by Ally Carter
"Yeah." He smiled. "Well, I heard that Macey McHenry was going to be making her first post-convention public appearance here today"—he stood and brushed some stray confetti from my hair—"and where there's one Gallagher Girl, there are usually others."
His smile deepened, and at that moment I seriously thought I would scream (but for a totally different reason.)
"We're like smoke and fire that way," I stuttered, trying my best to act cooler than I felt.
He smiled his slow, knowing smile. "Something like that."
And then a whole new kind of panic hit me—ZACH WAS THERE! Because he knew Macey was going to be there? And because he thought I might be with Macey?
(Note to self: Modify Liz's boy-to-English translator to account for multiple interpretations at once!)
That couldn't be it—could it? Was it possible that Zachary Goode had broken out of his top-secret spy school because this was his first chance at seeing me outside of my top secret spy school?
Oh.
My.
Gosh.
Could I go back to battling rooftop attackers now? Because at least with rooftop attackers you know where you stand! But boys—especially that boy—seemed to always be a mystery.
I heard the crowd erupt into applause again as the governor continued his speech, but it felt like all of that was taking place on the other side of the earth.
"I thought you'd vowed to stay out of secret passageways and laundry chutes, but I guess…" he started but didn't finish. Instead he reached up and traced the bruise that had all but faded along my hairline, and I felt something that has absolutely nothing to do with blunt force trauma.
And then something dawned on me. "How did you know about the laundry chute?"
Zach took a deep breath then smiled and pointed to himself like he used to do and said, "Spy."
I heard a voice in my earpiece say, "Chameleon, I know you're being Chameleony, but if you could wave or something, or tell me where you are, that would be great."
"Bleachers," I told her.
"Bex?" Zach guessed.
"Yeah," I answered.
"So you've got backup?" It was a truly weird question in what was shaping up to be a truly weird day, so for a second I just stood there, wondering if he was asking me as a boy or if he was asking as a spy. "The girls are here? And Solomon?"
"Of course they are."
But then one of the hundreds of voices in my ear was saying "Alpha team, there's movement under the bleachers," and in a flash I moved.
"Zach, there's someone under—"
I stopped. I realized we were the people under the bleachers.
"You!" one of the agents called. But as I spun to face him, his right hand, which had been inching toward where his regulation sidearm was holstered, relaxed. He almost smiled. And maybe for the first time ever I realized how totally advantageous being a sixteen-year-old girl can be.
"Miss," the agent said, "this area is restricted. I'm going to have to ask you to go back behind the barricades."
"Oh my gosh," I said, sounding a tad bit ditzier than my IQ might suggest. "I had to go to the bathroom so bad, so we—"
"We?" the agent said, going on alert again. He scanned the area. Big men in dark suits appeared out of nowhere. The earpiece was alive with chatter and commands.
"I was …" I started, the words coming harder now. And still I kept turning and looking.
But Zach was already gone.
Chapter Thirteen
"Yeah, we were looking for a bathroom." A voice came slicing through the barricade of agents in dark suits that surrounded me. Even though Secret Service agents are notoriously smart and incredibly well trained, everyone around me seemed to cower at the sight of Macey McHenry.
I watched my roommate turn to the agents and summon her inner Gallagher Girl (the snobby kind). "Do you have a problem with that?"
And that's how a chameleon was saved by a peacock.
"Thanks, boys," Aunt Abby said, appearing at Macey's side. "I think we can take it from here."
As dark suits scattered, my aunt took me by the arm and led me out from under the bleachers and into the sun of the main staging area while she softly sang, "I'm gonna tell your mother."
"I'm sorry, Aunt Abby," I told her. "I just"—I thought about Zach…mysterious Zach…suddenly disappearing
Zach—"saw something," I said—not someone.
But my aunt was shaking her head. "I don't even want to know how you got back here," She stopped. "Wait, you'd better tell me how you got back here."
After I explained, she walked twenty feet to where a security detail stood around a row of dark Suburbans.
"Emergency extraction vehicles," I said, turning to Macey, who was too busy staring at my feet to marvel at any of the totally cool surveillance things going on around us.
"I'll give you five hundred dollars if you trade me shoes," Macey said. I looked down at the pumps her mother had no doubt forced her into, and I totally knew she wasn't joking. But you can't put a price on comfort (as all pavement artists know), so I pretended like I didn't hear her, which wasn't all that hard considering that I absolutely had other things on my mind!
Zach had come to the rally! To see me?
"Macey, you're never going to believe who I just—"
"Hey," a voice cut me off. "I know you!"
I recognized the voice, but more than that I recognized the look on Macey's face as Preston came into view.
"Don't you have a baby to kiss?" Macey said with a sigh.
"Cammie, right?" Preston asked. "Macey didn't tell me you were coming."
"Yeah. It's a great chance to see the political process up close and—"
"Seriously," Macey snapped. "Go. Kiss. A baby."
"Can you believe her?" Preston asked, cocking his head toward Macey. "Every time she sees me, all she does is call me baby and talk about kissing."
Macey looked like she kind of wanted to kill him. But I kind of wanted to laugh.
Maybe it was just that I had boys on the brain. Maybe it was the relief of knowing, for the time being, that Macey was okay. But at that moment Preston seemed kind of…Hot?
No. No way, I told myself. And then I looked at Macey, who hated being in uncomfortable shoes and at her parents' disposal, and I thought that maybe Preston Winters was the one person who might hate all those things as much as she did. And as every spy knows, common enemies are how allies always begin.
"So hey," Preston said softly.
A gospel choir was singing in the distance. The Secret Service was getting ready for the long walk back to the busses. But Preston didn't seem to notice; he didn't seem to care. He seemed totally immune to those prying eyes and listening ears as he leaned closer and said, "I'm really glad I saw you."
Oh my gosh, I thought. Is it possible that two boys are flirting with me within ten minutes of each other?
But it wasn't flirting.
It was worse.
Totally, infinitely, utterly worse, because while the gospel band stopped singing and some military planes flew overhead, Preston looked at me as if he were really seeing
me and said, "I wanted to thank you … for Boston."
The girl in me started to exhale just as the spy in me studied the change in his breathing pattern and the dilatation of his eyes. I was seriously beginning to panic as he said, "That was really…awesome of you."
"Oh, it was nothing!" I blurted.
"Cammie's always doing stuff like that," Macey said, hearing my unease. "She's a total Girl Scout."
"Well, whatever she is," he said, turning to Macey, "it looked like you were one too."
As Macey glanced at me, I knew that neither of us wanted to imagine what might happen if the potential first son thought too hard or too long about what he'd seen on that rooftop.
"I was so freaked out," Preston said. "But you two, you were…rational."
"So, Macey," I said loudly, "I really enjoyed your speech."
"I mean"—Pre
ston went on as if I wasn't even standing there … as if he wasn't standing there. Instead he stared into space as if the movie of what had happened in Boston was playing in his mind—"there were, what? Ten guys after us?"
"Two men. One woman," Macey and I corrected him at exactly the same time.
"And you guys were …" He looked at us as if he were seeing us for the first time. "You're girls!" he blurted as if the fact had totally eluded him until then.
"Thanks for noticing," Macey said, grabbing my arm and pulling me away.
Preston followed after. "But you held your own against like a dozen—"
"Three!" Macey and I corrected him again.
"Men." He stopped in front of us, blocking our path. Which meant that unless we wanted to impress him with our unusual physical abilities even more, we were probably going to have to wait him out.
Just when I thought things couldn't get worse, he looked right at Macey. "How much do you weigh?"
"Hey!" I blurted, stepping between them. "It was nothing. Really! It was like those women who lift trucks off their babies—that's how I felt." I tried to sound like that moment was as exciting and adrenaline-filled and foreign to me as it had been for him.
"Yeah," Macey added.
"But the moves…" he started.
"My mom made me take a self-defense class," I blurted. (Totally not a lie.)
"Wow." He nodded. "Hope you got extra credit."
"I did," I said. (Also not a lie.)
"Well …" Preston ran his hand through his hair and straightened his tie. "They must be teaching you something special in that school of yours."
Macey and I looked at each other as if we knew we could kill him, but getting away might be way more difficult than usual.
And then he laughed.
And we breathed.
And he looked at both of us with (if he hadn't been a politician's son and all) an expression of genuine gratitude as he said, "I'm just glad I get to do this with girls like you."
"Mr. Winters!" one of the agents called. "We're moving."
A team of agents surrounded him, ushering Preston away, but Macey lingered a second longer.
"Well, he seemed…nice ?" I finally found the strength to mutter.
But Macey merely looked at me. "You're a spy, Cam. Don't you know that nothing is ever as it seems?"
I didn't get to mention Zach. I didn't get to tell her what I thought of her speech. I didn't even get to ask Aunt Abby if she was really serious about telling my mom that I'd been caught out-of-bounds.
Instead I watched the Secret Service swarm around my roommate once again. A gate swung open and Macey stepped toward her parents. Her father reached out for her hand, but she was already waving, pulling in votes and smiles and handshakes.
And there was already a voice in my earpiece telling me it was time to go home.
Chapter Fourteen
Do you know how long it took to get back to school? One hundred and seventy-two minutes. Do you know how long it took for things to return to normal? Well… I guess I'm still kind of waiting.
As soon as we got back, Mr. Solomon dragged us all the way down to Sublevel Two to review surveillance tapes and take a pop quiz. (I scored a 98%.) By the time we got upstairs to the foyer I heard the scraping of forks and the clanking of ice in our second-best crystal, but I totally wasn't hungry, especially when I saw Macey walking through the front door.
"Macey!" I yelled.
"Cam." Bex and Liz ran behind me. "What's going on?"
It was a normal night at a very abnormal school. But even by Gallagher Academy standards I'd had a very exceptional day, so I raced through the entry hall and climbed the stairs, still calling, "Macey!"
By the time I caught up to her she had already taken off her jacket and was standing there in a silk blouse. She was carrying a string of pearls and had crammed the scarf she'd been wearing at the rally into her purse. With every step, Macey was shedding her fake façade—her cover—one piece of pocket litter at a time.
"You're back," I said.
"Yeah," she said in the tone of the incredibly tired, "very observant. Hey, what was up with you today?" She took another step, then shed another piece of the clothing that only a mother can love. "When I saw you, you looked kind of…freaked?"
"Wait," Bex said, "you saw her?"
"Yeah, I was going to tell you, but well … we haven't exactly had a moment…And it's not exactly something you…And I just didn't know how…And—"
"Cammie." Bex snapped me out of it. She crossed her arms, stared me down, and gave me that "you've got some explaining to do" look that I've come to love. And fear. (Well, mostly fear.) And I knew I couldn't keep my secret any longer.
"I saw something!" I blurted. Then I had to correct myself as I said, "Someone."
The halls were quiet around us. Dark. The days were getting shorter. Summer was finally gone. And maybe that was why I shivered as I said, "Zach."
Time it took me to tell the whole story: twenty-two minutes and forty-seven seconds.
Time it would have taken me to tell the story had I not been constantly interrupted: two minutes and forty-six seconds.
Number of times Liz said, "No way!": thirty-three.
Number of times Bex gave me her "You could have brought me with you" look: nine.
"But what was he doing there?" Liz was asking again (time number seven, to be exact).
"I don't know," I managed to mutter. "I mean, one minute I'm thinking he's breaching security—well, technically, he did breach security …" I trailed off. "And the next I'm flipping him to the ground and—"
"Staring deeply into his eyes?" Liz guessed, because while security breaches might be serious, eye-staring-into is something that should never be ignored.
"Maybe Blackthorne was there for an assignment too?" Bex asked.
"Maybe," I said, but my heart wasn't in it. I thought about his cryptic postcard—his warning—and the way he'd looked at me that day. "It's just that something about him seemed…different."
"What?" Bex said. I could feel her moving toward me. Like a tiger. She was lethal and beautiful and very, very catlike in the curiosity department. "What are you thinking about?"
I didn't know what was more concerning—that there had been a gap, however small, in Macey's security perimeter, or that Zach had slipped through it.
I thought about the boy who had kissed me last spring and the one who had looked at me under the bleachers. "He seemed"—I started slowly, still trying to put the pieces together—"worried."
"Ooh!" Liz squealed. "He wants to protect you!"
"I don't need protecting," I told her, but Liz only shrugged.
"It's the thought that counts."
"Well, there is another option," Bex said, with a very mischievous grin. "Maybe he went under the bleachers knowing you wouldn't be able to resist following him under the bleachers…"
She let her voice trail off as she stared at me, the possibilities lingering until Liz felt the need to blurt: "So you could be alone!"
Okay, I don't want to sound braggy. Or unprofessional. Or naïve. But is it wrong to admit that I'd been kind of hoping all day that was the reason? (Partly because, as a girl, that's a good reason, and as a spy, it meant he wasn't conspiring to commit high treason.)
"No," I blurted. "No. That can't be possible. He wouldn't leave school and go all the way to Cleveland and sneak into a restricted area and everything just to see…me." I turned to Macey, our resident expert on all things boy. "Would he?"
"Don't look at me," Macey said, waving her hands (which were, by that time, holding a pump, a jacket, and a "walk the walk" campaign button). "I have a whole other kind of boy problem."
Wait. MACEY McHENRY HAD A BOY PROBLEM? I couldn't be sure I'd heard correctly, and evidently I wasn't alone.
"Boy"—Liz stammered—"problem. YOU?"
Macey rolled her eyes. "Not that kind of problem. Preston."
"Oh," Liz said, sounding way too matchmakery
, if you want to know the truth. "He is kind of cute. And really socially aware. You know, I read this article in—"
"He's a dork," Macey said, cutting her off.
"But you have so much in common," Liz protested. Macey glared. "I mean, besides the dork thing."
"'Common' is overrated," Macey said with another sigh.
"Well then," Liz said, "what's the problem?"
"The problem is that we were attacked by three highly trained operatives and lived to tell the tale," I said without even realizing that I'd known the answer all along.
"Bingo," Macey said. "And Preston was impressed. Very impressed."
"So boys really do make passes at girls who kick—"
"Bex!" I cut my best friend off.
Can I just say that it's really pretty hard to deal with boys who may want to…
A. Date you, or
B. Kill you, or
C. Learn the origins of your freaklike self-defense capabilities!
And that day it was highly possible that we might have been dealing with ALL THREE!
Will the boy drama in my life ever go away?! Seriously. I'm asking.
"Even after you left, he wouldn't shut up about it," Macey told me.
"You could have shut him up," Bex suggested.
"Don't think I wasn't tempted."
A group of eighth graders passed by, singing at the top of their lungs, but the four of us stayed quiet and still inside the dark alcove.
"You're smiling," Macey blurted, no doubt accusing Bex of doing something Bexish. "Why are you smiling?"
"Nothing," Bex said with a shake of her head. "I just keep thinking…"
Bex isn't one for trailing off. She always knows what comes next and never starts what she can't finish. So maybe it was that fact, or the way the smile faded from her face, but something made me hold my breath as she found the words to say, "I just keep thinking how shocked they must have been. You know…them. They thought they were coming after a girl. But instead they got…"