Gallagher Girls 5 - Out of Sight, Out of Time (18 page)

M
y memory wasn’t back. It wasn’t as simple as that. But there were flashes—images and sounds. I felt my head spinning like a compass, guiding us for hours until our ears popped and the snow blew, and I stared out our car window, looking for anything that seemed familiar.

No one spoke as the roads grew narrower, steeper. I didn’t know if it was the altitude or the situation, but I found it harder and harder to breathe until I said “Turn here” for reasons I didn’t quite know.

We drove on. The road turned to lane and then…to nothing. Agent Townsend stopped the SUV. “It’s a dead end,” he said, and Abby turned to me.

“It looks different in the winter, Squirt. Don’t pressure yourself or—”

“I’ve been here.” It wasn’t just the feeling of waking up in the convent, the memory of the chopper ride down the mountain. I knew that air. “We’re close,” I said, and before anyone could stop me, I reached for the door and was out, wading through the drifts.

The flashes were stronger then, clearer than they had been on the hillside with Dr. Steve. Those rocks were the same rocks. The trees were the same trees. And when I saw the broken branches, I knew that I had broken them on purpose—that I’d known someone would come looking for me eventually and I wanted to show them the way.

I just hadn’t known that that someone would be me.

“Are you sure?” Bex said from behind me. “Are you positive that this—”

I reached out for a piece of pine, my blood still on the bark. “This is the place.”

It took an hour to reach it—the ruins of an old stone house that stood alone, crumbling at the top of the mountain.

“I was here,” I said.

The images in my mind were black-and-white and blurry, but I felt it in my bones. My dreams were coming back, but they weren’t dreams. And yet they weren’t quite memories either as I pushed through a creaking wooden door and walked through rooms I didn’t recognize, listened to sounds I didn’t know. Only the feel of the stones beneath my fingers was familiar.

There was a cold fireplace filled with black logs and forgotten ashes. It hadn’t burned in months, but I heard the crackle of the fire.

Two bowls sat on a table, cold to the touch, but I could taste the food.

I’d already broken free once, but there was something in that building that hadn’t let me go.

Townsend and Abby were wordless, efficient. Opening drawers, scanning floorboards. They covered every inch of the old stone house until they finally huddled together and spoke in low, conspiratorial whispers.

“Nothing,” Abby told him. “You?”

“This place is clean,” he said.

But I just turned to the small door that led to the narrow cellar stairs, and said, “Down there.”

Zach was at my back, following me into the musty cellar. There was one tiny window high on the wall, barely peeking over the ground.

“Come on, Gallagher Girl,” he said. “Don’t do this to yourself. The Circle never leaves anything behind.” My fingers traced the walls beside a narrow bed. “They never use a safe house twice.”

And then my fingers found the letters scratched into the mortar between the stones.

C.A.M

Cameron Ann Morgan

My hand began to shake as it pushed the mattress aside, revealing three more letters hidden below.

M.A.M.

Matthew Andrew Morgan

“Yes,” I told Zach, my voice flat and cold and even. “They do.”

* * *

Zach couldn’t hold me in the room. Agent Townsend couldn’t stop me on the stairs. I was too strong in that moment. I wasn’t running from that place or its ghosts. I was running to something, for something, as I burst through the door and out into the snow.

The woods were alive with flashes and beats, images that came in black-and-white, like I’d seen it all before in a dream. But not a dream, I realized. A nightmare.

Bring the girl
, a voice said.

Show her what happens to spies who don’t talk
.

My mind didn’t know where I was going, but my legs did. They took me over banks and around pine trees. My body was impervious to the cold and the boy at my back yelling, “Cammie!”

Zach was struggling to keep pace behind me, but all I heard was the music, and the cold voice saying,
The least we can do is take her to her father
.

I skidded to a stop at the edge of the trees, exhaling foggy, ragged breaths, staring into the small clearing. But it wasn’t a clearing—I knew it. The outline of the trees was too precise, the corners too square to be random.

Snow covered the ground, and yet I knew that patch of earth. I’d felt it calling to me for weeks, pulling me back to that mountain.

“It’s real,” I said.

Abby was behind me, panting from the altitude. Zach tried to put his arms around me. He didn’t know my shaking had nothing to do with the cold.

When I began to say, “No. No. No,” he didn’t know I was revolting against, not a memory, but a fact.

“What is this?” Townsend was there finally, Bex at his side.

But it was Macey who stood apart from the others, seeing the small clearing at a distance. And that’s why she was the first to realize, “It’s a grave.”

“No. No.” I fell to my knees and began to scrape blindly through the white.

“Cammie.” Townsend’s hands were on mine, but Abby was already on her knees beside me, scraping too.

“Cammie!” Zach yelled, and pulled me to my feet and into his arms. “Stop.”

“He’s there,” I said, the words blending into sobs. “He’s there. He’s there.”

Abby didn’t scream, but she kept clawing, her bare hands bleeding in the snow.

“It’s over.” Agent Townsend reached for her. He didn’t scold or scoff. He just smoothed her hair, pressed his cheek against hers, and said, “He’s gone.”

I
know the theories behind interrogation tactics. I’ve seen the tutorials. I’ve read all the books. In the part of my mind that was still thinking, processing, planning, I knew that if the Circle had wanted to break me, there was no better place than my father’s grave to do it. I stared at my reflection in the window of the car that carried us back to school twelve hours later—at my sunken eyes and thin frame—and I thought about the nightmares and the sleepwalking.

I knew it might have worked.

When the school gates parted, I couldn’t help but remember the first time I’d ever set foot behind those walls. It was the August after my father disappeared, and I had spent every day since wondering where he had gone and what had happened. For years I’d thought that not knowing was the hard part. But right then all I wanted to do was forget.

When the car finally stopped, I watched my friends climb from the backseat of the limo, saw Townsend take Abby’s hand, hold it tightly in his own and say, “If you’d like, I can come inside and help.…”

“No.” Abby shook her head. “I’ll tell her.”

Mom, I thought, the cold realization sweeping over me. Someone was going to have to tell Mom. And right then I was certain that Summer Me must have been willing to trade her memory for not having to face that moment.

I knew because it was a trade I would have willingly made again.

“Ms. Morgan.” Agent Townsend’s hand was on my shoulder, squeezing twice. He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to. Then he climbed back into the limo, and I stayed frozen, watching him drive away.

“Cam, come on,” Macey said, but I just stood there looking up at the moon. It was the first time in years I didn’t wonder if my father was out there, looking at it too.

“Cammie!” someone yelled, and something in Bex’s face made me turn to look at Liz, who stood in the doorway, light streaming around her yellow hair. She looked almost like an angel, and I expected her to say, “I heard about your dad.”

I thought she might scream, “I’m so sorry.”

Liz is the kindest of us all. I fully expected her to throw her arms around me and let me cry and cry until I couldn’t cry anymore.

What I wasn’t prepared for was to see her smile.

And yell, “It’s Mr. Solomon! Mr. Solomon is awake!”

* * *

Liz’s hand was in mine. She was running up the stairs, pulling me along. And while I know that, physically, Liz really isn’t a match for any of us, right then I couldn’t stop her. As soon as we reached Joe Solomon’s secret room, though, I froze, unable to go inside.

“Mr. Solomon!” Bex yelled, pushing past me, Macey on her heels. Then Aunt Abby was beside me, her hand on my shoulder, but neither of us moved. We just stood there staring at the woman by the bed.

She didn’t look like a spy or a headmistress or even a mother in that moment. She was just a woman. And she was beaming.

“Hi, girls,” Mom said. She held his hands and smiled at me. “Look who’s up.”

I don’t think I realized it at the time, but a part of me had been wondering if I’d ever see my mother happy again. A part of me was wondering if
I’d
ever be happy again. But the look on my mother’s face was one of pure, undeniable joy. I turned to my aunt, saw that realization in her eyes too, and then, more than ever, I wanted to run away and take my bad news with me.

“Welcome back, ladies,” Mr. Solomon said, but his voice sounded different, as if the smoke from the tombs was still in his lungs.

He was propped a little higher than he had been when he was sleeping. A little color filled his cheeks, but his lips were chapped and dry. Mom held a cup to his mouth, and he sipped, then smiled at her, but the effort must have been too much for him, because he started coughing.

I’d slept for six days. Joe Solomon had been out for six months. I didn’t want to know what that felt like.

“Joe!” Zach cried, pushing past me and Bex and Macey, rushing to his mentor’s side. “Joe…” He let the word trail off.

“Well, Rachel, the standards in this place must be dropping. I go to sleep and they start letting just anyone in here,” Mr. Solomon said, then coughed again. And I realized just how much tension there must have been in the room for a man like him to try to break it.

“Cam, Abby,
Joe’s awake
,” Mom said, because I guess our expressions weren’t at all what she was expecting. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

“Yes. Of course,” Abby said. Faint traces of dirt and blood still clung to her fingers. Her voice cracked when she said, “We missed you so much.”

Only Liz seemed to share my mother’s smile as she studied the machines. “The brain scans and EEGs are really good.” She spoke to us all, but she looked at Mr. Solomon. “You look really good.”

“Thank you, Ms. Sutton.”

“You do,” Mom said, leaning closer to my teacher. “You look perfect.”

Zach was smiling like I’d never seen him smile before, looking down at the closest thing to family he had left. But not me. I was thinking that I would never get to smile at my father again.

“So,” Mr. Solomon said, “what did I miss?”

A lot of people think that being a Gallagher Girl means not being afraid of anything. Actually, that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s not about ignoring fear. It’s about facing it, knowing the risks and the costs and sacrificing safety and security anyway. I’d seen my aunt Abby jump in front of a bullet once, and yet in that moment she was terrified. I didn’t want to know what I looked like.

“What is it?” my mother said, but I was already turning from the room that held so many people who didn’t know that this wasn’t the time to be happy.

“Rachel.” I heard my aunt’s voice fading away. “We need to talk.”

Of all the nooks and crannies, the narrow passageways and grand halls that comprise the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women, my very favorite space might possibly be the Protection and Enforcement barn at night. The moon shines through the skylights, and in the dark it’s all stillness and shadows. Plus, it’s the only place on campus where it’s almost always okay to hit things.

“You’re making a bad habit out of this.”

I don’t know what was more surprising—that Zach had found me so quickly or that he’d actually left Joe’s side. If the man I loved like a father were upstairs, I don’t think I’d walk away from him ever again.

“You should be with him,” I said, standing at the center of the mats, looking up at the moon.

Zach stepped closer. “I’m right where I need to be.”

“Did Abby…”

“She’s telling them now.”

“Is Joe your father, Zach?”

I don’t know where the question came from, but it was out, and I couldn’t take it back even if I’d wanted to.

“No.” Zach shook his head. “I never knew my dad. I don’t know anything about him.”

Suddenly I felt guilty for my foolishness. For my crying and my tantrums. After all, nothing could have made me trade mourning my father for not knowing him.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m not. I have Joe.”

“I’m glad he’s awake,” I said. My throat burned. “I’m glad he’s…back.”

“Gallagher Girl,” Zach said, reaching for me, but I stepped away.

“My dad’s not coming back,” I said.

“I know.”

“He’s not missing, Zach. He’s dead.”

“I know.”

“They killed him!”

“You’re alive, Cammie.”

“Mr. Solomon is alive,” I said, and Zach took my arms and squeezed them tight.

“
You’re
alive.”

“My dad…”

“You’re alive.”

I don’t know how long I cried. I don’t know when I slept. All I know is that Zach’s arms were still around me when I woke on the mats, lying in the center of the floor.

“Go back to sleep,” he said, smoothing my hair.

I’d been sleeping. I realized that I’d been sleeping and I hadn’t dreamed.

“Zach,” I said as I lay there. “Where did you go? When you were looking for me?”

I shifted in his arms, looked into his eyes.

“Crazy.” His voice was a whisper against my skin. “I went crazy.”