Gallagher Girls 5 - Out of Sight, Out of Time (23 page)

I
didn’t pass a soul on my way to the fifth floor. It was almost three a.m., the perfect time for roaming the halls unobserved. Too late for the night owls finishing papers and cramming for tests. Not yet time for the early birds who liked to start the day with a solid workout in the barn or by checking on an experiment in the labs.

So I was alone, walking through the dark halls that I know better than anyplace else on earth.

I didn’t try to hide the sound of my footsteps. I wasn’t careful with the doors. I wasn’t breaking any rules, wasn’t hiding or sneaking. I was just a girl following the orders of a teacher as I reached the fifth-floor landing and opened a window to step onto the small balcony outside.

The only thing I regretted was that I hadn’t gone to get a coat. Oh well, I thought, putting my arms around myself, inching closer to the edge. I wouldn’t be cold for long.

I couldn’t see the main gates from where I stood, so I climbed over the railing and dropped onto the sloping roof, inching around the corner of the building until the freezing north wind blew into my face.

The past few days had been filled with sleet and rain, and the whole roof was covered with ice, so I had to be careful where I stepped. Dr. Steve had told me to wait until he was through the gates, and I didn’t want to fall too soon. A lot was riding on my getting it just right.

I reached up and touched the necklace at the base of my throat. I had only worn it for a few weeks, and yet it felt like part of me. It was the last thing my father would ever give me—his final gift. Tears filled my eyes, and I shook my head, trying to toss the thought aside, but that just made me lose my balance, skid a little, so I stopped and stood perfectly still, my eyes on the gates.

The music was louder then, and I hummed along with it, remembering that day in the sixth grade when Dad came home with two tickets for the circus.

I was too old for the circus, I’d told him.

“That’s funny,” he’d said. “I’m not.”

And so we’d driven all the way across Virginia. Four hours in the car, just the two of us, talking and laughing and eating peanut M&M’s until our fingers looked like rainbows.

I was going to be going away to school soon, I’d told myself. He wanted to do this while he could.

Standing on the roof, I remembered the way my dad had watched the people on the high wire. It had looked so easy. But it couldn’t really be that easy, could it? So I stepped along the narrow tiles of the roof, my arms out wide.

Yes. It
was
easy.

“Cammie, sweetheart,” someone said, “I want you to walk over here.”

I turned and saw my mother behind me, easing from a window and out onto the icy roof.

“Mom!” I yelled, happy to see her. I pointed my toes and moved my hands. “It’s like the circus!” I cried, and in my head, the music was louder.

“Cam.” Bex was climbing over the balcony railing, easing toward me from the other direction. “It’s okay, Cam. We’re here. Let’s get you inside now.”

“My dad took me to the circus, Bex. Did I ever tell you that?”

“Sure, Cam,” she said.

I glanced at my mom. “You weren’t there,” I told her. “I think you were in Malaysia.”

“Let’s go inside and talk about it, kiddo.”

“Bex, have you ever wanted to be on a high wire?”

“No, Cam, I want to go inside.”

“Don’t you love that song?” I asked, and began to sing.

“Come inside, Cammie,” my mother said.

“Cammie!” Liz’s cry pierced the air. It was part scream, part screech, and I thought she must be hurt. She was at the window above me, and before I knew it, she was climbing through.

“Lizzie, stay there!” Bex cried, but Liz didn’t listen. “Liz, watch out for the—”

And before Bex could finish, Liz’s right foot landed on a piece of ice and she lost her hold on the windowsill. She was sliding, falling faster and faster until she finally caught hold of a pipe that stuck out of the roof. Her small hands gripped it, holding on for dear life.

“Liz!” Bex yelled, and moved toward her; but the ice was too thick. She started to skid, and stopped, frozen, unable to move.

“Cammie…” The worry in my mother’s voice had turned to panic. “Cammie, come over here to me.”

I heard her say it, but my gaze was locked on the gates, the taillights disappearing beyond them.

“It’s time,” I said.

“Time for what?” my mother asked.

“Time for me to jump,” I said, certain of what I had to do.

I looked out across the frosty grounds of the school, so peaceful and serene while the rest of my sisterhood slept. I raised my arms and—

“Cammie, don’t!” Liz screamed, and moved too quickly. The pipe she was clinging to broke free from the roof, and then she was falling, sliding.

I was supposed to jump. It was time. I’d been given a direct order, and I was the kind of Gallagher Girl who always follows orders. Wasn’t I?

But there was Liz, sliding down the steep pitch of the icy roof, and I fell to my stomach, stretched out, and caught her small wrist so tightly that I feared it might break, but I held on anyway.

We were at the edge. Liz’s small body was swaying back and forth like a pendulum in midair. Tears streaked down her face.

And still, part of me couldn’t help but notice how Dr. Steve had passed through the gates by then. There were other things I was supposed to do.

“Liz, I’m going to swing you up onto the roof, okay?”

“No!” Liz screamed. Her voice was a broken, terrified sob. “No, Cam. No. No.”

“It won’t hurt, Liz. I’ll swing you just like—”

“Cammie, no!” Mom yelled, but it was too late. I was already moving Liz’s thin frame, swinging her back and forth.

“Bex, get her!” I yelled and threw Liz in Bex’s direction.

It seemed to take forever for her to fly from my hand and onto the patch of icy roof at Bex’s feet. But she was there.

She was safe.

And the taillights were still fading, growing smaller and smaller in the distance. I knew the time had come.

I was almost too late.

The music grew louder, but rougher too—like a record that has been played too many times.

The taillights disappeared.

I knew I was
supposed
to go, but I looked back at my friends and my mother one final time, turning too fast on the ice. I felt my feet slip as the high wire became too much for me, and I was gone. Sliding. There was nothing beneath me but cold wind. Nothing above me but sky.

But the fall didn’t come. I looked up to see my mother gripping my left arm, my best friend holding my right. Behind Bex, Liz was scampering through the window, yelling for help.

I should have weighed too much for them to hold on to for that long, but neither hand that gripped mine even shook. They would have held me forever while I dangled there, legs floating free in the breeze while Dr. Steve’s taillights faded into the night.

“We have you, Cammie,” Bex said. “We have you.”

My mom didn’t say anything. Tears dripped off her face and onto mine as I stared up at the woman I wanted more than anything to become.

“Do you hear the music, Mom?”

“No, sweetheart. No. I don’t hear it.” She shook her head. Terror and tears filled her eyes.

The wind felt colder, washing over me.

“Neither do I.”

“M
om,” I said, over the din of people yelling and running. There were orders and lights—so many lights. “Mom, Dr. Steve…he had me. Last summer he had me and then he wiped my mind and came here and…”

“I know, kiddo. I know. Now rest.” She looked up and screamed down the hall, “Patricia, where are the doctors?”

“Mom, it was the circus.”

“It’s okay, Cammie. You’re safe.” Mr. Solomon was there, leaning by my mother’s side.

“No, Mr. Solomon. You don’t understand.” I felt a sharp prick in my arm, and my eyes got heavy. The words slurred, but I talked on. “Dad took me to the circus, Mr. Solomon.” My head began to sway. “He took me to the circus. And then he died.”

And then I slept.

When the sun broke through the windows of my mother’s office, it felt like the brightest light I’d ever seen. I blinked and turned, the leather couch soft and warm against my face and hands. Zach leaned against the wall, staring at me.

“You know,” I whispered, “some girls might think it’s creepy having a boy watch them sleep.”

He smirked and pointed to himself. “Spy.”

“Oh.” I nodded. “Right. So you’re a
trained
Peeping Tom.”

“Product of the best peeping academies in the country.”

“Well, now I feel much better.”

“You should.”

He was beside me then, his arms wrapped around me, holding me tightly.

“I’m not crazy,” I whispered.

“I know.”

Believe it or not, that’s the most romantic thing Zachary Goode ever told me.

And I kind of loved him for it.

I heard the door open, and in a flash, the room changed in a flood of people.

“Cammie!” Liz yelled. “Oh, Cammie, I was so worried when you…”

But she couldn’t finish. I was glad of it. I’d never been so humiliated in my life. Weak. I felt weak. And the mere thought of what I’d let myself become made me want to hurl myself off the tallest tower again (this time for an entirely different reason).

“Oh, Cammie. Oh, Cammie,” Liz went on, breathless and gasping for air. “You’re okay. You are okay, aren’t you? You don’t have any more headaches or—”

“I’m fine, Liz,” I said, but the expressions on my three best friends’ faces reminded me that they’d all heard that before.

“I
think
I’m fine,” I said, with special emphasis on the word. “I feel different.”

Macey eyed me. “You look different.” She touched my hair. “Seriously…
conditioner
.”

“It’s good to see you too, Mace.” And it was.

Mom and Abby sat on the coffee table in front of me. Bex and Macey stood hovering at their sides. Mr. Solomon was leaning against my mother’s desk. It was far too reminiscent of the morning after the election the year before, when I’d woken with the knowledge that the Circle was chasing me—that they wouldn’t rest until they’d found me.

Sitting there that morning, it might have been easy to think that nothing had changed, but that was wrong. Everything was different.

I was different.

“It was the circus,” I told them. In the cool light of morning, the words must have sounded more sane than they had the night before, because no one rushed to calm me this time. Everyone waited.

“The CoveOps report,” Liz said. She pulled a chair closer and sank onto it, as if my words had knocked her off her feet. She reached for her bag and found the dirty copy I’d retrieved from the embassy in Rome.

“What does that have to do with…” Bex started, but Liz was already turning to the page where I had talked about going to the circus with my father. It was nothing, really, a sentence or two that could have just as easily been left out.

And if I had left it out, then my life probably would have turned out very, very differently.

“I saw something that day,” I told them. “Dad met with an asset. And the asset gave him a copy of Gilly’s list—the one he was trying to find. The one in Ireland.” I shook my head. “He must have gotten the key somehow—hidden it in Rome and gone looking for the map. But he never found it. He never
had to
find it because someone gave the whole list to him right before he disappeared.”

“Who?”

I tried to remember, but the woman was a blur, her face nothing but shadows. “I don’t know. But the Circle wants that list. ..or.. .
part
of the Circle wants it. They’ve wanted that list all along.”

I told them everything then—about the splinter group and how traitors can happen on both sides of the law. And, last, I talked about how they’d had me and interrogated me and then wiped my mind and let me escape just so they could keep on interrogating me in the place where I felt safest.

It takes a lot to make people who know fourteen different languages speechless, but that did it.

When Zach said, “I’m going to kill Dr. Steve,” it wasn’t the angered threat of a worried boy; it was the calm, cool statement of an operative trained to do exactly that. And that, I think, is why it scared me.

But it wasn’t as terrifying as the look in Bex’s eyes when she said, “Not if I find him first.”

I couldn’t say I blamed them. After all, I know a lot of guys like to play games with a girl’s head, but Dr. Steve had taken it to a whole new level.

It seemed to take forever for Mr. Solomon to move to the window and say, “So they’re staging a coup.”

“Figures,” Zach said with a shrug. “If I know my mom, that’s about her style.”

“I don’t understand,” Macey said, shaking her head. “I don’t understand why Zach’s mom needed you alive—”

Bex finished. “And her bosses want you dead.”

“Because I’ve seen the list.”

In my mind I heard the circus music, made myself hum the song, and, with it, the memory came rushing back. I saw my father and read the words on the crumpled napkin. And then I knew what they had wanted—what part of the best criminal organization in the world had chased me to find.

What the remainder would kill me to hide.

“Your mom was right,” I said to Zach, somehow amused. “I didn’t need the copy Gilly hid in Ireland. I had it all along.”

Outside, sleet was falling, and in the warmth of my mother’s office, the windows had started to fog. I was faintly aware that I was standing. The window was cool beneath my forefinger as I ran it through the dampness on the glass.

“Cam, what are you—” Bex started, but Liz said, “Shhh.”

And I started writing.

It was like the gun in CoveOps, like the way the assassin’s rifle found its way into my grasp on the hill. My hands were not my own, but that time I knew they were moving, and I didn’t want them to stop.

When I ran out of space on the first pane, I moved to another. And then another. I could feel my roommates and Zach lurking, reading the words that I left. Drops of water bled down the glass, running line into line, but I couldn’t stop.

I had to keep writing until…

“Cam, is that…” Liz started.

“Elias Crane,” she said, looking up at Mr. Solomon, who nodded.

“The head of the largest agrichemical corporation in the world has that name. I’d wager it runs in the family.”

“Charles Dubois,” Liz offered another.

“There’s a Charlene Dubois with the European Union,” Abby said, running her hand through her hair. “Half the defense spending on that continent goes through her.”

There were four names that no one recognized immediately, but I kept writing until—

“Mrs. Morgan?” Liz’s voice was timid, afraid. “Do all the Circle heirs go…into…the business?”

“It’s unlikely that leadership would come from outside sources,” Mr. Solomon said. “They’re very secretive, girls. More so even than the CIA.”

“But…” Liz went on, eyes wide. “Does it ever…skip…a generation or something?”

“Why?” Bex asked.

Liz took a deep breath, then she pulled me away from the window so that the others could see. “Because the last name on the list is Samuel P. Winters.”