When I turned to the Grand Hall, I saw Professor Buckingham standing in the doorway, frozen. It was like she didn’t want to move—to break up the scene before her.
“Thank God you’re safe.”
But then everything in Buckingham’s countenance shifted. She bristled and stood up straighter. I could have sworn she actually grimaced as Townsend and Zach dragged Catherine through the front doors. But she didn’t flinch at the sight of the woman, even when Catherine smiled in Buckingham’s direction.
“Why, hello, Patricia.” Catherine’s gaze moved easily around the foyer and up the stairs. She wore shackles on her hands and feet and yet she examined the mansion as if she had more right to be there than Gilly herself.
“It is so good to be home,” Catherine said, and I had a terrible feeling that Catherine hadn’t lost—we hadn’t captured her. That she was somehow exactly where she had always wanted to be.
“Shut up!” Zach snapped, and jerked on his mother’s chains.
“Zachary,” Buckingham warned. “Take her to Sublevel Two.” Then Buckingham turned her gaze to Catherine. “We have a room all ready for you.”
As soon as Catherine was gone, I expected the mood to lighten, the tension to ease. But it wasn’t just Catherine’s presence that had everyone on edge. It went far deeper than the awkward silence that coursed between Zach and Townsend. Something was wrong, and I felt it.
“What is it?” I asked, inching forward. “What’s wrong? Is it my mom?”
“Your mother is fine, Cameron,” Buckingham told me. “In fact, she and Joseph are very close to tracking down the Maxwell heir, if I’m not mistaken.”
But something was wrong, and I wasn’t going to stop until they told me.
“Then what’s going on? Is it Amirah? Is she okay?”
“That’s an interesting question, Cameron,” Buckingham admitted. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t know.”
She didn’t waver or try to skew the facts in her favor. The truth matters—every spy knows that much. And we needed the whole truth right then.
“Last night after we spoke, we sat Amirah down and told her everything you’d said about her father and the Circle.” She looked at Abby then shook her head as if trying to cast aside her own doubts. “Maybe we should have waited. Her father just died. She’s had so much change and pressure and—”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Well, it seems we cannot find her.” Buckingham stood a little straighter. “It seems that Amirah has disappeared.”
I know this much is true: Bex was right. It is a whole lot easier being the runner than the one left behind.
There were searches of the grounds and of the mansion. My friends and I spread out and covered every secret passageway a seventh grader could have conceivably found in one year. We interviewed her friends and reviewed the security footage. And when that all failed, we walked through the halls and across the grounds calling out her name. But Amirah never answered.
Finally, I found myself sitting on my bed. In our room. It was almost like we’d never left, and yet, at the same time, it was like we’d been gone for years. Books sat exactly where we’d left them among unfinished papers and study guides for untaken tests. It felt like I’d entered some kind of archeological dig site—the dorm rooms of Pompeii, a fleeting glimpse of our lives before the fire.
“We can’t stay,” Bex said.
“I know.”
“The CIA may already know we’re back—they could be sending a grab team for Preston and Zach, and maybe even you, right now.”
“I know. But we can’t leave her, Bex.”
“Think, Cammie,” Bex ordered. She grabbed me by the shoulders, made me face her. “Where is she?”
“How am I supposed to know where she is?”
“No.” Liz shook her head. “Don’t you see, Cam? You don’t have to know where she is. You’re supposed to know how she feels.”
Yeah. It’s true. My friends are geniuses. And I was kind of foolish not to have seen it until then.
I turned and looked out the window, at our sweeping grounds and tall fences that more than ever before needed to keep one of us safe. And, beyond that, I saw the black stretch of Highway 10 and the lights of Roseville—the other world that existed just outside our reach.
“Normal,” I whispered. “She’s just learned she’s never going to be normal.”
“Amy?” I asked, but she didn’t turn. It was almost like she’d forgotten the name she’d used at school. Her American nickname. Her code name. Her legend.
The tiny girl with the gleaming black hair just stayed seated in the little gazebo in the Roseville town square. As dusk settled around us, the white lights of the square began to glow. It looked like a movie set. A dream. And I remembered why, once upon a time, I had come there, looking for another life. It was why, when my friends and I had divvied up all the potential places where Amirah might have run, I chose that familiar square. It was as good a place as any to play pretend.
“You’re back,” Amirah told me when I joined her on the bench.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I am.”
“That’s good.” Her legs were so short she could swing them where she sat and they didn’t scrape the ground. “We missed you. Tina Walters had a pool going on how long you’d be gone. I bet ten dollars that you’d show up at graduation in a helicopter.”
“I could stay away a little longer if you’d like.”
“No.” Amirah shook her head. “I’m glad you’re back now.”
Prior to that moment I’d had one conversation with her. Just one. That was all. But it’s true what they say about our sisterhood. It bonds us, forges us together. And with one look in that girl’s eyes I knew that we were more bonded than most.
“I’m sorry about your father, Amirah. I tried…” I started, but my voice broke. I couldn’t tell her that I’d been there. That I’d failed. I didn’t think I could stand the idea of her hating me as much as I hated myself. “I believe he was a great man.”
“He was.” She held her head a little higher. She didn’t face me as she wiped her eyes. “He had a duty. A legacy.”
She almost grimaced with the word, and I knew that, like me, Amirah had been born into a most unusual family business.
“His father was hanged in the streets that surrounded our palace. My father was blown up outside the United Nations. But me…I was born in America. Am I an American, Cammie?” She faced me then. “Can I just be an American? Why do these people want to kill me for the sake of a country I’ve never even seen?”
“These people…” I stopped and considered my words. “These people don’t care about you or your country. They just want governments to fall and chaos to rule. They think…they think the world is like a self-cleaning oven and they see you as the best way to turn up the heat.”
Just like I had been the best way to track down a list.
It was clear to me in that moment that everyone was wrong about Amirah. She wasn’t just a princess. She wasn’t just a Gallagher Girl. She was me, at the beginning. She was a girl who had stumbled into something so much larger than herself that she couldn’t possibly carry the weight alone.
“We should get you back to school, Amy. It’s not—”
“Safe. I know.” But she stayed seated, legs swinging in the glow of the Roseville town square twinkle lights. “I’m not safe.”
“Maybe not right now. But you will be soon. My mother and Mr. Solomon…they are tracking down the people who want to hurt you. And they’re getting close, Amy. I think they’re really, really close. And when they’re finished…then everything will be okay.”
“No, Cammie. When these people are dead there will be others. There will always be people who want to hurt the queen of Caspia,” Amirah said, even though, right then, she didn’t look like a queen. She looked like a twelve-year-old girl who didn’t want to go home and start her homework. And I, for one, totally couldn’t blame her.
“You see that pharmacy?” I pointed to the far side of the square, the old-fashioned sign. “Abrams and Son,” I said with a smile. “I used to date the son.”
“Really?” the girl asked, and smiled wide. She might have giggled.
“Yeah. Sophomore year. It was a big scandal.” I thought about Josh. He had been a dream once—a perfectly lovely piece of normal. But that dream was over.
“What happened?” she asked, like she already knew how the story was going to end. And she probably did. She was a Gallagher Girl, after all.
“I don’t know exactly,” I admitted. “We were really different, I guess. And then I met Zach, and a bunch of terrorists started trying to kidnap me, and I got too busy for a boyfriend.” They were all good reasons—any one of them would do. But it wasn’t the whole truth, and I knew it.
“I guess we just had different destinies. And I got tired of trying to outrun mine.”
Amirah nodded slowly, but didn’t say a thing.
“Come on,” I told her. “You’re not safe here.”
She looked down at her hands. Sparkly pink nail polish chipping away. “I’m not safe anywhere.”
And right then I wanted to cry. I wanted to hold her and smooth her hair and tell her everything was going to be okay. I wanted to say all the lies that, for months—for years—I had wanted to hear. And more than anything I wanted to believe that they were true. I wanted to tell her that I was okay—that I was proof that things get better and she wouldn’t feel that way forever.
But before I could say a word she turned her big brown eyes to me and asked, “Are you okay, Cammie?”
I’d been chased, tortured, kidnapped, and almost killed, but I’d survived it. And I knew in my gut that if I could survive spy school, I could survive anything.
“I will be.”
I took Amirah’s hands and pulled her to her feet. She giggled a little, the sound light and free, dancing in the twinkling lights. I looped my arm through hers, and together we started across the square, toward Highway 10 and my third-favorite secret passage.
I was walking away from Roseville and sneaking back into school for what might have been the last time, and so I stopped. Nostalgia took hold of me and turned me back to the pharmacy and the gazebo and the square.
And that was when I saw him.
“Hello, Cammie.” Dr. Steve raised the gun in his hand, kept it trained in our direction. “I see you found our girl. Now, why don’t you take me to Catherine?”
Chapter Thirty-five
It’s sad how accustomed a girl can get to having a gun pointed at her. I didn’t tremble. I wasn’t afraid. There were too many other emotions coursing through me as I stood looking at the man who had played with my mind for months and then sent me to a rooftop to die.
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