Dusty cobwebs hung between the low beams like nature's little surveillance detectors. The biggest spiders I'd ever seen scurried from the light, and I just stood there remembering that there are many, many reasons why a Gallagher Girl should keep in practice. One, you don't want to lose your edge. Two, you never know when you might have to call upon your training. And three, if you go too long without using your secret passages, other things tend to take over in your absence.
Even Bex took a big step back. (Because, while Bex is perfectly willing to take on three armed attackers at once, spiders are an entirely different thing.) But Liz was the person I was staring at. After all, there we were, locked inside the safest place in the country, and yet she was already bleeding.
"Hey, Liz, maybe you should stay here. You know … set up and run a comms center?"
"That's better if I'm on site," she argued back.
"And cover for us," I added, "if someone starts asking where we are."
"It's Saturday," she reminded me. "In a huge building. That you are notorious for disappearing inside."
"But—" I didn't know what was coming over me, but suddenly I felt like someone should change my nickname from Cammie the Chameleon to Cammie the Corrupter. I was about to break out of my school (again), to do something I wasn't supposed to be doing (again). But that wasn't what worried me as I looked at Liz, who barely weighed a hundred pounds, and then at the secret tunnel that might have been leading us to actual bad guys with actual guns. "Liz, it's just that—"
"Why aren't you telling Bex to stay behind?" Liz shot back, but we all knew the answer: the only way Bex would miss this would be if she were unconscious. And tied up. And locked in a concrete bunker. In Siberia.
Which was a thought that almost made me laugh. Almost. But when I heard Bex say, "Maybe you should sit this one out, Lizzie," I knew my best friend was thinking it too. That once we went forward, there might not be any coming back. In a lot of ways.
Liz is a genius—the kind of genius that puts the rest of us to shame. She no doubt knew the odds. She'd probably calculated the chances of us getting caught, of us getting hurt, and (if it wasn't too traumatic for her to think about) of us getting knocked down a full letter grade on our midterms. But still she turned defiantly and pushed through the cobwebs.
There was no hiding our tracks then—no turning back— so Bex swept her arm across the door, gesturing "after you."
I stepped into the darkness with nothing but my training and my cover and my friends who would follow me to the end of the earth, no matter what was waiting for us on the other side.
Well, it turned out what was waiting for us was a 1987 Dodge minivan.
And Liz had the keys.
"Liz," I said, walking toward her, praying that no one would come driving by and see us. (Partly because we totally weren't supposed to be there. Partly because…well … it was a really ugly minivan.)
But Liz just said, "Get in." Then she stopped. "Who's driving?"
Bex dove for the keys, but given her tendency to forget which side of the road we're supposed to be on, I snatched them out of her grasp.
"Liz," I said again, eyeing the rusty fender, "when you said you could get us a car… Liz, where did you get this car?"
"It's a project," she said simply, strapping herself into the backseat.
I pulled at the drivers-side door, and for a second I thought it would fall off its hinges. I looked at the seat. Stuffing was bursting through its fraying seams. The steering wheel was being held together almost entirely by duct tape.
"What kind of project?" I asked, almost afraid of the answer because something told me that pushing that van to Philadelphia wasn't really going to help our mission objectives.
"Oh, give me those," Bex said, grabbing the keys from my hand. She jammed them into the ignition and turned and then…nothing.
"Great!" I snapped. "It doesn't even work." But then I felt it. The car was running, but it was almost completely silent, almost completely still.
"New technology," Liz said with a shrug. "Dr. Fibs has been helping me. We've got it up to 250 miles per gallon now," she said, with only the teeniest hint of a gloating smile. "But I think I'll have it doing 325 by Christmas."
And who says Gallagher Girls on the research and operations track never get a chance to save the world?
We spent the next few hours in silence. Well, if by silence you mean that Liz was rattling on nonstop like she does when she's nervous, and Bex was totally tuning her out like she does when she's nervous. And me? I just drove, listening to the rain that started as we crossed the Pennsylvania border. The windshield wipers must not have been as high-tech as the engine because they stuck and stalled, leaving streaks across the glass that caught the light of passing headlights, and by the time we made it to Philadelphia, everything was a blur.
"Right turn," Liz said, navigating our way through narrow cobblestone streets. Buildings older than the Declaration of Independence rose into the rainy sky. Maybe I was expecting the noise of Ohio, the blockades and chaos of the convention, but instead we peered out the grimy windshield onto the slick black streets, and I couldn't help thinking that something felt…different.
"Are you sure this is the right place?" I asked. Liz leaned between the two front seats, but before she could act too insulted, we turned and saw a great stone building that covered two city blocks. Massive columns spanned its front entrance, so that it looked more like a Roman temple than a train station. And there, in the center of the façade, was a banner fifty feet long that read WINTERS-McHENRY: PUTTING AMERICA BACK ON TRACK.