All around us, though, the sirens kept blaring. The lights kept swirling. And, worst of all, the water kept rising.
"Lizzie?" I heard Bex yell behind me.
"Almost . . ." Liz said, her fingers flying over the laptop's keys. "Almost . . . got it!"
Instantly, the sirens went silent. The lights stopped swirling. From the corner of my eye, I saw Liz and Bex give each other a high five, but the water level kept rising.
I thought of what Mr. Mosckowitz had told Agent Townsend that night in the shadowy halls - that every generation had added a layer of defense to that honored place - and I knew that the original Gallagher Girls were in many ways the wisest.
"Got it!" Macey, yelled, pushing the final piece into place, but nothing happened.
It felt like an eternity before a shrill mechanical voice sounded through the echoing space. "IDENTIFY. IDENTIFY. IDENTIFY. WHO GOES THERE?" it asked.
And then instinct must have taken hold, because the four of us shouted the first words that came to mind : "We are the sisters Gillian!"
I held my breath and said a prayer until the water began to recede and the mechanical voice said, "WELCOME HOME."
Chapter Thirty
There are things people like Townsend would never understand about the Gallagher Academy. Ever. You see, it isn't about a Gallagher Girls - it's about being one of the Gallagher Girls. Plural. All of us. Without Bex, I would have triggered the sensors.
Without Macey, I might never have solved the puzzle in time. And without Liz . . . well, Liz had multiple roles on this particular mission.
"How high is that again?" she said as she walked beside me.
"Not that high," I said slowly, looking up at the towering shelves that lined the walls of Sublevel Two.
It wasn't where we stored the chemicals. As I looked around the long rows of tall shelves, there wasn't single weapon in sight. But the information contained within this room was volatile enough to bring my school crashing down, potent enough to poison every member of our sisterhood. And I knew we didn't dare stay too long - that we live our lives on a need-to-know-basis for reason.
Unfortunately, I was the only one who felt that way.
"Ooh! Cool!" I heard Macey cry from one row away, despite that fact that, upstairs, half of the Gallagher Academy security team was now on high alert, wondering what in the world had just happened in Sublevel Two.
"Hey, Cam," Bex called, "did you know Amelia Earhart spent the last twenty years of her life undercover in Istanbul?"
A half second later, Macey came running around the end of an aisle, a file in her hands.
"Quick, guys, I've for pictures of Professor Buckingham . . . in World War Two . . . in a swimsuit!"
Bex raced to look at the images, but my gaze was locked on Liz as I ran a cable through the utility belt that hung around her tiny waist.
"Liz, this is silly. I'll do it," I told her.
"But Cammie, Zach said it's in the very middle of the highest shelf. It's going to be really hard to get someone in exactly the right place, and I'm the lightest," she said, citing the one scientifically verifiable - and thus relevant - piece of information we had.
"You don't have to prove anything, Lizzie. I can -"
"They need you, Cammie," she said, her voice no louder than a whisper. "And if their side needs you alive . . . our side needs you alive." She looked up at the tall shelves and took a deep breath as if clearing all those unpleasant thoughts away and focusing on a single, quantifiable fact: "I'm the lightest."
"Bex, we're ready," I called out. A second later she appeared, Liz's crossbow in her hands. It looked absolutely effortless as she took aim at the ceiling fifty feet overhead. I heard a cable whirling, watched the coil at my feet slowly disappear, until I heard the metallic noise that titanium makes when it strike soild stone.
"Ready?" I asked Liz, who nodded.
"You can do it," I silently whispered while Bex grasp the other end of the cable and pulled. In the next moment, Liz was floating gracefully (or as gracefully as Liz does anything) over the shelves marked: WARNING, HIGH VOLTAGE.
I stood, holding my breath as I watched. Maybe that's why I was the one who heard it, a buzzing sound, so distant that at first I thought it was the whirling of my own mind.
But I heard it again.
"Did you guys hear that?" I asked, straining.
Bex was trying to maneuver Liz into position, and Liz was staring at the high-voltage sign as if her life depended on it, which . . . well . . . it probably did.
"Do you hear that?" I asked Macey.
"We're five hundred yards beneath the ground," she said with a shrug.
She was right, of course. I was probably as safe here as I could have probably been anywhere in the world, but there was something about the eerie quiet that surrounded us.
I stood for a long time, listening to the sound of my heartbeat - a rhythm that hadn't slowed in months until . . .
"There," I said again, and this time Macey stopped too.
"Maybe it's a furnace of something?" she asked as the sound got louder.
I held my breath. "That's no heating unit."
"How much longer, Liz?" Bex asked.
"Almost got it!" she called, reaching as far as her thing frame would go, but still the book stayed out of grasp.
"Liz," I said again. The noise was growing louder, and it came with more regularity. "Liz, how long would it take you to bring the laser grid back up?"
"Two minutes." She said.
But in the depths of the space, the noise growled to life again. I looked at Bex and Macey. "We don't have two minutes."