Chapter Twenty-five
I'm not exactly proud of what came next, but Mr. Solomon himself has told me that spies do bad things for good reasons, so I smiled, I gripped DeeDee's arm, and I used that unsuspecting girl for cover as I announced, "I've got to go to the bathroom!"
"I'll walk with you," Zach started, but I didn't let him finish.
"No," I said, smiling at DeeDee. "It's a girl thing."
As we pulled away from Josh and Zach, DeeDee giggled and wrapped her thin arm in mine. It probably seemed like fun to her—two girls setting off on their own down the crowded sidewalks. But I was entrenched in another kind of adventure as I scanned the crowds, looking for friends and enemies on the bustling square.
"We can go to the pharmacy," DeeDee yelled over the roaring siren of a passing fire truck covered with cheerleaders—the end of the parade.
"What?" I asked.
"The pharmacy has bathrooms," she said again, and I nodded.
"Okay, we'll go to the pharmacy," I repeated loudly, hoping my friends would hear.
Something was wrong—Zach was lying, and a man I'd never seen was stalking Gallagher Girls in Roseville. And that's the kind of thing that never happened before the Blackthorne Boys came to the Gallagher Academy and brought a Code Black with them.
"So, Cammie, I'm really glad I ran into you," DeeDee said, as if I had time for girl talk. "I was wondering if things are…you know…serious? With you and Zach? You guys seem happy."
Despite everything, I stopped and turned to her. Was I happy with Zach? Could I ever be happy with Zach? Two minutes before I might have had a different answer to that question, but in a spy's life, two minutes is all it takes for the whole world to change.
"Cammie!" Bex was rushing toward me, waving. "Oh," she said with a quick glance at DeeDee. "Hi." Then she looked at me and rolled her eyes. "I just got a call on my cell phone," she lied. "We've got to go back to school." She sounded disappointed—annoyed. Nothing in her tone reflected any of the panic I felt.
I looked back at DeeDee. "Sorry," I said, already stepping away. "I've got to—"
"Okay," DeeDee said, but her usually bright smile seemed to fade. "Cammie," she called just as I started to turn, "I really hope you and Zach are happy."
Any other day I might have pondered that sentence for hours, dissected it with Macey, searched for hidden meaning in the words. Was that DeeDee's way of telling me that she and Josh weren't happy? Was I a threat to their seemingly perfect love? Or was DeeDee just the kind of person who wanted everyone to be as happy as she was?
If I'd been a normal girl I might have replayed every second of that day—my almost-kiss, the hurt look on Josh's face. But I wasn't a normal girl. As Zach himself had reminded me time and time again … I was a Gallagher Girl.
"We had two guys on us, too," Bex said as she fell into step beside me. I stopped in the street and turned to check behind us, but she rolled her eyes. "I said had." She shook her head. "I knew we couldn't trust boys who keep their rooms that clean. It's not natural!"
Liz was a half-step behind her, already out of breath. I looked around. "Where's Macey?"
"Telling as many girls as she can find about the tails," Bex answered.
"Wait! Cammie," Liz panted, "you can't just leave in the middle of your date! What if Zach gets worried about you? What if he thinks you've been kidnapped?" Then she gasped. "What if he thinks you don't like him?"
"Liz," I snapped, "protocol says that we're supposed to report any suspicious activity to the security department immediately! We were being tailed in Roseville!" The words felt heavy. "And Zach recognized one of them." I took a deep breath before I finished, "And he lied to me about it."
I remembered the expression on my mother's face as we'd sat in the red glow of the emergency lights during the Code Black. Someone or something had already threatened our school once this semester, so I didn't worry about Zach's feelings or what Madame Dabney would say about leaving a boy during the middle of a date. I didn't ask my friends if they knew the reasons why a boy might try to kiss a girl, and all the reasons a girl might let him.
We'd had a tail in Roseville—that was all that mattered. I felt my feet pounding the pavement. As we reached the mansion, I finally turned to see almost the entire sophomore class running down the lane behind me. "You were right," Courtney told us, swallowing hard, gasping for air. "We had a tail, too."
And whatever hope I'd had that I was wrong—that it was all some bizarre misunderstanding—vanished in the wind.
We pushed open the mansion's doors, and I immediately felt the silence that's usually reserved for the days before classes start and after they end, when I'm the only Gallagher Girl there to roam the halls.
"Mom!" I called, but my voice echoed in the empty corridors.
Courtney and Eva went into the Grand Hall. Mick and Tina started for the library. I headed for the Hall of History.
"Mom!" I called again, but my voice was swallowed by screeching sirens as the lights went out and the words "CODE BLACK CODE BLACK CODE BLACK" filled the air.
Gilly's sword disappeared into its impenetrable case, the bookshelves around us became vaults, and metal shutters covered the windows.