0445 hours
"You girls should be in bed."
"No thank you, professor," Bex said. "Rebecca, your mother and father have personally asked me to watch out for you, and I would like you to go to bed."
"I'm fine where I am, professor. Thank you."
"I had a feeling you might say that. At least let Ms. Sutton get some sleep."
0520 hours
I knew I wasn't alone. Bex's whispers were soft outside the door. Liz was mumbling something, half-asleep. Then a shadow cut across the room, and I saw Mr. Solomon standing in the moonlight, staring out across the grounds.
But it must have been the drugs—I must have still been sleeping—because it looked like his shoulders were shaking. I could have sworn his hand wiped across his face. It wasn't real.
I was asleep.
Joe Solomon does not cry.
0625 hours
"Cammie." My mother's voice was high and scratchy, and I knew that she'd been crying. If you want to know the truth, that scared me most of all. I thought that maybe I was dead. I wondered if I was looking up from a coffin and not a leather couch. And then I thought about Aunt Abby.
"She's out of surgery," my mother said, answering my unasked question, reading my mind. She drew a deep breath. "She's out of surgery."
I pushed myself upright and a blanket fell from my lap to the floor. There were bandages on my head and arm. It was far too familiar to be anything but a very bad dream.
"Did you sleep, sweetheart?"
I thought it was an obvious question—a stupid waste of time. But all good interrogators know to start with the things the subject knows for sure. So I nodded my head. My mother said, "Good."
She was sitting on the coffee table in front of me—the very place where every Sunday night she laid out trays of veggies and bowls of dip. But that morning she just sat there with her hands in her lap. Was she a mother or a spy then? I'm not sure. But I knew the one I needed.
"Tell me," I demanded, not caring who heard—how far our voices carried. I saw Mr. Solomon by her desk, knew why he was there. "Both of you, start talking," I said, but Mom was easing toward me.
"Sweetheart, this is not something—"
"I have the right to know!"
She grew harder, still the boss of me and not about to let me forget it. "Cameron, there is a time and a place for—"
"They weren't after Macey," I said. "They were never after Macey. And…you knew."
"Cameron, this—" But Mom didn't get the chance to finish, because Mr. Solomon was easing onto the corner of her desk, crossing his arms as he said, "We didn't know anything more than you, Ms. Morgan. Not for a long time."
"But…" I started, my mind spinning, "Philadelphia." I thought about the closed door of my mother's office that next day, my aunt's newfound terror on the train. A chill like none I'd ever felt ran through me as I said, "What did Zach tell you in that tunnel, Mr. Solomon?"
My teacher nodded. He almost smiled. "He'd heard Macey wasn't the target. That was a possibility all along—we knew that, but Zach has sources—"
"What kind of sources? Who are they? Where are they? What—"
"That's all you get, Cammie," Joe Solomon said, and I hated him a little. But then he shrugged, defeated. "Because that's pretty much all there is."
Mr. Solomon is a good liar—the best. And I hated him for that too.
"Joe," my mom said calmly, as if I weren't ranting and bruised. As if everything in my life weren't suddenly different. And over. "Could you give us a minute?"
A moment later, I heard the door open and close. I knew we were alone.
"Sweetheart, don't…" She trailed off, unable to finish, until the Gallagher Girl in her overruled the mother, and she found the strength to carry on. "You're going to be okay, Cammie. The Gallagher trustees have been notified. The full strength of the school and The Agency are behind us. You're going to be okay."
I love my mother's office. It's the closest thing to home I've had in years. I sat there for a long time that morning looking at the pictures that used to sit on her dresser in our apartment in Arlington. Before she was a headmistress. Before I was a Gallagher Girl. Before we lost Dad.
Before we lost a lot of things.
"What happens now?" I heard my voice crack and knew that I was almost crying, almost pleading. My anger was gone, and in its wake rushed a wave of grief and terror so powerful that I could hardly breathe. I thought of Abby bleeding. I thought of Macey and Preston. And finally, I saw Zach as he hovered over me, as my mind whirled down a laundry chute, plummeting in a free fall that I feared might never end. "It's just…Mom…why?"
My mother held me. My headmistress smoothed my hair. And the greatest spy I've ever known whispered, "We'll find out. I promise we will find out."
Chapter Twenty-nine
Classes should have ended, but they didn't. Finals week should have been over, but it was still weeks away. And yet every girl at my school knew that my roommates and I had already been tested. I thought about Aunt Abby, and I knew we'd barely passed.
It took three weeks for it to happen, for Mr. Solomon to knock on the door of Madame Dabney's tearoom, for my roommates and me to get called downstairs.
Following our teacher through the hall that day, I didn't let my mind wander—I knew too many dark places where it might go, so I kept my focus on the footsteps, on the stairs and on the walls. Until Mr. Solomon opened my mother's office door—
And someone said, "Hey, squirt."