And yet she was right there beside them.
Beside us.
And she'd heard everything we'd said.
"The family tie to Roseville," Macey softly repeated what the man on the street had said.
"Macey," I said, stepping closer.
"Does this mean …" she started, and I knew there were a dozen ways that sentence could have ended. If I had just discovered that I was related to Gillian Gallagher, I would have been ecstatic. Bex would have thought it was the coolest thing ever. Liz might have decided to conduct some serious DNA experiments to determine if covertness was hereditary.
But it didn't matter what we would have done. What really mattered was what Macey did.
"You knew about this?" she asked me. Her voice was cracking. Her lip was shaking. "How long have you known about this?"
I could have lied, I guess. But I didn't. Maybe because Macey had lived with me for over a year and would see through it. Maybe because we hadn't covered lying to a trained operative yet in CoveOps. Or maybe I just thought Macey had the right to know that of the thousands of Gallagher Girls in the world, she was the only one who carried Gilly's blood in her veins.
"Yeah, my mom told us last—"
"Us!" Macey snapped. "Does the whole school know?"
"No! Just Bex and Liz and me. Mom explained all that after you got accepted. She—"
"So I'm Gillian Gallagher's descendant?" The fire seemed to be fading from her, so I reached out, still half afraid that when I touched her she would turn to ash. "So that's why they let me in."
"Macey, it's not—"
"True?" she said, staring at me, but for once in my life I couldn't lie—couldn't hide. I could only watch as she pushed away without another word, through the red-clad members of the Pride of Roseville Marching Band, who were exiting the field.
"Macey!" I called after her, but then Zach's hand was in mine.
"Cam—" he started.
"Not now, Zach." I jerked away. Maybe I wanted to find Macey. Or maybe I just wanted to be anywhere but there.
I set off through the crowd, pushing through the band and out into open space—seeing potential threats everywhere I turned.
Twenty feet to my right and up three rows, there was a guy in a red cap who jumped to his feet to cheer a split second too late, as if his attention had been elsewhere. On the track between the cheerleaders and the bleachers, two women stood together scanning the crowd while wearing
shoes that no small-town housewife would be caught dead in.
I wanted to scream into my comms unit and call for backup, but I had no comms. There was no backup. And Macey was already gone.
Chapter Twenty-four
The road from Roseville had never felt so long. In the hours that passed, the mansion had never felt so big. And I had never felt so stupid as when Bex and Liz and I went room to room, floor to floor, searching for Macey.
Covert Operations Report 0500 hours
Operatives Morgan, Baxter, and Sutton conducted a detailed search of the Gallagher Mansion, following the textbook grid pattern of detection. (They were sure about this because Operative Sutton brought along the actual textbook.)
"I know she made it back," I said for what must have been the hundredth time, but I had to keep saying the words. It didn't matter that neither Bex nor Liz needed to hear
them. "I tracked her footprints down the tunnel…She came back that way—I'm sure of it. She left her wig by the door with the rest of her disguise, so I dropped mine there too and went looking for her. …" I looked at Bex and Liz, not even trying to hide my panic as I begged them to believe me. "I know she made it back!"
I wanted Liz to cite the incredible odds in our favor that Macey was fine. I expected Bex to tell me that everything was going to be okay, but instead she just stared at me and asked, "Scale of one to ten, how mad was she?"
We were in the library, but there were no girls among the stacks. The clock in my head was telling me it was almost five in the morning. The fire in the fireplace was nothing but a pile of smoldering embers—the only light in the room. I thought about Bex's question, slowly realizing that mad wasn't the word. Mad could be handled by challenging Bex to a good sparring match in the P&E barn. Mad goes away with a good night's sleep.
"Not mad," I said, shaking my head. "It was more like she was—"
"Heartbroken." Liz's voice was so soft I barely heard it, and even now I'm not sure if she knew she'd said the word aloud. We'd been looking for Macey for hours, but something in the way she sank onto the spiraling staircase made me realize that, somewhere along the way, Liz had gone missing too.
"When Macey found out, she was heartbroken," Liz said again, and I knew she was right.
"Yeah," I said, turning to her. "Heartbroken."
"Oh, I'll break something when we find her…" Bex's accent was coming back in waves. "She's gonna get herself snatched right up if she keeps acting this bloody stupid. Running about the country on her own …"
"You don't get it, do you?" It was the first time I'd ever heard Liz raise her voice, the first time I'd seen her skin so deathly white. Even Bex stopped and stared. "I mean, look at you—look at both of you! You don't know what it's like. You…belong," Liz said, as if Bex and I were at the core of an ancient secret and didn't realize it. And I guess, in a way, we were.
"You." Liz turned to Bex. "You go all over the world with your mom and dad, tracking down arms dealers and staking out terrorists during summer break."