places that we had to pull our shirts up and cover our mouths. My eyes burned and watered, and the air was so dry it was like breathing sand.
Still, the air grew fresher with every step. The lower we got, the farther we moved from the fires. The passageway was leading to freedom—I could feel it. We just had to keep walking, moving, following the path.
But then I heard the singing.
I could see Bex and Zach up ahead with Liz and Macey. No one was behind me, I was sure. And I stopped just to listen—just to make sure—when I heard the voice again, louder now.
“It all burned down.”
That passageway didn’t branch, I was certain. There was nothing down there but old timbers and cobwebs. There was nothing, I was sure. Except the voice was there. I heard it.
“The knights rose up and killed the kings.”
I backtracked and followed the sound of the voice until I reached a place where the passage widened. I’d never noticed it before and I might not have seen it then, had it not been for the smoke, the way it spiraled there, as if caught in a draft.
I turned to the wall, pushing and pressing until…pop. A door swung open, and there she was.
“Don’t do this, Catherine,” I told her.
Slowly the woman turned. Her hair was greasy and matted. Dirt and grime clung beneath her nails, and yet she smiled at me as if she were a contestant in a pageant.
“Hello, Cammie,” she said.
She sounded so calm—but then I saw Liz’s device in her hands.
“What are you doing with that?” I asked her.
“You know what I’m doing with it,” she said. She pointed to the heavy beams that crisscrossed the ceiling. “Every structural support in the entire mansion can be traced to right here. Did you know that, Cammie?”
I shook my head. “No. I’ve never seen this room before.” And I hadn’t.
As secret rooms go, that one was massive. I was on something of a balcony, looking down on where Catherine stood below. A rickety staircase led toward her, and I studied the space. I think it might have been a cellar once, cold storage for the pre-refrigeration era. More tunnels spiraled out from where she stood, and I knew that one of them must have led to the lake, because there was a wetness in the air. It probably would have been cool there on a normal day, but with the fires raging above us, the dampness felt more like steam.
“How disappointing,” Catherine said, and she sounded like she honestly meant it—like I wasn’t quite the formidable opponent she had thought me to be. “This was always my favorite room.”
Candles burned all around her. It was almost like a temple. A shrine. I could see her retreating to that place during her time at the Gallagher Academy, Catherine’s favorite place for hiding. But I imagine that, unlike me, she never had friends who tried to find her.
“I used to spend so many hours down here. I used to love to get lost. But I don’t have to tell you what that feels like, do I, Cammie? I can see why Zachy likes you. You know what they say, boys always fall for girls just like their mothers.”
I wanted to tell her that she was crazy—that she was wrong. But Catherine and I had both retreated to those dark and secret places. We had pushed through the cobwebs and the shadows in search of the secrets of the past. Yeah. She was right. We had a lot in common. But I knew the kind of girl I wanted to be when I reached the end of the tunnel. I wanted to climb out into the light.
“Don’t you think we’re alike, Cammie?”
“No.” I shook my head and, in that moment, I meant it. I really did. “I think you’re angry. And hurt. And vengeful.” I tried to take a deep breath but the smoke made me cough. “I think you’re in
credibly vengeful.”
“Maybe I am.” She looked up at me with a smirk. “But I’m the one with the bomb.”
“You don’t have to do this,” I said. “You’ll never make it out alive. If you set that off now, you’ll die here.”
“You still don’t get it, do you? I won’t die today. And I didn’t die the day I left your precious school—your sisterhood. I died the day I came to it.”
I don’t understand hate. I’ve seen its power. I’ve known its wrath. I’ve even felt it coursing through my own veins, pushing me on. But I don’t know where it comes from or why it lasts, how it can take hold in some people and grow.
I heard a cracking sound, like thunder. Sparks rained down, and I jerked back just as a beam crashed overhead, showering me with smoke and flames, and yet I wanted to run through the falling ash. Stop her once and for all.
“Gallagher Girl!” Zach grabbed my arm and jerked me around to face him. I hadn’t even heard him come up behind me.
“Hello, Zachy,” Catherine said from below, but Zach didn’t even look at her.
“We’ve got to go,” he said, starting to drag me away.
“Zach, we can stop her.” I fought against him with all I had while, down below us, Catherine started singing once again.
“We can still save the school!” I yelled.
A hundred and fifty years of history stood around me. It was the place I loved. It was my home. My destiny. That building was in my veins, and without it, I feared that I might die.
“Zach, we have to stop her!”
But Zach just held me. He looked at me with shock and awe and just a little bit of wonder. In spite of everything, I thought that he might laugh.
“Gallagher Girl,” he told me, “you are the school.”
Then he held my head between his hands and kissed me, hard and fast, breaking whatever trance I was in.
“Zachy!” Catherine called from below.
“Good-bye, mother,” he yelled over the railing. “I will never see you again.”
Then Zach took my hand and together we ran into the passageway. Smoke swelled and I kept running, away from the fire and the woman, fleeing from the ghosts.
