by Ally Carter
We walked for what felt like five minutes. The air around us was damp and cool, and yet something told me that even in the dead of winter or heat of summer the temperature would never vary more than three degrees.
And then finally Joe Solomon came to a stop. As we stepped onto a floor of solid stone, I looked back up the spiraling walkway—at the corridors that branched like a maze—and suddenly I pitied the enemy agent who was ever foolish enough to try to penetrate this store of covert knowledge. And finally I smiled, wondering what on earth (or beneath it) could possibly lay in store on Sublevel Three.
"Covert operations." Mr. Solomon walked through a set of large double doors into a room twice as large as the library in the mansion above us. As in the library, a second-story walkway circled the room, and old-fashioned wooden tables were arranged in a U-like shape across the floor.
"The clandestine service…" our teacher talked on as the entire junior CoveOps class rushed to claim seats. "It's a life of being where you're not supposed to be—of doing what you're not supposed to do." There was a wooden chair at the front of the room, but instead of sitting, he gripped the back of it with both hands. It was the first thing about Covert Operations that felt familiar. "It means getting in, ladies." He searched the room. "And most important, it means getting out."
I thought about hotels and laundry chutes, and for a second my head hurt. I felt a little dizzy as our teacher said, "Exfiltrations are defined by two factors, Ms. Baxter. Name them."
"They take place in hostile territory," Bex said.
"Correct," Mr. Solomon replied, taking a step. He wrote Bex's response on an ancient rolling chalkboard at the front of the room. "That's one qualifier of an exfiltration. Ms. Fetterman, what's two?"
As we waited for Anna's response, I heard the chalk against the board. Everything was louder here, especially the clear bright voice that said, "No one ever knows about it."
Every head turned. I've never seen anyone command a room more effortlessly than Aunt Abby did when she said, "You rang, Joe?"
Oh. My. Gosh.
Maybe it was the spy in me … or the girl in me … or the niece in me … but when Aunt Abby placed her hand on her hip, I could have sworn she was doing something that I hadn't thought any Gallagher Girl would ever dare to do: flirt with Joe Solomon!
"Agent Cameron," Mr. Solomon said. "So glad you could join us. The junior class…" He gestured toward us. Aunt Abby waved two fingers.
"Hi, girls."
"…and I were just getting ready to discuss exfiltration operations." He dropped the chalk into the tray and slapped his hands together twice. "Thought you might lend a unique perspective to that topic."
"Oh, Mr. Solomon," Abby said with a smile, "you do know how to show a girl a good time."
She walked around the U of desks, scanning the walls, the cases of books, everything about Sublevel Two; and I realized that while I was seeing it for the first time, my aunt was seeing it again after a long time. I wondered if it might look different in the light of everything she'd learned since leaving.
"As I was saying," Mr. Solomon went on, "exfiltrations are critical. And they're hard—"
"Especially in Istanbul," Aunt Abby added softly, and our teacher laughed. It sounded like an inside joke, except spies don't make inside jokes! There's too much information "inside," and so that's where we keep it. But the craziest thing wasn't that Aunt Abby had made a joke. … It wasn't even that she was flirting. The craziest thing was that I was pretty sure that smiling and laughing were Mr. Solomon's way of flirting back!
There we were, in a cavern of stone and secrets, and yet it felt like my aunt had brought the sun in with her, illuminating a side of my teacher that I had never seen.
For the first time in weeks, my head didn't hurt. Boston was just a city in Massachusetts.
I might have been content to sit like that all day—all week. All year. But then the lights went out. At the back of the room an old-fashioned projector came to life, and an image was slicing through the dark.
"I'm sure you've all seen this before," Mr. Solomon said.
But I hadn't seen it. A chill ran through me as I realized…I'd lived it.
The entire class seemed to hold its breath while the film cut between different angles, different cameras, different news crews. Parts of the footage had been shown in an almost continual loop on every TV in the country for days, but as with most things we Gallagher Girls do, there was a lot more to the story, and that day we were seeing the uncensored version.
"What I'm about to show you is a nearly textbook example of a daylight exfiltration operation in an occupied area." I thought Mr. Solomon would look at me. I expected my aunt to ask if I was okay. I wanted someone to acknowledge that it wasn't a lesson—it was the hardest day of my life. But the only change in our teacher's voice was a sudden pause before he added, "Lucky for us, it didn't work."
And then I knew that we weren't there to study what Macey and I had done right. We weren't the seasoned professional operatives on the roof that day. We were just two girls who got lucky, and luck's not a skill that anyone can learn.
Dust kept dancing in the projector's light. At no point did anyone say, "If this is too much for you, Cammie, you can leave" or "Ms. Morgan, what were you thinking there?"
I was just another girl in the room, not the girl on the roof. The sounds were different there—just the buzz of my instructor's voice. The answering of questions. The muffled shouts of the camera operators as they jockeyed for position.
But in my head I saw the whirl of circling blades. I heard the grunts and kicks, the distant roar of the wind coming in off the harbor. In my mind, the film was clearer and slower as Preston fell to safety. And then I watched a masked figure ignore the son of a potential president, point to my best friend, and say the two words I hadn't truly heard before.
The room was dark.
The walls around us were thick.
And I'm pretty sure my aunt was the only person who heard me whisper, "Get her."
Chapter Ten
There are things spies often carry with them: pocket litter, fake IDs, the occasional weapon-slash-camera-slash-hair accessory. But the heaviest things, I think, are the secrets. They can drown you if they let them. As I sat inside Sublevel Two that day, I knew the one I held was so heavy I might never see the surface again.
When class was over, the lights came on, and I listened as half of my classmates scattered to explore their new surroundings. I watched Mick Morrison corner Mr. Solomon with a dozen questions about the Marciano Theory and its proper use in urban settings, but the rest of the class stood huddled around Aunt Abby, who was doing a very dramatic reenactment of the time she'd had to sneak a nuclear engineer out of Taiwan during the rainy season.
"So then I told him, I know it's a rickshaw, but that doesn't mean it doesn't float!" Abby said.
Tina and Eva burst out laughing, but I knew Aunt Abby was watching out of the corner of her eyes as I left the classroom and started up the long spiraling ramp that led to the mansion above us. I knew she was listening as Bex fell into step beside me and said, "Cam, slow down," as if it were possible for me to outpace her. (Which it isn't.)
But I just kept spiraling upward, remembering the words I had listened to but hadn't heard; recalling the attackers' indifference when Preston fell to safety over the side of the roof—the things I had watched but hadn't seen.
"I was an idiot!" I snapped.
"You were brilliant," Bex said, and from any other girl in any other school those words might have sounded like lip service. But not this girl. Not this school. From Bex, it was an undisputed fact, and she was willing to take on anyone who said otherwise.
"Two girls in this school could have done what you did," She cocked an eyebrow. "And you're the other one."
As we reached the elevators and stepped inside, I thought about how there are two types of secrets: the kind you want to keep in, and the kind you don't dare to let out.
; I could have looked at Bex. I could have lowered my voice, and there, in that tiny elevator a hundred feet beneath the ground, I could have been certain that no one could possibly overhear.
But my mother and Mr. Solomon were the two best spies I know, and they hadn't told Macey. They hadn't told me.
As the elevator doors slid open, I heard the sound of girls coming down the stairs above us. The smell of lunch drifted from the Grand Hall. Things move through our mansion as fast as fire sometimes. And that's when I knew I had the second type of secret.
I didn't dare to set it free.
Instead I carried it into the Grand Hall and sat down at the juniors' table for lunch, barely looking up until I heard Eva Alvarez announce, "Mail's here,"
She dropped a postcard on the table in front of me, and immediately I recognized the ruby slippers from the National Museum of American History and The Wizard of Oz and, most important, from the very place where Zach and I had first seen each other for what we really were.
This isn't a hallucination, I told myself. This is real, I thought as I turned it over and studied the handwriting that, last spring, I'd watched wash away in the rain.
And I read the words "Be careful."
I spent the rest of that week trying to talk to Aunt Abby alone, but the problem was, from that point on, my aunt was never alone.
"Um, Aunt Abby, can we…talk?" I asked Monday night after supper, but Abby just smiled and started for the door. Unfortunately, half the sophomore class started with her.
"Sure, squirt. I was just going to go to teach these guys this really cool move with a garden hose. Wanna come?"
When I saw her in the foyer Tuesday afternoon, I asked, "Hey, Aunt Abby, do you maybe have some time to…catch up…tonight?"
"Ooh, sorry, Camster," she told me as she started walking Macey to P&E. "Fibs has asked me to help him whip up a batch of this superpowerful coma-inducing cream I learned how to make in the Amazon. It could take all night."
Everywhere I turned I heard questions like, "Hey, Cammie, has Abby ever shown you that thing she did in Portugal with a bobby pin?"
Or "Well, I heard that five more senior operatives were begging to take Macey's detail, but the deputy director of the CIA himself called and asked Abby to take the job."
By Saturday, it was starting to feel like the one story Aunt Abby wouldn't tell was the only one I wanted to hear.
And, by Sunday, it had started to rain.
The halls seemed dimmer than usual for that early in the semester as I walked through the empty corridors on my way to my mother's office. When I passed the window seat on the second floor, I couldn't resist pulling back the red velvet curtains and peering through the wavy glass.
Heavy gray clouds hung low in the sky, but the trees were lush and green in the forest. Our walls were still tall and strong, and beyond them, not a single news van sat. I thought for a second that maybe the worst of it was over, but then a flash of lightning slashed through the sky, and I knew the storm was just beginning.
"Cammie!" Mom's voice called through the Hall of History, and I turned away from the glass.
Walking toward my mother's office, I couldn't help notice that she was smiling as if this were exactly how the first Sunday night after summer vacation was supposed to be—except this time it was definitely different. Because first, there was music. Loud music. Fast music. Music that was definitely not of the Culture and Assimilation variety!
And second, the food didn't smell terrible. Sure, it didn't smell as good as the aromas drifting from the Grand Hall, but it didn't look like the smoke (and/or hazardous materials) detectors had gone off yet, and that was a very good sign.
But as soon as I reached the door to my mother's office, I could see that what really set this Sunday night apart was that, this time, my mother was not alone.
"Hey, squirt. I'm crashing." My aunt winked as she pulled a grape from a bowl of fruit on the corner of my mother's desk. "Your mom and cooking," Abby said, grabbing me by the hand and spinning me around to the music, "this, I had to see."
"No one is forcing you to eat anything," Mom chided, but Abby just kept dancing, pulling me in and out until she whispered in my ear, "I've got an antidote for ninety-nine percent of the food-borne illnesses known to man in my purse, just in case."
And then I couldn't help myself. I laughed. For a second, it seemed right. For a second, it seemed safe. Everything was different…but familiar. The dancing. The music. The sounds and smells of Mom making her famous (in a bad way) goulash. It was as if I were having flashes of someone else's life. And then it hit me: it was my life. With Dad.
Dad used to listen to that music. Dad and I used to dance in our kitchen in D.C.
And suddenly I didn't feel like dancing anymore.
Mom watched me walk to the radio and turn down the volume.
"Oh, Cam," my aunt said with a sigh. "Look at you. All grown up and breaking hearts…" She raised her eyebrows. "And rules. Honestly, as an aunt, I don't know which makes me prouder."
"Abigail," Mom warned softly.
"Rachel," my aunt mimicked her sister's motherly tone.
"Perhaps the United States Secret Service should not be encouraging rule-breaking—especially at this particular school during this particular year."
"Perhaps the headmistress of the Gallagher Academy should try to remember that a spy's life is, by definition, rules-optional," my aunt lectured back.
"And while we're on the subject," Mom said, her voice rising, "perhaps the United States Secret Service should consider that it might be unwise to tell Madame Dabney's eighth graders how to make their own chloroform out of Kleenex and lemon wedges?"
"Yeah, I couldn't believe they hadn't figured out how to do that yet," Abby said, as if the standards for her sisterhood had gone down considerably.
"That technique was banned in 1982!"
"Hey, Joe said—"
"I don't care what Joe says!" Mom snapped, and this time her voice carried fire. "Abigail, rules exist for a reason. Rules exist because when people don't follow them, people get hurt." The words lingered in the air. My mom seemed to be shaking as she finished. "Or maybe you've forgotten."
I've known Aunt Abby my whole life, but I've never seen her look like she looked then. She seemed torn between tears and fury while the storm raged outside and the goulash congealed and I wondered whether any of us would ever feel like dancing again.
"Rachel, I—"
"Get her."
I don't know why I said it. One minute I was standing there watching them argue, and the next, the secret I'd carried with me all the way from Sublevel Two was breaking free.
Mom inched closer. Abby stepped away. And outside, the rain was falling against the mansion walls like the tide.
"What did you say, Cammie?" my mother asked in the manner of someone who already knows the answer to her question.
"I remembered …" I sank to the leather sofa. Mom inched closer, but behind her, Aunt Abby gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head—a warning. Be careful what you wish for. "I remembered something…about Boston. I put Preston on that window-washing thing, and they didn't really…care." Mom was easing onto the coffee table in front of me, moving slowly as if afraid to wake me from that terrible dream. "They said get her."
"Cam—" Mom started, but flashes filled my eyes again—a gray door, a black helicopter, and finally a white piece of paper fluttering to the ground.
"Preston's agenda," I whispered, but this time I didn't look at my mother—I looked at my aunt. "He was never supposed to be there, was he?"
Mom started to say something, but Aunt Abby walked past her and dropped onto the leather couch beside me. "Nope."
Some people might wonder why it mattered—we'd known for weeks that Macey was in danger. But sitting there, listening to the storm that had been a long time coming, I couldn't help but feel like it made all the difference in the world. The kidnappers weren't there for the son and daughter of two of the most p
owerful families in the country—they were there for only one of them.
And she was one of my best friends.
"It's true, kiddo," Mom said. "Preston Winters wasn't supposed to be there, so we can only assume that he wasn't the target."
I nodded. She smoothed my hair. But nothing could keep my heart from pounding as I asked, "Who were they?"
"More than three hundred groups have claimed credit for the attack," my aunt said, then added with a shrug, "which means at least 299 of them are lying."
"The ring," I said, closing my eyes and seeing the image that was burned into my mind. "I drew you a picture of that ring. Have you—"
"We're looking into it, kiddo," Mom said softly. I bit my lip, needing to know where at least some of the pain I was feeling was coming from.
"Why Macey?" I blurted, turning to my mother. "She's the daughter of very powerful people, Cam. They have very powerful enemies."
And then I asked the question more terrifying than anything I'd seen on the roof. "Is she going to be okay?"
My mother and aunt looked at each other, two CoveOps veterans who had seen enough to know that there was no easy answer to my question. "The Secret Service is good, Cam," my mother said. "Your aunt Abby is very good." She looked at my aunt as if no amount of sibling rivalry could ever come between them. So I sat there for a long time thinking about sisters. About our sisterhood.
And then suddenly it seemed funny. It seemed crazy. We were in the middle of the Gallagher Academy, where the people are both crazy and really, really good at being crazy about security. Of course Macey was going to be okay,
"Well, at least we already go to the safest school in the world. And it's not like Macey's going anywhere, right?" I said with a smile—totally not expecting my aunt to smile back and say, "Yeah…well…Cam, have you ever been to Cleveland?"
Chapter Eleven
Ohio has twenty electoral votes and a history of high voter turnout. It has a governor from one party and two senators from the other. In September, it also had a lot of women who were unsure about who to vote for but who were certain about one thing: Macey McHenry was a brave, brave girl for surviving what happened to her in Boston.